Abstract Yang, Chen, Spinelli, and Lupker (2019) reported a large masked priming effect in a Chinese lexical-decision task using prime-target pairs in which the primes were presented in a backward (right-to-left) orientation (e.g., 说来的总-总的来说) (a “backward” priming effect). The question addressed here is whether this effect is truly an orthographic priming effect or is, to some degree, morphologically/meaning- or syllabic/phonologically-based. Five experiments, two involving phonologically-related primes and three involving meaning-related primes, produced no evidence that either of those factors contributed to the backward priming effect, implying that it truly is an orthographic effect. As backward priming effects do not emerge in English, these results suggest that the orthographic coding process is quite different for Chinese versus English readers. Specifically, they support the conclusion that the orthographic coding process for Chinese readers codes character positions in a quite flexible fashion. Issues concerning the generalizability of current models of orthographic coding in alphabetic languages, as well as implications for models of Chinese word recognition, are discussed.

中文翻译：

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四字词语标文字中后向启动效应的起源

摘要 Yang、Chen、Spinelli 和 Lupker (2019) 报告了在使用素数-目标对的中文词汇决策任务中的大型掩蔽启动效应，其中素数以向后（从右到左）的方向呈现（例如，说来的总总体）（“向后”启动效应）。这里要解决的问题是这种效果是否真的是正字法启动效应，或者在某种程度上是基于形态/意义或音节/语音的。五个实验，两个涉及音系相关的素数，三个涉及意义相关的素数，没有证据表明这些因素中的任何一个都导致了反向启动效应，这意味着它确实是一种正字法效应。由于后向启动效应不会在英语中出现，这些结果表明，中文和英文读者的正字法编码过程完全不同。具体而言，他们支持以下结论：中文读者的正字法编码过程以相当灵活的方式编码字符位置。讨论了当前字母语言正字法编码模型的普遍性问题，以及对中文单词识别模型的影响。