The Lexicalization Of Newly Learned Chinese Character:competition And Priming Effect

The process of lexical acquisition and its underlying neural mechanisms have long been of interest to researchers.Lexicalization is the process by which a learned new word is inserted into the mental lexicon at both the morphological level and the semantic level,i.e.,a newly learned word completes the integration process.When the newly learned word is integrated with the existing knowledge in the mental lexicon,we can observe that the new word interacts with the known word,and this interaction is usually expressed as a semantic priming effect and a lexical competition effect.Studies of phonetic scripts have shown that the acquisition of a new word(e.g.,cathedruke)affects our recognition of the neighboring word(e.g.,cathedral)of the new word.If the learned new word is integrated into the mental lexicon,we automatically activate the lexical network associated with the new word when we recognize its neighboring word,i.e.,the new word is activated in competition with its the neighboring word,resulting in a longer recognition time for the neighboring word.In the field of Chinese vocabulary learning,related studies have mainly used two-character words as materials,while Chinese vocabulary learning is divided into two levels: single-character and word.No studies have examined the learning and integration processes at the Chinese character level.Given that Chinese characters differ from alphabetic scripts in terms of their configuration and morphophonological mapping relationships,Chinese characters may have different linguistic output mechanisms than English words,resulting in different lexical competition effects for newly learned Chinese characters.The first issue to be explored in this study is the performance of newly acquired Chinese characters in terms of lexical competition effects.In analogy to the processing of English words,the processing of Chinese characters goes through three levels: strokes,parts,and whole characters,and this study will further explore the differences in the lexical competition effects at different levels of processing.Compared to alphabetic characters,Chinese characters can be divided into three levels of processing: strokes,parts,and whole characters,but also have a morphological-phonological separation,so the second issue explored in this study is the integration process of morphological and phonological representations of newly acquired Chinese characters.The integration process of different representations can be separated in the experiment by exploiting this feature of morpho-phonological separation of Chinese characters and using different conditions(similarity of character forms and identical phonology)for the initiation task.The present study explored the lexicalization process of newly acquired Chinese characters through four experiments.Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 explored the time course of the competition effect after the newly acquired characters were integrated into the mental lexicon.In Experiment 1,low-frequency characters that differed from known characters in only one stroke(e.g.,丠)were selected as learning materials,and after learning,subjects completed a naming task for characters that were close to the newly acquired characters(e.g.,北)and for filler characters.Stroke-level competition effects and their time course were examined by comparing the difference in naming latency between the two types of Chinese characters on the immediate post-learning test and the next day test.Experiment 2selected low-frequency Chinese characters(e.g.,?)that differed in parts from known Chinese characters(e.g.,裂)as learning materials to examine the competition effect at the part similarity level for newly acquired Chinese characters.Experiment 3 used a priming task to examine the consolidation process of newly learned Chinese characters at the level of part similarity and phonology by using newly learned Chinese characters as the priming characters(e.g.,丠)and similarly shaped(e.g.,北),phonetically identical(e.g.,秋),and unrelated Chinese characters as the target characters to examine the priming effects under both the part similarity and phonetic identities conditions.Experiment 4 used Chinese characters with similar parts as the initiation condition for form similarity.The results of the study were as follows.(1)In the lexical naming task of Experiment 1,both the first and second days revealed that the response time of the neighbouring existing characters was greater than that of filler characters,indicating an immediate competition effect for newly acquired characters.(2)In Experiment 2,this effect was replicated after using partly similar characters as learning materials,indicating that the competition effect for newly acquired characters was stable at both the stroke similarity and partly similar levels.(3)In Experiment 3,only the phonetic similarity condition showed a significant priming effect on both days,while the form similarity condition did not show a priming effect on both days,and the results of Experiment 4 were similar to those of Experiment 3.In conclusion,the present study found that the lexical competition effect for newly acquired characters was immediate and existed at both the stroke and part levels of the characters,indicating that the newly acquired characters were rapidly consolidated.In addition,novel characters can quickly show some degree of lexicalization at the phonological level after learning.