The P200 Effects Of Phonetic-radical Neighborhood Size And Of Regularity In Chinese Characters

The concept of family of target characters originated from the study of alphabetic characters.Clotheart(1977)gave a clear definition.It refers to a set of adjacent words formed by changing one letter of a word and keeping the relative position of other letters unchanged.This set is called family.These adjacent words are family members,abbreviated as family words.For example,the word cake can form family words bake,lake,care,coke and cave by changing one of the letters.Families with large family members are called big family,otherwise they are called small family.A large number of studies on Pinyin characters have found that the recognition reaction speed of words with more family words is significantly faster than that of words with fewer family words,that is,the so-called family size effect in Pinyin characters.The bigger the family,the faster the response,which shows the promotion effect.This effect can prove that the response of target words is influenced by their family members.However,there are linguistic differences in this family effect.In English,family members tend to promote responses,while in Dutch and French,they tend to inhibit responses.That is,the larger the family,the slower the response.As the basic unit of Chinese writing and semantic expression,Chinese characters can be divided into two categories: monosyllabic characters and synthesized characters.Monographic characters can be formed independently(?)or combined with other phonetic or morphological paragraphs to form synthesized characters(?).The phonetic side is used to express the sound(?)and the phonetic side is used to express the meaning(?)in the synthesized characters,so we also call it the phonetic word.The pictophonetic characters can be divided into left right sound or right left sound according to the position beside the sound.Voice-side or form-side can usually form multiple words,i.e.a set of similar words,i.e.a family,near the same sound or form-side.The set of similar words formed by the same sound side is the sound side family.For example: phonetic: ?,its family words are: ?,?,?,?.Similarly,according to the definition of Coltheart et al.,we call families with more family members as large families,and families with fewer family members as small families.The phonetic relationship between the whole word and the whole word can be explained by regularity.The words with the same pronunciation as the whole word are regular words,while the words with different pronunciation are irregular words.The phonetic relationship between pictophonetic characters and adjacent phonetics can also be explained by consistency,that is,the proportion of regular members(family members with adjacent homonyms)in adjacent phonetic families.In this study,we define the rule family with many words as rule family,that is,high consistency.Families with fewer regular members that are homophonic with the voice are defined as irregular families.The purpose of this study is to explore whether there is family size effect in Chinese characters,and the influence of family regularity on family size effect.In the first experiment,we divided the vocal families into regular vocal families and irregular vocal families according to the number of family members with homonyms,and then divided them into regular large families,regular small families,irregular large families and irregular small families according to the absolute number of family members(large families(> 7)and small families(<7).Regular phonetic family refers to the family members,most of the whole word pronunciation and phonetic side the same,irregular phonetic side family refers to family members,most of the whole word and phonetic side pronunciation is different.On this basis,we combine ERP technology and use the feedback index P200 to explore the family size effect in Chinese character reading and the influence of family regularity on the family size effect.The results of previous studies on family size effect are not uniform.They show both inhibition and promotion.It is found that the regularity,frequency,the number of high frequency family members(words with higher frequency than target words),the voice consistency of family members and so on all interact with family size.Therefore,in order to better understand the influencing factors of family size effect in Chinese character reading,this paper explores the influence of family regularity on family size effect in Chinese character recognition.The experiment was designed with 2((regularity: regular characters,irregular words)X2(size of sound family: big and small).The task of experiment was to judge the same word.The target of rule family was regular words with medium and low frequencies,and irregular words with medium and low frequencies in irregular family were irregular words with medium and low frequencies.The number of strokes,frequency,speech consistency and high frequency membership of target words are balanced under four conditions.We expect that there will be family size effect in the reading of Chinese characters,and family regularity will interfere with the size effect of the phonetic family.The experimental results show that under irregular families,large families trigger smaller P200 amplitude than small families,which shows a promotional effect.Under the rule family,there is no significant difference between large and small families.From the first experiment,we can see that family size effect is separated from family regularity.In other words,family size effect also