Semantic Radicals Contribute More Than Phonetic Radicals to the Recognition of Chinese Phonograms: Behavioral and ERP Evidence in a Factorial Study.

The Chinese phonograms consist of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The two types of radicals have different functional contributions to their host phonogram. The semantic radical typically signifies the meaning of the phonogram, while the phonetic radical usually contains a phonological clue to the phonogram’s pronunciation. However, it is still unclear how they interplay with each other when we attempt to recognize a phonogram because previous studies rarely manipulated the functionality of the two types of radicals in a single design. Using a full factorial design, the present study aimed to probe this issue by directly manipulating the functional validity of the two types of radicals in a lexical decision task with both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measurements. The results showed that recognition of phonograms which were related to their semantic radicals in meaning took a shorter reaction time, showed a lower error rate, and elicited a smaller P200 and a larger N400 than did recognition of those which had no semantic relation with their semantic radicals. However, the validity of phonetic radicals did not show any main effect or interaction with that of semantic radicals on either behavioral or ERP measurements. These results indicated that semantic radicals played a dominant role in the recognition of phonograms. Transparent semantic radicals, which provide valid semantic cues to phonograms, can facilitate the recognition of phonograms.

汉字形声字由形旁和声旁组成。这两种偏旁对其所构成的形声字有不同的功能贡献。形旁通常表示形声字的意义，而声旁通常包含形声字发音的语音线索。然而，当我们试图识别一个形声字时，它们之间是如何相互作用的仍不清楚，因为先前的研究很少在单一设计中操控这两种偏旁的功能。本研究采用全因子设计，通过在词汇判断任务中直接操控这两种偏旁的功能有效性，并结合行为和事件相关电位（ERP）测量来探究这一问题。结果表明，与形旁在意义上相关的形声字的识别反应时间更短，错误率更低，并且引发的P200更小、N400更大，相比之下，与形旁没有语义关系的形声字则不然。然而，声旁的有效性在行为或ERP测量中，对形旁的有效性均未显示出任何主效应或交互作用。这些结果表明，形旁在形声字的识别中起主导作用。透明的形旁，即能为形声字提供有效语义线索的形旁，可以促进形声字的识别。