Early encoding of radical position legality in Chinese character reading: an ERP study

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: In the alphabetic writing system, the identity and order of letters in a word have long been studied as important factors in reading. An analogous question in Chinese is how readers identify sublexical orthographic components called radicals and represent their positional information. Taft, Zhu, and Peng (1999) addressed this question by studying characters containing transposable radicals. Since transposable radicals can form multiple characters based on their spatial placements, if radicals are position-general they would activate multiple lexical representations and be harder to process. No difference was found in readers' performance for characters with transposable radicals and those with non-transposable radicals, which supported a position-specific account. Nevertheless, contending claims of position-general radical representations have also ...