Submorphemic processing in reading Chinese.

Abstract

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.

The Nature of the Mental Representation of Radicals in Chinese: A Priming Study.

“…From Feldman and Siok's (1999b) results, it is expected that facilitatory priming at a 43-ms SOA will be observed when the prime and target share their nonsemantic (right-hand) radical (e.g., , qu1 and , shu1) and hence are unrelated in meaning (i.e., body and pivot, respectively). According to the claim that radical representations are position specific (Taft & Zhu, 1997;Taft et al, 1999), radicals in different positions in the prime and target will not prime each other. For example, preexposure of (ou1) will not prime recognition of (shu1).…”

The Lexical Constituency Model: Some Implications of Research on Chinese for General Theories of Reading.

“…For simplicity, the model does not include a stroke level, which could be considered an initiating input level connected to a radical level. Taft and Zhu (1997) describe a model that includes strokes as one of three hierarchical levels, the other two being radicals and characters.…”

Exploring orthographic neighborhood size effects in a computational model of Chinese character naming

“…Although a number of theoretical models of Chinese reading have been proposed in the literature (Perfetti, Liu, & Tan, 2005;Perfetti & Tan, 1999;Taft & Zhu, 1997), only recently have large-scale computational models been developed (Hsiao & Shillcock, 2004;Yang et al, 2009;Yang et al, 2013). These provide explicit details about the connections between the core processing layers within the system and allow for effective evaluation of reading effects.…”