| Whether alphabetic characters also exist with the sub-lexical structure, whether the process of cognitive processing among characters cognitive lexical structure is it? Words whose processing are primed by a word that share a sub-lexical unite such as syllable and radical are responded to faster than words whose processing are not primed, which reflects an intermediate, activation role of the priming sub-lexical units. On the other hand, words with a high-frequency syllable, i.e., larger syllable-neighborhood, elicit higher N400 of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), reflecting greater lateral inhibition associated with larger neighborhood. To explore the controversial intermediate roles of sub-lexical units, the present study examined whether the number of simple radicals in the fragments of Chinese characters could modulate N400. The present study recorded ERPs elicited by radical- and stroke-deleted fragments of Chinese characters, while the participants performed a delayed character matching task on the fragment stimuli and the probe characters that followed a stimulus. The radical-deleted fragments were created by deleting a simple radical from a root character that contained in average 4.66 simple radicals. The stroke-deleted fragments, which contain at least one radical, were created by deleting the same number of strokes as deleting the corresponding radical, and deleting at random except that the deleted strokes belonged to as many different radicals of the root character as possible; the stroke-deleted fragments nevertheless contain at least one radical. A radical-deleted (eg.墩) and a stroke-deleted fragments (eg.墩) were created from one root character only which was drawn in Kai Ti(eg.墩), and in total two types of 120 fragments each were generated with 120 root characters. Two complementary stimulus sets, one for each participant, were formed based on the two types of fragments. Half of one type was combined with fragments of the other type created from the remaining root characters. Therefore, the probability of every character being presented under the radical-deleted and the stroke-deleted fragment conditions was balanced by the rotation of the stimulus sets across all participants. The main results showed that the stroke-deleted fragments elicited a larger N400-like component than did the radical-deleted fragments. These results demonstrated an intermediate role of sub-character functional unit of simple radicals in the recognition of complex Chinese characters, given equal numbers of strokes in the two types of fragments. Further, the stroke-deleted fragments contained fewer intact radicals. Thus, the present results support the suggestion which is based on previous studies that the stroke-deleted fragments do not sufficiently activated their character representation while activate a larger number of radical neighbors again due to fewer radicals. These two points could jointly lead to a difficulty of selecting the target representation from the neighbors, and to difficult recognition of their character. Again, their target representation suffers from less activation and yet greater lateral inhibition. Thus, as expected a higher N400 was elicited by these fragments as compared with the radical-deleted fragments. The N400 effect is interpreted in a multilayer interactive-activation model as reflecting relatively stronger competition from the neighbors of the stroke-deleted characters along with the disadvantage of their radical processing. Radicals should be embedded into the multilayer model as sub-lexical units. The result of the second experiment is that, the interaction of phonetic radical family and regularity is significant. The regular characters with small phonetic radical family elicit higher N400 of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) than those with larger phonetic radical family. The effect of the family is reverse in irregular characters. |
PDF Full Text Request