Do position-general radicals have a role to play in processing Chinese characters?

Abstract

Over 90% of Chinese characters are compounds, comprising two or more constituents called radicals. Two experiments employed a character matching task to examine the contribution of radical position in Chinese character processing. The task was to decide whether the target character had appeared in two briefly and sequentially presented preceding source characters. Experiment 1 discovered significantly more false matching when the target (e.g., ‘’) shared radicals with the source stimuli (‘’, ‘’) than when the target and the source shared no radical, indicating that radicals contribute to character processing. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and further demonstrated that sharing a single radical between target and source characters, regardless of its radical position, was sufficient to generate false matching. More importantly, participants took significantly longer time to correctly reject those target characters with two shared radicals (one at the same position and another at the changed position) relative to those with only a single shared radical at the same position. Furthermore, false matching rates were significantly affected by lexical variables such as character frequency. These results suggest that position-general radicals play a significant role in character recognition and processing.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CUHK4142/04H) to Hsuan-Chih Chen.

Notes

¹Over 90% of Chinese characters are compounds (Dictionary of Chinese Character Information, 1988), which consist of two or more radicals. For example, the character ‘’ is formed by combining the left radical ‘’ and the right radical ‘’.

²Pronunciations are marked in Cantonese using the Romanisation system developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

³In addition, Saito et al. (1998) obtained a main effect of local consistency (radical positions in a character); a locally consistent probe elicited more illusory perception. Moreover, false alarm rates increased interactively when both local and global consistency held in the probe (i.e., interaction between the two types of consistency was significant). Therefore, the results from Saito et al. supported the existence of both position-general and position-specific radicals. However, one should be cautious in drawing strong conclusions from this study because of the extremely high false alarm rates in some conditions (from 50% to nearly 70%).