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The Chinese Lexicon Project: A repository of lexical decision behavioral responses for 2,500 Chinese characters

Behavior Research Methods volume 46, pages 263–273 (2014)Cite this article

Abstract

The Chinese language has more native speakers than any other language, but research on the reading of Chinese characters is still not as well-developed as it is for the reading of words in alphabetic languages. Two areas notably lacking are the paucity of megastudies in Chinese and the relatively infrequent use of the lexical decision paradigm to investigate single-character recognition. The Chinese Lexicon Project, described in this article, is a database of lexical decision latencies for 2,500 Chinese single characters in simplified script, collected from a sample of native mainland Chinese (Mandarin) speakers (N = 35). This resource will provide a valuable adjunct to influential mega-databases, such as the English, French, and Dutch Lexicon Projects. Using two separate analyses, some advantages associated with megastudies are exemplified. These include the selection of the strongest measure to represent Chinese character frequency (Cai & Brysbaert’s (PLoS ONE 5(6): e10729, 2010) subtitle contextual diversity frequency count), and the conducting of virtual studies to replicate and clarify existing findings. The unique morpho-syllabic nature of the Chinese writing system makes it a valuable case study for functional language contrasts. Moreover, this is the first publicly available large-scale repository of behavioral responses pertaining to Chinese language processing (the behavioral dataset is attached to this article, as a supplemental file available for download). For these reasons, the data should be of substantial interest to psychologists, linguists, and other researchers.

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Notes

  1. A mega-naming study was previously conducted by Liu, Shu, and Li (2007). Unfortunately, their naming latencies were not released for public access.

  2. The Web of Science search was conducted on July 2, 2012. Results from the search can be generic, so each of the articles generated by the search was checked manually to remove the irrelevant titles.

  3. The numerical breakdown of participants excluded on the basis of poor performance on the screening tasks or lexical decision task is as follow: 1 participant was eliminated on the basis of The Chinese Author Recognition Test, 2 were eliminated on the basis of The HSK Chinese Proficiency Test, and 8 participants scored less than 85% accuracy on the lexical decision task and thus, their data were discarded.

  4. We should point out that cncorpus was not created solely for psycholinguistic research. As a national corpus, it probably serves other functions—for example, providing historical linguists information on the evolution of character use and so forth. One recommendation would be for the corpus to include an option for users to select, say, which period and type of text to begin computing character/word statistics from, thus reducing dead weight.

  5. In the virtual replication of Leong et al. (1987), 数 (數 in traditional script) was included in the stimuli as a character with many strokes. The inclusion of 数 does not violate the stroke manipulation, since its simplified form has 13 strokes, which is above the cutoff of “many strokes” (Leong et al.’s cutoff is placed at 12). The traditional 數 has 15 strokes. In any case, we also ran an additional series of analyses that excluded 数. The same pattern of findings was elicited [response time: F 1(1, 34) = 5.26, MSE = 1,985.36, p < .03, η partial = .13].

  6. B. Chen et al. (2009) created two sets of stimuli for their three experiments (Experiment 1 [tachistoscopic task] used stimuli set 1, while Experiments 2 and 3 [visual duration threshold and lexical decision tasks] used stimuli set 2). Both sets of stimuli were created on the basis of the same design and requirements. These two sets of stimuli were thus combined for the drawing of our stimuli. Out of the 128 unique characters found in the combined set (61 early AoA, 67 late AoA; there were repetitions in the two stimuli sets), 78 of them are present in the Chinese Lexicon Project (38 early AoA, 40 late AoA). The value 78 is rather close to the original number of stimuli used in Chen et al.’s lexical decision experiment (72 characters were chosen as stimuli—i.e., 36 early AoA, 36 late AoA).

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  1. Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Wei Ping Sze, Susan J. Rickard Liow & Melvin J. Yap

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  1. Wei Ping Sze
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Sze, W.P., Rickard Liow, S.J. & Yap, M.J. The Chinese Lexicon Project: A repository of lexical decision behavioral responses for 2,500 Chinese characters. Behav Res 46, 263–273 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0355-9

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Keywords

  • Mandarin
  • Visual word recognition
  • Megastudy
  • Reaction time
  • Nonalphabetic
  • Logograph