Psychological Development and Education ›› 2025, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (1): 60-67.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2025.01.07

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The Role of Character Positional Frequency in Chinese Word Recognition in Semantic Categorization Task

CAO Haibo1,2, LAN Zebo3, GAO Feng4, WANG Jingxin1   

  1. 1. Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387;
    2. College of Education, Hebei University, Baoding 071002;
    3. School of Health, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou 350122;
    4. Mental Health Service Center, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao 066000
  • Published:2025-01-22

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Abstract: Understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying word segmentation has been an important aspect of research on Chinese reading. Accordingly, to obtain insight into the influence of character positional frequency during Chinese word segmentation, we investigated the effects of orthogonally manipulating both initial and final character positional frequency for target words that were of either high or low lexical frequency through two semantic categorization tasks. In Experiment 1, low-frequency words were used to examine the effect of character positional frequency. The results indicated that the initial character positional frequency was significant in reaction time, and had no effect on the final character positional frequency for target words. In Experiment 2, high-frequency words were used to investigate the effect of character positional frequency. The results showed no character positional frequency effect for the initial or final target words. In conclusion, the findings show that the character positional frequency plays a more important role in word processing, which reveals a privileged role for the initial character positional frequency as a cue to word segmentation and recognition. Furthermore, this influence of character positional frequency depends on word frequency; and is only observed for words of lower lexical frequency.

Key words: semantic categorization task, character positional frequency, word recognition

CLC Number: 

  • G442
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