The Effects of Orthographic Neighborhood Size and the Influence of Individual Differences in Linguistic Skills During the Recognition of Chinese Words

Abstract

There are still inconsistencies as to whether frequency and orthographic neighborhood size affect the reading and recognition of Chinese words. In addition, research on Chinese reading still adheres to the view that “all skilled readers read in the same way” and pays little attention to the influence of individual differences in linguistic skills on word recognition. In this research, we studied the recognition of Chinese two-character words in a lexical decision task (LDT) by manipulating neighborhood size and word frequency and controlling the frequency of the initial constituent character. Individual differences in linguistic skills were assessed through tests of spelling and reading comprehension. The results showed that: (1) A larger orthographic neighborhood size of the initial character had a facilitative effect on Chinese word recognition. The orthographic neighborhood size effect is modulated by word frequency, but this modulation effect was not stable. (2) Spelling and reading comprehension skills are good indicators to assess individual differences in Chinese linguistic skills, and they are significantly correlated. (3) Individual differences in linguistic skills influence the neighborhood size effect, which is moderated by word frequency.

Neighborhood in Chinese lexicon: A megastudy analysis of lexical decision and naming of two-character Chinese words.

“…This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Consistent with the prediction of Li et al's (2015) model and parallel dual-route mechanism, we found the Neighborhood Size × Word Frequency interaction in both lexical decision and naming, with the effect being stronger for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words (see also Tsai et al, 2006;Xiong et al, 2021).…”

“…They obtained a facilitatory effect of neighborhood size, which, however, did not depend on word frequency or task type. The absence of the first-character Neighborhood Size × Word Frequency interaction in lexical decision (see also Wu et al, 2013, which controlled for the first-character frequency) or naming is inconsistent with Tsai et al (2006) and Xiong et al (2021). When neighborhood size is defined as the sum of the number of words that can be formed by the first and second characters of a word, Huang et al (2006) found that the effect of neighborhood size was facilitatory for high-frequency words but This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

“…Previous studies reported a facilitatory neighborhood size effect on lexical decision and naming in Chinese (e.g., Li et al, 2015Li et al, , 2017Y. Liu et al, 2007;Tsai et al, 2006;Tse et al, 2023;Wu et al, 2013;Xiong et al, 2021), which can be interpreted using Li et al's (2015) semantic activation model of Chinese word processing (see Figure 1), which is architecturally similar to the interactive activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981; see, e.g., Taft et al, 1999, for a Chinese version). When a twocharacter word is processed, there are bottom-up feedback and topdown influences between the perceived level and the meaning level.…”

“…When the neighborhood size of a word is larger, more related nodes at the lemma level are activated. This heightened level of top-down semantic activation may then facilitate the recognition of the target word and in turn speed up lexical decision and naming responses (see also Xiong et al, 2021). However, characters appearing in words with larger neighborhood size tend to be higher in frequency as, by definition, they are appearing in more words; this makes it difficult to manipulate these two variables simultaneously in factorial experiments.…”

Beyond quantity of experience: Exploring the role of semantic consistency in Chinese character knowledge.

“…Research has already shown that Chinese words are recognized more quickly if they contain an initial character from a large family (Li et al, 2015, 2017; Liu et al, 2007; Wu et al, 2013; Xiong et al, 2021), with the family of a Chinese character defined as the number of words that contain that particular character. This result provides evidence that the recognition of Chinese compounds involves the analysis of individual characters.…”