Another sub-lexical unit of representation in reading Chinese? The logographeme number effect

Abstract

Studies of Chinese character recognition have demonstrated widely that complex characters are automatically decomposed into sub-lexical components referred to as radicals during reading and writing in Chinese. Yet, an issue raised by Yang et al., (2009) was that it is unclear how the orthographic sub-system in during character recognition is able to differentiate when the sub-lexical unit “口” in characters such as 呵 should be activated as a radical for the left side unit, but not for the right radical 可 which also embeds a 口 within the radical. Studies of writing errors of Chinese children and aphasic patients argue that logographemes, a smaller sub-lexical unit than ...