Semantic Transparency of Radicals in Chinese Characters: An Ontological Perspective (original) (raw)
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Chinese character decoding: a semantic bias?
Reading and Writing, 2010
The effects of semantic and phonetic radicals on Chinese character decoding were examined. Our results suggest that semantic and phonetic radicals are each available for access when a corresponding task emphasizes one or the other kind of radical. But in a more neutral lexical recognition task, the semantic radical is more informative. Semantic radicals that correctly pertain to character meaning facilitated reaction time in semantic categorization tasks (Experiment #1), while radicals that had no immediately interpretable relation to character meaning had a strong inhibitory effect. Likewise, phonetic radicals that accurately indicated a character's pronunciation facilitated a homonym recognition task (Experiment #2), whereas phonetic radicals that differed significantly in pronunciation from their character inhibited homonym recognition. In a lexical decision task (Experiment #3) where each character had either a blurred semantic radical or a blurred phonetic radical, the characters with a blurred semantic radical elicited a significantly higher error rate and a trend for longer response times. These results are interpreted to indicate that while educated native Chinese speakers have full use of both semantic and phonetic paths to character decoding, there is a slight predisposition to semantic decoding strategies over phonetic ones indicating that the semantic path is the default means of character recognition.
Meanings within meanings: Skilled readers activate irrelevant meanings of radicals in Chinese
2021
Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. These cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character’s meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the reader’s processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman & Siok, 1999). We investigated whether readers automatically activate the semantic information associated with a radical even when it is irrelevant to the character’s meaning, using a modified version of the Van Orden (1987) task. Fifty-one Mandarin speakers participated in the study. On each trial they saw a reference category such as “animal” prior to seeing a character then indicated whether the target character was a member of that category. Decisions were slower and less accurate when a target that is not a member of the target category contained a radical that is. For example, if the category is “found in the kitchen,” the answer for the target 券...
Chinese characters: Semantic and phonetic regularity norms for China, Singapore, and Taiwan
Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 1999
Cognitive models of language processing in English are founded on norms for word properties, but their universality is now being explored across different writing scripts and subject groups. Although Chinese characters are popular for this comparative work, their salient properties remain ill defmed or poorly controlled. We describe how norms for semantic and phonetic regularity in Mandarin can be calibrated on a regional basis. The rating data that we present from China, Singapore, and Taiwan also illustrate why the diversity of both oral and written forms of Chinese should be considered in future empirical work. Word properties are known to affect cognitive processing in English and other alphabetic scripts. Norms for these properties have been published cumulatively: word frequency (Carroll, Davies,
Semantic Radicals Contribute to the Visual Identification of Chinese Characters
Journal of Memory and Language, 1999
In a character decision task, phonetic compound targets (composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic component) followed primes that shared (a) the target's radical and were semantically related (RϩSϩ), (b) the target's radical and were not semantically related (RϩSϪ), (c) no radical but were semantically related (RϪSϩ), and (d) no radical and were not semantically related (RϪSϪ). Target radicals also varied as to the number of compounds in which they appeared (i.e., combinability). When targets followed primes immediately (Experiment 1; SOA 243 ms), target latencies following RϩSϪ primes were slowed relative to RϪSϪ controls but those following RϩSϩ and RϪSϩ primes were facilitated equivalently. Increases in combinability significantly reduced decision latencies. When 10 items separated primes and targets (Experiment 2), facilitation was evident only after RϩSϩ primes. Results indicate that one type of component, the semantic radical, is processed in the course of Chinese character recognition and that orthographic similarity due to repetition of a radical is not an adequate account.
This study examined how the properties of semantic radicals affect character meaning inference among adult learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). A semantic radical is a component of a compound character whose primary function is to provide an aspect of the meaning of its host character. Because radicals differ in the nature of the information they supply and their relationships with the characters' meaning, their functions are not uniformly salient to users. This study focused on the notion of radical functional salience and its impacts on character learning and processing. In Study 1, we identified radical properties pertinent to functional salience via a sequence of property analyses, and determined how the identified properties were related to perceived familiarity with commonly used radicals among native Chinese speakers. Based on the analyses, in Study 2, we examined how functional salience affects the way CFL learners use radical information through character meaning extraction and inference tasks. The results demonstrated that functional salience was differentially related to performance variances. The findings suggest that CFL learners' use of radical information during character processing is explained jointly by the properties of semantic radicals and learners' radical knowledge.
