1
|
Tsang YK, Huang J, Wang S, Wang J, Wong AWK. Comparing word recognition in simplified and traditional Chinese: A megastudy approach. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 2024; 77:593-610. [PMID: 37154615 DOI: 10.1177/17470218231176472] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/10/2023]
Abstract
Although it is well established that the visual complexity of a written word can influence processing, it is far less clear from a cross-script perspective, whether the overall visual complexity of the entire written lexicon also affects word recognition. This question can be answered with the data in megastudy of lexical decision in Chinese (MELD-CH), which was developed with over 800 participants responding to 12,587 simplified and traditional Chinese words. The results showed that lexical decision was slower but more accurate in simplified Chinese, which has about 22.5% less strokes, than traditional Chinese. This pattern could not be explained by a speed-accuracy trade-off. Moderate correlations were found in response times and error rates between the two scripts, indicating considerable overlap in processing despite the script difference. In addition, (generalised) linear mixed-effects modelling was used to examine whether the simplified and traditional Chinese groups differed in sensitivity towards linguistic variables. The results showed that the effects of word frequency, word length, and number of strokes were stronger in recognising simplified Chinese words, whereas the effects of number of words formed and number of meanings of the constituent characters were stronger in traditional Chinese. These results suggested that the visual-perceptual processing demands of simplified Chinese might force readers to focus more on local properties of the words, making them less sensitive to global properties that are defined over the entire lexicon. Finally, limitations and alternative explanations of the results were discussed.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Yiu-Kei Tsang
- Department of Education Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong
- Centre for Learning Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong
| | - Jian Huang
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China
| | - Suiping Wang
- School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China
| | - Jie Wang
- Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong
| | - Andus Wing-Kuen Wong
- Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
| |
Collapse
|
2
|
Tsang YK, Zou Y, Wang J, Wong AWK. Rethinking orthographic neighbor in Chinese two-character word recognition: Insights from a megastudy. Psychon Bull Rev 2024:10.3758/s13423-023-02434-8. [PMID: 38169040 DOI: 10.3758/s13423-023-02434-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 12/05/2023] [Indexed: 01/05/2024]
Abstract
The influence of orthographic neighbors on visual word recognition is well established in alphabetic scripts. To determine the universality of this effect across writing systems, researchers have been keen on exploring its presence and nature in Chinese word recognition. Given that Chinese is logographic, it necessitates a different definition for orthographic neighbors from the ones used in alphabetic scripts. One popular approach is to consider words that share characters as orthographic neighbors. Adopting this definition, a facilitative effect has been observed for characters that can create more words. However, as characters are also morphemes in Chinese, the facilitation found might actually come from a larger morphological family size. This possibility was tested in the present study by analyzing data from the Chinese Lexicon Project (CLP; Tse et al., Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1503-1519, 2017, Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1503-1519, 2022), a megastudy of two-character word recognition in traditional Chinese. If the effects of character-sharing are indeed morphological in nature, the facilitation should be smaller for ambiguous characters because the words formed are distributed over several morphological families. The results of the analyses were consistent with this hypothesis, revealing interactions between the number of words formed by a character and the number of meanings of the character. The implications of these findings were discussed in the context of definitions of orthographic neighbors and theories of word recognition in Chinese.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Yiu-Kei Tsang
- Department of Education Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
- Centre for Learning Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
| | - Yun Zou
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, USA
| | - Jie Wang
- Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Ting Kok, Hong Kong
| | - Andus Wing-Kuen Wong
- Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
| |
Collapse
|
3
|
Wang T, Xu X, Xie X, Ng ML. Probing Lexical Ambiguity in Chinese Characters via Their Word Formations: Convergence of Perceived and Computed Metrics. Cogn Sci 2023; 47:e13379. [PMID: 37988245 DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13379] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/04/2023] [Revised: 09/07/2023] [Accepted: 11/02/2023] [Indexed: 11/23/2023]
Abstract
Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and the nature of the representations of an ambiguous word's multiple meanings is yet to be fully understood. With a special focus on Chinese characters, the present study first established that native speaker's perception about a character's number of meanings was heavily influenced by the availability of its distinct word formations, while whether these meanings would be perceived to be closely related was driven by further conceptual analysis. These notions were operationalized as two computed metrics, which assessed the degree of dispersion across individual word formations and the degree of propinquity across clusters of word formations, respectively, in a distributional semantic space. The observed correlations between the computed and the perceived metrics indicated that the utility of word formations to tap into meaning representations of Chinese characters was indeed cognitively plausible. The results have demonstrated the extent to which distributional semantics could inform about meaning representations of Chinese characters, which has theoretical implications for the representation of ambiguous words more generally.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Tianqi Wang
- School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- Speech Science Laboratory, The University of Hong Kong
| | - Xu Xu
- School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
| | - Xurong Xie
- Beijing Key Lab of Human-Computer Interaction, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences
| | | |
Collapse
|
4
|
Wei Y, Niu Y, Taft M, Carreiras M. Morphological decomposition in Chinese compound word recognition: Electrophysiological evidence. BRAIN AND LANGUAGE 2023; 241:105267. [PMID: 37121022 DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2023.105267] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/25/2022] [Revised: 04/06/2023] [Accepted: 04/15/2023] [Indexed: 05/22/2023]
Abstract
The present study examined the effect of both morphological complexity and semantic transparency in Chinese compound word recognition. Using a visual lexical decision task, our electrophysiological results showed that transparent and opaque compounds induced stronger Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) than monomorphemic words. This result suggests that Chinese compounds might be decomposed into their constituent morphemes at the lemma level, whereas monomorphemic words are accessed as a whole-word lemma directly from the form level. In addition, transparent and opaque compounds produced a similar N400 as each other, suggesting that transparency did not show an effect on the involvement of constituent morphemes during access to the whole-word lemma. Two behavioral experiments additionally showed similar patterns to the EEG results. These findings support morphological decomposition for compounds at the lemma level as proposed by the full-parsing model, and no evidence is found to support the role of transparency during Chinese compound word recognition.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Yanjun Wei
- Key Laboratory of the Cognitive Science of Language (Beijing Language and Culture University), Ministry of Education, China; Center for the Cognitive Science of Language, Beijing Language and Culture University, 100083 Beijing, China; Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.
