Binding radicals in Chinese character recognition: Evidence from repetition blindness

• Radical-RB occurs when the repeated radical in two characters is only seen once.
• Radical-RB indicates that radicals are represented during character processing.
• This is true for both high- and low-frequency characters.
• Radical-RB is insensitive to character-level similarity and radical combinability.
• Radical representation corresponds to morpho-orthographic representation in English.

Many Chinese characters consist of two radicals and it has long been debated whether characters are decomposed into radicals during the processing of character recognition. Here we examine this issue utilizing a novel repetition blindness (RB) paradigm that provides a sensitive measure of internal representations in the early stages of processing. We found a radical-RB effect (i.e., two characters are less likely to be correctly reported when they share a common radical) for both high- and low-frequency characters (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 was to exclude the possibility that radical-RB effect can be explained by character-level similarity. Finally, the radical-RB effect was found to be robust irrespective of how frequently a radical is presented in different characters (Experiment 3). All these results suggest that radicals are represented during the processing of characters, supporting the analytic (rather than holistic) hypothesis of Chinese character recognition. A model that highlights a dynamic process of binding radicals to construct character representations is proposed.