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"Chinese character sets"
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The Chinese computer : a global history of the information age
\"Exploration of the largely unknown history of Chinese-language computing systems, accessible to an audience unfamiliar with the Chinese language or the technical workings of personal computers\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The “Dogs’ Catching Mice” conjecture in Chinese phonogram processing
In Chinese phonogram processing studies, it is not strange that phonetic radicals contribute phonologically to phonograms’ phonological recognition. The present study, however, based on previous findings of phonetic radicals’ proneness to semantic activation, as well as free-standing phonetic radicals’ possession of triadic interconnections of orthography, phonology, and semantics at the lexical level, proposed that phonetic radicals may contribute semantically to the host phonograms’ phonological recognition. We label this speculation as the “Dogs’ Catching Mice” Conjecture . To examine this conjecture, three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 was designed to confirm whether phonetic radicals, when embedded in phonograms, can contribute semantically to their host phonograms’ phonological recognition. Experiment 2 was intended to show that the embedded phonetic radicals employed in Experiment 1 were truly semantically activated. Experiment 3, on top of the first two experiments, was devoted to demonstrating that the semantically activated phonetic radicals, when used as independent characters, can truly contribute semantically to their phonological recognition. Results from the three experiments combine to confirm the conjecture. The implication drawn is that phonetic radicals may have forged two paths in contributing to the host phonograms’ phonological recognition: one is the regular “Cats’ Catching Mice” Path , the other is the novel “Dogs’ Catching Mice” Path.
Journal Article
A syllable-character collaborative model for enhanced Pinyin and Chinese recognition
In Chinese speech recognition, end-to-end speech recognition models usually use Chinese characters as direct output and perform poorly compared with other language models. The main reason for this phenomenon is that the relationship between Chinese text and pronunciation is more complex. Inspired by the learning process of Chinese beginners, who first master initials, finals, and pinyin before learning characters, we propose the Syllable-Character Collaborative Model (SCCM), which incorporates these phonetic elements into the training process. Additionally, we design a Pinyin-Ensemble module that employs an ensemble learning approach to reduce pinyin recognition errors, which in turn leads to a reduction in text recognition errors. Experiments on AISHELL-1 show that our approach not only reduces pinyin and character error rates compared to a prior end-to-end method using pinyin as auxiliary information, but also achieves a 45.7% relative reduction in Character Error Rate (CER) over the AISHELL-1 baseline.
Journal Article
Aesthetic evaluation and the perceived properties of Chinese characters
Previous studies have indicated that the visually perceived properties of geometrical figures influence aesthetic evaluations. However, it is unclear whether findings based on geometrical figures can be extended to artworks such as paintings and calligraphy, as artworks have their own contents and meanings. To answer this question, we designed experiments in which users of Chinese characters were asked to rate the perceived symmetry, complexity, prototypicality, and beauty of Chinese characters. Each character was presented to 35 Japanese and Chinese participants in five typing fonts in a laboratory setting (Experiment 1), and to 100 Japanese participants in five calligraphic handwriting scripts online (Experiment 2). By analyzing the relative impacts of perceived properties on aesthetic evaluation and their interactions with script styles using a generalized linear mixed model, we discovered that script style plays an important role in the association between the perceived properties and aesthetic evaluation of Chinese characters. These results are discussed in relation to studies on the aesthetic evaluation of geometrical figures and recent studies using Chinese calligraphy.
Journal Article
Measurement method research of Chinese texts’ difficulty based on two-characters continuations
Two-characters continuation, which is a string with two characters emerging in linear sequence, can break through the encapsulation and independence of long solidified language chunks (words and phrases). In this way, two-characters continuation can measure the information of not only static language units (words and phrases) but also their combination in the text. Therefore, two-characters continuation is used as a measurement unit for investigating Chinese text’s difficulty, to enhance the accuracy of measuring text’s difficulty. Three different measurement methods of text’s difficulty are proposed, which are respectively based on \"continuation index of character\", \"new and stable two-characters continuation\" and \"emerging tendency of two-characters continuation\". The results show that compared to other two methods, the measurement method of text’s difficulty based on new and stable two-characters continuations has better effectiveness, whose accuracies for measuring text’s difficulty with 6 levels, 3 levels and 2 levels difficulties can reach 36.4%, 64.6% and 79.6%, respectively. In addition, compared to Jiang and Wu’s research works, the above measurement method also shows a better effectiveness.
Journal Article
Similarities and differences between Chinese two-character words and their constituent characters in norm-feature correlations
The graphic units in Chinese are Chinese characters (characters), most of which often join with others to form words of two or more characters. High-frequency two-character words (2C-words) tend to be composed of high-frequency characters. However, whether similarities exist between 2C-words and their constituent characters in other features remains an open question. The present study used a sample of 7,311 commonly used 2C-words (2CWs) and their constituent characters (CCs) to compare correlations among features that are common to 2CWs and characters. For both the 2CWs and the CCs, age of acquisition (AoA) was negatively correlated with frequency, sensory experience arousal was positively correlated with concreteness and emotion arousal and imageability was positively correlated with concreteness, sensory experience arousal, and emotion arousal. However, as the result of changes in AoA, skilled readers were more likely to be aware of changes in concreteness, imageability, and sensory experience arousal for the 2CWs than for the CCs. They might be less aware of valence, concreteness, number of strokes, and number of meanings but more conscious of emotion arousal and imageability of the 2CWs than of the CCs. The implications are that words and characters are important units in parallel and that words are both associated with and independent of their constituent characters. This may suggest a resolution to the debates about whether words or characters should be taken as the basic structural units in the Chinese language.
