Binding radicals in Chinese character recognition: Evidence from repetition blindness

Chen, Yi-Chuan; Yeh, Su‐Ling

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2014.10.002

Cited by 18 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Instead, our findings can be explained by the view that Chinese characters are recognized by activating their radicals first 6 , 50 – 57 . In this decomposition camp, most researchers have mainly focused on how radicals are processed to fulfill their semantic or phonetic functions.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 53%

“…Previous studies have revealed certain similarities between morphemic processing in English and radical processing in Chinese, such as being decomposed regardless of word frequency and position 1 , 50 , 56 , 64 , 65 . This study went one step further and asked whether the radical processing in Chinese is also similar to the morphological decomposition in English whereby only semantics of transparent morphemes but not opaque morphemes are activated.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Yeh

Chou

2017

Sci Rep

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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.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 53%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Yeh

Chou

2017

Sci Rep

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“…Since the majority of Chinese characters are made up of combinations of subcomponents (Leck et al., ), decomposition of a character may help readers identify a particular character from among other candidates. Based on the analyses of L1 Taiwanese readers’ immediate recall, Chen and Yeh () argued that radicals represent sub‐morphemic units in L1 Chinese readers’ lexicon and are activated prior to an entire character being recognized. They confirmed a phenomenon known as radical repetition blindness, which refers to the difficulty of retrieving the common radical in a set of characters (e.g., イ in 何 and 伺) within a brief moment.…”

Section: The Role Of Radicals In Logographic Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The fourth edition kanji database, which contains 1,945 characters for daily use, reveals that approximately 60% of the characters belong to this category (Tamaoka & Morioka, ). Over the past few decades, research on first language (L1) logographic processing has shown that L1 readers engage in both phonographic and visual decoding to identify characters (Chen & Yeh, ; Flores d'Arcais, Saito, & Kawakami, ; Hino, Lupker, & Taylor, ; Hue & Erickson, ; Perfetti & Liu, ; Perfetti & Zhang, ; Spinks et al., ; Williams & Bever, ; Wong & Chen, ; Wydell, Patterson, & Humphreys, ). Taken together, the results from many studies suggest that adult L1 readers possess the ability to identify phonetic radicals and know a fair amount of pronunciation represented by radicals so that an ambiguous relationship between phonology and orthography does not prevent L1 readers from using a phonographic decoding strategy when necessary.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Role of Phonology and Phonetics in L2 Kanji Learning

Hagiwara

2016

The Modern Language Journal

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This study explores whether emphasizing the phonetic components of kanji, Chinese characters used in Japanese, facilitates second language (L2) learners' novel character learning. Previous L2 studies on Chinese characters indicate that phonology plays a major part in word identification. However, this view remains controversial, because the role of phonetic radicals has not been closely examined. In this study, 70 learners of Japanese, whose first language (L1) is alphabetic, were divided into 3 learning condition groups: pronunciation-hearing and read aloud, pronunciation-hearing, and no pronunciationhearing. All learners were repeatedly exposed to unfamiliar kanji, some of which included visually emphasized phonetic radicals to help the learners identify characters. Learning was measured by the ability to select the target kanji from visually similar alternatives and to write their meanings in English. The results revealed no significant difference in learning kanji, either in terms of meaning production or selection of the correct orthographic representation across groups. The pronunciation-hearing group successfully related phonetic radicals with the sounds represented by the radical, but this skill did not contribute to better learning of novel kanji. The results support the direct route view, suggesting that logography is learned by extracting meaning directly from orthography regardless of phonological mediation.

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“…In the field of expertise, stimuli may be encoded by comparisons with templates in long-term memory. With characters, these are word form entries (Dehaene et al, 2005), which are activated via radicals (Perfetti et al, 2005;Chen and Yeh, 2015). Experts can represent a character as a perceptual token of a word form type.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Working Memory of Chinese Characters and Expertise: The Expert’s Memory Advantage Is Based on Long-Term Knowledge of Visual Word Forms

Zimmer

Fischer

2020

Front. Psychol.

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People unfamiliar with Chinese characters show poorer visual working memory (VWM) performance for Chinese characters than do literates in Chinese. In a series of experiments, we investigated the reasons for this expertise advantage. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the advantage of Chinese literates does not transfer to novel material. Experts had similar resolution as novices for material outside of their field of expertise, and the memory of novices and experts did not differ when detecting a big change, e.g., when a character's color was changed. Memorizing appears to function as a rather abstract representation of word forms because memory for characters' fonts was poor independently of expertise (Experiment 3), though still visual. Distractors that were highly similar conceptually did not increase memory errors, but visually similar distractors impaired memory (Experiment 4). We hypothesized that literates in Chinese represent characters in VWM as tokens of visual word forms made available by long-term memory. In Experiment 5, we provided novices with visual word form knowledge. Participants subsequently performed a change detection task with trained and novel characters in a functional magnetic resonance experiment. We analyzed set size-and trainingdependent effects in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the visual word form area. VWM for trained characters was better than for novel characters. Neural activity increased with set size and at a slower rate for trained than for novel characters. All conditions approached the same maximum, but novel characters reached the maximum at a smaller set size than trained characters. The time course of the bold response depended on set size and knowledge status. Starting from the same initial maximum, neural activity at small set sizes returned to baseline more quickly for trained characters than for novel characters. Additionally, high performers showed generally more neural activity in the IPS than low performers. We conclude that experts' better performance in working memory (WM) is caused by the availability of visual long-term representations (word form types) that allow a sparse representation of the perceived stimuli and make even small changes big because they cause a type change that is easily detected.

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Binding radicals in Chinese character recognition: Evidence from repetition blindness

Cited by 18 publications

References 76 publications

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

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

The Role of Phonology and Phonetics in L2 Kanji Learning

Visual Working Memory of Chinese Characters and Expertise: The Expert’s Memory Advantage Is Based on Long-Term Knowledge of Visual Word Forms

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