Simplified Chinese lexicon project: A lexical decision database with 8105 characters and 4864 pseudocharacters.

Abstract

This paper presents the Simplified Chinese Lexicon Project (SCLP), which collects lexical decision data for all 8105 characters in the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters and for 4864 pseudocharacters, which were generated using a novel method that leveraged the hierarchical nature of Chinese characters. We compared the collected data to existing megastudies on Chinese characters, and found that the newly collected data performed similarly in terms of reliability. The comprehensive coverage of simplified Chinese characters in the present study added to the existing studies by allowing for a more fine-grained investigation of the effects of a variety of character attributes on visual processing. We illustrated these advantages by performing virtual experiments on visual complexity and on the interplay between neighborhood size and regularity. Our results indicated that characters with higher visual complexity were harder to recognize, in line with previous findings, while regular characters took longer to process when the neighborhood size was small. In addition, we present a new evaluation of the interaction between character frequency and subcomponent frequency, resulting in a three-way interaction among character frequency, radical frequency, and residual component frequency. Extending the investigation of subcomponent frequency to the analysis of pseudocharacters, we found that the interaction of radical frequency and residual component frequency also modulated pseudocharacter rejection. To support researchers in conducting behavioral experiments or statistical modeling, we provide both trial-level data and experiment materials.