THE EFFECTS OF WORD FREQUENCY AND STIMULUS QUALITY IN CHINESE VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

Abstract

High-frequency words and clearly presented stimuli are recognised faster than low-frequency words and degraded stimuli respectively in a Lexical Decision Task (LDT), where participants have to discriminate words from nonwords. Researchers have examined the joint effects of word frequency and stimulus quality to understand the stage(s) of information processing these variables affect. Additive effects of word frequency and stimulus quality (two main effects but no interaction) were observed in regular LDT when orthographically legal nonwords (orthographically regular and pronounceable; e.g. “NUST”) were used. To make more definitive language-general claims, the present study examined whether the additive effects of the two variables found in English LDT will generalise to Chinese LDT. Simplified and traditional Chinese LDTs were conducted in Singapore and Hong Kong respectively. Results showed that the additive effects found in regular English LDT do not generalise to Chinese LDTs, where additivity was found in the means but not in the distributional characteristics. Specifically, over-additive interaction (larger frequency effects for degraded words) was found in the modal portion of the distribution but this is cancelled out by the opposite interaction in the slow tail of the distribution. Implications for existing Chinese models of word recognition are discussed.