Encoding operation and transcoding as the major loci of the frequency effect

The Effects of Orthographic Neighborhood Size and the Influence of Individual Differences in Linguistic Skills During the Recognition of Chinese Words

There are still inconsistencies as to whether frequency and orthographic neighborhood size affect the reading and recognition of Chinese words. In addition, research on Chinese reading still adheres to the view that "all skilled readers read in the same way" and pays little attention to the influence of individual differences in linguistic skills on word recognition. In this research, we studied the recognition of Chinese two-character words in a lexical decision task (LDT) by manipulating neighborhood size and word frequency and controlling the frequency of the initial constituent character. Individual differences in linguistic skills were assessed through tests of spelling and reading comprehension. The results showed that: (1) A larger orthographic neighborhood size of the initial character had a facilitative effect on Chinese word recognition. The orthographic neighborhood size effect is modulated by word frequency, but this modulation effect was not stable. (2) Spelling and reading comprehension skills are good indicators to assess individual differences in Chinese linguistic skills, and they are significantly correlated. (3) Individual differences in linguistic skills influence the neighborhood size effect, which is moderated by word frequency.

Lexical processing of Chinese sub-character components: Semantic activation of phonetic radicals as revealed by the Stroop effect

Most Chinese characters are compounds consisting of a semantic radical indicating semantic category and a phonetic radical cuing the pronunciation of the character. Controversy surrounds whether radicals also go through the same lexical processing as characters and, critically, whether phonetic radicals involve semantic activation since they can also be characters when standing alone. Here we examined these issues using the Stroop task whereby participants responded to the ink color of the character. The key finding was that Stroop effects were found when the character itself had a meaning unrelated to color, but contained a color name phonetic radical (e.g., “guess”, with the phonetic radical “cyan”, on the right) or had a meaning associated with color (e.g., “pity”, with the phonetic radical “blood” on the right which has a meaning related to “red”). Such Stroop effects from the phonetic radical within a character unrelated to color support that Chinese character recognition involves decomposition of characters into their constituent radicals; with each of their meanings including phonetic radicals activated independently, even though it would inevitably interfere with that of the whole character. Compared with the morphological decomposition in English whereby the semantics of the morphemes are not necessarily activated, the unavoidable semantic activation of phonetic radicals represents a unique feature in Chinese character processing.

Neighborhood Frequency Effect in Chinese Word Recognition: Evidence from Naming and Lexical Decision

Neighborhood frequency is a crucial variable to know the nature of word recognition. Different from alphabetic scripts, neighborhood frequency in Chinese is usually confounded by component character frequency and neighborhood size. Three experiments were designed to explore the role of the neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese and the stimuli were all two-character words. This effect was evaluated on targets with- and without-higher frequency neighbors with neighborhood size matched. Among the experiments, the patterns of the leading character frequency effect and word frequency effect in the naming and lexical decision tasks were compared. The results implied an inhibitory neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese word recognition. Accordingly, a possible cognitive mechanism of the neighborhood frequency effect was thus proposed.

Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese

In psycholinguistic research, the frequency effect can be one of the indicators for eligible experimental tasks that examine the nature of lexical access. Usually, only one of those tasks is chosen to examine lexical access in a study. Using two exemplar experiments, this paper introduces an approach to include both the lexical decision task and the naming task in a study. In the first experiment, the stimuli were Chinese characters with frequency and regularity manipulated. In the second experiment, the stimuli were switched to Chinese two-character words, in which the word frequency and the regularity of the leading character were manipulated. The logic of these two exemplar experiments was to explore some important issues such as the role of phonology on recognition by comparing the frequency effect between both the tasks. The results revealed different patterns of lexical access from those reported in the alphabetic systems. The results of Experiment 1 manifested a larger frequency effect in the naming task as compared to the LDT, when the stimuli were Chinese characters. And it is noteworthy that, in Experiment 1, when the stimuli were regular Chinese characters, the frequency effect observed in the naming task was roughly equivalent to that in the LDT. However, a smaller frequency effect was shown in the naming task as compared to the LDT, when the stimuli were switched to Chinese two-character words in Experiment 2. Taking advantage of the respective demands and characteristics in both tasks, researchers can obtain a more complete and precise picture of character/word recognition.

