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Chinese Characters: Semantic and Phonetic Regularity Norms for China, Singapore, and Taiwan

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Chinese Characters: Semantic and Phonetic Regularity Norms for China, Singapore, and Taiwan Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 1999,31 (1),155-177 Chinese characters: Semantic and phonetic regularity norms for China, Singapore, and Taiwan SUSAN J. RICKARD LIOW, SIOKKENGTNG, and CHER LENG LEE National University ofSingapore, Singapore Cognitive models of language processing in English are founded on norms for word properties, but their universality is now being explored across different writing scripts and subject groups. Although Chinese characters are popular for this comparative work, their salient properties remain ill defmed or poorly controlled. Wedescribe how norms for semantic and phonetic regularity in Mandarin can be calibrated on a regional basis. The rating datathat we present from China, Singapore, and Taiwan also illustrate why the diversity of both oral and written forms of Chinese should be considered in future empirical work. Word properties are known to affect cognitive process­ glish (Coltheart, 1981) and the Max-Planck Institute's ing in English and other alphabetic scripts. Norms for (1995) CELEX Lexical Database for Dutch, English, and these properties have been published cumulatively: word German. Despite Wu and Liu's (1988) preliminary work frequency (Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971; Kucera & on Mandarin, this precision is not a standard practice for Francis, 1967); concreteness, imagery, and meaningful­ research on Chinese language processing. The availability ness (Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968); word familiarity and use ofnorms for empirical work on Chinese charac­ and pleasantness (Toglia & Battig, 1978); age of acqui­ ters is very limited. Most experimenters control (or try to sition (Gilhooly & Logie, 1980); associative difficulty control)frequency and/or age ofacquisition (H. C. Chen (Brown & Ure, 1969); synonymity (Wilding & Mohindra, & Leung, 1989; Woo & Hoosain, 1984), and some have 1981); and spelling-sound regularity (Berndt, Reggia, & taken account of the number ofstrokes' per character Mitchum, 1987; Venezky, 1970). Depending on the exper­ (Leong, Cheng, & Mulcahy, 1987; Seidenberg, 1985), but imental design, other linguistic properties-such as the the salience ofother properties, including character reg­ number of letters, number of phonemes, stress pattern, ularity, has yet to be explored. homophony, and so forth-might need to be controlled. In English, word regularity (explained below) is known For many cognitive tasks (e.g., perceptual recognition, to have potent effects in a number ofparadigms and for naming, and lexical decision), multiple sources of infor­ several different subject groups: skilled adult readers (An­ mation from different word properties affect processing. drews, 1989, 1992; Kay & Marcel, 1981; Parkin, 1982, At the word level, these include the interaction of fre­ 1984), young readers (Laxon, Masterson, & Coltheart, quency and spelling regularity (Seidenberg, Waters, 1991), and surface dyslexics (Coltheart, 1982; Coltheart, Barnes, & Tanenhaus, 1984) and the conjoint influence Masterson, Byng, Prior, & Riddoch, 1983). The nature of oforthographic structure, spelling-to-speech correspon­ the Chinese writing script, particularly the relationship dences, and word frequency (Massarro & Cohen, 1994). between orthography and phonology, precludes drawing At the word family level, neighborhood density (Andrews, a simple parallel for characters. This begs the question of 1989, 1992) and word consistency (Glushko, 1979) have whether the cognitive models ofreading, which have been both been shown to have effects. developed for alphabetic scripts, could ever be adapted to The importance ofmanipulating and controlling word fit nonalphabetic scripts (but see Hung & Tzeng, 1981; properties with precision has led to the development of Seidenberg, 1985; Yin & Butterworth, 1992). computerized compilations-for example, the U.K. Med­ In what follows, we summarize the features relevant to ical Research Council's psycholinguistic database for En- this study ofcharacter regularity in Mandarin, but there are many other properties ofChinese languages that could influence performance on cognitive tasks. These include visual complexity, visual confusability, semantic related­ This work was funded by the National University of Singapore ness, and syntagmatic relatedness in character groupings. (RP39110067) and the Shaw Foundation. We are grateful to Hua Shu (China), S. Y. Tiang (Taiwan), Ming Lee Yong, Leh Woon Mok, Joy The reason for our focus is that illustrating the satisfac­ Ping P'ing, and Olivia Wee May Ling (Singapore) for their help with tory calibration ofregularity will enable two elements of data collection and to Max Coltheart, Dan-ling Peng, Arthur Jacobs, standard reading models to be investigated more system­ Catherine McBride-Chang, Xiang Dong Jia, and two anonymous review­ atically in Chinese. These are the nature ofany (analog­ ers for their insightful comments on earlier versions. