The Neighborhood Size Effect Of Chinese Characters:The Roles Of General Activation Of Phonology And The Lateral Inhibition Mechanism

Chinese characters become an important field of cognitive neuroscience because of its unique form,phonology and semantic.Chinese characters are not alphabetic characters,and don’t have form in consistent with phonology.But Chinese characters obtain more than 80% phonograms,which contain semantic radicals that provide meaning information and phonetic radicals that provide phonological information.The set consists of the same semantic radical or phonetic radical is semantic neighborhood or phonetic neighborhood.Chinese characters’ smallest unit is strokes,so the stroke neighborhood is a set of new Chinese characters that randomly replace the strokes of Chinese characters and keep the original structure unchanged.In this study,we propose the concept of general activation of phonology,which refers to the sum of the phonetic activation levels of Chinese characters.The phonetic neighborhood has the same phonetic radical,so the larger neighborhood size,the more Chinese characters of similar pronunciation,the general activation of phonology is higher.This study examines whether there is an effect of general activation of phonology on the phonetic radical neighborhood size of Chinese characters and what is the role of general activation of phonology in the phonetic radical neighborhood size of Chinese characters.The lateral inhibition mechanism is proposed by the interactive activation model,which means that the activation of each member of the family members can inhibit the target word to be identified.Studies on the effect of phonetic radical family of Chinese characters did not come to a unified conclusion,both the inhibition effect of phonetic radical family and facilitation effect of phonetic radical family.Those inconsistent results may be related to experimental task paradigm,the type of experimental material in language,family members of high frequency,phonetic consistency,the phonetic rule and so on.Many researchers also propose theoretical models to explain the experimental results,including Andrews family feedback mechanism and the lateral inhibition mechanism of Interactive Activation Model.This study proposed the experimental hypothesis: The promotion or inhibition effect of Chinese characters is determined by the roles of the general activation of phonology and the lateral inhibition mechanism.The general activation of phonology performance is contributed to the promotion effect of Chinese characters’ neighborhood,and interactive activation model of lateral inhibition mechanism inhibitory the neighborhood size effect of Chinese characters,whose effect is stronger,occupying the dominant position,then showing what the neighborhood effect of Chinese characters.The phonetic radical neighborhood can provide phonetic clues,so the larger family,the more family members,the higher level of general activation of phonology,it is more likely to promote vocabulary recognition,and contributes to the facilitation effect of phonetic neighborhood,the performance of faster reaction and higher accurate of the larger family.The stroke family that is make up of Chinese characters that replace the Chinese characters’ strokes and keep the structure,contains similar orthographic representation and different pronunciation,no phonology clues,so there is no difference of general activation of phonology between large stroke family and small stroke family.Moreover,the larger stroke family,the more the interference words are similar to the target words,and the inhibitory effect between the target word and the family members is strong.That is to say,in the case of controlling the general activation of phonology,the roles of the lateral inhibition mechanism is occupying dominant position.So it contributes to of inhibition effect of stroke family,showing the performance of slower reaction and lower accurate of the larger family.This study uses phonetic radical family and stroke family as experiment materials,the naming task and lexical decision task as experimental paradigm,to examine the roles of general activation of phonology and the lateral inhibition mechanism in the neighborhood size effect of Chinese characters.In experiment 1,using naming task paradigm and make use of phonetic radical family as experimental materials,there was significant difference in the level of general activation of phonology,to examine whether general activation of phonology to promote the emergence of phonetic neighborhood’s facilitation effect.The experiment design was 2(large phonetic radical family,small phonetic radical family)*2(regular,irregular),and experimental subjects were asked to quickly and accurately read Chinese characters,by the master to judge the results of right or wrong.The experimental results showed that:(1)on the reaction time(RT),it showed a significant main effect of phonetic radical family,the RT of large phonetic radical neighborhood being significantly less than that of small neighborhood,performing the facilitation effect of phonetic radical family;the main regularity effect that was not significant;the interaction effect of phonetic radical neighborhood and regularity which was significant,showing that the RT of regular Chinese was significantly less than the irregular Chinese under the condition of small phonetic radical family;the RT of large phonetic radical family of Chinese characters was significantly less than large phonetic radical family under the condition of regular Chinese;the RT of large phonetic radical family of Chinese characters was significantly less than large phonetic radical family under the condition of irregular Chinese;(2)on the accurate rate(ACC),the phonetic radical neighborhood size effect was not significant;the regularity effect was significant;the interaction effect of phonetic radical neighborhood and regularity was not significant.The facilitation effect of phonetic radical neighborhood preliminarily validate our experimental hypothesis which the neighborhood size was larger,the level of general activation of phonology was higher.The general activation of phonology was contributed to the phonetic radical neighborhood effect,supporting Andrews’ s family feedback mechanism.In experiment 2,making use of the naming task paradigm and the use of the stroke family(large or small)as experimental materials,there was no difference in the level of general activation of phonology.In other words,we investigated the Chinese characters’ neighborhood effect in the case of no difference on the level of general activation of phonology between the large stroke family and small stroke family.The experimental design was a single factor(the large stroke family,the small stroke family)design,and experimental subjects were asked to quickly and accurately read Chinese characters,by the master to judge the results of right or wrong.The experimental results showed that: on the reaction time(RT),it showed a significant inhibition effect of stroke family,the RT of large stroke family being significantly more than that of small family,showing inhibition effect of stroke family;(2)on the accurate rate(ACC),the ACC of large stroke family being significantly lower than that of small family,showing inhibition effect of stroke family.The inhibition effect of stroke family conforms to our experimental hypothesis.There was no difference in the level of general activation of phonology between the large stroke family and small stroke family,which led to the inhibition effect of the stroke family,according with the lateral inhibition of the interactive activation model.In experiment 3,making use of ERP technology and the lexical decision task,the experimental design was a single factor(the large stroke family,the small stroke family)design,The subjects are required to quickly and accurately determine the true or false of Chinese characters on screen.Experimental results showed that:(1)behavioral experimental results: on the reaction time(RT),there was no significant effect of stroke family;on the accurate rate(ACC),the ACC of large stroke family being significantly lower than that of small family,showing inhibition effect of stroke family;(2)the EEG experiment results showed that: there was no significant difference between the large stroke family and small stroke family in P200,which further validated of our experimental hypothesis.There was also no difference between the large stroke family and small stroke family in N170 and N400.A comprehensive conclusion of experiment 1,experiment 2 and experiment 3 showed that the neighborhood size effect of Chinese characters was related to the general activation of phonology and the lateral inhibition mechanism.The general activation of phonology had a positive effect on the neighborhood effect of Chinese characters,and the lateral inhibition had an inhibitory effect on the neighborhood effect of Chinese characters.The promotion or inhibitory effect of Chinese characters depends on the sum of the general activation of phonology and the lateral inhibition.