The impact of Chinese character features on short-term memory information retrieval

In the present study, we used the Sternberg paradigm to investigate the differences in short-term memory (STM) retrieval across different types of Chinese characters. In Experiment 1, we examined the impact of stroke count of Chinese characters on STM retrieval. The results indicated that accuracy for simple characters was higher than that for complex characters. This finding suggests that, in terms of visual-graphical characteristics, simpler characters with fewer strokes are more readily retrievable from STM. In Experiment 2, we examined the influence of the phonological features of Chinese characters on STM retrieval. The results showed that irregular characters yielded higher accuracy than regular characters. This finding implies that Chinese characters for which the pronunciation of the phonetic radical is consistent with that of the whole character (i.e., regular characters) are more difficult to retrieve from STM. In Experiment 3, we investigated the influence of the semantic features of Chinese characters on STM retrieval. The results demonstrated that accuracy for semantically non-transparent characters was higher than that for semantically transparent characters. Furthermore, across all three experiments conducted, a memory load effect was observed, indicating that the reaction times under the 7-item memory load condition were significantly longer than those under the 5-item and 3-item conditions. Overall, the results of this study indicate that the graphic, phonological, and semantic features of Chinese characters have different effects on STM retrieval. This study has provided certain insights into the language-specific mechanisms underlying STM retrieval for Chinese characters.