The Behavioral and Neurophysiological Evidence of the Hierarchical Orthographic Representation of Chinese Characters

Studies of alphabetic languages have proposed a hierarchical organization of visual features/units for word orthographic representations. The Chinese writing system has a highly complex spatial structure in which a character is a combination of components that can be split into basic radicals at multiple levels. The current study examined the hierarchical organization of Chinese orthographic representation using a radical detection task in two experiments. Experiment 1 found a hierarchical effect that detecting embodied radicals at shallow split-level was faster than radicals at deep split-level. Experiment 2 used the event-related potential (ERP) technique to replicate the hierarchical effect at the N170 amplitude confirming its neural correlates. The findings suggested a hierarchical orthographic representation of Chinese characters by providing behavioral and neurophysiological evidence.