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to S. 1. Rickard Liow, De­ ical) lexical-semantic processing and the plausibility of partment of Social Work and Psychology, National University of Sing­ (assembled) nonlexical phonological processing. The uni­ apore, Singapore S 119260 (e-mail: [email protected]). versality ofcurrent dual (or multiple) route theories (e.g., 155 Copyright 1999 Psychonomic Society, Inc. 156 RICKARD LIOW, TNG, AND LEE Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993) depends pri­ the importance of tone differences is often overlooked marily on these. (but see Taft & Chen, 1992). The learner ofa second Chi­ nese language (L2)-say, Cantonese, when the first lan­ THE CHINESE SCRIPT guage (Ll) is Mandarin-must cope with a new set of tones, as well as a different set ofphonemes for most writ­ Radicals ten characters. Given the very large number of homo­ Estimates vary, but at least 80% ofChinese graphemes phones, tone phonology is the major obstacle for L2 learn­ are compound characters (Wang, 1973). They comprise ers ofany Chinese language, because, without the correct a semantic radical (SR), which is sometimes called a sig­ tone, the syllable's meaning is changed completely. nific, and a phonetic radical (PR). For example, in the compound character Wf, which means clear or pure, the Homophones SR is written 1 and is associated with water, and the PR In English, heterographic homophones are sets ofwords is written Fr. As a simple character in Mandarin, this PR with the same phonemes (same onset, same rime) but with would be pronounced exactly like the compound itself. different graphemic orders or elements-for example, So, for m, the SR does provide some information about wear and ware, but also rain and reign. In Chinese, ho­ the meaning, and the PR provides very accurate infor­ mophony is more common, and several distinct written mation about the phonology. However, not all radicals forms (e.g., ~, ~, 1lX, with three different meanings) can are as useful as these two, and it is the regularity ofcom­ have identical phonology-in this case tan(4). The wide­ pound characters and their constituent radicals with spread homophony in Chinese has often been exploited which we are concerned in this paper. in priming paradigms, but there is little consensus about Like m, most compound characters are ofthe SR-PR the role oftone. A priori, we would expect a tone difference type, such that the radical on the left (supposedly) pro­ between characters with the same syllable phonology to vides information about the meaning ofa character, and render them nonhomophonic for the skilled speaker-hearer. the radical on the right (supposedly) provides informa­ The idea that homophony is (probably) tone sensitive has tion about the phonology. However, the simplification of been neglected in some experiments (e.g., Fang, Horng, characters in China during the cultural revolution reduced & Tzeng, 1986) and compromised in others (e.g., Perfetti the iconic nature ofsome so-called pictographs (e.g., M, & Zhang, 1991, 1995). Full appendices ofstimuli are not meaning "shut, obstruct," simplified to ffi), and additional always provided (e.g., Hue, 1992), but when they are, the changes to the script continue to be made in order to ac­ heterogeneity ofthese stimuli is often evident. commodate new concepts. To keep pace with social, po­ litical, and technological developments, new compound Simplified Versus Complex Characters characters are created using the rebus principle. This in­ Irrespective ofthe spoken form, the script for experi­ volves borrowing similar sounding (but semantically un­ mental purposes can be written in complex characters or, related) syllables to act as PRs; the resulting homophones more commonly, in simplified characters. Leong et al. are then disambiguated by adding an SR. Hence, most (1987) suggest that the likelihood of a confound is in­ new characters are compounds, which have a syllabic, as creased when differences between the original complex opposed to a logographic, structure. characters (still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) and the So, for some time, character development has been simplifiedcharacters (used widely in China since the cul­ based on speech, chiefly the phonology ofMandarin (De­ tural revolution and, subsequently, in Singapore) are not Francis, 1989). If the derivation ofmany present day char­ observed. Theoretically, this is because the process of acters is more phonetic than semantic, the popular view of simplification might affect the orthography-phonology characters as pictographs with rote-learned, unpredict­ relationship
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