The Mechanism Of Occurrence Of Chinese Character Saturation

When we look at a character for a relative long period,or write a word repeatedly,we will have a experience that the meaning of the character is lost or the character seems strange.This is named Chinese character satiation.This phenomenon is influenced by many factors,and a variety of methods and paradigms has been developed to measure it.However,these different methods failed to converge on a coherence conclusion.There are three different hypothesis that the semantic satiation may occur in the stages of the perceptual representation,semantic processing,of the association between the above two stages.To investigate how the semantic satiation occurs,what factors affect it and its neural mechanism in Chinese,the study used word named task and eye tracking technology and the speeded category-matching task in three parts.To explore the factors that affect Chinese character satiation,the eye tracking technology was used to record interest area dwell time and interest area fixation count when participants were named Chinese characters in the first study part.And the number of errors in the pronunciation report was recorded,too.The experiment design is mixed design including a between-subject variable and two within-subject variables.The within-subject variables are the type of character including normal character and special character,and the location order,including four orders.And the between-subject variable is the matrix location that display the special character,including left area and right area.The result reveals that the type of character and location order are the important factors that contribute to semantic satiation.The second study part using the speeded category-matching task to explore in which stage the semantic satiation may occur,including three experiments.The experiment 1 used familiar two-word noun that including the perceptual representation,semantic processing and the association between the above two stages in Chinese character and ask participants to match the priming category word and the target sample word.And the result did not show the significant satiation effect.The experiment 2 that including only the semantic processing asks participants to match the priming sample word and the target sample word.And the result did not show the significant satiation effect,either.The experiment 3 including the perceptual representation used rarely single character as material and asked participants to match the perceptual representation.The result showed the significant satiation effect.The results reveal that it may occur at different stages which depend on different materials.And it may occur in the stages of the perceptual representation which used single Chinese character as the material of the test.The third study part using ERP to explore the neural mechanism of the orthographic disorganization between rarely single character and familiar two-word noun by examining the N170 components that reflecting the orthographic processing and the N200 amplitude of the top-central area which only reflects the Chinese word processing.The experiment design is within-subject design.The variables are material type and the satiation level.The results show that the satiation effect is not observed in the familiar two-word noun,it reveals that there are different mechanisms decided by different materials.