Wang, XiaXiaWangDr. YANG Yike2024-03-252024-03-252019Wang, X., Yang, Y. (2019 Jun 1). Processing phonetic radicals of Chinese characters in a sentence: Data from Cantonese speakers. Second Forum on Cantonese Linguistics, The Education University of Hong Kong.http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/9155A Chinese phonogram consists of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The latter provides the phonological cue for the whole character and can also be used as a single character. The dual-route access hypothesis suggests two routes when we access the meaning of a word, one directly accessing the meaning through orthography and another through both orthography and phonology (Coltheart et al., 1993). It remains unknown whether the phonetic radicals are at work when processing Chinese characters, especially in the context of sentence processing (Ren et al., 2017). <br> Method: Thirty Cantonese native speakers will attend a self-paced reading experiment designed with the priming paradigm. For the stimuli, each priming is a single Chinese character, and the target characters are all phonograms. Four conditions have been manipulated: 1) the target and the priming share the same pronunciation, and the priming is the phonetic radical of the target; 2) the priming is the phonetic radical of the target, but the target and the priming have different pronunciations; 3) the priming shares the same pronunciation with the phonetic radical of the target, but the target and the priming have different pronunciations; and 4) the control condition, in which neither the target character nor its radical has any relationship with the priming. The priming and target characters in a group were embedded in the same sentence. Following Ren et al. (2017), two types of sentence context, high-constrained and low-constrained, were constructed. For the high-constrained context, the character before the critical region has a closed relation (high expectation) to the priming character, while for the low-constrained context, the character before the critical region of has a low expectation to the priming character. The reaction time (RT) of critical regions will be measured and analyzed. Also, both written Chinese and colloquial Cantonese are included in this experiment to test the processing of different registers.<br> Hypotheses: 1) If the phonetic radical is activated, the RT for the target of the first condition will be significantly shorter than the control condition; 2) if the orthography of phonetic radical affects the processing, the RT for the target of the second condition should be significantly shorter than the control condition; 3) if the phonological cue of phonetic radical affects the processing, the RT for the target of third condition will be significantly shorter than the control condition; and 4) if the phonological cue of phonetic radical is more prominent in colloquial version than the written Chinese, the RT for the colloquial sentences will be shorter.enConference Paper