| Currently, researches about the visual information from Chinese characters and how the visual information impact the cognitive processing of Chinese characters are drawing increasing attention of many researchers. That is to say,more and more researchers have paid much attention on the early processing stages of the recognition of Chinese character such as orthography, but most of the studies are focused on the study of degradation, font, and distortion. According to our recent study, we found the font effects and degradation effects, and the font effects were regarded as similar to the degradation effects. But there was no study combined font and degradation effect to investigate whether their impact on the Chinese character recognition is acting on the same stage. Following Sternberg’s additive logics(1969), if the interaction was significant after analyzing the reaction time coming from the two factors, the two factors were considered to work in the same stage.Hence, if the interaction between font and blurriness was significant, both of them would have the same influence on the processing of Chinese characters. Therefore, the first experiment of our current study mainly focuses on the how font and blurriness impact our cognitive processing of Chinese characters.Moreover, during our previous study,we found that there was a certain relationship between the font effects and lexicality effects, and there might be interactions existed between this two factor. The research about the cognitive processing of compound words found that the word status(two-character compound words, two-character compound pseudo-words) and fonts (XKT and ST) interacted in the N400 component, that is to say the inherent characteristic of words(orthography) or the font impact the semantic processing. And an interaction was found between the word status and the font. According to Sternberg (1969) additive logics,word status and font access in the same stage of cognitive processing. Similarly, these two variables(font and word status) may also act on the same stage of cognitive processing in the cognitive processing of Chinese characters. Hence, our present study concentrates on the impact of the word quality and the font on the cognitive processing of Chinese characters.The purpose of this study is to explore how the font, lexicality,and the blurriness influencing our cognitive processing of Chinese characters by combing the first experiment and the second experiment, and to investigate whether these factors are involved in the same cognitive processing stage.In experiment 1, this experiment is made up of two variables, namely font variable (XKT and ST) and blurriness variables (blurred in 5 and blurred in 6).It is a 2X2 project design. Subjects were asked to decide whether the former probe character and the latter target probe character were the same character,recording subjects’reaction scalp event-related potentials when the target word was displayed.The ERP results indicated that at the 160-195 time window, stimuli in ST elicited greater negatives,with higher blurred stimuli producing larger negatives.This process might be involved in the experience from expertise.That is to say, we have more expertise with characters in ST than in XKT. For the degradation effect in this time window, the blurred stimuli destroyed our expertise,leading to highly blurred stimuli producing larger negatives.And regardless of the character displayed in the XKT or ST, the highly blurred stimuli elicited larger negative-going waves in 225-275 ms time window. Likewise, the stimuli in XKT produced larger negative-going waves in the same time window regardless of the blurriness of stimuli although this effect was larger for lightly blurred stimuli.One possible explanation might be that highly blurred stimuli were different from our inner representation,so did the stimuli in XKT. Most importantly, the interaction between the effect of font and the blurriness effect was observed in 225-275 ms time window, which could be taken as an evidence that blurriness and font affect the same stage of processing. Thus, our present results are consistent with the notion that the effect of font impact on processing is similar to the effect of blurriness playing on characters(Caixia Lv,2012).According to experiment 1,we found the interaction between with the blurriness and the font, suggesting that the font and the blurriness act in the same cognitive processing stage. So this experiment is to study whether the font and word status are involved in the same stage of cognitive processing. The experiment is made up of two variables, namely font variable (XKT and ST) and word status variable (real characters and pseudo-characters).It is a 2X2 project design. We ask the subjects to complete our lexical decision task, with using fMRI to collect the EEG data. We found that the common brain areas activated by font and word status are the right middle temporal gyrus. The temporal lobe is mainly related with the semantic and the early orthography processing. We also found that ST activated less significant than XKT in this area such as the right fusiform gyrus and the left occipital.Pseudo-characters significantly activated than the real word on the the left insula and the right insula.Researching on the two experiments of our present study, the following conclusions might be indicated:First, we study the impact of font and blurriness on the cognitive processing of Chinese characters by the same word judgment task, finding the interaction between the font and the blurriness in the ERP waveform.This results suggest that the font and the blurriness were involved in the same cognitive processing stage.Hence, the font effects can be as analogous to degradation effects, which means that the characters in XKT can be seen as highly blurred characters and characters in ST can be seen as slightly blurred characters. And, because the interaction was found on the time window of N250 and N400, the results indicated that the meaning of Chinese single-character words is accessed directly from orthography without, phonological mediation.Second, we study the effect coming from font and word quality played on the cognitive processing of Chinese characters by applying a lexical decision task.We found that a significant interaction between font and word status appeared on the temporal lobe, indicating that the font and word status were involved in the same cognitive processing stage.That is to say the font effects can be as analogous to lexicality effects. This results might also supports the concept that the processing of Chinese characters is accessed directly from orthography to semantics.Third, after analyzing the results from our two present experimental, we can say that the font, blurriness and word status act in the same cognitive processing stages, that is to say the font effects,the degradation effects and the lexicality effects can be regarded similarly. Specifically, the characters displayed in XKT, pseudo- characters can be seen as highly blurred characters.Similarly, characters displayed in ST, real characters can be seen as slightly blurred characters. |
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