Abstract
Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. These cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character’s meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the reader’s processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman and Siok in J Memory Language 40(4):559–576, 1999). We investigated whether readers automatically activate the semantic information associated with a radical even when it is irrelevant to the character’s meaning, using a modified version of the Van Orden (Memory Cogn 15(3):181–198, 1987) task with auditory semantic relatedness ratings on test items. Fifty-one Mandarin speakers participated in the study. On each trial they saw a reference category such as “animal” prior to seeing a character then indicated whether the target character was a member of that category. Decisions were slower and less accurate when a target that is not a member of the target category contained a radical that is. For example, if the category is “found in the kitchen,” the answer for the target 券 “ticket” is no; however the character contains the misleading radical 刀 “knife”. These patterns suggest that readers process the semantics of the radical even when it is not relevant to the meaning of the character. The results further verify the role of radical semantics in character processing and raise questions as to whether repetitions of experience with the idiosyncrasies of the script may result in some of the irrelevant semantics influencing the meaning of the character.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of data and material
Data and experimental materials can be found on OSF at https://osf.io/hqxdk/.
Code availability
Code can be found in the same repository as data and other materials: https://osf.io/hqxdk/.
Notes
This practice dates back to the Eastern Han Dynasty (25–189). In an ancient Chinese dictionary titled Shuowen Jiezi, Xu Shen (c. 58-c. 148 CE) categorized Chinese characters and discussed the function of radicals.
There were two exceptions, both in the Incongruous condition, where the context words were low frequency since the target word itself was of very low frequency and no context words (in which the target word is embedded) could fit the criterion.
This is not to say that all characters in Chinese with the 女 female radical have negative connotations. Many are simply neutral, denoting social roles or labels associated with women, whereas others represent desirable qualities, albeit often from a male perspective.
For example, there is a widely-discussed tendency for ethnonyms of foreign peoples to contain what might otherwise be considered the semantically incongruent radical 犭 “dog.” In such contexts, the animalistic associations conferred by this radical (or others such as 虫 “worm/insect,” also employed in foreign ethnonyms) do not seem entirely coincidental to a reader’s processing of the characters denoting such ethnic groups.
References
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. arXiv:1406.5823
Boltz, W. (1999). Language and writing. In M. Loewe & E. Shaughnessy (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the origins of civilization to 221 BC (pp. 74–123). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521470308.004.
Cheng, C. M. (1981). Perception of Chinese characters. Acta Psychologica Taiwanica, 23(2), 137–153.
Da, J. (2004). Chinese text computing. http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing.
DeFrancis, J. (1984). The Chinese language: Fact and fantasy. University of Hawaii Press.
Ding, G., Peng, D., & Taft, M. (2004). The nature of the mental representation of radicals in Chinese: A priming study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30(2), 530–539.
Feldman, L. B., & Siok, W. W. (1999). Semantic radicals contribute to the visual identification of Chinese characters. Journal of Memory and Language, 40(4), 559–576. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1998.2629
Ford, R. B. (2020). Rome, China, and the Barbarians: Ethnographic traditions and the transformation of empires. Cambridge University Press.
Fox, J., & Weisberg, S. (2019). An R companion to applied regression (3rd edn.). SAGE Publications. https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Books/Companion/.
Frost, R. (2012). Towards a universal model of reading. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(5), 263–279. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X11001841
Hall, D. L., & Ames, R. T. (2000). Sexism, with Chinese characteristics. In C. Li (Ed.), The sage and the second sex: Confucianism, ethics, and gender (pp. 75–96). Open Court.
Ho, C. S. H., Ng, T. T., & Ng, W. K. (2003). A “radical” approach to reading development in Chinese: The role of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals. Journal of Literacy Research, 35(3), 849–878. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15548430jlr3503_3
Hoosain, R. (1991). Psycholinguistic implications for linguistic relativity: A case study of Chinese. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Hsu, C. H., Tsai, J. L., Lee, C. Y., & Tzeng, O. J. L. (2009). Orthographic combinability and phonological consistency effects in reading Chinese phonograms: an event-related potential study. Brain and Language, 108(1), 56–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2008.09.002.
Ju, D., & Jackson, N. E. (1995). Graphic and phonological processing in Chinese character identification. Journal of Reading Behavior, 27(3), 299–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/10862969509547885
Judd, C. M., Westfall, J., & Kenny, D. A. (2012). Treating stimuli as a random factor in social psychology: A new and comprehensive solution to a pervasive but largely ignored problem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(1), 54–69. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028347
Leck, K. J., Weekes, B. S., & Chen, M. J. (1995). Visual and phonological pathways to the lexicon: Evidence from Chinese readers. Memory & Cognition, 23(4), 468–476. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197248
Lewis, M., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., Converse, E., Lupyan, G., & Seidenberg, M. (2021). What might books be teaching young children about gender? Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211024643
Lewis, M., & Lupyan, G. (2020). Gender stereotypes are reflected in the distributional structure of 25 languages. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(10), 1021–1028. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0918-6
McBride-Chang, C., Bialystok, E., Chong, K. K., & Li, Y. (2004). Levels of phonological awareness in three cultures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 89(2), 93–111.