Journal Article
The effect of applying augmented reality to Chinese character learning on novice CFL learners
Augmented Reality (AR) is believed a suitable teaching method for beginning-level Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners in learning Chinese characters, as the effects of AR on visualization may enhance recognition of pictographic characters and the integration of multimedia may facilitate comprehension of this logographic language. Yet the multimodal presentation may trigger different reactions in learners with distinct learning preference, including visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinesthetic (VARK) sensory modalities. This exploratory study aimed to investigate the effects and impacts of learning Chinese characters using AR application on beginning-level CFL learners, and took the impact of learning styles into consideration. Twenty-eight beginning-level Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learner participated in the study, learning 24 Chinese characters with an AR application that demonstrated animated evolutionary processes. A Chinese character recognition test was implemented to evaluate the learning effects in terms of meaning identification and pinyin transliteration before and after the AR intervention. A VARK questionnaire was used to assess their preferred learning styles, and to cross-examine with the learning effects. The results showed significant improvements in the posttest, in particular the identification of character meanings. However, no significant difference was found in the test scores of the four modes of the VARK learning styles, though the learners with multimodal preferences that included the visual learning style had better scores.
Journal Article
The familiarity effect of Chinese stroke stimulus and imagery on contextual integration: Evidence from ERP correlates
The neural process of contextual integration has been examined through the phenomenology of semantic incongruence of words. The present study investigated whether the effort of contextual integration would be heightened by the increased demand of selective attention and attention orientation to unfamiliar Chinese stroke style and sequence. It also examined whether visual imagery of unfamiliar stroke style and sequence would mitigate the effort of contextual integration of unfamiliar Chinese stroke. Nineteen participants take part in two cognitive tasks: (a) imagery of Chinese strokes and (b) detection of Chinese familiar and unfamiliar stroke style. An electroencephalogram was concurrently recorded for the analysis of event-related potential (ERP). Results revealed significant differences in attention orientation and effort of contextual integration between familiar and unfamiliar Chinese strokes, as indicated by larger amplitudes of N160 (100–200 ms) & P200 (260–380 ms) components. Furthermore, a larger amplitude of N400 (300–500 ms) component, signifying the neural process of integrating external from the context, was obtained when individuals viewed unfamiliar Chinese strokes. These findings suggest a cognitive effort was needed to process unfamiliar Chinese stimuli, followed by a greater mental effort required for contextual integration of the unfamiliar stimuli. Furthermore, top-down control of visual imagery would facilitate the process of contextual integration via generating internal representation. This finding provides a new insight that the effort expended in contextual integration may be associated with both attentional control and the generation of internal representation from long-term storage across visual stimuli with varying levels of stimulus familiarity. In summary, our study provided insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying attentional control, contextual integration, and the role of visual imagery in the processing of stimuli with different levels of familiarity. Furthermore, it suggested the potential utility of the N400 component as a biomarker for assessing attention control and memory retrieval functions.
Journal Article
Positive referential meaning and color metaphor bring beauty: Evidence on aesthetic appraisal of ancient Chinese character from Han, Bai, and Yi ethnic groups
Ancient Chinese characters were produced using two systems, one were produced according to man-made conventions to convey abstract meanings (oracle bone script), and another were generated by outlining the shape of object (pictograph). Whether these two kinds of ancient Chinese characters elicit different aesthetic appraisals of font structure depend on the referential meaning or object? And whether this aesthetic appraisal vary by color metaphors? In this present study, participants recruited from the Han, Bai, and Yi ethnic groups were unacquainted with the ancient Chinese characters. Experiment 1a, 1b, and 1c used abstract oracle bone scripts as materials, and Experiment 2a, 2b, and 2c used concrete pictographs as materials. Across three Chinese ethnic groups, the results showed the font structure of oracle bone script or pictograph was more likely to be judged as beautiful when its referential meaning was positive or its referential object was beautiful. Whereas, when its referential meaning was negative or its referential object was ugly, the font structure was more likely to be judged as ugly. Moreover, beauty judgment was facilitated when a positive oracle bone script was presented in the ethnic preferred color, and ugliness judgment was facilitated in the ethnic disliked color. However, this modulation effect was not obvious in the aesthetic appraisal of pictograph. The results indicated that aesthetic appraisal of ancient Chinese characters may depend on the referential meaning or object, and this sense of beauty or ugliness is also modulated by the color preference and metaphors in different Chinese ethnic cultures.
Journal Article
Not perceptually equivalent in semantic emotion across visual and auditory modalities: cross-modal affective norms of two-character Chinese emotion-label words
Over recent years, although multi-sensory studies have increasingly revealed modality-specific mechanisms underlying lexical processing, validated lexical databases with reliable affective norms in both visual and auditory modalities have been scantly established, especially in Chinese. Therefore, this study aims to establish a cross-modal affective database consisting of 350 two-character Chinese emotion-label words, and investigate how neutral speech prosody changes semantic emotion perception in Chinese. Affective ratings of six variables were collected, including familiarity, valence, arousal, dominance, intensity and emotion type, from 364 participants in both visual and auditory modalities. Reliability and validity of the ratings were strictly examined. Statistical analyses manifested the U-shape relationships for valence-arousal and valence-dominance pairwise correlations in the within-modality setting, and identified the existence of a neutral prosody influence on semantic emotion access, thus showing no direct juxtaposition in lexical emotion perception across the two modalities. Specifically, the auditory modality imposed a neutrality convergence on valence perception, decreased the familiarity and dominance feelings, but did not change the intensity parameter. This study is among the first to introduce the multi-modal perspective into Chinese lexical database construction, which not only supplements extant research tools for selecting grammatically homogeneous Chinese emotion-label words as experiment stimuli, but also warrants further investigations on how speech prosody influences lexical semantic perception.
Journal Article