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Visual Similarity of Words Alone Can Modulate Hemispheric Lateralization in Visual Word Recognition: Evidence From Modeling Chinese Character Recognition
Author(s) -
Hsiao Janet H.,
Cheung Kit
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.12233
Subject(s) - lateralization of brain function , character (mathematics) , psychology , similarity (geometry) , orthography , perception , cognitive psychology , chinese characters , word recognition , visual processing , speech recognition , communication , linguistics , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , computer science , mathematics , reading (process) , philosophy , geometry , image (mathematics)
In Chinese orthography, the most common character structure consists of a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic radical on the right ( SP characters); the minority, opposite arrangement also exists ( PS characters). Recent studies showed that SP character processing is more left hemisphere ( LH ) lateralized than PS character processing. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether this is due to phonetic radical position or character type frequency. Through computational modeling with artificial lexicons, in which we implement a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception but do not assume phonological processing being LH lateralized, we show that the difference in character type frequency alone is sufficient to exhibit the effect that the dominant type has a stronger LH lateralization than the minority type. This effect is due to higher visual similarity among characters in the dominant type than the minority type, demonstrating the modulation of visual similarity of words on hemispheric lateralization.