The Effect Of Family Regularity On The Family Size Effect Of Chinese Characters

Some studies suggest that the family effect follows the grapheme-adjacent word hypothesis,i.e.words that are adjacent at the level of grapheme representation can speed up target word recognition.Other studies have found that the family effect follows the phonological proximity hypothesis,whereby words in close proximity at the level of phonological representation facilitate target word recognition.So which hypothesis is more consistent with cognitive patterns? Some studies have found that these two hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive and may interact(Liu,2013).It is difficult to distinguish between the two hypotheses because form-sound regularity is stronger for pinyin scripts,and words with similar glyphs usually also have similar pronunciations;however,in Chinese characters,irregular characters in irregular families have different forms-sounds,and most words are pronounced differently despite their proximity,so a study of the family effect in Chinese characters could help solve this problem.In addition,we can also make use of the sound family size effect to investigate in depth how the sound plays a role in the recognition of Chinese characters.In order to investigate the mechanism of action of the size effect in Chinese character families,and to examine the role of word sounds in Chinese character recognition.In this study,using a phonological priming paradigm and performing a true-false character judgement task,we selected irregular characters with high frequencies in irregular families as experimental materials and set three different experimental conditions: homophonically primed large paraphone families,unrelated primed large paraphone families and unrelated primed small paraphone families.In this experiment,large families were defined as those consisting of seven or more family members,while small families were defined as those with fewer than seven family members.The target word frequency,number of strokes,high-frequency membership rate,and phonetic agreement rate were balanced for the three conditions.After experimentation we found that the response time for homophonic priming was shorter compared to irrelevant priming,suggesting that word sound can have an effect on character recognition.In the irrelevant priming condition,the large family performed better than the small family,indicating the presence of a family effect and a family facilitation effect.EEG results showed that the P200 amplitude was smaller in the large family than in the small family under all three experimental conditions,and that P200 is thought to be related to early visual feature encoding and matching,reflecting sublexical processing(Hsu,Tsai,Lee,& Tzeng,2009).Smaller P200 wave amplitudes for large families indicate that the larger the family,the stronger the feedback to sublexical nodes and the easier the processing of Chinese characters.The P200 wave amplitude for homophonic priming was smaller than that for irrelevant priming.This suggests that homophonic priming may have activated irregular family members of homophones,just as activation of large families increases feedback to their sublexical units,resulting in easier processing of whole word units.Experiment 1 revealed both an effect of irregular target word family size P200(and behavioural response)for the irregular family and a P200 effect for homophone initiation.However,for irregular word recognition in regular families,we were unsure whether the same effect existed.Therefore,Experiment 2 used a 2(family regularity:regular family,irregular family)X2(family size: large,small)two-factor within-subjects design,selecting the same word judgement task and using irregular words with higher frequency among family members as target words.To ensure the reliability of the results,factors such as target word frequency,number of strokes,high-frequency membership and phonological agreement rate were aligned across the four conditions to ensure that there were no significant differences between them.The experimental EEG data showed that in the irregular family condition,The P200 wave amplitude was found to be smaller in the large family condition and larger in the small family condition,indicating the presence of a family facilitation effect.However,in the regular family condition,there was no significant difference observed between the large and small families in terms of the P200 wave amplitude,suggesting that the P200(facilitation)effect in the large regular family disappeared probably due to the fact that most members of the regular family were homophonic with the vocalic paraphones;the behavioural The data show that the reaction times of large families in irregular families are faster than those of small families;the reaction times of irregular families in large families are faster than those of regular families,while the reaction times of regular families in small families are significantly faster than those of irregular families.The findings from both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 demonstrate the presence of a family size effect in Chinese character recognition.,i.e.,large families respond faster and have smaller P200.The family regularity of Chinese characters has a non-negligible effect on the family effect,while the vocalic glyphs and vocalic phonology play a crucial role in the family size effect of Chinese characters.