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The Effect of Pinyin Input Experience on the Link Between Semantic and Phonology of Chinese Character in Digital Writing

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Abstract

With the development of ICT, digital writing is becoming much more common in people’s life. Differently from keyboarding alphabets directly to input English words, keyboarding Chinese character is always through typing phonetic alphabets and then identify the glyph provided by Pinyin input-method software while in this process which do not need users to produce orthography spelling, thus it is different from traditional written language production model based on handwriting process. Much of the research in this domain has found that using Pinyin input method is beneficial to Chinese characters recognition, but only a small part explored the effects of individual’s Pinyin input experience on the Chinese characters production process. We ask whether using Pinyin input-method will strengthen the semantic-phonology linkage or semantic-orthography linkage in Chinese character mental lexicon. Through recording the RT and accuracy of participants completing semantic-syllable and semantic-glyph consistency judgments, the results found the accuracy of semantic-syllable consistency judgments in high Pinyin input experienced group was higher than that in low-experienced group, and RT was reversed. There were no significant differences on semantic-glyph consistency judgments between the two groups. We conclude that using Pinyin input method in Chinese digital writing can strengthen the semantic-phonology linkage while do not weakening the semantic-orthography linkage in mental lexicon at the same time, which means that Pinyin input method is beneficial to lexical processing involving Chinese cognition.

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Correspondence to Huashan Liu.

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Funding

This study was funded by MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanity and Social Science (grant number 16YJCZH067) and Education Science “11th Five-Year” planning project of Hunan Province of China (grant number XJK011BGD005).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Pictures

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Appendix 2: Disturbance terms of glyphs and sounds

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Appendix 3: Priming characters in idioms and their disturbance terms of glyphs and sounds

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Chen, J., Luo, R. & Liu, H. The Effect of Pinyin Input Experience on the Link Between Semantic and Phonology of Chinese Character in Digital Writing. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 923–934 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9470-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9470-y

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