DOI: 10.6129/CJP.20131028
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2014, Vol.56, No.1, 49-63

Orthographic Inhibition between Characters with Identical Semantic Radicals in Primed Character Decision Tasks

Fu-Ling Yang（Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）；Jei-Tun Wu（Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）

Abstract

In two primed character decision experiments, one with 243 ms SOA and the other with 43 ms SOA, we examined the effects of semantic priming, orthographic priming, frequency in target characters, and  neighborhood density in target characters. Following results were obtained by both the experiments: (1) Compared with semantically unrelated conditions, semantic priming effects were observed in semantically related prime-target pairs; (2) compared with radically unrelated conditions, orthographic inhibition was observed in the prime condition where the prime and the target shared a common semantic radical. Moreover, orthographic inhibition occurred only in high-frequency target characters and not in low-frequency target characters; (3) Compared with low-frequency target characters, high-frequency target characters responded more quickly and correctly; (4) neighborhood density had a negligible effect on target character decisions. Priming effects between characters with identical semantic radicals in our study were character-level effects,
rather than radical-level effects. Because the same prime types were adopted as those in the study by Feldman and Siok (1999a), the present findings question the early semantic activation of radicals as suggested by their study, which supported the notion that radical processing is a constitutive element of character recognition and precedes meaning access in the identification process. Instead, the present results suggest that the semantics of radicals is optional for accessing meaning in Chinese character recognition among skilled adult readers. Thus, we propose the idea that in primed character decisions, semantic radicals act as orthographic units rather than semantic units.

Keywords: orthographic inhibition, orthographic priming, semantic radical, character recognition, semantic priming