Orthographic neighborhood size effect in Chinese character naming: Orthographic and phonological activations

• Published in: Acta psychologica Vol. 136; no. 1; pp. 35 - 41
• Main Authors: Li, Qing-Lin, Bi, Hong-Yan, Wei, Tong-Qi, Chen, Bao-Guo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier B.V 01.01.2011; Elsevier
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; China; Chinese naming; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Language; Male; Miscellaneous; Neighborhood frequency; Orthographic neighborhood; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading; Recognition (Psychology); Semantics; Young Adult; China; Orthographic neighborhood; 2300; Neighborhood frequency; Chinese naming; Human; Language; Chinese; Phonology; Cognition; Activation; Naming; Experimental study; Orthography; orthographic neighborhood
• ISSN: 0001-6918; 1873-6297
• DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.09.012

The present study examined the effects of orthographic neighborhood (N) size on the cognitive processes underlying Chinese character reading. Previous research has shown increasing N size facilitates word naming and recognition performance in alphabetic languages. Experiment 1 revealed that a large N size was associated with a general inhibition of processes underlying character reading, in contrast to previous findings with alphabetic languages. This inhibitory effect was influenced by regularity and consistency. Experiment 2 sought to assess the effects of higher-frequency neighbors on character naming performance. The results revealed that higher-frequency neighbors with different pronunciation to the target interfered with the phonological retrieval of targets. We propose that this type of interference may have caused the N size effect observed in Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 3 revealed that a large N size facilitated target naming in the absence of higher-frequency neighbors. The current results shed light on the processes underlying character naming, and we propose possible cognitive mechanisms of the N size effect on Chinese character naming.