Abstract:

Several components in phonogram characters, such as ‘女’, ‘口’ and ‘马’, can be phonetic radical in the phonetic components’ location or semantic radical in the semantic components’ location. We call these components Chinese wordable components (or Chinese wordable radical), and such components must be a single Chinese character. The location and function of Chinese wordable components vary in Chinese characters. In theory, each wordable components can appear in different parts of Chinese characters. However, the same component appears in different locations of Chinese characters with different characterisation characteristics because of the assumption that the location of components follows orthographic rules, and the frequency of the components’ location is different. However, previous studies have failed to distinguish between components’ location and the frequency of components in various locations and did not explore the effects of wordable components in different locations.
This study used the component priming paradigm, which can effectively explore the effect of components’ location on the cognition of Chinese characters. With regard to components that can appear in different locations of Chinese characters, this study investigated the roles of different parts in Chinese character recognition by matching the usage frequency of Chinese characters (all high-frequency characters), stroke numbers and other factors in the component priming paradigm. Experiment 1 adopted the component priming paradigm to investigate the function of wordable components in different locations in Chinese character recognition. The priming stimuli were wordable components of three locations (primary semantic radical, secondary semantic radical and phonetic radical). The target stimuli were Chinese characters that contained these wordable components in three locations. Subjects were asked to identify the true and false characters of the target Chinese characters. Experiment 2 adopted component priming and visual search paradigms to investigate the function of wordable components in different locations. The priming stimuli were similar to those in Experiment 1. The target stimuli were square pictures that contained four Chinese characters. Subjects were asked to determine the presence of true and false characters in the picture, and eye movement data were recorded.
The following points were gathered from the results. Firstly, the priming effect of the wordable component in the phonetic radical’s location was stronger than that in the semantic radical’s location. Secondly, when the wordable components were applied as semantic radical, they only appeared in the primary semantic radical’s location rather than in the secondary semantic radical’s location. Lastly, the wordable components in the phonetic radical’s location promoted not only the cognition of Chinese characters containing the phonetic radical’s location components but also the cognition of Chinese characters containing the primary semantic radical’s location components. However, they hindered the cognition of Chinese characters containing the secondary semantic radical’s location components. When priming components appeared in the secondary semantic radical’s location, they had no effect on the Chinese characters containing related components.
The study showed that in Chinese character cognition, the effect of component location includes the dual effect of the components’ location and the frequency of the components’ location.

Key words: semantic radical, phonetic radical, wordable components, component priming, location effect