Semantic transparency of radicals in Chinese characters: An ontological perspective

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how native speakers of Chinese perceive the semantic transparency of radicals in Chinese characters and how their perception is related to the ontological representation of characters. More specifically, we use semantic transparency as a measurement to compare the perception of native Chinese speakers of various dialects from different regions, including Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan. We explore several factors that may potentially cause convergence or divergence of native speakers’ perception. Our results show that the performances of participants from various regions converge with each other. From this, we conclude that Chinese speakers of various dialects share an ontological representation of characters and have an agreement concerning which ontological relation is more closely related to basic concepts, which provides evidence for the psychological reality of Chinese orthography. We also prove that the crowdsourcing method is a powerful and effective tool for empirical linguistic research.