- 期刊
CHARACTER RECOGNITION WITHOUT SOUND OR MEANING
排除意義或發音媒介的漢字辨識
摘要
A long-running debate in Chinese psycholinguistics has concerned the relative roles of semantics and phonology in reading Chinese characters. Some researchers argue that character reading requires activation of phonological representations, while others maintain the traditional view that Chinese readers generally access meanings directly without phonological mediation. This paper describes an experiment that addresses this debate from a novel direction: Chinese readers were asked to report what they know about simple characters with unfamiliar meanings and/or pronunciations. The ＂phonology-first＂ view predicts that it should be impossible to know the meaning of a character without knowing its pronunciation, while the ＂semantics-first＂ view predicts that it should be impossible to know the pronunciation of a character without knowing its meaning. Our experiment showed that both situations can exist, though with quantitative and qualitative differences: knowing the pronunciation without knowing the meaning is a somewhat more common occurrence, though it arises most often with characters that share a phonological component with other characters, while knowing the meaning without the pronunciation most often occurs when readers have an alternative (nonstandard) pronunciation for the character or when the character is used as a quasi-linguistic symbol. Moreover, a signal detection analysis found no difference in sensitivity to meaning vs. pronunciation. At the same time, however, readers were strongly biased in their confidence judgments about phonology. Our results thus reaffirm support for a more nuanced position in the debate over Chinese reading, one where both phonology and semantics play key roles in reading.
並列摘要
在中文的心理語言學研究上，語意和語音在閱讀中的相對角色一直是長久以來的爭議。有些研究者認為閱讀漢字時需要音韻表徵的作用；而有些仍持傳統看法，認為讀者可以直接提取語意，不需要音韻作為媒介。本實驗從一個創新的角度來探討這個議題。我們請受試者報告他們對不熟悉意義或發音的獨體漢字的瞭解。依照「音韻優先」的看法，知道意義而不知道發音是不可能的；依照「語意優先」的看法，則知道發音而不知道意義是不可能的。我們的實驗結果顯示這兩種情況都可能存在，但有質與量的不同。知道發音而不知道意義是比較普遍的情形，通常發生在有同樣聲符的漢字；而知道意義卻不知道發音的情形通常發生在當受試者認為該漢字還有其它發音，或此漢字實際上是代表某個字的符號，並不是真的語言。此外，在訊息偵測分析中，我們發現語意和發音在敏感度上並無不同。然而，受試者卻對音韻判斷有較強的信心。在中文閱讀研究的爭議中，我們的實驗結果再度肯定這個更精細與周全的立場：音韻和語意兩者都在閱讀上扮演著關鍵的角色。