Research On SNARC Effect Of Chinese Two-character Words

Dehaene and his colleagues found when participants react to the parity of numbers(1-9,except 5),they react faster to small numbers with their left hands and react faster to larger numbers with their right hands. They name this effect SNARC(spatial numerical association of response codes) effect.To explain the mechanism behind SNARC effect, he proposed the mental number line theory: numbers are internally represented on a continuous left-to-right-oriented line(the “mental number line”) and digital representation is associated with spatial representation. Some scholars believe SNARC effect was derived from the directionality of digital representation which is caused by the long time reading and writing habits.In the meantime, whether the sequential representation is enough to induce SNARC effect is also a focus of controversy. In our research, we broke the boundary of conventional SNARC research, extended it into the field of Chinese two-character words. Through the five sub-studies, we explored the multi-level and multi-dimension relationship between Chinese two-character words and SNARC effect and made a series of robust experimental results.By using the improved SNARC effect spatial cuing paradigm in Research 1 to verify the existence of SNARC effect in Chinese two-character words, the results of the experiment show that SNARC effect exists on the whole-word level.When inspected separately, the “left character” condition differs from the “right character” condition at theexistence of SNARC effect. Under “left character” condition, we found no SNARC effect while under “right character” condition we found significant SNARC effect.Based on Research 1,the aim of Research 2 is to verify whether the non-existence of SNARC effect under “left character” condition is caused by the low frequency of words. Also we want to verify the learning mechanism(frequency factor) of SNARC effect in Chinese two-character words. Through using high frequency words and low frequency words as the experiment material,we found a new special effect, instead of SNARC effect, existed in Chinese two-character words which we named“semi-SNARC effect”. Furthermore, the effect is not affected by frequency factor and is robust in many levels.In Research 3,we used a novel non-word learning paradigm to separate the semantic representation from the sequential representation and wished to ascertain the overall cause(the binding property of semantic representation) of the results(reverse SNARC effect under “left character”condition and SNARC effect under “right character” condition, namely the“semi-SNARC effect”) in Research 2. The results of Research 3 proved the possibility of the cause. The results also manifested that the sequential representation was enough to induce the semi-SNARC effect and the semantic representation had an impeding effect on it.We used reverse order representation in Research 4 to further study the mechanism of semi-SNARC effect. The results show that the semi-SNARC effect is induced by the priming role of the words’ emergence rather than the deep lexical representation mechanism.In Research 5, by applying the vertical presenting way of the words,we found semi-SNARC effect was not affected by the way of words’ presentation.In conclusion, the research used the improved spatial cuing paradigm and our original non-word learning paradigm to study the complex relationship between Chinese two-character words and SNARC effect.We found robust “semi-SNARC effect” in Chinese two-character words and did research about the formation mechanism and influencing factors of it in different levels.