Four experiments were designed to investigate the possible effect of orthographic neighborhood frequency (NF) on Chinese character recognition. Orthographic neighbors were operated under two conditions: stroke based and radical based. With the lexical decision and repeated-matching tasks adopted, the results showed an inhibitory NF effect on…

Background: Efficient word identification is directly tied to strong mental representations of words, which include spellings, meanings and pronunciations. Orthographic learning is the process by which spellings for individual words are acquired. Methods: In the present study, we combined the classic self-teaching paradigm with eye tracking to…

It hasn't been clear how holistic and analytic processing contribute to character recognition yet. The current study focused on two issues: (1) whether configural processing is sufficient to support the performance of identifying characters in absence of analytic processing; (2) whether configural processing involves multiple levels of character…

The orthographic choice (OC) task--requiring individuals to choose the correct spelling between a word and a pseudohomophone foil (e.g., "goat" vs. "gote")--has been used as an outcome measure of orthographic learning and as a predictor of individual differences in word reading development. Some consider the OC task a measure…

Several previous studies showed that prime-target pairs with orthographical overlap but no semantic or morphological relationship (e.g., freeze-free) produced a masked priming effect in second language (L2) speakers but not in first language (L1) speakers. The present study further explored this intriguing L1-L2 difference by comparing English…

This study investigated preschoolers' knowledge of Chinese characters by testing character structures on four levels: radical (character components), whole characters, characters in words and characters in sentences. A total of 107 preschool children between the ages of three and six from four nursery schools in Taiwan participated in the study.…

Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…

Phonological interference during written-word meaning judgments occurs in both Chinese and English, suggesting that word-level phonological activation is universal rather than dependent on the sublexical structures that vary with writing systems. To accommodate this universality, we distinguish two sources of phonological congruence between a…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

The picture-word task presents participants with a number of pictured objects together with a written distractor word superimposed upon each picture, and their task is to name the depicted object while ignoring the distractor word. Depending on the specific picture and word combination, various effects, including the identity facilitation effect…

Radical awareness (i.e. the ability to identify, analyze, and manipulate radicals within compound characters) plays an important role in character reading and learning for first language and second language (L2) learners of Chinese. Previous studies have shown that radical awareness contributes to character recognition, inference, and…

The process of word recognition can be analytic (or serial) or holistic (or parallel). They differ in the size of the processing units (lexical vs. sublexical) or in whether sublexical units are processed sequentially or simultaneously. First language (L1) reading development has been found to involve a transition from serial processing to…

Previous studies have uncovered the relationship between handwriting and mathematics performance, without articulating the underlying cognitive mechanism. With 197 Chinese fourth graders as participants, this study explored the mechanism by which the spacing/spatial relationship in handwriting legibility affects number-line estimation through VMI.…

Chinese coordinative compound words are common and unique in inter-character semantic and orthographic relationships. This study explored the inter-character orthographic similarity effects on the recognition of transparent two-morpheme coordinative compound words. Seventy-two native Chinese readers participated in a lexical decision task. The…