The Phonetic Neighborhood Size Effect In Chinese Characters During Character Decision Task

The orthographic "neighborhood size effect" of alphabetic characters refers to the number of other words that can be formed by changing one letter of a word without changing the position of the letter.Coltheart et al.(1977)initially proposed the family effect of phonetic alphabet,and subsequently many studies have reported the family promotion effect(Andrews,1989,Andrews,1992,Carreiras et al.,1997,Peereman and Content,1995,Sears et al.,1995).There are two explanations for the family facilitation effect of alphabetic characters: one is the glyph proximity hypothesis,which considers that the function of proximity is to speed up the recognition of target words at the level of morphological representation(Andrews,1997);the other is the pronunciation proposed by Dual Route Cascaded(DRC).The hypothesis of adjacent words holds that the function of adjacent words is to speed up the recognition of target words at the level of phonetic representation.The orthographic adjacent words are often pronounced adjacent words,so it is difficult to distinguish the two hypotheses.However,the regularity of Chinese characters is weak,and most of the pronunciations of the pronounced adjacent words are different,so it is helpful to solve this problem.At present,the results of the research on the family effect of Chinese characters are not consistent.Three experiments were designed in this study.The purpose of this study is to explore the phonetic family effect of Chinese characters in the character decision task,and the role of family words in the family effect.Experiments 1 explored the influence of the size of the phonetic family on the recognition of low-frequency target words.The results showed that the response of the target words of the large family was significantly faster than that of the small family,and the correct rate of the large family was significantly higher than that of the small family.Although there are higher family members in the phonetic family than target words,previous studies have shown that high frequency family members inhibit Chinese character recognition,but in experiment1,there is still a significant family promotion effect,which shows that the phonetic family effect of Chinese characters is very prominent in low frequency characters.The second experiment is to study the influence of the size of the sound-side family on the recognition of high-frequency target words.The Chinese characters with the highest frequency in the sound-side family are selected as the target words.The results show that there are only significant differences in response time between the sound-side family and the small family.The larger the sound-side family,the faster the response of the target words.Comparing the results of Experiment 1 and experiment 2,we found that the sound-side family facilitation effect appeared in both low-frequency and high-frequency words,but was more obvious in low-frequency words.In experiment 3,ERP technology and priming paradigm were used to further study the phonological family effect of Chinese characters.Irregular phonological family characters were selected as the target words,excluding the influence of phonological regularity,and controlling the influence of pronunciation consistency and high frequency family members.The purpose was to explore the pure phonological family effect and family effect.Action point.The results showed that the recognition speed of large family was significantly faster than that of small family,homonym family members triggered faster target word response,and P200 and N400 decreased.In this study,the target words are irregular words of irregular families,and the rate of pronunciation consistency is low.That is to say,there are fewer family members with the same pronunciation as the target words in the phonetic family,while the majority of family members with the different pronunciation of the target words are in the family.The number of members of the different pronunciation families in the large family is more than that in the small family.The speed of family facilitation is significantly faster than that of small family characters,which shows that family members promote target character recognition at the level of glyph representation and support the glyph proximity hypothesis.This can be explained by Andrews(1997)family feedback theory.He believes that family facilitation effect is caused by family members’ feedback at the whole-word level.The bigger the family is,the stronger the visual input stimulus is the target word.Through top-down feedback,the more members of orthographic family are activated.The activation of family members will spread downward to sub-byte points.The bigger the family,the stronger the orthographic activation of sub-byte points.The activation of the latter will turn upward.Candidates,especially target words,are propagated to the whole word level.Therefore,the bigger the family,the stronger the early orthographic feedback of subword processing,and the easier the family promotion effect.The results of experiment 1,experiment 2 and experiment 3 show that during character decision task,the phonetic neighborhood size promotes the recognition of target characters,which is more obvious in low-frequency characters.It shows that the recognition speed of large family characters(target characters with more family members)is faster than that of small family characters,and supports the hypothesis of adjacent words.It can be explained by Andrews(1997)family feedback theory.