TY - JOUR

T1 - Exploring orthographic neighborhood size effects in a computational model of Chinese character naming

AU - Chang, Ya-Ning

AU - Welbourne, Stephen

AU - Lee, Chia-Ying

N1 - This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Cognitive Psychology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Cognitive Psychology, 91, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2016.09.001

PY - 2016/12

Y1 - 2016/12

N2 - Orthographic neighborhood (N) size effects have been extensively studied in English consistently producing a facilitatory effect in word naming tasks. In contrast, several recent studies on Chinese character naming have demonstrated an inhibitory effect of neighborhood size. Response latencies tend to be inhibited by inconsistent characters with large neighborhoods relative to small neighborhoods. These differences in neighborhood effects between languages may depend on the characteristics (depth) of the mapping between orthography and phonology. To explore this, we first conducted a behavioral experiment to investigate the relationship between neighborhood size, consistency and reading response. The results showed an inhibitory effect of neighborhood size for inconsistent characters but a facilitatory effect for consistent characters. We then developed two computational models based on parallel distributed processing principles to try and capture the nature of the processing that leads to these results in Chinese character naming. Simulations using models based on the triangle model of reading indicated that consistency and neighborhood size interact with the division of labor between semantics and phonology to produce these effects.

AB - Orthographic neighborhood (N) size effects have been extensively studied in English consistently producing a facilitatory effect in word naming tasks. In contrast, several recent studies on Chinese character naming have demonstrated an inhibitory effect of neighborhood size. Response latencies tend to be inhibited by inconsistent characters with large neighborhoods relative to small neighborhoods. These differences in neighborhood effects between languages may depend on the characteristics (depth) of the mapping between orthography and phonology. To explore this, we first conducted a behavioral experiment to investigate the relationship between neighborhood size, consistency and reading response. The results showed an inhibitory effect of neighborhood size for inconsistent characters but a facilitatory effect for consistent characters. We then developed two computational models based on parallel distributed processing principles to try and capture the nature of the processing that leads to these results in Chinese character naming. Simulations using models based on the triangle model of reading indicated that consistency and neighborhood size interact with the division of labor between semantics and phonology to produce these effects.

KW - Orthographic neighborhood size

KW - Phonetic radical neighbors

KW - Consistency

KW - Chinese character naming

KW - Semantics

KW - Computational modeling

U2 - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2016.09.001

DO - 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2016.09.001

M3 - Journal article

VL - 91

SP - 1

EP - 23

JO - Cognitive Psychology

JF - Cognitive Psychology

SN - 0010-0285

ER -