The Processing Of Semantic And Phonetic Radicals In Chinese Phonogram Recognition

The majority of Chinese characters are phonograms which are comprised of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The semantic radical usually implies the meaning of the phonogram, and the phonetic radical often offers a phonological clue for the pronunciation of its host phonogram. However, regretfully, current results are confusing, with some studies reporting that the effects of the phonetic radicals were earlier and stronger than that of semantic radicals, but others assuming that the semantic radicals played a predominant role. On the basis of prior research, four experiments employing both behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures were designed in present research to further investigate the processing of the two types of radicals. In all the four experiments, a strategy neutral task-lexical decision task with pseudo-characters as fillers was carried out that the participants were asked to judge whether the stimulus was a reveal character or not.In Experiment 1a (Behavioral measures) and Experiment 1b (ERP measures), both semantic and phonetic radicals are standalone characters, and the frequency of semantic and phonetic radical was separately manipulated during each of two experiments. The results of Experiment 1a revealed only phonetic radical frequency could influence the processing of phonogram, the reaction time of phonograms containing high-frequency phonetic radicals was longer and the error rate was higher than those containing low-frequency phonetic radicals; The results of Experiment 1b showed that high-frequency phonetic radicals elicited a smaller P200 during 200-300ms time window and a larger N400 around 350?500ms time window as compared to the low-frequency ones. By contrast, the high-frequency semantic radicals only elicited a smaller N400 during the time window of 350?450ms than did the low-frequency ones in anterior scalp.In Experiment 2a (Behavioral measures) and Experiment 2b (ERP measures), the semantic transparency of semantic radical and the pronunciation regularity of phonetic radical were orthogonally manipulated. The results of Experiment 2a indicated that only the semantic transparency of semantic radical had effect on the reaction time and error rate, the recognition of phonograms containing transparent semantic radicals was faster and more accurate than that of phonograms containing non-transparent semantic radicals. The results of Experiment 2b exhibited a robust effect raised by the transparency of semantic radical that phonograms containing transparent semantic radicals could elicited a smaller P200 during 150-250ms time window as compared to the ones containing non-transparent semantic radicals. With respect to the pronunciation regularity of phonetic radical, only a comparatively weak N400 effect was found in anterior scalp during 300-500ms time window.In conclusion, the present results demonstrated that both semantic and phonetic radicals could be activated and play a role in Chinese phonogram recognition. However, the processing of the two types of radicals compete against each other during phonogram recognition. More attention one type of radical gains, more cognitive resources it may obtain, and much stronger it would activate, whereas this type of radical which is strongly activated will impede the activation of another type of radical.