The Effect Of "Word Bad / Word" On Sound Processing In Chinese Character Recognition

This research adopted the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm to investigate how the whole influence components in the process of components’identification. This impact was characterized by "word superiority effect" or "word disadvantage effect" from the studies on recognition of Chinese characters, thus further study is needed to illustrate whether the phonogram improves or inhibits the identification of phonetic radicals. In addition, we also regarded the independence, position, frequency of phonetic radicals and the relationship between the whole word and phonetic radicals. Results indicated that:(1) The phonetic radicals, which could be independent characters, were used as the target components and" word disadvantage effect" was found in the experimental1, in other words, the participants responsed faster at identifying the phontic radicals when the briefly presented character was a unpronounceable nonword than it was a real word;(2) The phonetic radicals, which couldn’t be independent characters, were used as the target components and "word superiority effect" was found in the experimental2, in other words, participants responsed faster at identifying the phontic radicals when the briefly presented character was a real word than it was a unpronounceable nonword;(3)"Word superiority/disadvantage effect" could be affected by the rendering time, position, frequency of phonetic radicals and the relationship between the whole word and phonetic radicals in two experiments."Word disadvantage effect "was not affected by rendering time in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters), but it would gradually disappear with the rendering time in which a semantic radical appears on the right and a phonetic radical on the left (PS characters). In addition,"Word superiority effect" would gradually recede with rendering time until it disappeared only for the SP characters;(4) The regularity effect was found in experimental1but regulated by the frequency of phonetic radicals. The consistency effect was found in experimental2only for SP characters. The results suggest that:(1) The character inhibits the identification of phonetic radicals when the target components are dependent characters;(2) The character improves the identification of phonetic radicals when the target components aren’t dependent characters;(3) Compared with phonetic radicals on the right side, the phonetic radicals on the left side are more closely related to the whole word, It would be more difficult to isolate the dependent phonetic radicals on the left side from the whole word, the independent phonetic radicals on the left side have to rely on the whole word to be identified. But the promotion of the whole word would recede with rendering time until it disappeared;(4) Both the pronunciation and relative frequency of the the whole word and phonetic radicals can also affect components’ identification. The longer characters process, the greater the whole inhibits the identification of phonetic radicals on the left side; But the low frequency effect of phonetic radicals appears when the whole word is low-frequency and irregular character. This phenomenon indicates that irregular characters take the whole word processing priority strategy, the low-frequency phonetic radicals are not easy to display.