Orthographic neighborhood effects in reading Chinese two-character words.

Full Abstract

The present study investigates the effects of neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency in reading Chinese two-character words. The neighborhood size of a word is defined as the summation of neighbors sharing the first constituent (neighborhood size 1) and the second constituent (neighborhood size 2) characters. The first experiment found two opposite neighborhood size effects in lexical decision of high-frequency and low-frequency words. The regression analysis showed that neighborhood size 1 influenced word reading more than the neighborhood size 2. The second experiment confirmed this finding and showed that reading words with higher frequency neighbors took a longer time and elicited greater N400 and LPC than those without higher frequency neighbors. These findings indicate that, when reading Chinese two-character words, all words sharing the first constituent character are activated in the early stage of word recognition and the existence of high-frequency words among neighbors leads to greater competition in the stage of semantic integration and response selection.

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Author information

Author/s: Huang, Hsu-Wen (HW); Lee, Chia-Ying (CY); Tsai, Jie-Li (JL); Lee, Chia-Lin (CL); Hung, Daisy L (DL); Tzeng, Ovid J-L (OJ);

Affiliation: Laboratory for Cognitive Neurosciences, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Neuroreport (Neuroreport), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Jul; vol 17 (issue 10) : pp 1061-5

Dates: Created 2006/06/22; Completed 2006/09/08; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 16791104, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Analysis of Variance
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Female
Humans
Male

Psycholinguistics
Reaction Time - physiology
Reading
Semantics
Visual Perception - physiology
Vocabulary

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