The Effect Of Phonetic Radicals On Identification Of Chinese Phonograms

For the Chinese characters, unlike the alphabetic language, semantic information of the character is linked more closely with the orthographic information than the phonological information. So, for the study of Chinese reading, the effect of orthographic information and phonological information on semantic access is always a controversial issue. Many studies have found that the orthographic information of Chinese character can directly achieve semantic access. However, the Chinese phonograms have phonetic radicals, which mostly have the same pronunciation with the phonograms. To some extent, the phonetic radicals can provide the phonological information. So, the phonological information of phonetic radicals maybe plays a part in the processing of the phonograms.Two studies were conducted to investigate whether the phonological information of the phonetic radicals play an important part in the processing of phonograms. And there are two experiments in every study. The two experiments explore the left-right structure and the up-down structure phonograms respectively. Naming task was adopted in Study1. Based on Study1, Study2adopted eye movement technology to explore the effect of the phonetic radicals in normal reading condition. In study1, a2(position of phonetic radicals)×3(pattern of stroke removal) within-participants design was used in both Experiment1and2. In Experiment1, the position of phonetic radicals includes left side and right side. In Experiment2, the position of phonetic radicals includes up side and down side. The pattern of stroke removal includes beginning stroke removal, ending stroke removal and normal character in both experiments. Reaction time and accuracy rate were recorded in Study1. In Study2, the naming characters in Study1were put in sentences as the target characters to read, recording the eye movement track as the same time. The experiment designs in Study2were the same as Study1.Both of the two studies have the same results. All the measures showed that when the phonetic radical was on the right side or down side of the character, there is no difference between the beginning strokes removal condition and the ending strokes removal condition. Even the processing time of the characters with ending strokes removed was longer than that of the characters with beginning strokes removed. It indicates tha if the-ending strokes removed are the phonetic radical, the stroke removal effect will disappear. The effect of the phonetic radical cancelled out the stroke order effect. The results demonstrate that:(1) The present study supports the stroke order effect. However, for the Chinese phonograms, the phonological information of the sub-lexical phonetic radicals can influence the stroke order effect.(2) The phonetic radicals play an important role in identification of Chinese phonograms both in the naming task and the normal reading task.(3) The present study supports dual route model. According to dual route model, there exists a phonetic activation on processing of Chinese phonograms.