How Semantic Radicals Support And Limit Inductive Reasoning In Hierarchical Category Concept

Categories are groups of distinct abstract or concrete items that the cognitive system treats as equivalent for some purpose. Maintaining and using categories involves mental representations that encode key aspects of category members. In natural categories, items form a hierarchical structure whereby each level has a different level of abstraction, with greater abstraction at higher levels. Usually, humans organize natural categories in subordinate, basic, and superordinate levels. One of the most important functions of categories is to support inferences. Inductive inferences go beyond the available data in a fundamental way and arrive at conclusions that are likely but not certain given the available evidence. People usually equally treat members of the same category, and tend to think that its members with the same or similar characteristics. There are two basic form of inductive reasoning, a reasoning from specific to general, such as "the sparrow liver have substance X/so bird’s liver have X", another is from special to special inference "sparrow liver a substance X/so swan liver have X". Extraction, summarization and inference are core steps of inductive reasoning.Inductive reasoning is one of the most important way of thinking, and language can support thinking.There are two main views of the relationship. One is a delegate with Wolf "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", believed that language determines thought, at least can affect thinking; another is a delegate with Pinker "language instinct" theory, believed that language is a kind of instinct, the human is not used in the support of thinking and people talk when used by the same "language", actually support the thought is "inner language", this is a kind of thinking, pinker believes there is no Whorf said the difference between simple or complex of languages, any language in the world can describe all concepts in their own way.Inductive inference is closely related to linguistic information:Research has revealed that linguistic information facilitates the acquisition of superordinate but not basic-level categories.Other research has found that nouns facilitate superordinate classification,butrender subordinate classification more difficult.Studies of children and adult participants alike have found that a superordinate level label leads to improved short-and longer-term memory recall.Studies of children also find“linguistic label effect”which means when children can categorize two items with same label as the same category even if the items are looked differently.“Linguistic label effect”also find in Chinese language,words with the same morpheme(such as:“car”(轿车)、“train”(火车))can facilitated categorization,and also the identification of atypical items.Nearly 81%of commonly used Chinese characters have a pictophonetic structure,i.e.,they contain semantic and phonetic radicals,81%of which have pictophonetic characters that conform to the rules that the semantic radical provides category information and the phonetic radicals provide pronunciation information(these data were based on a study of 7000 commonly used Chinese characters).Studies have shown that a semantic radical can facilitate categorization for single and two-character words.Words with semantic radicals garner shorter reaction times than those without semantic radicals.The basic processing unit of Chinese characters are radicals(e.g.:semantic/phonetic radicals).Semantic radical has it’s own pathway to access the category information,processing semantic radicals combined lexical network and concept network.Although there several studies focused on the relationship between Chinese characters and inductive reasoning, but the specific study of how semantic radical affect the inductive reasoning is still missing. There are evidence showed that word with same morpheme can facilitated reasoning and identification of atypical items, semantic radical was the smaller grammar unit than which of morpheme, whether semantic radical can paly the same role as morpheme is remain unclear. Semantic radicals contained category information, but without any hierarchical information, present study didn’t reveal the role of semantic radical played in hierarchical category. In addition, there are evidence showed semantic radical can facilitated the recognition of Chinese characters, and previous studies only used whole Chinese characters as material, so it is hard to distinguish the facilitated was caused by semantic radical only, or caused by the facilitation that semantic can enhance the recognition of the whole character.In order to answer the questions above, three part of studies were employed in present research. Part one focused children participants, and explore if semantic radical also can play a role as “linguistic label”; part two explored the how semantic radical affect inductive reasoning in hierarchical concept; part three explored the how semantic radical affect typicality effect.Part one includes three experiments, using triangular validation paradigm to examchildren’s inductive reasoning ability. Experiment used Chinese characters itself as material, a make no clue hint, experiment 2 weak clue hint(synonymous group operator marked in red),the three clues to use strong hints(directly tell participants symbol represents the same similar relationship). Each target words in each trail there is one target word( e.g. "copper" 铜),and there are four kinds of relationship with alternative words, respectively "same semantic radical