Limited Top-Down Influence from Recognition to Same-Different Matching of Chinese Characters

We investigated the extent to which recognition of Chinese characters influenced same-different matching performance that did not require recognition. In each experimental trial, two partially occluded characters were shown sequentially, and participants decided whether or not they were the same. The two characters were either both upright or both inverted and mirror-reflected. The participants' Chinese reading fluency spanned the full range, from not knowing any characters to native speakers. The participants who could recognize some characters (defined as readers) were subsequently tested with character recognition in a naming task. Interestingly, although the readers' recognition accuracies well correlated with their years of Chinese language schooling, they were uncorrelated with the matching accuracies in the same-different task with upright characters. The only indication of top-down influence was the readers' higher accuracy in matching upright than inverted and reflected characters. However, the magnitude of this effect was small, to the extent that the average same-different accuracies were comparable for readers and non-readers alike. This small effect was further confirmed with native speakers in China, who should give rise to the largest possible effect. We conclude that top-down influence from character recognition was present but very limited, at least with the task and stimuli used.