Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
DOI 10.3758/s13421-014-0430-1
The modulation of semantic transparency on the recognition
memory for two-character Chinese words
Yi-Jhong Han & Shuo-chieh Huang & Chia-Ying Lee &
Wen-Jui Kuo & Shih-kuen Cheng
Published online: 4 June 2014
# Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2014
Abstract This study demonstrated that semantic transparency as a linguistic property modulates the recognition memory
for two-character Chinese words, with opaque words
(i.e., words whose meanings cannot be derived from constituent characters—e.g., “光[/guang/, light]棍[/gun/, stick]”,
bachelor) remembered better than transparent words (i.e.,
words whose meanings can be derived from constituent characters—e.g., “ 茶 [/cha/, tea] 杯 [/bei/, cup]”, teacup). In
Experiment 1, the participants made lexical decisions on
transparent words, opaque words, and nonwords in the study
and then engaged in an old/new recognition test. Experiment 2
employed a concreteness judgment as the encoding task to
ensure equivalent semantic processing for opaque and transparent words. In Experiment 3, the neighborhood size of the
two-character words was manipulated together with their semantic transparency. In all three experiments, opaque words
were found to be better remembered than transparent words.
We concluded that the conceptual incongruence between the
meanings of a whole word and its constituent characters made
opaque words more distinctive and, hence, better remembered
than transparent words.
Keywords Semantic transparency . Recognition memory .
Remember/know
Y.<J. Han : S.<c. Huang : S.<k. Cheng (*)
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, National Central University,
No. 300, Jhongda Rd., Jhongli City, Taoyuan County 32001, Taiwan
e-mail: [email protected]
C.<Y. Lee
Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
W.<J. Kuo
Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University,
Taipei, Taiwan
The study of recognition memory frequently employs words
as stimuli. Words with different characteristics can be viewed
as mini-events that are analogous to various types of episodes
experienced in real life (Tulving, 1983). The understanding of
mnemonic processes has been advanced by examining the
memory performance for different types of words. For instance, verbs are more difficult to memorize than nouns because verbs have greater variations in meaning, so the differences between encoding and retrieval contexts could create
more obstacles for the retrieval of verbs (Gentner, 1981;
Kersten & Earles, 2004). Concrete words are better remembered than abstract words because concrete words can be
encoded with dual codes and processed more elaborately than
abstract words (Fliessbach, Weis, Klaver, Elger, & Weber,
2006; Hamilton & Rajaram, 2001). In addition, the memory
performance of words is modulated by how often a word is
encountered, with low-frequency words eliciting better recognition performance than high-frequency words (e.g., Dobbins,
Kroll, Yonelinas, & Liu, 1998; Heathcote, Ditton, & Mitchell,
2006).
The orthographic and phonological properties of words
have also been used to examine the effect of distinctiveness
on recognition memory (e.g., Hirshman & Jackson, 1997;
Hunt & Elliott, 1980). Despite abundant research on the
distinctiveness effect in memory (e.g., Malmberg, Steyvers,
Stephens, & Shiffrin, 2002; Rajaram, 1998; Schmidt, 1991;
Wallace, 1965), distinctiveness is seldom defined unequivocally (Schmidt, 1991). Cortese, Watson, Wang, and Fugett
(2004) argued that words with few phonological and orthographic neighbors (i.e., words sharing a same rhyme, which is
spelled in the same way for all of these words) are more
distinctive than those with many neighbors. The authors
indeed found a memory advantage for words with small
neighborhoods. Glanc and Greene (2007) further reported a
recognition mirror effect (Glanzer & Adams, 1985, 1990;
Joordens & Hockley, 2000) as a function of neighborhood
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size. The hit rate was higher and the false alarm rate lower for
words with a small neighborhood size than for those with a
large neighborhood size. In addition, the hit and false alarm
parts of the mirror effect were respectively associated with the
remember and know judgments that have been used to index
the phenomenology of recollection and familiarity (Gardiner,
1988; Tulving, 1983) associated with retrieval. Glanc and
Greene (2007) therefore concluded that words with a small
neighborhood size are more distinctive and more likely to be
recognized with recollective experience than are words with a
large neighborhood size.
