How Semantic Radical in Chinese Language Facilitated Inductive Reasoning

Abstract

Sixteen healthy undergraduate students were employed to explore how semantic radical in Chinese language facilitated inductive reasoning. Pseduo Chinese characters were employed as experiment material, have of them with right orthography and half were wrong. Participants were asked to do the inductive resoning tasks based on these pseduo characters. The result showed that: semantic radical, be it physical or semantic features, facilitated the inductive inference and such facilitation was closely related to the processes of semantic radical as lexical information was accessed early than that of conceptual information. Furthermore, semantic radical facilitated the inductive inference independently without the access to the meaning of a certain character.