The Stroke Number Effect In The Processing Of Chinese Characters: Evidence From ERP

Visual word recognition is a process in which people through visual or auditory to accept the form or voice information and obtain the meaning of word in the human brain. Accordingly, there are many influence factors which refer to glyph, orthography, word frequency (word), phonetics, semantics, and so on in the study of word recognition. The first step of word recognition is through the visual channel to processing morphological information, so the unit of word processing becomes the focus problem for linguists and psychologists. In the phonetic writing system, there are many researches related to units of word processing, such as word length effect, which showed slower respond to the English word which have more letters than English word which have of fewer letters. However, associated with the word length effect, longer words tended to have small orthographic neighbors (the orthographic neighborhood members forms new words by changing one letter of a target word; for example, a target stimulus’cake’had many neighbors, including bake, lake, care, coke, and cave). This enabled us to rethink that the word length effect we used to think about may not be caused by the differences on the length of the word itself, but by certain characteristics of words which was related to the length. Thus, the previous demonstrations of word length effect could be due to length, but it could also be due to confusion of neighborhood size. Finally, they concluded that the word length effect might be better explained by the differences in linguistic and lexical properties of short and long words rather than by length per se. We are inspired by the word length effect in English and aroused rethink the stroke number effect in the process of Chinese characters. The traditional stroke number effect is refers to small stroke number of Chinese characters recognition was faster than large stroke number of Chinese characters the number of strokes of Chinese characters stroke more than Chinese characters react faster, higher accuracy. There are a lot of paradigms for the traditional research of stroke number effect, and lexical decision task is more often selected forclassic research paradigm. Though, the research paradigm and the experimental materials are improved by the researchers in the experiment, therefore, stroke number effect was still an unclear problem for Chinese characters recognition. Similarly, like the word length effect, whether stroke number effect confounded orthographic neighborhood size effect Analogy to the processing of Chinese characters, strokes as units of Chinese characters may also affected a certain stage in the process of Chinese character recognition like letters. In general, small stroke number of Chinese characters had more orthographic neighborhood members than large stroke number of Chinese characters. Analogy to the processing of Chinese characters, strokes as units of Chinese characters may also affected a certain stage in the process of Chinese character recognition like letters that leaded to small stroke number of Chinese characters recognition is faster. Therefore, we designed a series of experiments to verify our hypothesis. The study includes two experiments which both using simplified Chinese characters as experimental material. We set three types of strokes of Chinese characters in the experiments, respectively are:(1) small number of strokes of Chinese characters, (2) middle number of strokes of Chinese characters, (3) large number of strokes of Chinese characters. In addition, we matched orthographic neighborhood size, structure, the number of radicals, the phonetic family size, as well as the pronunciation consistency one by one between moderate number of strokes of Chinese characters and large number of strokes of Chinese characters.Experiment 1, we explored the stroke number effect in lexical decision task which based on the traditional research paradigm. We aimed to compare traditional stroke number effect with stroke number effect under balancing the orthographic neighborhood size factor in the process of perfomiance. In the experiments, the participant was asked to judge the character is true or false words in lexical decision task. At the same time, we collected the reaction time and accuracy of the subjects. Experimental results showed that a main effect of the number of strokes which under the balanced orthographic neighborhood size factor. However, the small number of strokes of Chinese characters is not balance with the other two types of Chinese characters on orthographic neighborhood size, structure, the number of radicals. We analyzed difference between middle number of sirokes of Chinese characters and large number of strokes of Chinese characters. The results showed that there is no difference between two stimuli types among the subjects.Experiment 2, we have adopted a new technology called event related potential (ERP) which more objective and accurate. Meanwhile, we have adopted a delayed character-matching task as the research paradigm and have used the same Chinese character materials for experiment. The ANOVA on ACC showed that significant main Effects of strokes according to the results of the subjects. Event-related brain potentials results showed that moderate stroke number of Chinese characters generated more negative amplitude at the N2 time window, compared with large stroke number of Chinese characters, and showed no behavioral change on stroke number. The stroke number effect also appeared at the P200 time window, which indicated initial activation because of the strokes.