The present study presents another property of words that
can be used to investigate the distinctiveness effect in recognition memory. In three experiments, we examined how semantic transparency modulates the recognition performance
for two-character Chinese words. Semantic transparency refers to the relationship between the meanings of a whole word
and its constituents (Libben, 1998; Libben, Gibson, Yoon, &
Sandra, 2003). A two-character Chinese word is transparent if
its meaning can be derived from its constituent characters
[e.g., “茶(/cha/, tea)杯(/bei/, cup)”, teacup]. In contrast, opaque
words are those whose meanings cannot be derived from their
constituent characters [e.g., “ 陽 (/yang/, sun) 春 (/chun/,
spring)”, plain]. Previous studies of semantic transparency
mainly focused on the comparison between the morphological
structure and lexical organization of transparent and opaque
words (Libben, 1998; Libben et al., 2003; Mok, 2009; Myers,
Derwing, & Libben, 2004). In a study that examined how
memory performance is modulated by transparency, Wong
and Rotello (2010) reported that transparent words elicited
more memory conjunction errors than did opaque words
because of the semantic overlap between a transparent word
and its constituents. It was argued that the semantic congruency of a whole word and its constituents leads to greater
subjective familiarity for the lexemes of the transparent words
than for those of the opaque words. The false alarm rate was
therefore higher for the conjunction lures generated by
rearranging the lexemes of the transparent words than for the
lures generated by rearranging the opaque words. In Wong
and Rotello’s study, however, the hit rates were equivalent for
the transparent and opaque words. It was not clear why the
greater familiarity associated with the lexemes of the
transparent words, in comparison with the opaque words,
contributed to the memory conjunction errors but not to the
veridical recognition of the studied words. A possible
interpretation is that the greater familiarity associated with
the transparent words was offset by the recognition
advantage caused by the semantic incongruence between an
opaque word and its constituents.
The present study examined how the inconsistency between the meanings of a whole word and its constituent
characters modulates recognition memory performance. We
hypothesized that the incongruence between the meanings of
Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
an opaque word and its constituents results in semantic conflicts during lexical access that require additional efforts to
resolve. Resembling the processing distinctiveness proposed
by Schmidt (1991), the conflict resolution processes that were
uniquely required for the opaque words make their representations marked and better remembered than transparent words.
The remember/know procedure was employed to examine
whether the recognition advantage for opaque words, if obtained, would be associated with recollective experience that
has been linked to conceptually distinctive items (Rajaram,
1996, 1998) or with the phenomenology of familiarity.
Experiment 1
A study–test recognition experiment was conducted to examine whether opaque words are better remembered than transparent words. In the study, participants made lexical decisions
on two-character Chinese real words and nonwords without
knowing the upcoming memory test. Half of the real words
were transparent, and the other half were opaque. In the
subsequent memory test, participants made old/new judgments on the studied and unstudied items that were both real
words (half of them transparent and the other half opaque). A
recognition advantage for opaque words was expected if
opaque words are indeed more distinctive than transparent
words.
Method
Participants
Thirty-two students (between 18 and 24 years of age) from the
National Central University, Taiwan, participated in the experiment. All participants were right-handed native Mandarin
Chinese speakers with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
They were paid 100 New Taiwan Dollars for their participation. Written consent was obtained from all participants. The
participants were not given the definitions of transparent and
opaque words until the end of the experiment. In the postexperiment briefing, no participants reported that they noticed
differences between these two types of words.
Materials
The stimuli consisted of 184 two-character Chinese words1
selected from the Academia Sinica balanced corpus (C.-R.
Huang, Ahrens, & Chen, 1998). Half of the words were
1
The 184 two-character words consisted of 361 characters in total, with 7
characters appearing in two words. The statistical results reported in the
experiments remain the same when trials containing these words were
excluded.
Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
transparent and the other half opaque in terms of the semantic
relationship between a whole word and its constituent characters. A 5-point transparency rating (5 = most transparent; 1 =
most opaque) of these words, obtained from 24 university
students who did not participate in the present study, confirmed that words designated as transparent were more transparent (mean = 4.32, SD = 0.36) than those designated as
opaque words (mean = 1.55, SD = 0.45), t(182) = 46,35, p <
.001. The frequencies of the transparent (25.23 per million)
and opaque (25.72 per million) words were statistically equivalent, as were their neighborhood sizes and degrees of concreteness. The neighborhood size for a two-character Chinese
word is defined as the number of words that share the same
constituent character and position, regardless of the character’s meaning (H.-W. Huang, Lee, Tsai, Lee, Hung, & Tzeng
2006; Tsai, Lee, Lin, Tzeng, & Hung, 2006). For instance, 花
市 (hua1 shi4, flower market) has neighbors such as 花園
(hua1 yuan2, flower garden), which shares the first constituent
character, or都市 (du1 shi4, city), which shares the second
constituent character. The first-character neighborhood size
(14.52 and 15.09 for transparent and opaque words, respectively), second-character neighborhood size (16.79 and 16.22
for transparent and opaque words, respectively), and the
whole-word neighborhood size (15.66 for both transparent
and opaque words, calculated by totaling the sizes from the
two constituents then minus 1) were all matched for the
transparent and opaque words (all p-values>.8). A 7-point
concreteness rating (7 = most concrete; 1 = most abstract) of
the transparent (mean = 5.69, SD = 1.19) and opaque (mean =
5.38, SD = 1.71) words obtained from 20 university students
who did not participate in the present study revealed that these
two classes of words did not differ in the degree of concreteness, t(182) = −1.42, p = .16. In addition to the 184 real words,
92 two-character nonwords were used in the lexical decision
task in the study phase. The nonwords were generated by
rearranging real two-character words that were not used in
the present experiment. None of the nonwords were listed in
the corpus. The nonwords were not presented in the recognition memory test.
