Word naming and psycholinguistic norms: Chinese

Abstract

192Recent research has shown that many variables affect speakers' performance in word-naming tasks. As Balota, Cortese, Sergent-Marshall, Spieler, and Yap (2004) pointed out, such variables could include factors at various levels-for example, the surface level (initial phoneme), the lexical level (e.g., word length, word frequency, and spelling-to-sound consistency), and the semantic level (e.g., imageability and concreteness). These levels are not mutually exclusive and in fact sometimes overlap with one another-for example, word frequency could influence word naming at both the lexical and the semantic level.Previous studies in alphabetic languages, especially those languages with transparent orthographic systems, have suggested that lexical-level variables play more important roles than semantic-level variables in word-naming tasks (e.g., Balota et al., 2004;Barca, Burani, & Arduino, 2002;Frost, 1998;Lukatela & Turvey, 1994;Van Orden, Pennington, & Stone, 1990). For example, in Italian, a language with transparent orthography-phonology correspondences, Barca et al. (2002) found that only lexical-level variables (e.g., frequency, word length, and neighborhood size) had significant effects on the naming of nouns, whereas semantic variables (e.g., imageability and concreteness) had negligible influences. In English, in which the orthography-phonology relationship is less transparent, Balota et al. (2004) found that surface-, lexical-, and semantic-level variables all have an impact on word-naming performances. Semantic effects, however, have been shown by a few studies to be significant only for low-frequency and exception words (e.g., Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995.Previous studies have also examined variables on word/ character 1 naming in nonalphabetic languages such as Chinese and Japanese. These studies have shown that surface and lexical variables such as word/character frequency, phonetic regularity, number of strokes, and number of components are also important for Chinese word naming (Leck, Weekes, & Chen, 1995;Zhou, Shu, Bi, & Shi, 1999). Other variables, such as initial phoneme of a syllable, age of acquisition, homophone density, and phonological frequency, have only recently been examined and shown to be important (Chen, Wang, Wang, & Peng, 2004;Liu, Zhang, & Shu, 2006;Ziegler, Tan, Perry, & Montant, 2000). Finally, semantic-level variables such as imageability and concreteness have also recently been found to be important in the processing of Japanese Kanji (Chinese characters; Shibahara, Zorzi, Hill, Wydell, & Butterworth, 2003), as well as in word naming and lexical decision in Chinese (Chen & Peng, 1998; see also Q. Zhang & Zhang, 1997). A major finding from Shibahara et al. (2003) was that semantic effects (i.e., imageability effect) were stronger in Kanji processing than in word processing in English.However, few previous studies have attempted to relate their experimental patterns (usually based on a small set of characters/words) to large-scale normative data, since collection of such...

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

“…Character frequency A considerable amount of evidence has indicated that character frequency is a powerful predictor of RTs in Chinese character recognition; frequency effects have been observed consistently in a wide range of tasks (Hue, 1992;Lee et al, 2005;Liu et al, 2007;Yang et al, 2009). Higher frequency characters tend to be processed more quickly than lower frequency characters during naming (Lee et al, 2005;Yang et al, 2009).…”

“…Regarding Chinese, only recently have large-scale psycholinguistic norms for simplified Chinese characters been developed (Liu, Shu, & Li, 2007;Sze, Rickard Liow, & Yap, 2013). Liu et al provided the first large-scale database of simplified Chinese character naming.…”

“…This results in generally fewer strokes and homophones in simplified than in traditional characters. It is worth noting that the two existing sets of Chinese norms (Liu et al, 2007;Sze et al, 2013) are based on simplified Chinese characters. The existing norms may not be directly applied in studies on traditional characters, in particular for word-form and frequencyrelated measures.…”

“…Variables such as frequency, regularity, age of acquisition, imageability, familiarity, and concreteness have been included in the existing psycholinguistic norms (Liu et al, 2007). Nevertheless, some variables have not yet been considered, in particular those related to radical information.…”

“…This database includes five variables (i.e., consistency, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity rating, and number of disyllabic compound words formed by a character) that have not been considered previously, and five variables (i.e., frequency, regularity, homophone density, familiarity, and number of strokes) that have been shown to be important predictors for naming RTs (Liu et al, 2007). In total, ten variables are included in the present database.…”