A Behavioural and Electrophysiological Investigation of Chinese Character Recognition as Revealed by the Character Superiority Effect

The word superiority effect is one of the most robust findings in English word recognition. It is commonly believed that the coarse-scale configurational information in a lexical context is more familiar to readers and therefore facilitates the identification of its component letters. Aiming at reassessing the character superiority effect in the Chinese language, this thesis first reports an empirical study determining the fundamental factor of stimulus presentation size by establishing the optimal retinal image size in normal Chinese reading. It then presents a series of experiments which examined if the Chinese character superiority can be obtained by using the stringent Reicher-Wheeler task and carefully manipulated stimulus conditions which featured impairment of spatial configuration information of characters to various degrees. The thesis further presents a study which investigated the character superiority effect in lateralized display and its neural correlates by comparing the event-related potenials (ERPs) to characters versus character-like stimuli. The findings show the character superiority over pseudocharacters and several types of character-like stimuli in central and lateralized dispaly. More importantly, a temporal-spatial profile was established for Chinese character recognition.