Semantic radicals’ semantic attachment to their composed phonograms

In Chinese character processing studies, it is widely accepted that semantic radicals, whether character or non-character ones, can undergo semantic activation. However, there is a notable absence of studies dedicated to understanding the nature and operation of the semantic radicals' semantic information. To address this gap, the present study employed a masked semantic priming paradigm combined with a part-of-speech decision task and a lexical decision task across three experiments. Experiment 1 was designed to examine the semantic autonomy and the semantic attachment of semantic radicals in transparent phonograms. Experiment 2 sought to further investigate the degree of semantic autonomy of semantic radicals in opaque phonograms. Experiment 3 was crafted to further probe into the presence of semantic attachment of semantic radicals in pseudo-characters. Results showed significant priming effects in both transparent and opaque phonogram conditions, with faster reaction times and higher accuracy for semantically related prime-target pairs. However, no such priming effect was observed in the pseudo-character condition, indicating that semantic radicals are not activated in non-lexical contexts. These findings suggest that semantic radicals were semantically activated when embedded in both transparent and opaque phonograms, but not when planted in pseudo-characters. The plausible account put forward is that semantic radicals stand on pars with their composed phonograms in possessing their own semantic information, but the former is semantically strongly attached to the latter, such that it cannot live without the latter's semantic company.