A Study Of Visual Word Processing On Symmetry Characters

Structurally symmetric characters, with a visual symmetry, can be processed more easily. The vocabulary characteristics (eg structure, units strokes and so no.) of Chinese characters which is ideogram play an important role in the process of visual character recognition.In behavioral experiments, an effect of structurally symmetry characters was be found that responses are faster and accuracy is higher to structurally symmetric characters (SCs) than to asymmetric characters (ACs) in tasks. In this study, only horizontally symmetric characters were employed, which were bilaterally symmetric around the vertical line across the center of their own virtual frame (e.g.,黄huang2, yellow).Many researchers thought that N400was associated with the semantic processing of words. And some researchers found that vocabulary characteristics (e.g., word frequency, word concreteness, orthography, and orthography neighborhood size) could modulate the amplitude of N400. Orthography neighborhood size was the number of words which share most of the same component. The orthography neighborhood size of Chinese character was the number of characters with the most same strokes and components. The effect of structurally symmetric characters suggests that information play an important role in the process of visual Chinese character recognition, so the study think the real family members of a structurally symmetric character were the words with the symmetric structure. In the modern Chinese word frequency, only3.8%horizontally symmetric characters were found around0.0015%-0.00418%frequency range, so this study think about structural members of the family of symmetrical Chinese characters of true than asymmetric words less true members of the family.In the experiment1, we use a semantic classification task, records and analysis the EEG data about symmetric and asymmetric Chinese characters, examined the ERP effect of structurally symmetric characters. The study had a hypothesis that ACs have a larger real neighborhood size than do SCs. If three of ERP components (P150, P200and N400) were induced, the assumption that structurally symmetric characters contain small orthography member can be accepted, otherwise it indicates that there is no such symmetrical structure in characters.In experiment2, we used a rhyme judgment task, record and analysis about the EEG data about symmetric and asymmetric Chinese characters. The experimental materials were same to the ones in the experiment1. The purpose of this study is to investigate that if the ERP effects was consistent with that ones in the experiment1. if it is, the result provide evidence for the family, is also a further sign that symmetry structure play a role not only in the processing of visual characteristics of Chinese character, but also in the processing of semantic information extraction.The results showed that:(1) The effect of structurally symmetric characters was also found in ERP study that a series of ERP effects (N170, P150, P200and N400), SCs, with smaller members of family than ACs, will been identify more easily;(2) The feature of symmetry structure in Chinese characters played an important role in also the early orthography processing and the semantic processing;(3) N170which was sensitive to the structure information of Chinese characters may participated the processing of visual information of characters, P200and P150were similar ERP components, reflected the early orthography processing, and N400composition also reflected the lexical representation of information processing.