Semantic activation of phonetic radicals in Chinese

Yiu Kei TSANG*, Yan Wu, Hezul Tin Yan Ng, Hsuan Chih Chen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The phonetic radical of a Chinese character is typically considered as a sublexical unit providing clues to pronunciation. This tradition was challenged by a previous study showing that the meanings of phonetic radicals affected character naming speed. Three experiments were conducted to further investigate this issue. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the meanings of phonetic radicals could be activated in the primed character decision and semantic categorisation tasks, indicating that the semantic activation of phonetic radicals is robust in different tasks. Moreover, Experiment 1 also showed that the meanings of phonetic radicals could be as strongly activated as whole characters. Experiment 3 adopted a multi-prime procedure and showed that the semantic activation of phonetic radicals could be eliminated when a prior context was supportive to whole-character meanings. These results are discussed with reference to the nature of sublexical processing in Chinese and how context influences character recognition.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)618-636
Number of pages19
JournalLanguage, Cognition and Neuroscience
Volume32
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 May 2017

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

User-Defined Keywords

  • Chinese
  • phonetic radical
  • semantics
  • sublexical
  • word recognition

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