The role of orthographic neighborhood size effects in Chinese word recognition

Previous studies about the orthographic neighborhood size (NS) in Chinese have overlooked the morphological processing, and the co-variation between the character frequency and the the NS. The present study manipulated the word frequency and the NS simultaneously, with the leading character frequency controlled, to explore their influences on word lexical decision (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2). The results showed a robust effect that words with a larger NS produced shorter reaction time than those with a smaller NS, irrespective of the word frequency and the tasks. This facilitative effect may occur due to a semantic network formed by neighbor words, resulting in the semantic activation to accelerate the word recognition. Moreover, the comparison of the effect sizes of word frequency between the two tasks showed that lexical decision responses demonstrated a larger word frequency effect, indicating that the sub-word processing was involved in the multi-character word recognition.

Analysis of a Chinese phonetic compound database: implications for orthographic processing

The complexity of Chinese orthography has hindered the progress of research in Chinese to the same level of sophistication of that in alphabetic languages such as English. Also, there has been no publicly available resource concerning the decomposition of Chinese characters, which is essential in any attempt to model the cognitive processes of Chinese character recognition. Here we report our construction and analysis of a Chinese lexical database containing the most frequent phonetic compounds decomposed into semantic and phonetic radicals according to Chinese etymology. Each radical was further decomposed into basic stroke patterns according to a Chinese transcription system, Cangjie (Chu, 1979 Laboratory of chu Bong-Foo Retrieved August 25, 2004, from http://www.cbflabs.com/). Other information such as pronunciation and character frequency were also incorporated. We examine the distribution of different types of character, the information skew in phonetic compounds, the relations between subcharacter orthographic units and the pronunciation of the entire character, and the processing implications of these phenomena in terms of universal psycholinguistic principles.

Frequency effects of Chinese character processing in the brain: an event-related fMRI study

Knowing how the brain processes Chinese characters of different frequencies of occurrence may shed light on the extent to which orthographic variations of different languages can influence reading processes in the brain. In the present study, event-related fMRI was used to investigate frequency effects on Chinese character processing. Reading low-frequency characters invoked higher activation in several brain regions including the left premotor/inferior frontal gyrus, supplementary motor area, left anterior insula, left posterior inferior temporal gyrus, left superior parietal cortex, and lingual cortex, while reading high-frequency characters resulted in higher activation in the left supramarginal/angular gyrus and left precuneus. The activation pattern of reading infrequently encountered characters reflects a more demanding processing procedure of retrieving, formulating, and coordinating the phonological output. Access to the lexical route may benefit the reading of high-frequency characters. By uncovering the differential brain responses in reading Chinese characters of different occurrence frequencies, not only has a substantial overlap between functional neuroanatomy of reading Chinese and alphabetical languages been demonstrated, but also features permitting the separation of language-specific content from universal mechanisms.

Phonology matters: the phonological frequency effect in written Chinese

Does phonology play a role in silent reading? This issue was addressed in Chinese. Phonology effects are less expected in Chinese than in alphabetical languages like English because the basic units of written Chinese (the characters) map directly into units of meaning (morphemes). This linguistic property gave rise to the view that phonology could be bypassed altogether in Chinese. The present study, however, shows that this is not the case. We report two experiments that demonstrate pure phonological frequency effects in processing written Chinese. Characters with a high phonological frequency were processed faster than characters with a low phonological frequency, despite the fact that the characters were matched on orthographic (printed) frequency. The present research points to a universal phonological principle according to which phonological information is routinely activated as a part of word identification. The research further suggests that part of the classic word-frequency effect may be phonological.

Exploring reading-spelling connection as locus of dyslexia in Chinese

This paper advances the argument that in learning to read/spell Chinese characters and words, it is important for learners to understand the role of the component parts. These constituents consist of phonetic and semantic radicals, or bujians, made up of clusters of strokes in their proper sequence. Beginning readers/spellers need to be sensitive to the positional hierarchy and internal structure of these constituent parts. Those Chinese children diagnosed with developmental dyslexia tend to have more difficulties in spelling Chinese characters and in writing to dictation than in reading. A lexical decision study with two groups of tertiary students differing in their Chinese language ability was carried out to test their efficiency in processing real and pseudo characters as a function of printed frequency of the characters, and the consistency of their component semantic radicals. There is some evidence that even for adult readers differing in their Chinese language ability, lexicality, frequency of characters and the consistency of the semantic radicals affect accurate and rapid character identification. Suggestions for research and teaching approaches are made to enhance the analysis and synthesis of the phonetic and semantic radicals to promote efficient reading and spelling in Chinese.