What Are the Functional Orthographic Units in Chinese Word Recognition: The Stroke or the Stroke Pattern?

• Published in: The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology Human experimental psychology, 1996-11, Vol.49 (4), p.1024-1043
• Main Authors: Chen, Y. P., Allport, D. A., Marshall, J. C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0272-4987; 1464-0740
• DOI: 10.1080/027249896392423

The visual analysis of Chinese characters by skilled readers is investigated in an experiment designed to contrast the effect of number of strokes & that of orthographic units consisting of stroke patterns. Four stimulus sets consisted of characters having either two or three orthographic units arranged either vertically or horizontally; orthographic units of these sets were recombined with the lexical radical in its proper position to generate pseudo-character sets & with the lexical radical improperly placed to generate illegal noncharacter sets. Each of the 12 sets was divided into two subsets based on number of strokes. Pairs of stimuli were presented to right-handed native Chinese graduate students (N = 6 males & 6 females) having undergraduate degrees from mainland China institutions, who judged as quickly as possible whether stimulus pairs were same or different. Conditions varied number of strokes within same pairs & proportion of different units within different pairs. Mean reaction times for correct responses & mean error rates show a word superiority effect, an advantage of pseudo-characters over noncharacters, an effect of number of orthographic units, an effect of proportion of mismatching units in "different" judgments, & no effect of the number of individual strokes. 5 Figures, 39 References. Adapted from the source document