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

Abstract

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.

Learning Chinese Mandarin characters in an English-speaking country: The development of a child’s symbolic mind

“…Writing Chinese characters may not give as much information about symbolic representation as the ability to recognize characters. However, once children begin to recognize the characters, the meaning can be internalized through the (embodied) motor process of (re)producing the symbols through writing (Yeh et al, 2017). While it is acknowledged that use of apps, such as Wukong Literacy, are helpful because they are designed to demonstrate character evolution, capture children's attention and provide structure for learning practice, it is also understood that due to the cultural basis of language and meaning, children still need social interaction during the learning process to fully comprehend the symbolism inherent in language and specifically, Chinese characters.…”

“…Chinese characters are made from radicals, usually two or more. Radicals can indicate meaning in a character (semantic) or indicate phonetic clusters that cue pronunciation similar to rime in alphabetic systems (Yeh, Chou and Ho, 2017). For example, the water radical (氵) can be found in the characters lake (湖), ocean (海), and river (河).…”

The nature of perceptual units in Chinese character recognition

“…To our knowledge, our study is the first to demonstrate the implication of MCUs in Chinese character recognition, even when these MCUs are not related to the entire character in meaning or pronunciation. Although there is some evidence for the automatic activation of phonetic radicals during visual word recognition (Yeh et al, 2017), this study used MCUs that were not phonetic radicals themselves. The results show that MCUs are implicated in character recognition, even when they do not function as phonetic radicals.…”

A semantic analysis of the fire radical in chinese

“…Since FIRE is an independent pictographic character (independent character 独体字 dú-tǐ-zì), it can also be used to form composite characters (合体字hé-tǐ-zì) 4 where it functions as a semantic or phonetic indicator (e.g. see Huang et al forthcoming;Wang 2016: 97;Yeh et al 2017). More specifically, when the FIRE character is used as a semantic indicator in a composite character, it is usually referred to as the FIRE radical.…”