Phonetic Radicals Neighborhood Effect Of Chinese Characters In Visual Word Recognition

Chinese character is a variety of ancient and remarkable language which is complex and accurate. More than 80% Chinese characters are phonogram, which contain phonetic radicals that can provide phonological clues. Phonetic radical has a great impact on word recognition. Against the word recognition of Chinese characters, three different theoretical models were proposed, namely: direct access model, phonological mediation model and dual route cascaded model. Direct access model holds that lexical access can be accomplish by front activation without phonological activation. And phonological mediation model keeps the opinion that front code would activate phonology code, and then this phonological mediation would activate lexical code. And dual route cascaded model insists that these two channels can coexist and be processed in parallel. Semantic can be activated by each channel, depending on its frequency, task paradigm, subject’s level, etc. These theories attracted researchers’ intense debate. A large amount of experiments had been made by researchers to supporting their own theories. Among them, the role of the phonology in the process of word recognition became the essential question. Phonograms’ phonetic radical can provide phonology clues. In the course of word recognition, all these phonology information would affect the visual word recognition. The study found that phonology-priming word recognition may play a positive role in promoting word recognition, or may appear to be inhibited. Interactive activation model can account for the inhibition phenomenon: In the course of word recognition, lexical and sub lexical nodes can be activated by each other., so when a sub lexical node is activated, the similar nodes of its neighbors will also be activated, all these activated nodes start to compete with each other and generate inhibition(lateral inhibition), finally high starting level of the target node is selected to obtain recognition. The more neighbors of target it has, the more distracted nodes it has, and the higher level of inhibition it happens, resulting in inhibition effect. Andrews’ top-down processing model can account for the promoting phenomenon: In the course of word recognition, the target stimulus is activated, they would also activate their family members, then these would start to activate their next level of letters and letters strings, these letters and letters strings would in turn can enhance the target stimulus activation. The more family members they have, those same letters are constantly activated and thus contributing to promoting the target word activation and generating promoting effect. Although there is some controversy between IA model and Andrews’ top-down processing model, but they are not essentially antagonistic. It depends on whether IA model or Andrews’ model occupies a dominant position.In the study, we examine the assumption that effect of phonological radical neighborhood to word recognition was related to some special tasks. In some easier tasks such as naming task and lexical decision task which can fully rely on similar phonological global activation, it promoted word recognition. And in some more difficult tasks such as semantic classification task, it inhibited word recognition. The current study used phonetic radical family as experimental material, adopted the semantic classification tasks, lexical decision task and naming task to investigate the effect of phonology information in Chinese character recognition.The experiment 1 aimed to investigate how phonetic radical neighborhood and regularity affect the word recognition in semantic classification task. It was a 2(phonetic radical neighborhood size: large vs. small) X2(regularity: regular vs. irregular) within-subjects design. The participants were asked to press buttons to judge whether the presented stimuli were animal words. Response time and accuracy were recorded. The results of behavioral data showed a significant main effect of stimulus regularity with the slower RT in the response of regular stimuli compared with irregular ones. And there was a significant interactive effect of the two variables on ACC. The analysis of the interaction implied that ACC was significantly smaller in the regular condition than the irregular one during the large phonetic radical family; the ACC was significantly smaller in the larger phonetic radical family condition than the smaller one during the regular characters. The experimental result supported the interactive activation model. Based on the experiment 1’s program, experiment 2 only deleted a blank screen without any other changes to eliminate any possible affection on RT causing by this blank screen. The result of experiment 2 was the same as experiment 1; the interactive activation model was supported by experiment 1.Experiment 3 used stroke neighborhood which does not contain any phonological information, aimed to acquire the processing mechanism of Chinese character without any phonological information in lexical decision task. It was a single factor(stroke neighborhood size: large vs. small) within-subjects design. Subjects were demanded to press buttons to judge whether the presented stimuli were a true word. Experimental results showed that: compared with smaller one, large stroke neighborhood’s ACC is lower.The experiment 4 used the same material as experiment 1, aimed to examined phonetic radical and regularity‘s effect to word recognition in naming task. T Subjects were requested to read the e presented characters, recording participants’ RT and ACC. The results of behavioral data showed a significant main effect of family size with the slower RT in the response of larger family stimuli compared with smaller ones and a significant main effect of regularity with the slower RT in the response of regular stimuli compared with irregular ones. And there was a significant interactive effect of the two variables on ACC. The analysis of the interaction showed ACC was significantly larger in the regular condition than the irregular one during the small phonetic radical family; the ACC was significantly smaller in the larger phonetic radical family condition than the smaller one during the regular characters.Based on the above results of four experimental, we can obtain the following conclusions: Phonetic radical neighborhood effect showed inhibition effect in Chinese character word recognition, especially under regular words. Phonetic radical neighborhood effect is irrelevant to the tasks.