The Representation Of Chinese Characters And Radicals During The Visual Word Recognition

The recognition process of Chinese character and its components has been widely discussed.However,previous studies rarely made distinction on the recognition of phonetic radical and semantic radical during visual character recognition.The current study focuses on the influence of phonogram’s properties on the recognition of Chinese phonogram and its radicals.Two experiments utilizing primed lexical decision task were implemented.Experiment 1 directly compared the recognition of semantic radical and phonetic radical,and Experiment 2 exploited characters semantically related to the semantic radical or phonetically related to the phonetic radical as targets to investigate the semantic or phonetic representation of radicals.The results from Experiment 1 reveal that radicals can be activated during visual word recognition process.There are main effects of semantic transparency and phonetic regularity on the recognition of semantic radical,while the recognition of phonetic radical suffers from the influence of phonogram’s frequency.In Experiment 2,the results show that the activation of synonymy to the semantic radical is in a similar pattern as that of the semantic radical.These results indicate that the semantic information of semantic radical is represented during Chinese phonogram recognition,and in turn,the semantic information can be used to activate other characters with shared semantic meaning.However,the recognition of homophone to phonetic radical differs from that of the phonetic radical,and receives facilitation when the prime is high-frequency and phonetically regular.These results indicate that the activation of phonogram’s phonetic information may facilitate the recognition of characters via phonological similarity,but the phonetic radical is not always phonetically represented during visual word recognition.It is postulated that both phonetic and semantic radicals can be activated during visual word recognition,but they may be activated through different recognition routes.