A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

Ya Ning Chang, Chun Hsien Hsu, Jie Li Tsai, Chien Liang Chen, Chia Ying Lee

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

46 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this study, we aimed to provide a large-scale set of psycholinguistic norms for 3,314 traditional Chinese characters, along with their naming reaction times (RTs), collected from 140 Chinese speakers. The lexical and semantic variables in the database include frequency, regularity, familiarity, consistency, number of strokes, homophone density, semantic ambiguity rating, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, and the number of disyllabic compound words formed by a character. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the predictive powers of these variables for the naming RTs. The results demonstrated that these variables could account for a significant portion of variance (55.8 %) in the naming RTs. An additional multiple regression analysis was conducted to demonstrate the effects of consistency and character frequency. Overall, the regression results were consistent with the findings of previous studies on Chinese character naming. This database should be useful for research into Chinese language processing, Chinese education, or cross-linguistic comparisons. The database can be accessed via an online inquiry system (http://ball.ling.sinica.edu.tw/namingdatabase/index.html).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)112-122
Number of pages11
JournalBehavior Research Methods
Volume48
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Mar 2016

Keywords

  • Chinese character naming
  • Chinese visual word recognition
  • Naming
  • Psycholinguistic norm

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