An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Semantic Radical Consistency And Homophone Density On Chinese Character Recognition

One of the important characteristics of the Chinese language is the existence of a large number of homophones,and most Chinese characters are phonograms.Therefore,the Chinese character is an important test field to study the linguistic factors in lexical recognition.Through previous studies on the recognition of characters and vocabulary,the relative significance of phonology and semantics in Chinese character recognition was found.These studies have found different results in comparing phonological and semantic processing.This might be due to lack of control,without control of various orthographic,phonological,and semantic factors.Therefore,this paper discusses the semantic and phonological information encoded in Chinese character recognition,using auditory semantic decision task.We mainly consider the influence of homophone density and semantic radical consistency on Chinese characters recognition.This paper mainly investigates phonologically mediated model in the study of the word recognition.Finally,we return to the theoretical issues:one is when processing a single Chinese character,is the whole word extraction and processing,or by the radicals?The other is when determining the semantic category of Chinese characters,from orthography mapping to the semantics,or from orthography mapping to phonology and then to semantics?This research adopts the method of behavioral experiments,with reaction time as index of symbol,a 2(semantic radical consistency:consistent vs.inconsistent)x2(homophone density:high vs.low)within-subjects factorial analysis of variance(ANOVA)for participants and a between-word ANOVA for items were performed.The aim of this paper is to study the effects of semantic radical consistency and homophone density on Chinese characters recognition.This paper aims to answer the following two questions:1)What are the effects of semantic radical consistency and homophone density on Chinese character recognition?2)If semantic radical consistency and homophone density have an effect on Chinese word recognition,then how do they exert their effect?The experiment selected 30 students as subjects.They are English majors and non-English majors,graduate students from Grade one to three from Hunan University.Formal experimental materials using E-Prime2.0 programming were presented on computer screen.The subjects are required to identify sound and categorize the semantic category of the target word.All experimental data(reaction time and accurate rate)generated was input into SPSS 20 software for statistical analysis.Through the experiment,this study found that:I)Judging semantic radical consistency,there is consistency effect of words level.The results indicated a significant difference in RT,F(1,4086)=152.711,p<0.05.Moreover,the semantic radicals that are consistent with the semantic category of the whole word can be recognized more easily;2)Homophone density affects the semantic processing of Chinese characters.Similarly,A significant main effect for homophone density was also obtained in RT,F(1,1978)=152.711,p =0.012<0.05.Moreover,high homophone density characters were responded to more slowly than low homophone density characters;3)A significant interaction between semantic radical consistency and homophone density was found in the RT analysis by subjects,F(1,4084)=54.335,p<0.05.Results found a robust semantic consistency effect within homophone families.Through the analysis of empirical evidence,we found an inhibitory homophone density effect and a facilitative semantic radical consistency effect.The results show that,between the interaction with semantic radical consistency and homophone density,the semantic radical consistency plays a robust and leading role.In the synthesis:l)In Chinese word recognition,semantic radical has significant effect,which indicates that Chinese characters extraction is extracted by the radical component.2)Similarly,phonological information is crucial for obtaining the semantics of Chinese characters.This indicates that when determining the semantic category of Chinese characters,the mapping locus is very likely from orthography mapping to phonology and then to semantics.