Processing fluency of the forms and sounds of Chinese characters
The goal of this study is to investigate whether different types of structures and lexical tones of Chinese characters cause different processing fluency. In Experiment 1, partici-pants' explicit affective assessments of Chinese characters with different structures, frequencies , and lexical tones were analyzed. Results indicated that participants showed explicit preferences and dispreferences to different structures and lexical tones. In Experiment 2, participants' implicit responses to different structures and lexical tones were investigated using a metaphor experimental paradigm. Results were consistent with the major findings of Experiment 1. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants' recognition of words of different structures and lexical tones were analyzed. Results revealed that participants had a better memory for Surround structure characters when stimuli were visually presented and for Tone 3 when stimuli were auditorily presented. Finally, the significance and implications of this study are discussed.
Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach
Behavior research methods, 2017
Words are considered semantically ambiguous if they have more than one meaning and can be used in multiple contexts. A number of recent studies have provided objective ambiguity measures by using a corpus-based approach and have demonstrated ambiguity advantages in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Although the predictive power of objective ambiguity measures has been examined in several alphabetic language systems, the effects in logographic languages remain unclear. Moreover, most ambiguity measures do not explicitly address how the various contexts associated with a given word relate to each other. To explore these issues, we computed the contextual diversity (Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, Psychological Science, 17; 814-823, 2006) and semantic ambiguity (Hoffman, Lambon Ralph, & Rogers, Behavior Research Methods, 45; 718-730, 2013) of traditional Chinese single-character words based on the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus, where contextual diversity was used to evaluate the pre...
Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2005
This paper describes a case study of a Chinese brain-injured patient with mild dyslexia and more severe dysgraphia. The distributions of his reading and writing errors across tasks are consistent with previous reports. Semantic errors predominated in naming tasks in both modalities, while the preponderance of LARC or phonologically similar errors in reading and phonologically plausible errors in writing-to-dictation was found. Furthermore, his writing errors showed that the semantic radical could be replaced, omitted, or added, whereas only substitutions or deletions of the phonetic radical were observed. The finding that had not been reported before was the existence of a semantic relationship between the substituting or inserted semantic radicals and their target word in many noncharacter responses. This was taken as evidence for models of the mental lexicon where orthographic units of different sizes are arranged at the same level and semantic radicals are directly connected with semantic features.
Synaesthesia in Chinese characters: The role of radical function and position
Consciousness and Cognition, 2014
Grapheme-colour synaesthetes experience unusual colour percepts when they encounter letters and/or digits. Studies of English-speaking grapheme-colour synaesthetes have shown that synaesthetic colours are sometimes triggered by rulebased linguistic mechanisms (e.g., B might be blue). In contrast, little is known about synaesthesia in logographic languages such as Chinese. The current study shows the mechanisms by which synaesthetic speakers of Chinese colour their language. One hypothesis is that Chinese characters might be coloured by their constituent morphological units, known as radicals, and we tested this by eliciting synaesthetic colours for characters while manipulating features of the radicals within them. We found that both the function (semantic vs. phonetic) and position (left vs. right) of radicals influenced the nature of the synaesthetic colour generated. Our data show that in Chinese, as in English, synaesthetic colours are influenced by systematic rules, rather than by random associations, and that these rules are based on existing psycholinguistic mechanisms of language processing.
Frontiers in psychology, 2017
This study investigates the effects of teaching semantic radicals in inferring the meanings of unfamiliar characters among nonnative Chinese speakers. A total of 54 undergraduates majoring in Chinese Language from a university in Hanoi, Vietnam, who had 1 year of learning experience in Chinese were assigned to two experimental groups that received instructional intervention, called "old-for-new" semantic radical teaching, through two counterbalanced sets of semantic radicals, with one control group. All of the students completed pre- and post-tests of a sentence cloze task where they were required to choose an appropriate character that fit the sentence context among four options. The four options shared the same phonetic radicals but had different semantic radicals. The results showed that the pre-test and post-test score increases were significant for the experimental groups, but not for the control group. Most importantly, the experimental groups successfully transferre...