Position-general radicals are involved in planning Chinese written word production

The current study adopted the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate the word-form encoding process during written word production in a non-alphabetic language, i.e., Chinese. Most Chinese characters are composed of radicals. A radical can appear at different positions in different characters (e.g., on the left in Character A, on the right in Character B, and at the bottom in Character C). Whether the representations of radicals carry intrinsic positional information remains largely unexplored in the domain of written word production. Thirty Chinese participants were asked to write down the names of individually presented pictures while ignoring distracting characters superimposed on the pictures. Three types of distractors were included, and significant facilitation effects were found when the distractor shared the same radical with the picture name (relative to unrelated control conditions), no matter the radical appeared at the same or a different position in the distractor. The current finding suggests the involvement of position-general radicals in planning Chinese written word production and provides original evidence to the models of written word production. Copyright © 2020 The 61st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.