學刊論文
A Longitudinal Study of Association Strength and Semantic Transparency in Semantic Processing of Chinese Characters in Children

DOI: 10.6129/CJP.20130501
中華心理學刊 民103,56卷,1期,1-11
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2014, Vol.56, No.1, 1-11


Shu-Hui Lee(Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University);Kuo-Chung Hung(Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University);Tai-Li Chou(Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University;Neurobiology and Cognitive Science Center, National Taiwan University;Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, National Taiwan University)

 

Abstract

This study examined the developmental changes in association strength (i.e., the degree of semantic relation
between two characters) and semantic transparency (i.e., the degree of semantic relation between the semantic radical and the whole character) in a cross-modal semantic judgment task. Character pairs were presented in the visual and auditory modality sequentially to determine the mapping between phonology and orthography. A longitudinal approach was used to study a group of Chinese children aged 9 to 15 years (age 1), and 11 to 17 years (age 2). Association strength (strong, weak) and semantic transparency (high, low) were independently varied to study semantic processing. Participants were asked to decide whether two Chinese characters were related in meaning. There were two main results in the current study. First, children performed better on accuracy for high relative to low transparency in the strong association, reflecting the differences of semantic constraint to perform semantic judgments in the strong association. Second, our results showed a reduced difference in accuracy for high than for low transparency for age 2, compared to that of age 1. These findings demonstrate developmental changes from a focus on radical components (i.e., sublexical processing) to a focus on whole characters (i.e., lexical processing) and the development of more efficient bi-directional links between the radical and the character, which accelerates access to semantic representations. 

 

Keywords: association strength, auditory, development, semantic, semantic transparency Fluency i n reading i s associated with the maturational changes

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