exists in Chinese character reading,and family regularity affects family size effect.That is to say,under irregular families,large families promote response,which shows that large families produce smaller P200 than small families.Under the rule family,there is no significant difference between large and small families.Although there is no significant difference between large and small families under the rule family,the disappearance of family facilitation of the big family itself can also indicate that the processing of the big family of rules is disturbed and the processing facilitation is blocked.Most of the existing theoretical models about family size effect are based on Pinyin characters.Andrews(1997)family feedback theory is often used to explain the promotion effect,while IA model lateral inhibition theory is more used to explain the inhibition effect.Different from the simple family promotion effect or inhibition effect of Pinyin characters,the family size effect of Chinese characters seems to be more complex.These two theoretical models can not explain the two opposite family size effects under family rules at the same time.Therefore,on the basis of these two theories,we propose a hypothesis,that is,homophonic sideband interference feedback.We assume that as an integral word,besides the activation of the target word,the voice side is also activated,so it participates in the competition among family members and inhibits each other.When the voice side is homophonic or similar to most family members(i.e.in the rule family),the inhibition of competition will be strengthened,which will interfere with the feedback of family members on the voice side of the target word and lead to everyone.Families of ethnic groups promote disappearance or even produce inhibitory effects.When the voice side is different from most family members(irregular family),the effect of restraining competition is small,and the voice side does not interfere with the feedback of family members on the voice side glyph,and produces a promoting effect.Therefore,in experiment 2,we continue to use ERP technology and start-up paradigm.The purpose is to test whether the expected vocal side interferes with the feedback of the members of the same family because it is similar to the majority of the members of the same family through the start-up of homophone rule family members,thus becoming an important factor affecting the size effect of the family.In experiment 2,rule words of rule family were selected as target words,and the task of judging true and false characters was used.The experiment was designed as a single factor in the subjects.The three conditions were homophonic activation of large families,no activation of large families and no activation of small families.We anticipate that homophone activation will enhance the interference of the voice side.Compared with the non-homophone activation family,homophone activation family will produce a larger P200.The non-startup family is to be taken as the control group and compared with the non-startup family.The family size effect of the rule family is further explored under different experimental tasks.The results of Experiment 2 show that the main effects are significant under three experimental conditions.Further analysis shows that homophone-activated large families cause larger P200 amplitudes than non-activated large families.on-startup large families trigger larger P200 amplitudes than non-startup small families.According to the results of Experiment 1 and experiment 2,there is also family size effect in Chinese character recognition,but unlike alphabetic characters,family size effect of Chinese characters is influenced by family regularity,which is promoted by irregular families,and larger families produce smaller P200.Under the rule family,the promotional effect disappears or inhibits.In experiment 2,the results of homophonic activation and non-homophonic activation prove our anticipated feedback of homophonic side interference.That is to say,in the large family of rules,the downward feedback of the early rule members is suppressed by the sound side because of the similarity between the rule members and the sound side homonyms,and the interference is increased,and the early processing is blocked.Compared with the condition that the sound side is not activated,the interference suppression of the sound side is better under the condition of sound side activation,so the homonym initiation family produces a larger P200 than the non-activation family.On the contrary,most of the members of the irregular vocal families are mutually dissimilar with their non-homophonic ones,which does not constitute a substantial similarity.Their activation is not inhibited by the non-homophonic ones,and their feedback output is not disturbed.A certain degree of competition between the target words and the members of the vocal families can not offset the early accumulated feedback of the large families(especially for the low-frequency target words,For high-frequency words,the recognition process is very fast,and it is difficult to stand out beside the sound,so that it does not affect the smaller P200 caused by large irregular families.At the same time,in experiment 2,we creatively added the non-priming small family as the control group,and repeated the family size effect under the rule family in the new experimental situation,which made our research results on the family effect of Chinese characters more general biased,and the results showed significant inhibition effect,which was basically consistent with the results of experiment 1.