Frequency trajectory effects in Chinese character recognition: Evidence for the arbitrary mapping hypothesis

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 110; no. 1; pp. 39 - 50
• Main Authors: You, Wenping, Chen, Baoguo, Dunlap, Susan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 2009; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adolescent; Age; Age of acquisition; Aging - psychology; Biological and medical sciences; Character; Character Recognition; Chinese; Chinese character; Chinese languages; Cognitive Mapping; Female; Frequency; Frequency trajectory; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Judgement; Language; Learning; Learning - physiology; Male; Mapping; Orthographic Symbols; Production and perception of written language; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading; Recognition (Psychology) - physiology; Regression (Statistics); Semantics; Semiotics; Word Recognition; Written Language; Young Adult; Age of acquisition; Chinese character; Frequency trajectory; Human; Pronunciation; age of acquisition; Cognition; Naming; Experimental study; Orthography; Reading; Language; Chinese; Recognition
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.08.004

Frequency trajectory is a better measure to investigate age-limited learning effects than age of acquisition (AoA) ratings (Zevin, J. D., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2002). Age of acquisition effects in word reading and other tasks. Journal of Memory and Language, 47(1), 1-29). The current study uses frequency trajectory as a variable to investigate age-limited learning effects in Chinese character recognition, and tests predictions of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis as applied in a non-alphabetic writing system. In Experiment 1, regression analyses showed that, compared to rated AoA, frequency trajectory of characters was less affected by other lexical properties, and could explain a significant proportion of variance of AoA. In Experiment 2, the frequency trajectory and predictability from orthography to pronunciation of characters were orthogonally manipulated in a character naming task. The frequency trajectory effect appeared only for the arbitrary mapping condition. In Experiment 3, frequency trajectory and predictability from orthography to meaning of characters were manipulated in a semantic category judgment task. The frequency trajectory effects were found only when the mapping from orthography to semantic is less consistent. In summary, the study confirmed that AoA is a genuine factor affecting word processing, and the AoA effects were limited to those situations in which mapping between input and output representation was arbitrary. These results provide strong cross-linguistic evidence in support of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis.