Lexical and Sublexical Processing in Chinese Character Recognition

Three studies were conducted to investigate lexical and sublexical processing in Chinese character recognition. Each study consisted of a behavioral experiment and an event-related potential (ERP) experiment. Participants were asked to judge whether each individually presented character belonged to the semantic category of animal.;In Study 1, position-general radical frequency (GRF) and position-specific radical frequency (SRF) were manipulated to explore radical processing using the behavioral method and the ERP technique. The behavioral data revealed a robust effect of GRF and a relatively weak effect of SRF, with HGRF and HSRF characters processed faster than LGRF and LSRF characters, respectively. The ERP data showed that the effect of GRF was associated with N170, whereas the effect of SRF was associated with P200 and N400.;In Study 2, I used masked priming paradigm together with the behavioral method and the ERP technique to investigate radical processing. The behavioral experiment revealed similar priming effects for target characters preceded by primes containing them as radicals in both dominant and subordinate positions. The ERP experiment also revealed reliable priming effects for target characters preceded by primes containing them as radicals, but the effect produced by radicals of high Lexical and Sublexical Processing IV position-specific radical frequency appeared earlier than that yielded by radicals of low position-specific radical frequency.;In Study 3, I used multiple linear regression approach with the behavioral method and the ERP technique to investigate the processing of radical-level and character-level properties when they functioned jointly during visual Chinese character recognition. The behavioral data showed that all the 7 variables contributed to character recognition, with the variance accounted for by familiarity being the largest, followed by stroke number and semantic transparency, and followed by the four radical-level variables. The ERP data showed that the first significant effects of stroke number, the SRF of the first radicals, the GRF and SRF of the second radicals occurred around 100 ms post-stimulus onset, and the first significant effects of the GRF of the first radicals, familiarity and semantic transparency appeared slightly later round 150 ms. At later stages from 150 ms to 350 ms, different levels of variables contributed to the processing simultaneously.;The results from the three studies together indicate that 1) radical-level and character-level information contributed to the process of character recognition simultaneously, but the contribution of character-level information and semantic-radical information were greater than that of phonetic-radical information during single Chinese character recognition in a semantic categorization task., 2) position is an important property of radicals that should be considered during Chinese character recognition, 3) the temporal relationship between radical identity and position coding is relatively flexible and can be modulated by various factors. Based on the results of the current studies and previous studies, an interactive model of orthographic processing in Chinese character recognition was proposed.