| | - Ying Niu
- Center for the Cognitive Science of Language, Beijing Language and Culture University, 100083 Beijing, China
| | - Marcus Taft
- Center for the Cognitive Science of Language, Beijing Language and Culture University, 100083 Beijing, China; School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
| | - Manuel Carreiras
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain; Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48940 Leioa, Spain; Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013 Bilbao, Spain
| |
Collapse
|
5
|
Huang B, Yang X, Dong S, Gu F. Visual event-related potentials reveal the early whole-word lexical processing of Chinese two-character words. Neuropsychologia 2023; 185:108571. [PMID: 37119984 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108571] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/04/2022] [Revised: 04/25/2023] [Accepted: 04/26/2023] [Indexed: 05/01/2023]
Abstract
Morphologically complex words are common across different languages, especially in Chinese, because more than 90% of common modern Chinese words are complex words. Many behavioral studies have suggested the whole-word processing of Chinese complex words, but the neural correlates of whole-word processing remain unclear. Previous electrophysiological studies revealed automatic and early (∼250 ms) access to the orthographic forms of monomorphic words in the ventral occipitotemporal area. In this study, we investigated whether there is also automatic and early orthographic recognition of Chinese complex words (as whole units) by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). A total of 150 two-character words and 150 two-character pseudowords composed of the same 300 characters (morphemes) were pseudorandomly presented to proficient Chinese readers. Participants were required to determine the color of each stimulus in the color decision task and to determine whether each stimulus was a word in the lexical decision task. The two constituent characters of each stimulus were horizontally arranged in Experiment 1 and vertically arranged in Experiment 2. The results revealed a significant early ERP difference between words and pseudowords approximately 250-300 ms after stimulus onset in the parieto-occipital scalp region. The early ERP difference was more prominent in the color decision task than in the lexical decision task, more prominent in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, and more prominent in the left parieto-occipital scalp region than in the right. Source analysis results showed that the early ERP difference originated from the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These results reflected early and automatic access to whole-word orthographic representations of Chinese complex words in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Bo Huang
- Neurocognitive Laboratory for Linguistics and Semiotics, College of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610207, China
| | - Xueying Yang
- Neurocognitive Laboratory for Linguistics and Semiotics, College of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610207, China
| | - Shiwei Dong
- Neurocognitive Laboratory for Linguistics and Semiotics, College of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610207, China
| | - Feng Gu
- Neurocognitive Laboratory for Linguistics and Semiotics, College of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610207, China; Digital Convergence Laboratory of Chinese Cultural Inheritance and Global Communication, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610207, China.
| |
Collapse
|
6
|
Yu L, Qiao J, Ming WK, Wu Y. Megastudies: A New Approach to Reducing Vaccine Hesitation Worldwide. Vaccines (Basel) 2023; 11:vaccines11010133. [PMID: 36679978 PMCID: PMC9865671 DOI: 10.3390/vaccines11010133] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/04/2022] [Revised: 12/29/2022] [Accepted: 12/30/2022] [Indexed: 01/09/2023] Open
Abstract
Vaccine hesitancy is a considerable obstacle to achieving vaccine protection worldwide. There needs to be more evidence-based research for interventions for vaccine hesitancy. Existing effectiveness evaluations are limited to one particular hypothesis, and no studies have compared the effectiveness of different interventions. A megastudy takes a large-scale, multi-intervention, uniform participant and the same evaluation criteria approach to evaluate many interventions simultaneously and find the most effective ones. Therefore, megastudies can help us find the most effective interventions for vaccine hesitancy. Additionally, considering the complex causes of vaccine hesitancy, we design interventions that involve social factors in megastudies. Lastly, quality control and justice are critical issues for megastudies in the future.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Lian Yu
- Health Care System Reform and Development Institute, School of Public Health, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710061, China
| | - Jiaqi Qiao
- Jinhe Center for Economic Research, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710061, China
| | - Wai-Kit Ming
- Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health, Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China
- Correspondence: (W.-K.M.); (Y.W.); Tel.: +85-234-426-956 (W.-K.M.); +861-881-016-9630 (Y.W.)
| | - Yibo Wu
- School of Public Health, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China
- Correspondence: (W.-K.M.); (Y.W.); Tel.: +85-234-426-956 (W.-K.M.); +861-881-016-9630 (Y.W.)
| |
Collapse
|