The Time Course Research Of Global And Local Processing In Chinese Word Recognition

In the study of the Chinese character recognition, the relationship between the global and the local processing has been an important topic in this research field. Although there have been a lot of researches which have proved that the global and local processing have an important role in Chinese character recognition processing, the debate, whether local processing first processes, or global processing first processes, or these two processing process at same time, still exists. Therefore, this study aims to address this debate by using font as stimuli, which is different in the local features but not in the global features.The experiment 1 using the prime paradigm required the participants to judge whether the two Chinese compound words are the same or not. A two-character compound word was first presented rapidly in one of the three font types(i.e., Shu Ti, Lishu, Song), and followed by an uncertain time interval(i.e., 100 ms, 250 ms, 350 ms). Then participants were shown a Chinese two-character compound words in Song font, and then asked to judge if the word was the same as the prime word. The results show that when the prime words were presented in the Song font, participants judged the most quickly when the prime words were presented in the Song font, and judged the most slowly when the prime words were presented in the Shu Ti. Similar results were found in the judgment of the correct rate index. In addition, it is found that the interaction between font and time interval is not significant.In experiment 2, participants were asked to passively view lists of two-character compound words and only indicate Korean words via button press. A compound word was presented in a prime trial in one of the three font types(i.e., Song, Li Shu, or Shu Ti),and was immediately followed by a target trial that presented the same word in Song font. A clear N200 enhancement effect was observed for target trials of all three conditions. Manipulation of font type did not modulate the N200 enhancement effect, but did modulate earlier ERP components N1 and N270.The results were discussed in the information theory. The experiments 1 and 2 suggest that global and local processing are two relatively independent process, and local processing is acted before global processing in Chinese character recognition. These illustrates the Chinese characters recognition contains three stages. The first stage is an information accumulation stage. The local features is processed in this stage to accumulate some necessary local features for the preparation of the next global processing stage. The second stage is the recovery stage of written morphemes. Written morphemes are recognized by decoding local feature with Chinese character knowledge and orthography in this global processing. The third stage is the confirmation stage. At this stage the brain continues to be processed from top to bottom in order to verify that the Chinese characters are the same as that of the real Chinese characters.