语言学视角下的英语语义饱和与汉字字形饱和现象对比研究

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background
It is a common phenomenon which is widely experienced among people all overthe world, despite of their culture, religion and language. The phenomenon is that，ifone stairs at a particular word, character or graph for a while, one may feel a sense ofconfusion, uncertainty，and loss of meaning. This，as one of the cognitive feelings asTip of the Tongue and deja vu, is acknowledged as Semantic Satiation amongwestern scholars; while for eastern scholars. Semantic Satiation has a different title;Japanese psychologists named it as Gestaltzerfall, and Taiwan psychologists referredit as Orthographic Satiation in their researches. In the mainland of China，however,Semantic Satiation is a virgin land yet to be explored.Semantic Satiation is generally studied as a psychological issue by the forerunnerscholars, eastern and western alike. Yet no discipline in the current world can entirelyisolate itself from other disciplines, nor can linguistics from psychology. Avratn NoamChomsky, the father of modem linguistic, considers linguistics as a branch ofcognitive psychology. Therefore, the research of Semantic Satiation as apsychological phenomenon can benefit also the development of linguistics in manyways.
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1.2 Contents and Objectives
This thesis is a study of the Semantic Satiation in Chinese character. With a briefbut complete and comprehensive introduction of the studies carried out by scholars inother countries and regions, this thesis aims at presenting a general review of thehistory of this phenomenon. By doing this, it is believed that the study underdiscussion will be useful and helpful for the later scholars who arc interested in thistopic, especially for scholars in the mainland oi China tor whom Semantic Satiation isstill a totally strange and new researching tieklBesides providing a general review of the studies of Semantic Satiation, thisthesis ivS to carry out a Chinese-oriented empirical study on Semantic Satiation, In thisthesis, three issues about the Semantic Satiation of Chinese characters are investigated,namely，，(1) the inter-relevance of English Semantic Satiation and ChineseOrthographic Satiation: (2) the cross-satiation effect among Chinese-Englishbilinguals; and (3) the cross-satiation effect between simplified and traditionalChinese.In order to fulfill the previous objectives, the thesis is arranged into seven parts.The first part is the Introduction in which a brief introduction of the concernedphenomenon and its researching background are presented.The second pail, Chapter 2 of the body is devoted to the literature reviews ofSemantic Satiation in English, Chinese and Kanji characters in a chronological order. The disputes among the previous scholars' studies and problems untouched, togetherwith the methodologies to solve the problems, are all listed out accordingly in chapter3. There are one dispute and two problems about Chinese-oriented OrthographicSatiation: the dispute about the relation between English Semantic Satiation andChinese Orthographic Satiation aroused by Taiwan scholars; and the cross-satiationeffect among Chinese-English bilinguals, and between simplified and traditionalChinese characters.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Semantic Satiation in English Language
The establishment of the studies of Semantic Satiation was officially announcedby Elizabeth Severance and Margaret Floy Washburn in 1907 when they published onthe Ametican Journal of Psychology their work entitled as The loss of associativepower in words after long fixation.In their experiment. Severance & Washburn (19()7) selected six womenobservers as their participants to look fixedly at a group of six-letter English words forthree minutes, and asked the participants to describe in details the change of theappearance of the words during the experimenting period. With a careful analysisbasing upon the description and records made by the participants. Severance &Washburn (1907) attributed the reasons of Semantic Satiation to “shifting attentions/"Severance & Washburn's (1907) experiment served a fundamental function inthe study of Semantic Satiation, both thcorclically and methodologically.Theoretically, it was the first academic paper published ami llic first seriousexperiment earned out on Semantic Satiation. With detailed records of the experimentprocess. Severance & Washburn (1907) presented the reader a vivid picture of theparticipants' experience in Semantic Satiation.
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2.2 Chinese-oriented Satiation Studies
The similar phenomenon attracted also the attention of Japanese scholars whonoticed the decomposition of Japanese Kanji characters after a steady and continuousview. Japanese scholars, with Yuri Ninose & Jiro Gyob ( 1996, 1997，2002，2003 ) asrepresentatives, took a very different way from their western peers by concentratingmainly on the structure of the words and characters, and named tlie phenomenonGestaltzerfall.In their studies, Yuri Ninose & Jiro Gyob (1996, 1997，and 2002) examined thedelays in the recognition of test Kanji following a prolonged viewing of adaptation Kanji which were comprised of both the same or different part and structures. Theresults revealed that the delay effect occurred with complex Kanji patterns containinga few components, but that the phenomenon did not occur with simple Kanji patternsconsisting of only one component (Yuri Ninose & Jiro Gyob, 2002). In the latterstudies carried out by Taiwan scholars, however, the results turned out to be acomplete opposite, which I will explain below in Section 2.2.2. Besides, in order tosettle the dispute among Japanese and Taiwan scholars, an experiment was designedand carried out to testify the decomposition of Chinese/Kanji character consisting ofonly one component.
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Chapter 3 Questions and Methodologies..........  17
3.1 Inter-relevance between Chinese Orthographic Satiation..........17
3.2 Orthographic Decomposition in Singlc-component Chinese Characters.......... 19
3.2.1 Disputes.......... 19
3.2.2 Methodology.......... 19
3.3 Chinese-oriented Cross-satiation Effect ..........21
3.3.1 Semantic Satiation among English-Chinese bilinguals.......... 21
3.3.2 Cross-satiation Effect between Simplified and Traditional ChineseCharacters.......... 22
Chapter 4 Experiment Description.......... 24
4.1 Experiment One: Orthographic Decomposition.......... 24
4.2 Experiment Two: Cross-satiation Effect among English-Chinese Bilinguals...........26
4.3 Experiment Three: Cross-satiation between Simplified ..........30
Chapter 5 Experiment Results and Data collection.......... 34
5.1 Orthographic Decomposition among Single-component Chinese Characters..........34
5.2 Cross-satiation Effect among English-Chinese Bilinguals.......... 39
5.3 No Cross-satiation Effect between Simplified and Traditional Chinese.......... 40

