The Research On Semantic Satiation And Orthographic Satiation In Chinese

Verbal satiation refers to the phenomenon that a character or a word will become strange after continuous watching or oral repetition so that its correctness of writing cannot be defined nor its meaning be extracted.English satiation was studied first.In 1960,Lambert et al.named this phenomenon "Semantic Satiation" and proposed the theory that satiation occurred in the stage of semantic processing,however,researchers holding the view of perceptual satiation did not agree with this theory.In 2010,Tian et al.proposed a new hypothesis that the location of satiation was the connection between word form and word meaning,so they proposed the statement of "Association Satiation".For decades,western researchers have been arguing about the mechanism of satiation phenomenon,which can be seen partly from different names given to same phenomenon.The research on Chinese character satiation started relatively late.In 1994,Cheng C M et al.in Taiwan conducted the first research on it,and thought it was on perceptual and glyph level,and named the Chinese character satiation as "Orthographic Decomposition",while Japanese researchers called it "Gestaltzerfall".In recent years,many domestic researchers have copied and improved the mature paradigm of foreign studies on English satiation and applied it to the study of semantic and orthographic satiation in Chinese.This study intends to explore the mechanism of Chinese character satiation,that is,through experiment 1 and experiment 2,the semantic satiation and orthographic satiation in Chinese will be explored respectively.The overall design follows the idea of applying mature foreign paradigms to the phenomenon of Chinese character satiation.After sorting out and reviewing previous studies,Category Membership Task(Smith L.,1984)is selected.Experiment 1 is a replicative study,while experiment 2 improves the original paradigm to enable it to induce and monitor orthographic satiation.To explore the existence of semantic satiation in Chinese,in experiment 1,with 2(matching: match/not match)x 2(repeatability,high repeat/low repeat)factors within subjects design,participants were asked to look at the prime word(category name)continuously,then to determine whether the target word(exemplar word)belong to that category.The dependent variable was the average reaction time for category matching judgment task.The results showed that when the "prime-target" word pair was matched,the response time of the subjects was significantly lower than that in the case of mismatching,that is,the main effect of matching was significant,and the priming effect was significant;under matching conditions,the response time of the high saturation group was lower than that of the low saturation group,but the interaction was not significant.;the main effect of repeatability was not significant,indicating that there was no fatigue effect.Experiment 1 has not been able to prove that saturation occurs at the semantic level.To explore the existence of orthographic satiation in Chinese,in experiment 2,with 2(consistency: consistent/inconsistent)x 2(repeatability,high repeat/low repeat)factors within subjects design,participants were asked to look at the prime word(a Korean character),then to determine whether the target word(a Korean character)was completely the same as the prime character.The dependent variable was the reaction time of the glyph consistency judgment task.The results showed that the consistency main effect was not significant,the repeatability main effect was not significant,and the interaction between the two was not significant,that is,no significant priming effect,fatigue effect and satiation effect were observed.Experiment 2 could not prove the occurrence of orthographic satiation.Conclusion: This study cannot observe the semantic satiation in Chinese,and cannot prove the applicability of Smith L.'s classical Category Membership Task in the study of semantic satiation in Chinese;the orthographic satiation in Chinese was not observed,and the applicability of the improved paradigm cannot be proved.Although this study failed to get significant results,it also provided a lot of enlightenment for future researchers through the discussion and analysis of the non-significant causes.For example,the eye tracker can be added to monitor the experimental process and provide screening criteria;it is not recommended to conduct experiments on this paradigm in small samples;using different materials such as ancient Chinese characters to explore again;further research on the influence of different time intervals,different "category-member" word pairs on the material.