Norman, J. (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press.
Packard, J. L., Chen, X., Li, W., Wu, X., Gaffney, J. S., Li, H., & Anderson, R. C. (2006). Explicit instruction in orthographic structure and word morphology helps Chinese children learn to write characters. Reading and Writing, 19(5), 457–487. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-006-9003-4
Pae, H. K. (2020). From linguistic relativity to script relativity. In Script effects as the hidden drive of the mind, cognition, and culture (pp. 37–58). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55152-0_3.
Peirce, J. W. (2007). PsychoPy—Psychophysics software in Python. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 162(1–2), 8–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneumeth.2006.11.017
Perfetti, C. A. (2020). Foreword. In H. K. Pae, Script effects as the hidden drive of the mind, cognition, and culture (pp. vii–viii). Springer.
Perfetti, C. A., & Zhang, S. (1991). Phonological processes in reading Chinese characters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 17(4), 633–643. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.17.4.633
R Core Team. (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.
Seidenberg, M. S. (2011). Reading in different writing systems: One architecture, multiple solutions. In P. McCardle, B. Miller, J. R. Lee, & O. J. L. Tzeng (Eds.), The extraordinary brain series. Dyslexia across languages: Orthography and the brain–gene–behavior link (pp. 146–168). Paul H Brookes Publishing.
Shu, H. (2003). Chinese writing system and learning to read. International Journal of Psychology, 38(5), 274–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207590344000060
Shu, H., & Anderson, R. C. (1997). Role of radical awareness in the character and word acquisition of Chinese children. Reading Research Quarterly, 32(1), 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.32.1.5
Taft, M., Zhu, X., & Ding, G. (2000). The relationship between character and radical representation in Chinese. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 32(Suppl.), 3–12
Taft, M. (2006). Processing of characters by native Chinese readers. In P. Li, L.-H. Tan, E. Bates, & O. Tzeng. (Eds.), Handbook of East Asian psycholinguistics (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511550751.023.
Taft, M., & Zhu, X. (1997). Submorphemic processing in reading Chinese. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(3), 761–775. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.23.3.761
Taft, M., Zhu, X., & Peng, D. (1999). Positional specificity of radicals in Chinese character recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 40(4), 498–519. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1998.2625
Tan, D. (1990). Sexism in the Chinese language. The National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 2(4), 635–639. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316075.
Tan, L. H., Liu, H. L., Perfetti, C. A., Spinks, J. A., Fox, P. T., & Gao, J. H. (2001). The neural system underlying Chinese logograph reading. NeuroImage, 13(5), 836–846. https://doi.org/10.1006/nimg.2001.0749
Van Orden, G. C. (1987). A ROWS is a ROSE: Spelling, sound, and reading. Memory & Cognition, 15(3), 181–198. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197716
Wang, T. (2018). How to define linguistic units from a psycholinguistic approach: A case study of morpheme. In Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting of the international association of Chinese linguistics (pp. 72–88). Harvard University Press.
Wu, X., Li, W., & Anderson, R. C. (1999). Reading instruction in China. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(5), 571–586. https://doi.org/10.1080/002202799183016
Yang, J., McCandliss, B. D., Shu, H., & Zevin, J. D. (2009). Simulating language-specific and language-general effects in a statistical learning model of Chinese reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 61(2), 238–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2009.05.001
Yu, L., & Reichle, E. D. (2017). Chinese versus English: Insights on cognition during reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(10), 721–724. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.06.004
Zhou, X., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (1999). The nature of sublexical process-ing in reading Chinese characters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25(4), 819–837. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.25.4.819
Acknowledgement
We thank Dr. Randolph B. Ford for his contributions on the sociocultural significance of ethnonym naming conventions.
Funding
This work has been supported by the Vilas Trust at UW-Madison and by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, through Award #R305B150003 to UW-Madison. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the US Department of Education.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by MCB and MB. The first draft of the manuscript was written by TW and MCB and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wang, T., Borkenhagen, M.C., Barker, M. et al. Meanings within meanings: skilled readers activate irrelevant meanings of radicals in Chinese. Read Writ 35, 1381–1399 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10260-y
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10260-y