Attention and lexical decomposition in chinese word recognition: Conjunctions of form and position guide selective attention

Abstract A series of experiments on skilled readers of Chinese demonstrated selective attention to different orthographic components within compound, single-character words, as a function of different reading tasks (pronunciation vs. meaning). Chinese orthography provides a number of contrasts with alphabetic writing systems. The majority (over 90%) of Chinese single-character words are compound, consisting of a lexical radical (LR) and one or more other constituents. which together form the “non-radical component” (NR). The NR component as a whole specifies the syllabic pronunciation of the whole word (except in the case of “irregular” words). In contrast, the LR specifies (an aspect of) its meaning. Thus in order to take advantage of these regularities in pronunciation tasks, the skilled reader should attend selectively to the NR component. To do so, however, the reader must first locate the LR, which can occur in practically any relative location (e.g. top, bottom, left, or right of the character), in ...

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