Semantic transparency of radicals in chinese characters: An ontological perspective

This study aims to investigate how nativespeakers of Chinese perceive the semantictransparency of radicals in Chinese charactersand how their perception is related to the ontological representation of characters. More specifically, we use semantic transparency as ameasurement to compare the perception of native Chinese speakers of various dialects fromdifferent regions, including Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan. We explore severalfactors that may potentially cause convergenceor divergence of native speakers' perception.Our results show that the performances of participants from various regions converge witheach other. From this, we conclude that Chinese speakers of various dialects share an ontological representation of characters and have anagreement concerning which ontological relation is more closely related to basic concepts,which provides evidence for the psychologicalreality of Chinese orthography. We also provethat the crowdsourcing method is a powerfuland effective tool for empirical linguistic research.