State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China.
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2024 Aug;56(5):4732-4757. doi: 10.3758/s13428-023-02214-1. Epub 2023 Aug 24.
Lexical databases are essential tools for studies on language processing and acquisition. Most previous Chinese lexical databases have focused on materials for adults, yet little is known about reading materials for children and how lexical properties from these materials affect children's reading comprehension. In the present study, we provided the first large database of 2999 Chinese characters and 2182 words collected from the official textbooks recently issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People's Republic of China for most elementary schools in Mainland China, as well as norms from both school-aged children and adults. The database incorporates key orthographic, phonological, and semantic factors from these lexical units. A word-naming task was used to investigate the effects of these factors in character and word processing in both adults and children. The results suggest that: (1) as the grade level increases, visual complexity of those characters and words increases whereas semantic richness and frequency decreases; (2) the effects of lexical predictors on processing both characters and words vary across children and adults; (3) the effect of age of acquisition shows different patterns on character and word-naming performance. The database is available on Open Science Framework (OSF) ( https://osf.io/ynk8c/?view_only=5186bd68549340bd923e9b6531d2c820 ) for future studies on Chinese language development.
词汇数据库是语言处理和习得研究的重要工具。以往大多数中文词汇数据库都专注于成人的材料，而对于儿童阅读材料以及这些材料中的词汇属性如何影响儿童阅读理解的研究却知之甚少。在本研究中，我们提供了第一个大型数据库，其中包含了 2999 个汉字和 2182 个单词，这些汉字和单词是从中国大陆大多数小学最近发布的中华人民共和国教育部（MOE）官方教材中收集而来的，同时还包括了来自学龄儿童和成人的规范。该数据库包含了这些词汇单位的关键正字法、语音和语义因素。我们使用命名任务来研究这些因素对成人和儿童在字符和单词处理中的影响。结果表明：（1）随着年级的升高，这些字符和单词的视觉复杂度增加，而语义丰富度和频率降低；（2）词汇预测因素对字符和单词加工的影响在儿童和成人之间存在差异；（3）习得年龄的影响在字符和单词命名表现上呈现出不同的模式。该数据库可在开放科学框架（OSF）上获取（https://osf.io/ynk8c/?view_only=5186bd68549340bd923e9b6531d2c820），供未来的汉语语言发展研究使用。
