The Roles Of Global Phonological Activation In The Facilitation Effect Of Phonetic Neighborhood Size In Chinese Characters

The earliest research on the effect of orthographic neighborhood size mainly comes from the alphabetic languages.Studies found that words of a large number of orthographic neighbors that share all but one letter with the target words produce faster response times(RTs)than words with few neighbors,which is shown as the facilitation effect;otherwise,it is shown as the inhibitory effects.This shows that the number of family members,namely the neighborhood size,is one of the factors affecting vocabulary access.However,the study found that the effect of neighborhood size also has linguistic differences.When non-English alphabetic languages are used,the promoting effects disappear or the inhibitory effects are reported.Different from the alphabetic languages with the form in consistent with phonology,Chinese characters take stroke as the smallest unit,the number of phonetic characters accounts for the majority of Chinese characters,which includes semantic radicals and phonetic radicals,that conveys meaning information and phonological information together,and the collection of similar characters with the same semantic radicals or phonetic radicals constitutes the semantic neighborhood or phonetic neighborhood.Similarly,promoting effects or inhibitory effects of the Chinese characters have likewise been reported,due to the effects of experimental tasks,languages of stimuli,availability of neighborhood members of higher frequency,pronunciation consistency,regularity of pronunciation,and so on.The inconsistency thus could reflect various underlying mechanisms in visual word recognition such as neighborhood feedbacks,the global lexical activation and the lateral inhibition in the interactive activation model.However,based on the first two mechanisms,the promoting effect should exist in English,French,Spanish and Chinese,but in fact,only English orthographic neighborhood and Chinese phonetic neighborhood show the promoting effect in naming and lexical decision tasks.Based on this,this study hypothesized that the facilitation effect of phonetic neighborhood in Chinese characters in naming and lexical decision tasks were also related to global activation of phonology(GAP)other than neighborhood feedback and global lexical activation.GAP is equal to sum of pronunciations that are contributed by each neighbor that can generate a pronunciation similar to that of the target character,which is different from the phonetic consistency rate.When the phonetic consistency rate remains unchanged,a large neighborhood tends to produce greater GAP than a small neighborhood,thus producing a facilitation effect of phonetic neighborhood.Similar to English orthographic neighborhood,stroke neighborhood in Chinese characters is a collection of new characters that replace strokes and retain the original structure,the members are similar in shape but not consistent in pronunciation.also does not have phonology clues,and thus there is no GAP level difference between the large stroke neighborhood and small neighborhood.Therefore,the larger the stroke neighborhood size,and the lateral inhibition between the target word and its neighborhood is stronger,and the top-down total feedback and global lexical activation are not enough to offset the lateral inhibitions among the members,thus producing the inhibiting effect.In conclusion,in the case of controlling high-frequency family members,this study used phonetic radical neighborhood and stroke neighborhood of Chinese characters.To some extent,the members of both families share certain similarities in the orthographic representations.Members of the phonetic radical neighborhood share the same phonology,while members of the stroke neighborhood only replace several strokes without changing the structure.Therefore,the phonetic radical neighborhood is also a special form of the stroke neighborhood,with the difference being the participation of GAP.In this study,the naming paradigm and the true or false lexical judgment paradigm were used to compare the effect of phonetic radical and stroke neighborhood.Furthermore,combined with ERP technology,the role of GAP in the phonetic radical neighborhood facilitation effect was explored.Experiment 1 used a naming task paradigm,and the participants were asked to pronounce the target word quickly and accurately,and the experimenter was asked to judge whether it was right or wrong.This experiment had a 2(phonetic radical neighborhood vs stroke neighborhood)by 2(large neighborhood vs.small neighborhood)within-subject design,in order to discuss the effect of phonetic radical neighborhood and stroke neighborhood in the naming task,verify the GAP’s promoting role in the neighborhood size effect.The results showed that the response time and accuracy for large phonetic radical neighborhood were better than for small neighborhood,which showed the promoting effect.However,the stroke neighborhood produced inhibitory effect.In addition,the response time and accuracy of the phonetic radical neighborhood were better than stroke neighborhood under the condition of large families.The results support our hypothesis,namely the phonetic radical neighborhood with higher total feedback and global lexical activation,coupled with high levels of GAP’s participation still showed the facilitation effect,and without GAP,the large stroke neighborhood suffers from lateral inhibition to a greater extent than in small neighborhood,leading to inhibitory effect.In Experiment 2,the participants were supposed to determine whether the target characters were a character or not.In this study,the experiment had a 2(phonetic radical neighborhood vs stroke neighborhood)by 2(large neighborhood vs.small neighborhood)within-subject design,to explore whether the involvement of GAP still plays a role in the family effect under the lexical decision task which is not closely related to phonetic.The results were same as the experiment 1,indicating that in the lexical decision task which is less difficult and can rely on the level of family GAP can also shows facilitation effect,which further verifies the promoting role of GAP in the phonetic radical neighborhood size effect.In Experiment 3,P200 and N400 were used as feedback indicators to investigate the phonetic radical neighborhood effect and stroke neighborhood effect,and the influence of GAP on the Chinese characters’ neighborhood effect in the lexical decision task.The results showed that phonetic radical neighborhood produced promoting effect in behavioral outcomes.However,the difference in response time and accuracy was not significant between the large and small stoke neighborhood.In addition,the response to phonetic radical neighborhood was faster and more accurate than that of stroke neighborhood in large family condition.EEG results showed that the large phonetic radical neighborhood’s P200 was smaller and N400 was larger and more negative than that of small neighborhood.However,the difference in P200 between large and small stroke neighborhood was not significant,but the large stoke neighborhood induced a larger and more negative N400 amplitude.This indicates that the difference of GAP affects neighborhood size effect and plays a promoting role in the phonetic radical neighborhood effect in Chinese characters.Comprehensive the above three experiments,it shows that GAP,global lexical activation and top-down neighborhood feedback together offset the effect of lateral inhibition,the inhibition effect of stroke neighborhood showed that top-down neighborhood feedback and global lexical activation alone are not enough to offset the effect of lateral inhibition,the GAP plays a promoting role in the phonetic radical neighborhood effect.