Spatial specification in Chinese character recognition: The role of structural configuration and radical similarity

Poster Session B: ReadiNg & WritiNgIntroduction: About 34% of 4-letter words in English and French can form other words by rearranging their letters. Therefore, spatial specification of letter position is vital to correct word recognition and production (see Grainger & Van Heuven, 2003). The orthographic form of Chinese characters differs dramatically from alphabetic scripts as character components (radicals) are arranged in a square shape of constant size. Whether spatial information of these components is necessary in the Chinese lexicon can also be asked given the existence of transposable characters, e.g. 呆 and 杏 (Taft, Zhu, & Peng, 1999). Hence, how characters are structurally represented has led to at least two proposals. The Multilevel Interactive- Activation model (Taft & Zhu, 1997) postulates that radicals are specified for position of occurrence within a character (e.g. 嫁 constitutes of a left radical 女 and right radical 家). In contrast, the Lexical Constituency model (Perfetti, Liu, & Tan, 2005) assumes a role of structural configuration in characters. This refers to the relative spatial relationship among radicals in a character and is conceptualized as ‘spatial slots’ that radicals occupy (e.g. left-right: 嫁; top-bottom: 爸; enclosing: 鬧or困). While the former finds evidence from facilitative priming effects on lexical decision latency when prime and target share the same radical in the same position, unambiguous support for the latter is lacking. Methods. Thirty-three right-handed Cantonese speakers performed a lexical decision task where each trial began with a prime (48ms) sandwiched between a forward (100ms) and backward (16ms) mask, followed by the target character. Targets were 30 low frequency (