Cascadedness in Chinese written word production

2017

Front. Psychol.

The interaction between central and peripheral processing in written word production remains controversial. This study aims to investigate whether the effects of radical complexity and lexicality in central processing cascade into peripheral processing in Chinese written word production. The participants were asked to write characters and non-characters (lexicality) with different radical complexity (few- and many-strokes). The findings indicated that regardless of the lexicality, the writing latencies were longer for characters with higher complexity (the many-strokes condition) than for characters with lower complexity (the few-strokes condition). The participants slowed down their writing execution at the radicals' boundary strokes, which indicated a radical boundary effect in peripheral processing. Interestingly, the lexicality and the radical complexity affected the pattern of shift velocity and writing velocity during the execution of writing. Lexical processing cascades into peripheral processing but only at the beginning of Chinese characters. In contrast, the radical complexity influenced the execution of handwriting movement throughout the entire character, and the pattern of the effect interacted with the character frequency. These results suggest that the processes of the lexicality and the radical complexity function during the execution of handwritten word production, which suggests that central processing cascades over peripheral processing during Chinese characters handwriting.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interaction between Central and Peripheral Processing in Chinese Handwritten Production: Evidence from the Effect of Lexicality and Radical Complexity

Zhang

2017

Front. Psychol.

“…However, it was surprising that the orthographic effect was not facilitation (see Table ) but inhibition (orthographically related vs. unrelated). These findings were not consistent with the recent literature in spoken modality (Ma et al ., ) or written modality (Qu & Damian, ). The most plausible reason was that semantic content provided by semantic radicals was also involved in the present process.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the traditional picture‐word interference writing task (e.g., Qu and Damian, ), the picture and its distractor disappeared, followed by a blank screen, once the pen‐touch action was fulfilled. The interval between picture onset and initial contact of the pen with the tablet was recorded as the latency in that research (Qu et al ., ).…”

Section: Method: Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, discussions of cascadedness in the Chinese written modality have focused mostly on accessing phonological and orthographic information from either semantic radicals (Qu & Damian, ; Qu, Damian, Zhang & Zhu, ; Zhang, Chen, Weekes & Yang, ) or phonological radicals (Damian & Qu, ; Zhang et al ., ; Zhang & Wang, ), with less focus on accessing semantic content from semantic radicals. In Qu and Damian's study (), the critical manipulation was that for the “orthographically related” condition. Neither semantic relatedness nor phonological relatedness existed between the name of the target (color name such as 橙 ‘orange’) and the name of the interference object (object name such as 枕头 ‘pillow’).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Activation of semantic information at the sublexical level during handwriting production: Evidence from inhibition effects of Chinese semantic radicals in the picture‐word interference paradigm

Liao

Scandinavian J Psychology

2017

Using a non-alphabetic language (e.g., Chinese), the present study tested a novel view that semantic information at the sublexical level should be activated during handwriting production. Over 80% of Chinese characters are phonograms, in which semantic radicals represent category information (e.g., 'chair,' 'peach,' 'orange' are related to plants) while phonetic radicals represent phonetic information (e.g., 'wolf,' 'brightness,' 'male,' are all pronounced /lang/). Under different semantic category conditions at the lexical level (semantically related in Experiment 1; semantically unrelated in Experiment 2), the orthographic relatedness and semantic relatedness of semantic radicals in the picture name and its distractor were manipulated under different SOAs (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, the interval between the onset of the picture and the onset of the interference word). Two questions were addressed: (1) Is it possible that semantic information could be activated in the sublexical level conditions? (2) How are semantic and orthographic information dynamically accessed in word production? Results showed that both orthographic and semantic information were activated under the present picture-word interference paradigm, dynamically under different SOAs, which supported our view that discussions on semantic processes in the writing modality should be extended to the sublexical level. The current findings provide possibility for building new orthography-phonology-semantics models in writing.

“…A growing body of literature suggests that during visual word recognition, Chinese characters are automatically decomposed into subcharacter components (e.g., Ding, Peng & Taft, 2004;Taft, Zhu, & Peng, 1999;Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1999). In the written production literature, a few studies also indicate that Chinese writing involves independent radical processing (e.g., Law, 1994;2004;Law & Caramazza, 1995;Law, Yeung, Wong, & Chiu, 2005;Qu, Damian, Zhang, & Zhu, 2011;Qu & Damian, 2015;Qu, Damian, & Li, 2016).…”

Section: Exploring the Role Of Logographemes In Chinese Handwritten Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the role of logographemes in Chinese handwritten word production

Damian

2017

Read Writ

Self Cite

Recent research has demonstrated that abstract orthographic representations such as morphemes, syllables, and graphemes, influence handwritten production in languages with alphabetic scripts. The orthographic representations involved in the written production of non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese are less well understood. Chinese words consist of one or more characters which typically contain embedded radicals, with radicals themselves composed of strokes. A logographemic representational level, in between radical and strokes, has also been postulated. Here we report four experiments using a form preparation task ("implicit priming") to test for the presence of radical and logographemic priming effects in writers of simplified Chinese characters. We found strong evidence for radical-based effects, but only weak evidence for logographemic priming effects, which contrasts with recent positive logographemic priming effects reported by Chen and Cherng (2013) for writers of traditional characters. Possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed in terms of potential differences between simplified and traditional scripts, as well as other procedural differences.