title: Visual Similarity of Words Alone Can Modulate Hemispheric Lateralization in Visual Word Recognition: Evidence From Modeling Chinese Character Recognition.
abstract: In Chinese orthography, the most common character structure consists of a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); the minority, opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). Recent studies showed that SP character processing is more left hemisphere (LH) lateralized than PS character processing. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether this is due to phonetic radical position or character type frequency. Through computational modeling with artificial lexicons, in which we implement a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception but do not assume phonological processing being LH lateralized, we show that the difference in character type frequency alone is sufficient to exhibit the effect that the dominant type has a stronger LH lateralization than the minority type. This effect is due to higher visual similarity among characters in the dominant type than the minority type, demonstrating the modulation of visual similarity of words on hemispheric lateralization.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Janet H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Hsiao
authors.affiliation: Department of Computing, Imperial College London.
authors.forename: Kit
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Cheung
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Chinese character recognition; Computational modeling; Hemispheric asymmetry; Word type frequency