How Semantic Radicals Support And Limit The Processing Of Chinese Verbs And Nouns

Character is an external expression of language.Semantic radicals are Chinese-specific components which are the smallest semantic processing unit and the smallest grammatical unit.The processing of semantic radicals has special routes.Over years,researchers have put semantic radical's two important functions-the semantic and syntactic features in depth discussions.Semantics and the grammatical information contained by semantic radicals can reach the conceptual network via independent pathways.Several studies have found that when the meaning of semantic radical consist of the whole meaning,the radical can promote the classification,and when the meaning of radical is opposite will hinder the classification.It was found that,in semantics,semantic radical can impact the extraction of Chinese characters' category meaning,defined feature meaning and action verb meaning;in syntax,the survey found that 90 percent of semantic radicals have obvious syntactic tendency,semantic radical in Chinese noun and verb classification plays an important role.In the past several years,there has been a growing body of research using different methods asking whether processing words from different grammatical classes(especially nouns and verbs)engage different neural systems.Verbs refer to events,nouns can also refer to events,typical nouns referring to objects,instead,refer to discrete entities.Nouns and verbs usually rely on morphological marks to distinguish in English.Because of nouns and verbs have no obvious morphological change,the distinction of verbs and nouns mainly depends on their semantic features.Most of Chinese nouns mark the materials with semantic radical that things were made of or made from,and most of Chinese verbs are marked the organs or tools of actions by semantic radical.The present research explored the influences of semantic radicals to word recognition,semantic extraction and grammar classification from the view of sub-lexical processing of Chinese characters in nouns and verbs.In experiment 1 Behavior data showed that subjects responded character semantic radical with shorter time and higher accuracy.Three time windows P200,N400 and P600 were employed in ERPs data analyze.Main effect of semantic radical was only found in N400 time window for nouns and verbs(characters with semantic radical elicited larger N400 wave)in the syntax decision task.But there is no main effect of semantic radical was found in semantic judgement.and found in P600 time window(characters with semantic radical elicited larger P600 wave)in both tasks.Experiment 1 indicated that semantic radicals of Chinese characters provided important grammatical information of words and played important role in grammar classification of Chinese nouns and verbs of single word.In the experiment 2,stimuli were combined with a priming word to construct two contrastive phrase contexts,namely,noun-predicting and verb – predicting.ERPs in response to the stimuli in different contexts were recorded.Main effect of semantic radical was found in P200 and P600 time window for nouns and verbs(characters with semantic radical elicited larger P200 wave)in both tasks.But main effect of semantic radical was only found in N400 time window(characters with semantic radical elicited larger N400 wave)in semantic judgement task.The difference between verb and noun is morpho-syntactic properties or semantic-conceptual properties,the present study has not reached a concrete conclusion.As we shall see,there is plenty of evidence that grammatical class information is relevant to understanding and producing sentences,but the situation is highly different when considering single words.When stimuli were single word,in the syntax decision task,found in P600 time window(characters with semantic radical elicited larger P600 wave)for verb condition.But in the semantic judgement task,found in P600 time window(characters with semantic radical elicited larger P600 wave)for noun condition.But when stimuli were combined with a priming word to construct two contrastive phrase contexts,found in N400 time window(characters without semantic radical elicited larger N400 wave)for verb condition,while main effect of cue were found.In P600 time window,characters with semantic radical elicited larger 600 wave)for verb condition.For noun condition,there is no main effect of semantic radical was found in N400 and P600 time window.In the semantic judgement task,there is no main effect of semantic radical and grammatical class were found.In summary,semantic radical has semantic and grammatical information.Semantic radical as a sub-lexical component,it has much influence on the processing of grammatical class.The impact of semantic radical may depend on the processing depth of the task.The word situation in the experiment task will affect the processing way of verbs and nouns.The role of semantic radical in the processing of noun and verb will depend on the specific experimental task.