Meanings within meanings: Skilled readers activate irrelevant meanings of radicals in Chinese

Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. The cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character’s meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman & Siok, 1999). We investigated whether readers automatically activate the semantics associated with a radical even when it is irrelevant to the character’s meaning, using a modified version of the Van Orden (1987) task. Fifty-one Mandarin speakers participated in the study. On each trial they were shown a reference category such as “animal” prior to seeing a target character then indicated whether the target character was a member of that category. Decisions were slower and less accurate when a target that is not a member of the target category contained a radical that is. For example, if the category is “found in the kitchen,” the answer for the target 券 (ticket) is no; however the character contains the misleading radical 刀 (knife). These patterns suggest that readers process the semantics of the radical even when it is not relevant to the meaning of the character. The results present challenges for theories in which whole characters are the units of processing in reading Chinese. They also raise questions as to whether repetitions of this experience may result in some of the irrelevant semantics influencing the meaning of the character.