same category"(such as: iron 铁), "sound nearly"(such as barrels 桶), "same semantic radical different category"(such as fishing 钓) "the same phonetic radical"(such as holes 洞). The results showed that under the condition of no hint, participants generally tend to show reasoning based on phonetic radical, but as they get older, a reasoning rate based on semantic radicals was gradually promoted; under the condition of weak clue hint, 5 to 6 years old children do reasoning mainly based on phonetic radicals, 7-8 years old is a turning point,there are no difference found between semantic radical or phonetic radicao,9-10 years old children showed the tendency of reasoning based on semantic radical; under the condition of strong clues to the prompt, children of all ages are displayed the trend of the reasoning based on semantic radical, the choice of "same semantic radical same category" ratio is gradually increased with age growing.Part two included four experiments. Experiment 4 used nouns of animal and plant in basic superordinate and subordinate level as materials, half with semantic radical and half without. Differences among levels were found when characters were without semantic radicals, and such differences last from the very early cognitive processing stage(i.e., N1 time window) to the relatively late stage of processes(i.e., P600 time window); while no difference was found when characters were with semantic radicals, which means semantic radical facilitated the reasoning in hierarchical category concept. The mechanism underlying facilitation was the assess of semantic radical information, specifically, during the early stage of cognitive processing, processing of semantic radical was based on the lexical network and then transferred to concept network with P3 severing as an index of transformation. As orthography also played an important role in semantic radical processing. Experiment 5 used pseudo-characters as materials in order to explore whether semantic radical facilitated the inductive reasoning without accessing the meaning of the characters. As orthography also an important role of semantic radical processing, so it also was employed as a variable. The result showed that the processes of orthography were earlier than that of semantic radical, as the main effects of orthography were shown in N1, P2 and P3 time window respectively,while the main effects of semantic radical were only shown in N2 time period. And interactions of semantic radical and orthography were also found during N400 time period.Further simple effect analysis indicated that when semantic radical was in accordance the orthography, the reasoning in a pseudo-character can be facilitated as well. To sum up,semantic radical facilitated inductive reasoning and such facilitation effects were based on semantic information without accessing the meaning of characters with the premise that those semantic radicals were in accordance with the orthography. Experiment 6 and experiment7 used priming paradigm to study how semantic radicals affect inductive reasoning in same concept level(subordinate-subordinate) and cross concept level(subordinate-basic), cognitive control was need in these two experiments. Behavior data showed that when there is confliction of cueing and concept level, semantic radicals limited the inductive reasoning.ERPs results showed that, generally the cue affect reasoning more than which of semantic radicals. Four time windows N2,P3,N400 and P600 were employed in ERPs data analyze,main effect of semantic radical was only found in N400 time window for same level reasoning(characters with semantic radical elicited larger N400 wave), and found in N2 time window(characters with semantic radical elicited larger N2wave) for cross levels reasoning condition, while main effect of cue were found in rest of the time windows.Part three included two experiments. Experiment 8 and 9explored how semantic radical influenced the typicalilty effect in an inference task with difference categorization methods.Experiment 8 used a inclusion way while experiment 9 used a exclusion way. The result showed that no difference were find in semantic radical, and the typicality effect showed in both with and without semantic conditons. The result indicated that typicality grident was the intrinsic fearture of taxonomic category and cannot be influenced by semantic radical.In summary, present study showed that, the relationship between semantic radical and category information was formed through learning. Age 7-8 is the turning point of developing the ability. When semantic radical’s meaning was according with the whole character’s category information, it can facilitate the inductive reasoning. Semantic radical can facilitate inductive reasoning even in pseudo characters when the characters are according with orthography. In complex reasoning task, the task goal was more important than semantic radical. Participant was more influenced by task goal than which of semantic radical, it means there are cognitive control involved in complex reasoning tasks. Totally, the results revealed that, linguistic information can affect the inductive reasoning. Sematic radical can facilitate inductive reasoning without access the meaning of whole character in pseudo-characters which accordinate to orthorgraphy. Semantical radical contained category information but not hierarchical information, so it man impeded hierarchical judgement. Typicality effect as the intrict fearture of category, the judgement of typicality grident rely on clear conceptualinformation, it can be affected by task but not semantic radicals.