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Updated: Jun 8, 2025
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Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese
Published on: April 1, 2016
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Revealing hidden interactions in mean performance through distributional analyses: Evidence from Chinese lexical
Melvin J Yap1, Chi-Shing Tse2,3, An Qi Lim4
1Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Block AS4, Level 2, 9 Arts Link, Singapore, 117570, Singapore. melvin@nus.edu.sg.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|November 7, 2024
Summary
This study reveals that stimulus quality and word frequency interact similarly in visual word recognition across English and Chinese languages. This finding suggests universal principles in how readers process meaning from print, regardless of writing system.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Visual word recognition research often focuses on mean response times in English.
- Deeper analysis of response time distributions and cross-linguistic studies are needed for a complete understanding of print-to-meaning activation.
- Previous research has not extensively explored these factors in non-alphabetic writing systems.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the effects of stimulus quality and word frequency on lexical decisions in Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese.
- To compare these effects with those found in English to identify potential universal patterns in visual word recognition.
- To analyze how these variables influence different components of response time distributions.
Main Methods:
- Lexical decision task administered to participants in Singapore (Mandarin) and Hong Kong (Cantonese).
- Analysis of stimulus quality and word frequency interactions across response time distributions.
- Comparison of behavioral patterns between Chinese languages and previously established English data.
Main Results:
- A significant stimulus quality × word frequency interaction was observed in both Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese lexical decisions.
- This interaction pattern was remarkably similar across different portions of the response time distribution for both Chinese and English.
- Findings indicate that the optimization of lexical processing by leveraging available codes extends across diverse writing systems.
Conclusions:
- The interaction between stimulus quality and word frequency in visual word recognition is not unique to alphabetic systems like English.
- Principles of lexical processing, including the trade-offs between stimulus quality and word frequency, appear to be universal across diverse writing systems.
- This study provides crucial cross-linguistic evidence supporting generalized models of visual word recognition.
Keywords:
Chinese lexical processingLexical decisionResponse time distributional analysesVisual word recognition
