Verbal Satiation of Chinese Bisyllabic Words: A Semantic Locus and its Time Course

Verbal Satiation of Chinese Bisyllabic Words: A Semantic Locus and its Time Course Bruno Galmar (hsuyueshan@gmail.com) Institute of Education, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, TAIWAN Jenn-Yeu Chen (psyjyc@mail.ncku.edu.tw) Institute of Cognitive Science, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, TAIWAN Abstract different components is disrupted and the character looks weird. Hence, the primary subjective experience is an orthographic decomposition of the character, not the loss of the character’s meaning. Cheng and Lan (2009) advanced that for the Chinese script there is no genuine semantic satiation but mainly orthographic satiation. To our knowledge, no one has tried to demonstrate whether for the Chinese script a verbal satiation with a unique semantic locus exists. If it does, semantic satiation would be genuine and would not be a mere by-product of orthographic satiation or of any pre-semantic satiation. Neither were we aware of any studies that examined Chinese verbal satiation at the word level rather than the character level. In a most recent study on verbal satiation in English, Tian and Huber (2010) designed a continuous speeded category- matching task to track the time course of verbal satiation, and to identify its locus. In their Experiment 1, subjects performed for each trial a membership task for a category name (the cue) and an exemplar (the target). Half of the 20 trials of an experimental block contained a repeated category name (e.g. VEGETABLE). In half of these trials, the repeated category name was paired with exemplars of the category, producing matching trials (VEGETABLE- CARROT). In the other half of these trials, it was paired with exemplars of non-repeated categories, producing mismatching trials (VEGETABLE-GOLF). These 10 trials constituted the satiation trials. The other 10 trials using 10 distinct category names constituted the non-repeated trials, or the baseline trials. The satiation trials and the baseline trials were mixed and ordered randomly within a block. In their Experiment 1, Tian and Huber aimed at monitoring continuously the effects of repetition of a category name. They predicted that only response times for satiation trials should slow down as the task progressed if satiation occurred and if the task did not cause fatigue. The locus of any detected satiation in this experiment could be: (a) orthographic if the word’s orthographic form representing the category name is satiated, (b) semantic if the meaning of the word is satiated, (c) both orthographic and semantic, or (d) on the associative link between the orthographic and semantic units. To distinguish between these four possible loci, Tian and Huber designed two more experiments based on the same speeded category-matching task. In their Experiment 2, Tian and Huber aimed at isolating a sole semantic locus of verbal satiation. They tested whether verbal satiation of the meaning of a category name (e.g. Verbal satiation of Chinese bisyllabic words was studied in three experiments to ascertain the phenomenon, to track its time course, and to identify its locus. Experiment 1 asked the participants to judge if an exemplar matched a category in 22 blocks of 40 trials each. Within a block, one category appeared 20 times (repeated trials) while each of the remaining 10 categories appeared only twice (baseline trials). For the first 11 trials, response times (RTs) for the repeated ones were similar to RTs for the baseline ones. For the subsequent trials, repeated RTs were slower (by 9 ms) than baseline RTs, indicating a satiation effect. Its loci could be orthographic, semantic, or both, or on the associative links between form and meaning. In Experiment 2, category names were not shown. Participants judged if two exemplars belonged to the same category. Repeated RTs were faster (by 6 ms) than baseline RTs for the first 12 trials. Then, verbal satiation emerged but was short-lived (between the 13 th and the 17 th trial) and was of greater magnitude (20 ms) than that observed in Experiment 1. The satiation effect must be semantic, as only meanings were repeated. Experiment 3 asked participants to judge if two category names were identical, mostly an orthographic task. Repeated RTs were similar to baseline ones across all trials, suggesting no orthographic satiation. The results indicate that semantic satiation of Chinese words can be directly semantic (categorical). Its time course conforms to the habituation model described in Rankin, et al. (2009), i.e., sensitization (semantic priming) before habituation (semantic satiation) and habituation followed by dishabituation (recovery). Keywords: Verbal Satiation, Semantic Satiation, Repetitive Semantic Processing. Introduction For more than a century, the self-reports collected by psychologists (Moulin & Connor, 2006; Severance & Washburn, 1907) mention a loss of the meaning of an alphabetic word following its prolonged viewing (e.g., 3 min.) or its active repetition (oral or written, e.g., for 30 times). This experienced loss of meaning has been coined semantic satiation. The term semantic satiation emphasizes that the locus of satiation is thought to be semantic. In the present work, we will also use the term verbal satiation which is neutral regarding the locus of satiation. For the non-alphabetic Chinese script, according to the self-reports collected by Cheng and Wu (1994), prolonged viewing of a multi-component Chinese character (e.g. 臉, which means a face, can be decomposed at a first level into 月 + 僉) elicits an orthographic satiation. The original binding of the