Age of acquisition affects early orthographic processing during Chinese character recognition

• Published in: Acta psychologica Vol. 130; no. 3; pp. 196 - 203
• Main Authors: Chen, Baoguo, Dent, Kevin, You, Wenping, Wu, Guolai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier B.V 01.03.2009; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adolescent; Age Factors; Age of acquisition; Asian Continental Ancestry Group; Biological and medical sciences; Chinese character; Cognition; Discrimination Learning; Empirical Research; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Language; Perception; Phonetics; Production and perception of written language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Recognition (Psychology); Semantics; Verbal Learning; Vision; Visual duration threshold; Visual Perception; Young Adult; Age of acquisition; Chinese character; Visual duration threshold; 2343; Human; age of acquisition; Perception threshold; Cognition; Duration; Experimental study; Orthography; Reading; Language; Vision; Perception; Chinese; Recognition
• ISSN: 0001-6918; 1873-6297
• DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.12.004

Three experiments investigated age of acquisition (AoA) effects on early orthographic processing during Chinese character recognition. In Experiment 1, we measured the accuracy of identification of brief masked characters, accuracy was higher for early compared to late acquired characters. In Experiment 2, the visual duration threshold (VDT) was measured for both early and late acquired Chinese characters. The results showed that early acquired characters were successfully identified at shorter display durations than late acquired characters. Significant AoA effects were also found in Experiment 3, using a lexical decision task requiring mainly orthographic processing (discriminating real Chinese characters from orthographically illegal and unpronounceable characters). In summary, three experiments provide converging empirical evidence, for AoA effects on the early orthographic processing stages of Chinese character recognition. These results suggest that AoA effects during word identification go beyond the phonological or semantic processing stages. These results aslo provide cross-linguistic evidence for an AoA effect on early perceptual processing during identification.