Sublexical semantic decoding during incidental novel word learning in natural Chinese reading

The majority of Chinese characters convey meaning explicitly via their semantic radical and studies investigating isolated character identification and character acquisition have shown them to be an important source of sublexical semantic information. However, to date, it is unclear whether Chinese readers recruit and utilize semantic cues from radicals when encountering, learning and representing entirely novel characters in natural reading – an important aspect of vocabulary growth. To address this question, we created sixteen semantic-phonetic compound single pseudo-character words as novel targets, whose semantic radicals were either consistent (i.e., transparent) or inconsistent (i.e., opaque) with high-constraint sentential contexts, and embedded them within nine sentence frames to support the formation of new lexical representations. The eye movements of 113 undergraduates were recorded as they read sentences. The results revealed that reading times for transparent novel words were significantly shorter relative to opaque novel words. This effect diminished over exposures, indicating a familiarity, or learning effect. When participants were categorized into faster and slower readers, we found that the semantic transparency effect was greater for faster than slower readers suggesting that faster readers utilized sublexical semantic information associated with semantic radicals to enhance word learning to a greater degree than slower readers. We consider our results in the context of Chen and Zhang's (2012) model of sublexical semantic radical processing and Share's self-teaching hypothesis. Our results are the first to demonstrate effects of sub-lexical semantic transparency during novel word learning in Chinese and highlight the important and distinctive role of semantic radicals in Chinese orthographic learning.