Chapter 6 General Discussion

6.1 The Relation between Orthographic Satiation and SemanticSatiation
Although Taiwan scholars relied on the same explanation as western scholars,they focused on a very different aspect of the phenomenon under discussion. Unlikethe latter that centered on the loss of meaning, Taiwan scholars believed that inChinese characters，only the structure is decomposed, and the meaning is not affected.Therefore, they asserted that their study of orthographic decomposition is differentfrom that of western scholars' Semantic Satiation.However, as far as what the theories prove and the experimental data shows, thetwo are of the same nature. The Orthographic Satiation, actually, is the first stage inthe process of Semantic Satiation proposed by Xing Tian & Huber (2010). To begin with, the two phenomena are resulted from a repeated stimulation(prolonged view of a certain word). In accordance with Severance & Washburn(1907), a participant suffered Semantic Satiation after a steady stare at Blood for 179seconds, while in the experiment carried out by Lee (2007)，it took 31.17 seconds fora single-component Chinese character and 26.53 seconds for a left-to-right characterto occur Orthographic Satiation. Cheng & Wu (1994) also acknowledged that:“Semantic Satiation, as Orthographic Satiation, is a phenomenon triggered by aprolonged view.”

Conclusion

The current study is an experimental study of Chinese-oriented satiation. In thestudy, three problems or disputes among the scholars concerning this phenomenon arcnoticed，and explanationsfor each problem are offered by applying experiments andrelevant theories.To begin with, the relationship between English Semantic Satiation andOrthographic Satiation in traditional Chinese characters is studied as the first concern.Although Taiwan scholars argue that in orthographic Satiation only decomposition ofa character occurs and its meaning is unaffected, the results of experiment one provetwo things: first, simple Chinese characters with only one component can also occurorthographic decomposition after repeated stimulation, which agrees with Taiwanscholar's studies and differs from Japanese scholars', and settles the dispute amongthem. Sccond. simple Chinese characicrs with one component may suffer a loss ofmeaning in Orthographic Satiation, which is against Taiwan scholars" studies. Takingthese two points as basis, the thesis comes to the conclusion that OrthographicSatiation is the first level of Semantic Satiation. Then, by applying Hjelmslcv's theoryof System of Signification: ERC.
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