The Psychological Mechanism Of Chinese Character Frequency And Contextual Diversity

Recent researches show that,the contextual diversity plays a critical role in visual word recognition,rather than word frequency.The same effect was found in the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages.Then,does the minimum unit "letter"or "Chinese character" that constituted a word have corresponding effects in frequency or contextual diversity?Unlike the composition unit letters of the words in Indo-European languages,Chinese characters have independent orthographic rules and frequency effects.Therefore,this study aims to examine whether or not there is a contextual diversity effect and its underlying psychological mechanisms in Chinese cognitive processing through two experiments.In experiment 1,the Chinese character recognition task was used to examine the contextual diversity of Chinese character,using the response time as a basic indicator.Based on the same experimental design and materials,experiment 2 used high resolution ERP technology to further examine the effect of the contextual diversity of Chinese character.Experiment 1 found that when the contextual diversity was controlled,the character frequency effect disappeared,showing that there was no significant difference in the response time between high and low frequency.When word frequency is controlled,the contextual diversity effect is significant,and the response time of high contextual diversity is significantly lower than low.Consistent with behavioral research results,high time resolution ERP data shows that,high contextual diversity of Chinese characters larger late positive components in the 300-800 ms time window compared to low-context words.In summary,the results of behavioral and neuro-electrophysiological studies consistently showed that the contextual diversity of Chinese character situations rather than frequency plays an important role in Chinese character recognition.