Neighborhood Size Effect Of Chinese Words On Cognitive Development In Children

The neighborhood size effect is a concept that first appeared in the alphabetic system.It is defined as the number of real words that can be generated by changing a letter at any position within a word while keeping all other letters unchanged.The definition of the neighborhood size of Chinese is similar to that of the alphabetic system,which refers to the number of real words that can be formed by replacing the characters in any position within a word while keeping all other characters unchanged.Many foreign studies have found that adults can obtain faster response time for target words with larger neighborhood size than those with smaller neighborhood size.However,these studies are almost confined to adults,and most of them focus on alphabetic scripts.How the cognitive structure of Chinese neighborhood network is embodied in language development of children is still lacking in current research.Therefore,the purpose of this study was to explore the cognition and development of the neighborhood size effect in Chinese on elementary school children.Three experimental studies were designed to explore the comparison of the cognitive structure of neighborhood size between elementary schoolers and adults.Firstly,Study 1aimed to verify whether the adult subjects using simplified Chinese characters will be affected by the neighborhood size effect.65 college students were recruited for the lexical decision task.The results of Study 1 were consistent with the previous study which proposed the neighborhood size effect of semantic activation model in traditional Chinese word recognition(Li et al.,2015).In other words,adults whether using simplified or traditional Chinese characters could recognized target words with larger neighborhood size than those with smaller neighborhood size,and could generate stronger semantic activation in the mental lexicon network,thereby speeding up the identification time of target words.Secondly,in Study 2,the author selected 70 first graders,72 third graders,and 74 fifth graders with middle vocabulary level to perform the same lexical decision task.The resultsshowed that the first graders did not have the neighborhood size effect.The third graders could stably show the neighborhood size effect in the case of low-frequency words.The fifth graders' pattern of the neighborhood size effect had gradually approaching that of adults.Thirdly,Study 3 aimed to explore the cognitive structure of the neighborhood network in Chinese word recognition whether it naturally develops with age or it gradually formed with the growth of vocabulary.Three groups of high,middle and low vocabulary level were generated and 74,72 and 70 third graders were selected into each group to perform lexical decision task.The results showed that children's cognitive structure of the neighborhood network in Chinese word recognition developed with the growth of vocabulary.1.The results of Study I showed that significant facilitative effect of neighborhood size could also be observed in adults using simplified Chinese characters.2.The results of Study 2 showed that in the Chinese lexical decision task,the neighborhood size effect could be observed in the third and fifth grade children,and the cognitive structure of neighborhood words in children showed different patterns in different grades.3.The results of Study 3 showed that,in the Chinese lexical decision task,the cognitive structure of neighborhood words in children gradually developed with the growth of vocabulary,rather than naturally occurred with age.Finally,these studies revealed the developmental stage for the cognitive structure of neighborhood words in children,with a view to further breakthroughs and advances in the theories of language development for children.