Procedure
The experiment was divided into a study phase and a test
phase. During the study phase, participants made lexical decisions on 46 transparent words, 46 opaque words, and 92
nonwords. Each study trial started with a cross fixation shown
at the center of the screen for 500 ms, followed by the
presentation of a study item. The study item was displayed
for 300 ms and was then replaced by a second fixation
character “@,” which was shown for 1,700 ms. Participants
judged whether the item was a real word or a nonword during
the 2,000-ms presentation time of the study item and the “@”
character. The screen was blank for 500 ms before the next
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trial. The presentation order of the transparent words, opaque
words, and nonwords was randomized for each participant.
Responses of the lexical decisions were made by pressing one
of two response keys with the index finger of each hand. The
mapping of the hands to the response categories (word vs.
nonword) was counterbalanced across participants. During the
study phase, participants were not instructed to memorize the
presented items and were not aware of the subsequent recognition test. Four filler trials were inserted at the beginning and
the end of the study phase.
After the study phase, participants engaged in a video game
distraction task for 5 min. In the following test phase, participants made old/new judgments on the 92 real words that had
been presented in the lexical decision task and 92 unstudied
new words. The unstudied new words, similar to the studied
old words, consisted of 46 transparent words and 46 opaque
words. The assignment of the real words to the studied and
unstudied words was counterbalanced across participants. The
presentation order of the studied and unstudied words in the
test was randomly assigned for each participant. Each test trial
started with a cross fixation at the center of the screen for
500 ms, followed by the presentation of a test item. The test
item was displayed for 300 ms and was then replaced by the
second fixation character “@,” which was shown for
2,200 ms. Participants made old/new judgments on the test
word during the 2,500-ms presentation time of the test item
and the “@” character. If a test word was identified as old, a
“remember or know?” prompt (in Chinese) was shown after
the offset of the “@” character, signaling the participant to
make the remember/know judgment.
Prior to the test phase, participants were explained that
“remember” refers to a conscious awareness of what happened or what was experienced at the time the word was
presented at study. Participants were instructed that a “remember” judgment should be made when the recognition of the
word is accompanied by a clear experience of its prior occurrence in the study phase, such as a particular association,
image, or appearance or position of the word. By contrast, a
“know” judgment should be made when they recognize the
word but cannot consciously recollect anything about its
actual occurrence or what was experienced at the time of its
occurrence (see the Appendix for the instructions). To confirm
that participants understood the instructions, they were asked
to explain how they determined whether to give a “remember”
or a “know” response during the practice. Responses to the
old/new judgments were made by pressing one of two response keys with the index finger of each hand. The mapping
of the hands to response categories (old vs. new) was
counterbalanced across participants. The remember/know
judgments were made by pressing one of two response keys
with the middle finger. The mapping of the middle fingers to
the “remember” and “know” judgments was also
counterbalanced across participants.
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Results and discussion
Table 1 displays the old response rates in the old/new recognition test together with the proportions of “remember” and
“know” judgments to the transparent and opaque words. A 2 ×
2 repeated measures ANOVA was conducted on the old response rate with the factors of old/new status (i.e., hit vs. false
alarm) and transparency (i.e., transparent vs. opaque). The
main effects of old/new status and transparency were both
significant, F(1, 31) = 598.59, MSE = .02, p < .001, and F(1,
31) = 31.86, MSE = .003, p < .001, respectively, showing a
higher hit rate than false alarm rate and that opaque words
elicited more old responses than did transparent words. The
interaction between old/new status and transparency was significant, F(1, 31) = 118.71, MSE = .002, p < .001. The simple
main effect2 analysis found that the hit rate was higher for
opaque words than for transparent words, F(1, 31) = 106.98,
MSE = .001, p < .001, and that the false alarm rate was lower
for opaque words than for transparent words, F(1, 31) = 5.57,
MSE = .02, p < .05.
