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The Role of Orthographic Neighborhood Size Effects in Chinese Word Recognition

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Abstract

Previous studies about the orthographic neighborhood size (NS) in Chinese have overlooked the morphological processing, and the co-variation between the character frequency and the the NS. The present study manipulated the word frequency and the NS simultaneously, with the leading character frequency controlled, to explore their influences on word lexical decision (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2). The results showed a robust effect that words with a larger NS produced shorter reaction time than those with a smaller NS, irrespective of the word frequency and the tasks. This facilitative effect may occur due to a semantic network formed by neighbor words, resulting in the semantic activation to accelerate the word recognition. Moreover, the comparison of the effect sizes of word frequency between the two tasks showed that lexical decision responses demonstrated a larger word frequency effect, indicating that the sub-word processing was involved in the multi-character word recognition.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC 98-2410-H-002-027) to Jei-Tun Wu and (NSC 101-2410-H-002-093-MY2) to Tai-Li Chou. Our special gratitude goes to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Besides, thank Xin-Yu Gao for her precious support in our cooperation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, 10617, Taipei, Taiwan

    Meng-Feng Li, Wei-Chun Lin, Tai-Li Chou, Fu-Ling Yang & Jei-Tun Wu

  2. Neurobiology and Cognitive Science Center, National Taiwan University, 10617, Taipei, Taiwan

    Tai-Li Chou

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  1. Meng-Feng Li
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  2. Wei-Chun Lin
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  3. Tai-Li Chou
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Correspondence to Jei-Tun Wu.

Appendices

Appendix 1: High-Frequency Words Used in Experiments 1 and 2

figure m

Over 90 % of the above high-frequency words with larger and smaller NS had higher frequency neighbor words.

Appendix 2: Low-Frequency Words Used in Experiment 1 and 2

figure n

100 % of the above low-frequency words with larger and smaller NS had higher frequency neighbor words.

Appendix 3: Non-words Used in Experiment 1

figure o

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Li, MF., Lin, WC., Chou, TL. et al. The Role of Orthographic Neighborhood Size Effects in Chinese Word Recognition. J Psycholinguist Res 44, 219–236 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-014-9340-4

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