What Are the Functional Orthographic Units in Chinese Word Recognition: The Stroke or the Stroke Pattern?

Abstract

We present evidence that the visual analysis of Chinese characters by skilled readers is based upon well-defined orthographic constituents. These functional units are the recurrent, integral stroke-patterns, not the individual strokes as previously thought. The speed of simultaneous “same-different” comparisons of Chinese characters is affected by the number of these orthographic units and, for “different” judgements, by the proportion of mismatching units, but not by the number of individual strokes. We further define a category of orthographic unit, referred to here as the “lexical radical”, which requires strict positional regularity within each composite character. Violation of positional regularity results in illegal non-characters. In contrast, recombination of orthographic units (stroke patterns) with the lexical radical in its regular position forms a regular pseudocharacter. We show that real characters are matched faster than pseudocharacters and non-characters—a word superiority effect in Chinese. Pseudocharacters are matched faster than non-characters, a pseudoword advantage in Chinese. We also present evidence suggesting that individual stroke patterns may be better recognized in real characters than in pseudocharacters and non-characters—a word superiority effect in terms of unit recognition. These results support the hypothesis that the functional orthographic unit in the recognition of Chinese characters, comparable to the letter in alphabetic word recognition, is the recurring integral stroke pattern.

Developmental changes in character-complexity and word-length effects when reading Chinese script

“…For the completely different pairs (i.e., two radicals differing in two-radical stimuli, and three radicals differing in three-radical stimuli), comparisons were significantly faster when comparing different tworadical pairs than when comparing different three-radical pairs for real characters, pseudocharacters, and noncharacters. Although an effect of the number of radicals was shown in the study of Chen et al (1996), this might be partly due to the nature of a simultaneous same-different comparison task in which participants have to judge the physical identity of the two stimuli, and also partly due to the "different" pairs being manipulated by the proportion of mismatching radicals in each character. The simultaneous same-different comparison task and the manipulation of stimuli in the "different" pairs might lead participants to use a strategy comparing pairs of stimuli radical by radical.…”

“…Furthermore, the influence of length on reading speed is even more evident in dyslexic readers (e.g., Juphard, et al, 2004;Martens & de Jong, 2006; radicals" and "phonetic radicals" in semantic-phonetic compound characters (Chen et al, 1996;Ho, Ng, & Ng, 2003). By this definition, the semantic and phonetic radicals of the character "響" are the bottom part "音" and the top part "鄉", respectively.…”

“…Some previous adult studies (Chen, et al, 1996;Chen & Liu, 2000;Cheng, 1981;Fang, 1994;Just & Carpenter, 1987;Leong, Cheng, & Mulcahy, 1987;Tan & Peng, 1990), one children study (Chiang, 2003), and one dyslexic study (Yang, 1998) have explored the analogous wordlength effects (i.e., the Chinese character-complexity and word-length effects), using strokes, radicals, or characters as the unit of analysis. In studies examining how the number of strokes influences character-recognition latency (i.e., the character-complexity effect), Just, Carpenter, and Wu (cited in Just & Carpenter, 1987) used an eye-tracking paradigm and found that the gaze duration on Chinese characters increased with the number of strokes comprising a character.…”

“…Thus, it is unclear whether the number of radicals or the number of strokes was responsible for the different response latencies. Chen et al (1996) applied a simultaneous same-different comparison task that required skilled adult readers to make a judgment about the physical identity of two stimuli presented simultaneously on a computer screen. They found that when the number of strokes was between 8 and 11, the response latency was longer for threeradical stimuli than for two-radical stimuli comprising real characters in the "same" pairs (i.e., two stimuli were identical).…”

N170 Tuning in Chinese: Logographic Characters and Phonetic Pinyin Script

“…In Chinese, although each character is realized phonologically as a syllable, constituent phonemes of the syllable are not atomistically represented within the corresponding character (McBride-Chang & Chen, 2003). Thus grapheme-to-phoneme conversion processes are absent in reading Chinese logographic script (Chen, Allport, & Marshall, 1996;Perfetti & Zhang, 1995). This renders Chinese particularly suitable for studying the underlying mechanism of print tuning: If the enhanced and left-lateralized print N170 is triggered by grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, such effect should be weak or even nonexistent in logographic Chinese; in contrast, if the print N170 is engendered by visual familiarity with a particular script, it should be observed for Chinese, as well.…”