To examine whether the recognition of transparent and
opaque words was associated with different degrees of
recollective experience, an ANOVA employing the same factors
as those in the analysis of the old response rates was conducted
on the proportion of “remember” judgments. The main effects
of old/new status and transparency were both significant, F(1,
31) = 263.12, MSE = .029, p < .001, and F(1, 31) = 54.77,
MSE = .004, p < .001, respectively, reflecting that there were
more “remember” judgments for hits than for false alarms and
for opaque words than for transparent words. The interaction
between transparency and old/new status was significant,
F(1, 31) = 81.22, MSE = .003, p < .001. There were more
“remember” hits to opaque words than to transparent words,
F(1, 31) = 119, MSE = .0042, p < .001. The simple main effect
of transparency in the false alarms was not significant (p = .66).
The subjective feeling of familiarity associated with the
two types of words was also examined. Because of the binary
nature of the “remember” and “know’ judgments, a testing
item that elicits both phenomenology of recollection and
familiarity will be responded to with a “remember” judgment
and counted as recognition associated with recollective experience but not familiarity. It follows that the raw proportion of
“know” judgments underestimates the occurrence of subjective feelings of familiarity in recognition. The phenomenology
of familiarity was therefore indexed by a corrected proportion
of “know” judgments (CK) derived from the formula CK = K/
(1−R), where R and K stand for the raw proportions of
“remember” and “know” judgments, respectively (Yonelinas
& Jacoby, 1995). The ANOVA on the corrected proportion of
2
The F ratios of the simple main effects reported here and in the
following experiments were computed with the mean squared errors from
the original ANOVAs.
Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
Table 1 Mean proportions (with SEs in parentheses) of the old response,
“remember” judgment, and “know” judgment for the opaque and transparent test words as a function of old/new status in Experiment 1
Old Items
Old response
Remember
Know
Corrected know
New Items
Transparent
Opaque
Transparent
Opaque
.66 (.03)
.42 (.03)
.24 (.02)
.40 (.03)
.81 (.03)
.60 (.03)
.21 (.02)
.51 (.05)
.13 (.02)
.03 (.01)
.10 (.02)
.08 (.02)
.07 (.01)
.02 (.01)
.05 (.01)
.05 (.01)
“know” judgments yielded significant main effects of old/new
status, F(1, 31) = 93.05, MSE = .052, p < .001, and transparency, F(1, 31) = 6.88, MSE = .008, p = .013, indicating that
studied items and opaque words elicited stronger feelings of
familiarity than do unstudied new items and transparent
words, respectively. The interaction between old/new status
and transparency was significant, F(1, 31) = 16.72, MSE =
.009, p < .001. For the hit trials, the corrected proportion of
“know” judgments was higher for opaque words than for
transparent words, F(1, 31) = 24.83, MSE = .009, p < .001.
The simple main effect in the false alarms was not significant,
F(1, 31) = 1.61, MSE = .009, p = .213.
To recapitulate the findings, the hit rate was higher and the
false alarm rate was lower for opaque words than for transparent words. Furthermore, the advantage in recognition performance for opaque words was associated with subjective
feelings of both recollection and familiarity. The better recognition performance for opaque words, in comparison with
transparent words, supports the hypothesis that the linguistic
differences between these two classes of words modulate
recognition memory. A plausible interpretation is that in the
encoding task of lexical decision, the incongruence between
the meanings of an opaque word and its constituents made
opaque words stand out. The opaque words were therefore
more distinctive and yielded better recognition performance
than did the transparent words. An alternative interpretation,
however, was that opaque words were more deeply encoded
than transparent words and, hence, were better remembered.
This conjecture was supported by the finding that in the study,
the lexical decision time for the opaque words (mean =
640 ms, SD = 103) was longer than that for the transparent
words (mean = 622 ms, SD = 97), t(31) < .001. Decisions that
require deeper semantic processing are generally slower than
those that require shallower levels of processing (Posner,
1969). The longer lexical decision time for opaque words
might reflect the involvement of deeper semantic processing
that was absent in the encoding of the transparent words. It
was therefore possible that opaque words were better remembered because of the deeper semantic processing they received
than transparent words. This possibility was examined in
Experiment 2.
Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
Experiment 2
This experiment investigated whether opaque words are better
remembered because they are processed on a deeper semantic
level than transparent words in the lexical decision task. This
aim was achieved by employing a concreteness judgment,
which requires deeper semantic processing than do lexical
decisions, as the encoding task. Both opaque and transparent
words should be deeply encoded and processed to the same
semantic level in the concreteness judgment task. If the different recognition performance for opaque and transparent
words observed in Experiment 1 indeed resulted from different levels of semantic processing for the two types of words,
the advantage for opaque words should vanish in the present
experiment. If the opaque words were still better remembered
than the transparent words, this would suggest that levels of
processing cannot exclusively explain the better recognition
performance for opaque words.
