The Role Of Sublexical Information In Chinese Character Recognition

Language is an important tool for human communication and a medium for the exchange of ideas.Reading ability is an important skill,which plays an important role in adapting to modern society.Understanding of word meaning is an important part of text reading comprehension.Although it is widely assumed that visual word recognition involves processing of orthography,phonology and semantic information at both lexical and sublexical levels,it remains controversial on the relative prominence of the activation of these different types of information at the sublexical level in the process of Chinese character recognition.Using eye movement technique with revised visual-world paradigm,this study aimed to investigate how skilled readers used phonetic,semantic and positional information of radicals embedded in Chinese characters in Chinese character processing.In the visual-world paradigm,participants are visually presented with four stimuli on a computer screen,including two pseudocharacters(e.g.,(?) and (?)),which are legal combinations of semantic and phonetic radicals to form units that are character-like,but do not exist in the Chinese writing system,and two non-characters(e.g.,(?) and (?)),which are combinations of real radicals in illegal positions.This study composed of three experiments with different cues.In Experiment 1,participants were first required to listen to a spoken word(e.g.,?)while presented with a visual display of four printed words and they were then asked to choose one novel character that best represented the spoken target character.In Experiment 2,participants were presented with semantic cue and in Experiment 3 they were presented with no cue,instead of auditory cue.Both behavioral and eye movement results showed that positional information of radicals is the most important cue for skilled readers to process Chinese characters.Most importantly,we found that phonetic information appears to be used more than semantic information for skilled readers in Chinese character processing.These results were invariant with different cues.Main conclusions of this study are as follows:1.Skilled readers can use orthographic information,phonetic information and semantic information of Chinese characters in the Chinese character recognition.2.Compared with the semantic radicals,skilled readers prefer to use the phonetic radicals of Chinese characters in the Chinese character coding.3.Skilled readers' priority in using phonetic radicals in the character recognition is not affected by clues.