中  華  心  理  學  刊
民93，46卷，2期，181-196

May-Jane Chen（School of Psychology, Australian National University, Australia）；Brendan S. Weekes（Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, UK）

Abstract

A defining feature of the Chinese script is character components that convey meaning to readers. This component is called a semantic radical. We report our investigations of three features of the semantic radical namely character type, consistency and combinability on Chinese character identification. We defined character type as the extent to which the meaning of a whole character is denoted by the semantic radical; consistency as the extent to which a semantic radical consistently represents a specific meaning; and combinability as the total number of characters (tokens) that share the same semantic radical. We found that characters which had the same or similar meaning as the semantic radical it carried were processed more efficiently in semantic categorization and character decision tasks as were characters with high combinability semantic radicals. Consistency effects interacted with other variables. We argue that these results support the view that semantic subcomponents are processed during the course of character recognition.

Keyword：semantic consistency, semantic combinability, Chinese character recognition