The Activation Of Semantic Radicals In Processing Different Types Of Chinese Characters

Issues on the processing of semantic radical in Chinese character have attracted much attention.Studies have shown that,as sub-lexical components of Chinese characters,semantic radicals have certain impacts on the recognition of Chinese characters and the generalization of characters.At present,most of the researches on the processing of semantic radicals are mainly explained by establishing related models.Very few researchers have used empirical research methods to study the mechanism of semantic radicals in the processing of Chinese characters.Due to the distinctiveness of Chinese characters and semantic radicals,the role of semantic radicals with different functions in processing different levels of Chinese characters remains to be explored.Therefore,this study uses reaction time experimental technology to collect behavioral data and investigates how semantic radicals participate in the processing of different levels of Chinese characters.The specific research questions are:(1)What is the role of semantic radicals in processing semantically transparent and opaque Chinese characters? Are there any differences between radicals in transparent and opaque characters?(2)What is the role of the semantic radicals in processing false characters?Compared with processing real characters,what are the differences of semantic radicals in processing real characters and false characters?This study includes two experiments.Experiment One adopts the priming paradigm and explored the 2(effector-related character,the asterisk)×2(character semantic radical,non-character semantic radical)×2(transparent character,opaque character)three factor mixed design to investigate the role of different semantic radicals in transparent and opaque characters.Experiment Two also uses the priming paradigm and adopts the 2(effector-related character,the asterisk)×2(character semantic radical,non-character semantic radical)×2(pseudo character,non character)three factor mixed design to examine the the role of different semantic radicals in pseudo and non-characters.In both the experiments,46 students from Sichuan International Studies University were selected as the subjects.The task was to make lexical decision.The experiment recorded the behavior data(reaction time and correct rate)of the subjects when they made judgments on the target words.The experiment was programmed with E-Prime 2.0 software,and the results were input into SPSS17 statistical software for statistical analysis.The whole experiment is conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU.The experimental results are as follows:The results of Experiment One show that: the main effect of the priming type is significant,F(1,43)=9.408,p=.025,MSE =14305.500,η2=.111,indicating that under the different types of prime,there are significant differences in the responses of subjects to different types of priming.This shows that under the priming condition of effectorrelated Chinese characters,when processing different types of Chinese characters with different semantic radicals,the semantic radicals are activated.The main effect of different semantic radicals embedded in different characters is significant,F(1,43)=20.180,p=.000,MSE = 8900.284,η2=.319,which means that there are significant differences in the response time of processing semantic radicals in Chinese characters.It indicates that different types of semantic radicals have impacts on the processing of different types of Chinese characters.The main effect of semantic transparency is also significant,F(1,43)=14.304,p=.000,MSE = 9976.920,η2=.250.It shows that the activation of semantic radicals in transparent and opaque characters is different.The results of Experiment Two show that: the main effect of the priming type is significant,F(1,43)=13.092,p=.001,MSE =11672.526,η2=.233,indicating that under the different types of prime,there are significant differences in the responses of subjects to different types of priming.This shows that under the priming condition of effectorrelated Chinese characters,when processing different types of Chinese characters with different semantic radicals,the semantic radicals are activated.The main effect of different semantic radicals embedded in different characters is not significant,F(1,43)=0.18,p=.894,MSE = 7.389,η2=.000,which means that there are not significant differences in the response time of processing different semantic radical in Chinese characters.It indicates that different types of semantic radicals do not have impacts on the processing of artificial characters.The main effect of the type of artificial character is also significant,F(1,43)=390.511,p=.000,MSE = 460160.594,η2=.901.It shows that the activation of semantic radicals in pseudo characters and non-characters are various.To sum up,the semantic radicals in both real characters and artificial characters are activated.And different semantic radicals have different roles in processing different types of Chinese characters.