關聯強度與語意透明度對孩童漢字語意處理的影響之縱貫式研究

A Longitudinal Study of Association Strength and Semantic Transparency in Semantic Processing of Chinese Characters in Children

本研究以縱貫法檢驗一組孩童在9-15歲（第一次施測）及11-17歲（第二次施測）進行跨感官語意判斷作業（視覺─聽覺）中，語意關聯強度（兩個字之間的語意相關程度）和語意透明度（部件和整字之間的語意相關程度）的發展變化。中文字對先以視覺然後聽覺的順序呈現，用來探討語音和字形的對應關係。研究操弄語意關聯強度（強、弱）及語意透明度（高、低）兩個變項來檢驗語意處理。參與者需針對出現的兩個中文字做語意判斷。本研究有兩項主要發現。第一、孩童在語意判斷的正確率中，高語意透明度相對於低語意透明度在強語意關聯強度下有較好的行為表現，反映不同語意限制在強語意關聯強度下的差異。第二、孩童在語意判斷的正確率中，相對於第一次施測，第二次施測時的高語意透明度與低語意透明度之間的差距減少。孩童隨著年齡增加，其語意判斷由部件處理轉變為整字處理，或是部件和整字之間的雙向連結更有效率地加速語意表徵的對應，顯示出語意透明度在發展上的變化。

This study examined the developmental changes in association strength (i.e., the degree of semantic relation between two characters) and semantic transparency (i.e., the degree of semantic relation between the semantic radical and the whole character) in a cross-modal semantic judgment task. Character pairs were presented in the visual and auditory modality sequentially to determine the mapping between phonology and orthography. A longitudinal approach was used to study a group of Chinese children aged 9 to 15 years (age 1), and 11 to 17 years (age 2). Association strength (strong, weak) and semantic transparency (high, low) were independently varied to study semantic processing. Participants were asked to decide whether two Chinese characters were related in meaning. There were two main results in the current study. First, children performed better on accuracy for high relative to low transparency in the strong association, reflecting the differences of semantic constraint to perform semantic judgments in the strong association. Second, our results showed a reduced difference in accuracy for high than for low transparency for age 2, compared to that of age 1. These findings demonstrate developmental changes from a focus on radical components (i.e., sublexical processing) to a focus on whole characters (i.e., lexical processing) and the development of more efficient bi-directional links between the radical and the character, which accelerates access to semantic representations.