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A large-scale database of Chinese characters and words collected from elementary school textbooks

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Abstract

Lexical databases are essential tools for studies on language processing and acquisition. Most previous Chinese lexical databases have focused on materials for adults, yet little is known about reading materials for children and how lexical properties from these materials affect children’s reading comprehension. In the present study, we provided the first large database of 2999 Chinese characters and 2182 words collected from the official textbooks recently issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People’s Republic of China for most elementary schools in Mainland China, as well as norms from both school-aged children and adults. The database incorporates key orthographic, phonological, and semantic factors from these lexical units. A word-naming task was used to investigate the effects of these factors in character and word processing in both adults and children. The results suggest that: (1) as the grade level increases, visual complexity of those characters and words increases whereas semantic richness and frequency decreases; (2) the effects of lexical predictors on processing both characters and words vary across children and adults; (3) the effect of age of acquisition shows different patterns on character and word-naming performance. The database is available on Open Science Framework (OSF) (https://osf.io/ynk8c/?view_only=5186bd68549340bd923e9b6531d2c820) for future studies on Chinese language development.

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Acknowledgments

The first two authors contributed equally to the manuscript. We thank Leshan Chen for inspiring the research idea. The database is available on Open Science Framework (OSF) (https://osf.io/ynk8c/?view_only=5186bd68549340bd923e9b6531d2c820).

Funding

The study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31871097), the National Key Basic Research Program of China (2014CB846102), the Interdisciplinary Research Funds of Beijing Normal University, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2017XTCX04).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Man Zhang, Qinpu Dang, Qiming Yuan, Li Liu & Taomei Guo

  2. Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Zeping Liu

  3. Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Mona Roxana Botezatu

  4. Chinese Language and Culture College, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Jinzhuo Han

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  1. Man Zhang
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Zhang, M., Liu, Z., Botezatu, M.R. et al. A large-scale database of Chinese characters and words collected from elementary school textbooks. Behav Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02214-1

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