Dimensions of lexical coding in Chinese and English

Abstract

Phonology and orthography are closely related in some languages, such as English, and they are nearly unrelated in others, such as Chinese. The effects of these differences were assessed in a study of the roles of phonemic, graphemic, and semantic information on lexical coding and memory for Chinese logographs and English words. Some of the stimuli in the two languages were selected such that the natural confounding between phonemic and graphemic information in English was matched in the set of Chinese words used. An initial scaling study indicated that this attempt to equate degree of phonemic-graphemic confounding was successful. A second experiment used a recognition memory task for English and Chinese words with separate subject groups of native speakers of the two languages. Subjects were to select one of a pair of test words that was phonemically, graphemically, or semantically similar to a word on a previously studied list. Differences in the dimensions of lexical coding in memory were demonstrated in significant Stimulus Type by Decision Type interactions in the recognition data. Chinesespeaking subjects responded most rapidly and accurately in the graphemic recognition task, whereas performance was generally equivalent in all three tasks for the English-speaking subjects. Alphabetic and logographic writing systems apparently activate different coding and memory mechanisms such that logographic characters produce significantly more visual information in memory, whereas alphabetic words result in a more integrated code involving visual, phonological, and semantic information.Cognitive psychologists have long been interested in how variations in the format of visual stimulation result in changes in information processing strategies. The question has been viewed from several different perspectives; consequently, a number of related questions have been formed. For example, are words and pictures recognized by different cognitive mechanisms? Do different writing systems require different processing strategies for comprehension? It has been known for a long time that memory capacity is greater for pictures than for words (Haber, 1970;Shepard, 1967;Standing, 1973), which has led to suggestions that pictures and words are coded differently in memory. On the other hand, the effect of orthographic variation on memory coding has not been extensively investigated. Thus, the primary concern of the present study is the effect of different systems of writing on visual coding and memory mechanisms.

Lexical activation during the recognition of Chinese characters: Evidence against early phonological activation

“…Contrary to their claims, we found no evidence that phonological activation plays a critical role in Chinese character recognition and/or processing (for a similar finding, see, e.g., Chen et al, 1995;Chen & Juola, 1982;Shen & Forster, 1999;Wong & Chen, 1999). Rather, we found clear and consistent evidence across both experiments in the present study that it is semantic rather than phonological activation, which is robust and appears very quickly and early in the course of lexical access in Chinese character recognition, that is critical.…”

“…For instance, some researchers (e.g., Perfetti & Tan, 1998;Perfetti & Zhang, 1991Tan, Hoosain, & Siok, 1996;Tan & Perfetti, 1997) claim that the phonological representation of a character is automatically and rapidly activated when the character is recognized and that such activation plays a crucial role for accessing the meaning of the character. Others (e.g., Chen, Flores d'Arcais, & Cheung, 1995;Chen & Juola, 1982;Shen & Forster, 1999;Wong & Chen, 1999), however, maintain that phonological information plays a much less important role in the recognition and memory of Chinese characters than does orthographic or semantic information. Before one can start to evaluate the psychological reality of these alternative positions, it is essential to see whether the main results of previous studies on the topic can be replicated, especially because some of the mentioned findings (e.g., Perfetti & Zhang, 1991;Tan & Perfetti, 1997) have proven difficult to replicate (e.g., Chen, Flores d'Arcais, & Cheung, 1994;Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1999).…”

The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements

“…Less is known about this issue with respect to the reading of Chinese, a script used by nearly a quarter of the world's population (Chen & Juola, 1982;Chen & Shu, 2001;Chen & Zhou, 1999). Since Chinese differs in many important aspects from alphabetic languages, such as English, it is not obvious that the results obtained from English can be applied to Chinese.…”

“…Since Chinese differs in many important aspects from alphabetic languages, such as English, it is not obvious that the results obtained from English can be applied to Chinese. Indeed, there is behavioral and neural evidence to show that language-specific processes are involved in processing alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages (e.g., Chen & Juola, 1982;Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001;Cutler & Otake, 1994;Feng, Miller, Shu, & Zhang, 2001;Gandour et al, 2002;Schirmer, Tang, Penney, Gunter, & Chen, 2005). Hence, the study to be reported was designed to explore whether the relative time course of semantic and syntactic processing found in alphabetic languages can also account for reading comprehension in a distinctively different orthography-namely, logographic Chinese.…”

Orthographic and phonological facilitation in speech production: New evidence from picture naming in Chinese

“…Logographic by nature, the most significant unit of the written Chinese language is the character (e.g., 书, 'book'), which has a highly arbitrary symbolto-sound correspondence. In addition to this characteristic, in Chinese characters can be found that are (a) visually very similar but phonologically very different or (b) phonologically very similar (e.g., only different in tone), but very different in written form (heterographic homophones; Chen & Juola, 1982;Leck, Weekes, & Chen, 1995). For example, the Chinese words 创 (/chuang4/, 'creation') and 庆 (/qing4/, 'celebration') are phonologically and orthographically similar to the name of the target picture bed (床, /chuang2/), respectively.…”