Leck K J, Weekes B S, Chen M J
Australian National University, Canberra.
Mem Cognit. 1995 Jul;23(4):468-76. doi: 10.3758/bf03197248.
In this study, we investigated the role of visual and phonological information in lexical access of Chinese characters. Homophonic English words have been the main source of stimuli for word recognition research. However, since these stimuli also often look alike, visual and phonological information may be confounded in reported experiments. In contrast, many homophonic Chinese characters are visually distinct. In addition, visually similar characters often have very different pronunciations. These characteristics allow a more controlled investigation of the roles of visual and phonological information in activation of meaning. In the present study, two types of Chinese characters were used in a semantic categorization paradigm: integrated characters, which contain strokes that are not separable; and compound characters, which contain at least two clearly identifiable components. The results show that the recognition of a Chinese integrated character depends primarily on visual information, whereas the recognition of a Chinese compound character relies on visual, phonological, and semantic information. It is concluded that visual information plays a greater role in Chinese character recognition than has previously been documented.
在本研究中，我们调查了视觉和语音信息在汉字词汇通达中的作用。谐音英语单词一直是单词识别研究的主要刺激源。然而，由于这些刺激物通常看起来也很相似，在已报道的实验中，视觉和语音信息可能会混淆。相比之下，许多谐音汉字在视觉上是不同的。此外，视觉上相似的汉字往往发音非常不同。这些特点使得能够更可控地研究视觉和语音信息在意义激活中的作用。在本研究中，在语义分类范式中使用了两种类型的汉字：整字，其包含不可分离的笔画；以及合体字，其包含至少两个可清晰识别的部件。结果表明，对汉字整字的识别主要依赖于视觉信息，而对汉字合体字的识别则依赖于视觉、语音和语义信息。得出的结论是，视觉信息在汉字识别中所起的作用比之前所记录的更大。
