Abstract:

Semantic radicals are components which are related with Chinese characters in view of meaning. Semantic radicals’ research is the unique field of Chinese characters study. There has been a long history in semantic radicals’ research from the point view of linguistics. Linguists have investigated the properties of semantic radicals’ expressing meaning, the rate of semantic radicals’ expressing meaning and the frequency of semantic radicals’ constructing Chinese character from the aspects of quality and the statistics mainly. Cognitive psychologists have mostly explored the influences of semantic radicals to word recognition, semantic extraction, grammar classification and perceptual processing from the view of sub-lexical processing of Chinese characters, also discussed subjective familiarity, family size and consistency of semantic radicals. They found semantic radicals is not only the “chuck” of Chinese character’s structure, the “chuck” of Chinese character’s recognition, but also the “chuck” of semantics and the “chuck” of Chinese character’s grammar.Based on the previous studies, researchers have proposed processing models of semantic radicals impacting Chinese characters cognition, these models conform to the results of semantic research to some extent and deliver new blood into the Chinese characters cognition theory, and also lay a solid foundation for following researches.

Key words: semantic radical, theoretical discussion, experimental evidence, processing model