An implicit test of Chinese orthographic satiation

Abstract

In this research, an implicit test using a lexical-decision task, in which words were discriminated from homophonic pseudo-words, was developed to detect the phenomenon of Chinese orthographic satiation. The phenomenon is defined as a sense of uncertainty of the composition of a well-learned Chinese character through a prolonged visual inspection of the character. A statistic, β, was developed as a measure of the rate of orthographic satiation. Results show that the characters consisting of two radicals resulted in a higher value of β than did those consisting of a single radical. The results also showed that characters semantically dissimilar to its radical resulted in a higher rate of satiation than did those semantically similar to its radical. These results are discussed in terms of the link between orthography and sound of Chinese characters and its relation to orthographic satiation.