| dc.description.abstract | According to previous theories, phonology plays an important role in verbal short-term memory (VSTM). Meanwhile, orthography plays a role only when phonology is not available or less useful. Comparing to alphabetic languages, the correspondence between phonology and orthography is relatively opaque in Chinese. Therefore, the contribution of orthography to VSTM may be more likely to be revealed from Chinese characters. In the thesis, four experiments were conducted. The first two experiments manipulated the phonological and orthographic similarity among Chinese characters independently and attempted to determine whether the effect of orthography would be observed, even when the phonological information is helpful for the participants to maintain the memory items. The results showed the robust phonological similarity effect in the two experiments, which indicated that phonology plays a dominant role in VSTM. More important, the orthographic similarity effect was consistently observed when phonology of the stimuli was helpful to retain verbal materials. In addition, once the possible strategy of focusing on one of the radicals within a Chinese character while ignoring the other radical in Experiment 1 was prevented, Experiment 2 demonstrated the orthographic contribution to VSTM in both the phonologically similar and dissimilar characters. The findings of first two experiments suggested that although phonology is a dominant component for VSTM, orthography is also crucial to retain verbal stimuli. Experiment 3 manipulated the identity and positional information of the radicals within Chinese characters and investigated its impacts on VSTM. The results showed that both the identity and the positional information of a radical are important to determine the orthographic similarity among items in VSTM. Finally, Experiment 4 was designed to examine whether the non-linguistic visual similarity of Chinese characters would affect VSTM just like the linguistic orthographic similarity. The results did not reveal the effect of visual similarity. In addition, when comparing the visual similarity ratings from both the native Chinese and the foreign participants, who do not have linguistic knowledge of Chinese writing system, and the native Chinese participants’ VSTM performance, the results further confirmed that non-linguistic visual similarity did not influence the retention performance. Different from the physical perception (e.g., the similarity of stroke patterns), Chinese orthography is appeared at an abstract linguistic representation which would only have influence on the language users. Overall, the current findings supported the role of orthographic representations in VSTM, and were consistent with the psycholinguistic approach of VSTM. | en_US |