Do speakers of Japanese and alphabetic languages follow different routes in the semantic processing of Chinese characters?

This psycholinguistic study aims to investigate whether speakers of Japanese and alphabetic languages follow different routes in the semantic processing of Chinese characters. The study involved speakers of alphabetic languages (e.g., English, Russian) and Japanese achieving advanced levels of L2 Chinese in the experimental groups and native Chinese speakers in the control group. A semantic categorization task adapted from Ma, Wang, and Li (2016) was administered to the participants. They were required to judge whether a target character preceded by a prime character could represent a living thing. The primes and targets were categorized into five relationships: (1) orthographically similar (e.g., 船-般), (2) homophonic (e.g., 清-轻), (3) phonologically similar (e.g., 京-青), (4) semantically related (e.g., 河-海), and (5) unrelated control (e.g., 雪-灯). Three different Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) conditions, 60ms, 150ms, and 300ms, were designed to elicit the time course of orthographic, phonological, and semantic activation in processing the characters. The study's findings indicate that Japanese speakers, like native Chinese speakers, follow the direct route to process Chinese characters, accessing semantic information directly from the logographic visual form without phonological activation. Differently, speakers of alphabetic languages adopt the dual route to process Chinese characters, simultaneously activating phonological and semantic information. The findings delineate that L1 writing systems influence the semantic processing of Chinese characters by speakers of Japanese and alphabetic languages. The Japanese writing system is sound- and meaning-based, with a close orthographic distance from the meaning-based Chinese writing system. Conversely, alphabetic languages employ a sound-based writing system, completely different from the Chinese writing system. The finding of this study has implications for using differentiated methods to teach Chinese characters to L2 Chinese learners using different L1 writing systems.