Automatic Processing of Morphemic Orthography By Mature Readers

Leong, Che Kan; Cheng, Pui-wan; Mulcahy, Robert

doi:10.1177/002383098703000207

Cited by 69 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Similar findings have been demonstrated in normative lexical decision and naming data for English single-syllable words (Balota et al, 2004) and in the naming data for 2423 Chinese characters (Liu et al, 2007). For the characteristics that are specific for Chinese characters, our data revealed that reading characters with more strokes elicits longer response latencies than reading those with fewer strokes and such an effect for number of strokes is consistent with the results in Liu et al (2007) and other behavioral studies (Leong et al 1987). In addition, both phonetic combinability and semantic combinability showed facilitative effects on lexical decision latencies.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

The Feedback Consistency Effect in Chinese Character Recognition: Evidence from a Psycholinguistic Norm

Lee

Hsu

Chang

et al. 2015

Language and Linguistics

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Researchers have clearly shown the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g., -ean is always pronounced /in/ as in lean, dean, bean, etc.). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g., /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model (LMM) analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, sematic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character is, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the LMM analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for the other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

The Feedback Consistency Effect in Chinese Character Recognition: Evidence from a Psycholinguistic Norm

Lee

Hsu

Chang

et al. 2015

Language and Linguistics

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“…Chen and Yung (1989) based their support for holistic processing on their finding that stroke number was irrelevant in performing a lexical-decision task, no matter how disoriented the stimulus characters were. However, an effect of stroke number has consistently been found in many other studies using different paradigms---in patterns of eye fixation in reading (Just, Carpenter, & Wu, 1983, cited in Just & Carpenter, 1987, in a character-digit coding task (Wen, 1990), in a lexieal-decision task (Tan & Peng, 1989, in a naming task (Leong, Cheng, & Mulcahy, 1987;Yu & Cao, 1992b;Zhu, 1991;however, see Guo, Peng, & Zhang, 1985), and in a tachistoscopic identification task (Cao & Shen, 1963;Cheng, 1981;Cheng & Fu, 1986;Yeh & Liu, 1972). These findings indicated that component processing occurs, at least in relation to strokes, before the character-level representation is activated.…”

Section: Research On Chinese Character Processingmentioning

confidence: 74%

Submorphemic processing in reading Chinese.

Taft¹,

Zhu²

1997

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

191

216

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Three experiments are reported here to address the question of whether submorphemic information is involved in the recognition of Chinese characters. A character decision task was used in which frequency characteristics of the radicals within a character and radical status of the components within a noncharacter were manipulated. The frequency of the right-hand radical affected responses to 2-radical characters, whereas the radical status of both left and right components affected noncharacter responses. Furthermore, the impact of radical frequency was shown to be sensitive to radical position. For 3-radical characters, it appeared that the frequency of a compound radical (composed of 2 subradicals) had no effect on responses, whereas the frequency of the subradicals did. It is concluded that all simple radicals are independently activated in the process of character recognition. Compound radicals are not activated in this way despite their common occurrence. The results are considered within a multilevel interactive-activation framework incorporating position sensitivity.

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“…The finding of this null effect is consistent with the data reported by Su and Samuels (2010) in lexical decision, although they did observe an inhibitory effect for beginner readers. In addition, Leong, Cheng, and Mulcahy (1987) showed the effect only for low-frequency, but not for high-frequency characters in naming, and the effect was found in lexical decision when both high-frequency and low- The lexical variables included frequency, number of strokes, consistency, regular, unpronounceable, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, homophone density, semantic ambiguity rating, familiarity, number of disyllabic compound words formed by a character in the first position of the word, and number of disyllabic compound words formed by a character in the second position of the word. ** Correlation is significant at the .01 level.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

et al. 2015

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In this study, we aimed to provide a large-scale set of psycholinguistic norms for 3,314 traditional Chinese characters, along with their naming reaction times (RTs), collected from 140 Chinese speakers. The lexical and semantic variables in the database include frequency, regularity, familiarity, consistency, number of strokes, homophone density, semantic ambiguity rating, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, and the number of disyllabic compound words formed by a character. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the predictive powers of these variables for the naming RTs. The results demonstrated that these variables could account for a significant portion of variance (55.8 %) in the naming RTs. An additional multiple regression analysis was conducted to demonstrate the effects of consistency and character frequency. Overall, the regression results were consistent with the findings of previous studies on Chinese character naming. This database should be useful for research into Chinese language processing, Chinese education, or crosslinguistic comparisons. The database can be accessed via an online inquiry system (http://ball.ling.sinica.edu.tw/ namingdatabase/index.html).Keywords Naming . Chinese character naming . Psycholinguistic norm . Chinese visual word recognition Understanding how readers process words, which are fundamental units for reading, has been a core issue in psycholinguistic studies. Behavioral studies have utilized tasks such as naming, lexical decision, speech perception, and synonym judgment, with the aim of understanding how orthographic, phonological, and semantic information is processed during visual word recognition. These experiments have typically employed a factorial design by manipulating one or two lexical variables (e.g., word frequency and spelling-to-sound consistency) in a limited set of stimuli, while trying to control for other lexical variables (e.g., orthographic neighborhood size and acoustic properties of onsets) in order to prevent any potential confounds. Although this approach has provided fruitful evidence to advance our understanding of how various lexical properties affect visual word recognition, it has some limitations in terms of how to select a set of items that vary in only one dimension and how to generalize the findings to a larger set of stimuli.To overcome these limitations, a number of large-scale psycholinguistic databases have been made available for languages with alphabetic orthographies, including English (Balota et al

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Automatic Processing of Morphemic Orthography By Mature Readers

Cited by 69 publications

References 18 publications

The Feedback Consistency Effect in Chinese Character Recognition: Evidence from a Psycholinguistic Norm

The Feedback Consistency Effect in Chinese Character Recognition: Evidence from a Psycholinguistic Norm

Submorphemic processing in reading Chinese.

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

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