A Study On The Differential Contribution Of The Semantic Activation Of Semantic Radicals To Transparent And Opaque Chinese Characters Recognition

In Chinese,up to 90% of characters are phonograms,which consist of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals.Previous researches have shed light on the orthographic,phonological and semantic activation of semantic radicals and their contribution to the processing of whole phonograms by means of mediating the orthographic retrieval and semantic identification of the whole characters.However,whether the transparency and frequency of whole characters,and the status of radicals would have a impact on this sub-lexical contribution remains unsettled.In this study,we adopted RT experimental technique to explore the differential contribution between semantic activation of character semantic radicals and non-character semantic radicals in the recognition of transparent and opaque Chinese characters.The specific research questions are:(1)Do semantic activations of character and non-character semantic radicals affect the transparent word recognition? If yes,what are the differences?(2)Do semantic activations of character and non-character semantic radicals affect the opaque word recognition? If yes,what are the differences?(3)Is semantic activation of semantic radicals modulated by frequency?The experiment of this study employs a within-subject design with 2(Semantic Relatedness: related prime vs.unrelated prime)×2(Frequency of Targets: high vs.low)×2(Types of Semantic Radicals: character semantic radicals vs.non-character semantic radicals)×2(Types of Targets: transparent targets vs.opaque targets).Subjects carried out this experiment at the “Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience & Foreign Language Learning” at Sichuan International Studies University.The experimental materials were operated by E-Prime 2.0 software and analyzed through SPSS 20.0 to obtain the results:(1)In the transparent Chinese character processing,related radicals primes had a promoting effect both on the Chinese character of high and low frequency carried with character semantic radicals,F(1,39)=5.05,p =.030;F(1,39)=8.54,p =.006,so did Chinese character of low frequency enjoying non-character semantic radicals,F(1,39)= 19.11,p=.000.(2)In the opaque Chinese character recognition,related radicals primes facilitated the recognition of low-frequency Chinese character with character semantic radicals rather than high-frequency targets,F(1,39)=4.24,p=.046.Meanwhile,related radicals primes had an inhibitory effect on the processing of high-frequency Chinese character with non-character radicals.The results implied that character semantic radicals and non-character semantic radicals made a contribution to the recognition of Chinese character in a different way,on account of the balance between the orthographic and semantic route of whole character.In conclusion,character and non-character radicals exerted a different contribution to the recognition of transparent and opaque Chinese characters since their mental representations differed.In addition,this sub-lexical contribution would be modulated by frequency,albeit to a small degree.