Language Processing in Chinese

384 Pages·1992·7.145 MB·

by  Hsuan-Chih Chen and Ovid J.L. Tzeng (Eds.)

ADVANCES
IN
PSYCHOLOGY
90
Editors:
G. E. STELMACH
P. A. VROON
-N ORTH-HOLLAND
AMSTERDAM LONDON NEW YORK TOKYO
LANGUAGE PROCESSING
IN CHINESE
Edited by
Hsuan-Chih CHEN
Department of Psychology
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, NT, Hong Kong
Ovid J.L. TZENG
Department of Psychology
University of California
Riverside, CA, U.S.A.
1992
NORTH-HOLLAND
AMSTERDAM LONDON NEW YORK TOKYO
NORTH-HOLLAND
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Preface
Chinese is perhaps the most widely used language in the world. Its
popularity and many specific features makes it a unique language. The
Chinese language differs from many Indo-European languages in important
ways. For example, Chinese words generally do not have inflections to
indicate grammatical attributes such as the number, gender, and case for
nouns or the tense and aspect for verbs. Words in the Indo-European
languages, on the other hand, generally have inflectional markings.
Moreover, Chinese words usually have no inherently marked lexical cat-
egories, while words in the Indo-European languages normally do. In
addition, the Chinese adopted a writing system which is logographic in
nature. Unlike the alphabetic principle, its script/speech relationship is
highly opaque. The characters, as they are commonly called, represent
lexical morphemes, whereas alphabetic symbols, as in common Indo-
European languages, represent phonemes. Undoubtedly, knowledge about
how people process this specific language, Chinese, is indispensable to the
general understanding of human language processing.
The aim of this book is to integrate the most recent research investi-
gating cognitive aspects of the Chinese language into a single academic
reference for researchers interested in Chinese language processing and
related fields. In fact, in putting together this book, it was our goal to
invite contributions from specialists working in major areas of Chinese
language processing. We did succeed in assembling an excellent group of
researchers, from different parts of the world (Le., Hong Kong, Taiwan,
Mainland China, America, Australia, and Europe), representing a great
diversity of research topics and perspectives.
In this book, we have organized 14 papers that deal with several
aspects of language processing in Chinese; some review one or several
major issues and summarize the related evidence, and others present new
research on specific issues. These papers have been grouped into five
sections of the book. Part One includes four papers on visual perception
and processing of characters. Huang and Wang focus primarily on the role
of structural properties of Chinese characters in visual perception. Next,
Flores d’A rcais examines the activation processes of graphemic, phonologi-
vi
cal, and semantic information in character recognition. After this, Cheng
looks at the phonological processes in lexical access. In the final chapter,
Hue reports the findings of three experiments examining the recognition
processes underlying character naming.
Part Two contains three papers which focus more explicitly on
lexical representation than on process. Hoosain discusses the concept of the
word and the nature of the Chinese lexicon, whereas Zhang and Peng
present the results of three experiments investigating the structure of the
lexicon. Taft and Chen turn their attention to tonal and phonemic
representations in the lexicon and to the use of tonal information in making
homophonic judgments.
Part Three comprises two papers on sentence and text comprehen-
sion. Chen looks at the comprehension processes in reading Chinese text,
while Li, Bates, Liu, and MacWhinney examine the functional roles of
several cues (e.g., word order and animacy) in sentence interpretation.
Part Four includes three papers on language acquisition. Miao and
Zhu summarize the results to date from the studies conducted in China on
language development. Chang surveys the recent studies on the acquisition
of Chinese syntax. Chien concerns more specifically on the theoretical
implications of Chomsky 's "Principles and Parameters" model for language
acquisition.
Finally, there are two papers in Part Five: Yin and Butterworth
present the results of their work with deep and surface dyslexia and Au
looks at the methodological issues in cross-linguistic research on language
and cognition.
The volume presents an exciting sample of the current work in
Chinese language processing. It reveals both the potential of this relatively
new research area and also many intriguing questions that studying language
processing in Chinese has raised, thus pointing out a number of possible
directions for future research. It will, we hope, provide stimulating reading
to anyone interested in the cognitive aspects of the Chinese language,
human cognition, and any of the disciplines related to the psychology of
language.
Acknowledgments
The idea of putting together a book of this sort was developed and the first
stage of planning was completed while the first editor was spending a
sabbatical year at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in Eindhoven
and the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. The main
part of this project was carried out at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
with support from a UPGC Direct Grant for Research provided by the
Social Science and Education Panel of the University. The support and
resources of these institutions are gratefully acknowledged.
We would like to thank all the contributors for their cooperation
through the preparation of this book. We are especially grateful to
Rumjahn Hoosain, Marcus Taft, Thomas Lee, and Yun Yang Zee, who
helped to review one or more of the chapters in the book. Our colleagues,
In-Mao Liu, Norman Freeman, Marcus Taft, and Michael Bond, were
generous in their advice and encouragement. We are also grateful to K.
Michielsen of Elsevier and George Stelmach, the editor of the Advances in
PsychoZogy series, for having faith in the project, and to Mary McAdam for
her technical editing.
Our special thanks go to Connie Ho, Kit Kan Tang, Candy Leung,
Agnes Kwan, Karen Ma, Christine Lo, and Irene Liem for their assistance
in preparing the indices and the camera-ready copy for this book, to Tze-
Chau Chiu and Yau-Man Fung for their technical assistance, and to Robert
Phay and Siu Lung for their help in checking and correcting the English of
