The Influence Of Orthographic Neighborhood Size And The Level Of Consistency Of The Semantic Radicals’ Category On Cognitive Processing Of Chinese Phonograms Characters

As an important part of Chinese characters,semantic radical has an important influence on the cognitive processing of Chinese characters.As an important part of Chinese phonograms,semantic radical has important influence on the recognition of character,semantic extraction and grammar processing.Previous studies have paid more attention to the properties of semantic radicals(such as familiarity,specificity and grammaticality),but few studies on the consistency of the categories of semantic radical.Therefore,based on the previous studies,we further explores the effects of the orthographic neighborhood size and the level of consistency in the semantic radicals’ category on cognitive processing of Chinese phonograms.Orthographic neighborhood size of semantic radicals refers to the number of Chinese characters consisting a same semantic radicals,which means semantic radicals consisted of much more Chinese characters are attributed to the big family while those of less Chinese characters are attributed to the small family.The level of consistency in the semantics’ category has been regarded as the ratio between the number of the characters that semantic can represent the meaning and the number of Chinese characters with the same semantic.And the higher the ratio,the higher level of consistency in the semantics’ category.The divergence of cognitive processing caused by orthographic neighborhood size is termed as semantic radicals’ neighborhood effect.What is the effect and influence of semantic radicals’ family on the character recognition and semantics of phonograms? What kind of role does The level of consistency in the semantics’ category play in cognition processing of phonograms characters? Do they affect with each other? Meanwhile we may consider that the experimental results influence by the experimental task or not? This study will explore these questions through behavioral studies and ERP experiments.The results of the study are as follows:(1)Behavioral experiment 1a explores the role of orthographic neighborhood size of semantic radicals and The level of consistency in the semantics’ category in word recognition tasks.The results show that the reaction time and the correct rate of the large semantics’ family was significantly faster and higher than the small semantics’ family.There is a semantics’ family to promote the effect,but don’t find semantics’ family inhibitory effect.The influence of the level of consistency in the semantics’ category on the Identification of Chinese phonograms characters.(2)Based on the behavioral experiment 1a,we use the ERP technology and find semantics’ family effect in 80-130 ms time window,which the big semantics’ family evoked more negative N1.There is significant interaction between the semantics’ family size and the level of consistency in the semantics’ category.And there is significant difference when the level of consistency in the semantics’ category is lower.In the time window of latency 300-400 ms,the level of consistency in the semantics’ category is found to be significant,and the amplitude of the high consistency level was more negative.But we don’t find effects of Chinese character type and semantics’ family effect.(3)Behavior experiment 2a explores the effect of orthographic neighborhood size of semantic radicals and the level of consistency in the semantics’ category in semantic categories task.The results show that the reaction time and the correct rate of the large semantics’ family was significantly faster and higher than the small semantics’ family.The level of consistency in the semantics’ category has the same promoting effect,which reaction time of the higher level of consistency was significantly shorter than the lower.(4)According the ERP study,we find that he higher level of consistency evoked more negative N400.There was significant interaction between the level of consistency in the semantics’ category and semantics’ family size.The small semantics’ family induced a more negative N400 amplitude,when at the higher level of consistency.Main conclusions would be drawn from this study as follows:(1)The orthographic neighborhood size of semantic radicals would influence the recognition of character and semantic extraction of the Chinese phonograms,with finding the promotion effect of semantics’ family.(2)The level of consistency in the semantics’ category influence the cognition process of the Chinese phonograms,and regulated by the orthographic neighborhood size of semantic radicals.(3)The result from these experiment supports the adjustment model to explain the influence of semantic radicals on orthographic neighborhood and consistency,and we can find an adjustment mechanism influence whole-word processing of Chinese phonograms.