Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Sci Rep. 2017 Nov 17;7(1):15782. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-15536-w.
Most Chinese characters are compounds consisting of a semantic radical indicating semantic category and a phonetic radical cuing the pronunciation of the character. Controversy surrounds whether radicals also go through the same lexical processing as characters and, critically, whether phonetic radicals involve semantic activation since they can also be characters when standing alone. Here we examined these issues using the Stroop task whereby participants responded to the ink color of the character. The key finding was that Stroop effects were found when the character itself had a meaning unrelated to color, but contained a color name phonetic radical (e.g., "guess", with the phonetic radical "cyan", on the right) or had a meaning associated with color (e.g., "pity", with the phonetic radical "blood" on the right which has a meaning related to "red"). Such Stroop effects from the phonetic radical within a character unrelated to color support that Chinese character recognition involves decomposition of characters into their constituent radicals; with each of their meanings including phonetic radicals activated independently, even though it would inevitably interfere with that of the whole character. Compared with the morphological decomposition in English whereby the semantics of the morphemes are not necessarily activated, the unavoidable semantic activation of phonetic radicals represents a unique feature in Chinese character processing.
大多数汉字都是由一个表示语义类别的语义偏旁和一个提示汉字发音的声旁组成的。偏旁是否也像汉字一样经历相同的词汇处理，以及声旁是否涉及语义激活，这是有争议的，因为它们单独存在时也可以是汉字。在这里，我们使用斯特鲁普任务来研究这些问题，参与者需要对汉字的墨迹颜色做出反应。关键发现是，当汉字本身的意思与颜色无关，但包含一个颜色名称的声旁（例如，“猜”，右边的声旁是“青”）或与颜色有关的意思（例如，“怜悯”，右边的声旁是“血”，与“红色”有关）时，就会出现斯特鲁普效应。这种来自与颜色无关的汉字内部声旁的斯特鲁普效应支持汉字识别涉及到将汉字分解成其组成的偏旁；每个偏旁的意思都包括独立激活的声旁，尽管这不可避免地会干扰整个汉字的意思。与英语中的形态分解不同，英语中词素的语义不一定被激活，声旁不可避免的语义激活代表了汉字处理的一个独特特征。