various chapters in this book. And best thanks, finally, to Yin-Gin and
Sen-Lay for their constant support of the first editor.
Hsuan-Chih Chen
Ovid J.L. Tzeng
List of Contributors
Terry Kit-fong Au, Department of Psychology, University of California,
Los Angeles, California 90024-1563, U.S.A.
Elizabeth Bates, Department of Psychology, University of California, San
Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, U.S.A.
Brian Butterworth, Department of Psychology, University College Lon-
don, WClE 6BT, London, U.K.
Hsing-Wu Chang, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan Univer-
sity, Taipei 10764, Taiwan
Hsuan-Chih Chen, Department of Psychology, Chinese University of
Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong
Chao-Ming Cheng, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan
University, Taipei 10764, Taiwan
Yu-Chin Chien, Department of Psychology, California State University,
San Bernardino, California 92407, U.S.A.
Givoanni B. Flores d’A rcais, Max-Planck-Institute fur Psycholinguistik,
Postbus 310, NL-6500 Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Rumjahn Hoosain, Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong
Jong-Tsun Huang, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan Univer-
sity, Taipei 10764, Taiwan
Chih-Wei Hue, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University,
Taipei 10764, Taiwan
X
Ping Li, Center for Research in Language, University of California, San
Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, U.S.A.
Hua Liu, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San
Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, U.S.A.
Brian Mac Whinney, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1521 3, U.S .A.
Xiaochun Miao, Department of Psychology, East China Normal Univer-
sity, Shanghai 20062, China
Danling Peng, Department of Psychology, Beijing Normal University,
Beijing 100875, China
Marcus Taft, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales,
Kensington, New South Wales 2033, Australia
Man-Ying Wang, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University,
Taipei 10764, Taiwan
Wengang Yin, Department of Psychology, University of College London,
WClE 6BT, London, U.K.
Biyin Zhang, Department of Psychology, Beijing Normal University,
Beijing 100875, China
Manshu Zhu, Department of Psychology, East China Normal University,
Shanghai 200062, China
LANGUAGE PROCESSING IN CHINESE
H.C. Chen and O.J.L. Tzeng (Editors)
0 1992 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved. 3
From Unit to Gestalt:
Perceptual Dynamics in Recognizing
Chinese Characters
Jong-Tsun Huang and Man-Ying Wang
National Taiwan University
The present article discusses the role of geometrical and structural
properties in the recognition of Chinese characters. A stage model
for Chinese character recognition is proposed that non-accidental
properties are first searched within the character, and character
regions are parsed. Then, character components and their relations
are activated. The activation of the word model finally triggers the
identification of the intended character. Under this analytical
framework the literature is reviewed on the effects of stroke inter-sec-
tion, order and number of strokes, character decomposability,
component/character relationship, and corner information in character
recognition. We critically evaluate the plausibility of perceptual/non-
perceptual dichotomy, horse-racing models, and other general issues
in the hope that this may facilitate the proper investigation of the
perceptual dynamics in recognizing Chinese characters.
Supposing that Chinese characters are functionally equivalent to
English words and that visual information processing mechanisms are
universal in human perception, one would suspect that the principles derived
from English letter perception and word recognition experiments could
apply as well to Chinese character recognition. However, there are several
ways one might challenge this argument. Hung and Tzeng (1981) examined
4 J. T. Hung & M. Y. Wang
possible processing differences between alphabetic and logographic scripts.
They focused on the facets of phonological recoding, lexical access, and
cerebral lateralization, among others. In this article, we will emphasize the
geometrical and structural variables to provide a view of orthographic
variations which might contribute differentially to Chinese character
recognition.
Geometrical and Structural Properties of Chinese Characters
Liu, Chuang, and Wang (1975) identified a total of 40,032 Chinese
words from a base of nearly one million printed words. The words are
varied from one to six characters with different frequency counts.
Two-character words occupy the largest proportion with 65.15% of the
entire group (Huang & Liu, 1978). Each two-character word has its unique
meanings, but the constituent characters also have separate independent
meanings. English nominal compounds are similar; however, they account
for a much smaller proportion in the English language. Although
two-character Chinese words are often equated in function as English
words, one might suspect that the prevailing incidence of two-character
words in Chinese will signify different perceptual consequences. However,
Tzeng, Hung, Cotton, and Wang (1979) showed a similar pattern in
comparison with lateralization studies using English materials. They found
that the naming response of a single Chinese character manifested a
left-visual-field (LVF) superiority effect, whereas naming or lexical decision
time for two-character words showed a right-visual-field (RVF) superiority
effect. It might be argued that a single character is processed in a
holistic-gestalt manner, while a two-character word is analyzed sequentially
and analytically. Suppose that the sequential order between characters must
be processed so that a two-character word could be correctly recognized,
then a RVF superiority effect in the two-character word recognition might
be attributable to the finer temporal resolving power in the left hemisphere.
Such a finer cerebral function will, in turn, provide the opportunity for
better sequential coding (Tzeng -& Wang, 1984). We should therefore be
very careful in presenting arguments concerning functional differences
between different writing systems.
Even if two-character words are the most frequent semantic units in
natural reading, it is inevitable to focus on single characters for establishing
a context-free character recognition model. The majority of Chinese single