Method
Participants
Thirty-two students (between 18 and 26 years of age) from the
National Central University, Taiwan, participated in the experiment. All participants were right-handed Mandarin
Chinese native speakers with normal or corrected-to-normal
vision. They were paid 100 New Taiwan Dollars for their
participation. Written consent was obtained from all
participants.
Materials
The transparent and opaque words from Experiment 1 were
used as stimuli.
Procedure
The study phase was similar to that of Experiment 1, with the
exception that the lexical decision task was replaced by a
concreteness judgment task. Participants were instructed to
make a concreteness judgment (concrete, neutral, or abstract)
on 46 transparent words and 46 opaque words with the index,
middle, and ring fingers of their right hands. The procedure of
the subsequent test phase was the same as in Experiment 1.
Results and discussion
The mean response times of the concreteness judgments on
opaque and transparent words (mean = 997 ms, SD = 262)
were longer than the lexical decision times (mean = 631, SD =
100) observed in Experiment 1, t(62) = 7.37, p < .001,
reflecting that concreteness judgments were more difficult to
1319
make than lexical decisions. Importantly, the response times
for concreteness judgments on the opaque words (mean =
1,001 ms, SD = 255) and transparent words (mean =
992 ms, SD = 283) did not significantly differ from each other,
t(32) = 0.452, p = .65, revealing no evidence that these two
types of words were processed on different levels in the
concreteness judgment task.
Table 2 displays the old response rates in the old/new
recognition test, together with the proportions of “remember”
and “know” judgments to the transparent and opaque words.
The analysis of the old response rates showed that the main
effects of both transparency and old/new status were significant, F(1, 31) = 5.47, MSE = .005, p < .005, and F(1, 31) =
1,172.79, MSE = .016, p < .001, respectively. The interaction
between transparency and old/new status was also significant,
F(1, 31) = 32.83, MSE = .002, p < .05. The simple main effect
analysis found that the hit rate was higher for opaque words
than for transparent words, F(1, 31) = 19.31, MSE = .0048, p <
.001. However, there was no significant difference between
the false alarm rates for these two types of words (p = .28).
In the analyses of the “remember” judgments, the main
effect of old/new status was significant, F(1, 31) = 282.25,
MSE = .034, p < .001, reflecting that there were more “remember” hits than “remember” false alarms. The main effect
of transparency was not significant (p = .10), but its interaction
with old/new status was significant, F(1, 31) = 5.03, MSE =
.005, p < .05. The simple main effect analysis found that
opaque words received more “remember” hits than did transparent words, F(1, 31) = 7.27, MSE = .01, p = .01. The
proportions of “remember” false alarms to these two types
of words did not significantly differ from each other (p = .75).
For the corrected proportion of “know” judgments, the
main effects of old/new status and transparency were both
significant, F(1, 31) = 238.35, MSE = .046, p < .001, and F(1,
31) = 8.06, MSE = .013, p = .008, respectively. The interaction
between these two factors was also significant, F(1, 31) =
18.69, MSE = .008, p < .001. The corrected proportion of
“know” judgments was higher for hits to opaque words than
for hits to transparent words, F(1, 31) = 20.05, MSE = .008, p
< .001. On the false alarm trials, however, the corrected
proportion of “know” judgments was statistically equivalent
for opaque and transparent words, F(1, 31) = 0.21, MSE =
.008, p = .65.
The results of the old/new recognition test replicated the
hit-rate part of the mirror effect observed in Experiment 1. In
line with the expectation that a concreteness judgment requires deeper semantic processing, changing the encoding
task from lexical decision to concreteness judgment increased
the overall hit rate, t(62) = 2.96, p = .004. It was also found
that changing the encoding task diminished the hit rate advantage for opaque words, t(62) = 3.11, p = .003. Nevertheless,
opaque words were still better remembered than transparent
words. In addition, as evidenced by the results of the
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Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
Table 2 Mean proportions (with SEs in parentheses) of the old response,
“remember” judgment, and “know” judgment for the opaque and transparent test words as a function of old/new status in Experiment 2
Old Items
Old response
Remember
Know
Corrected know
speakers with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. They
were paid 100 New Taiwan Dollars for their participation.
Written consent was obtained from all participants.
New Items
Transparent
Opaque
Transparent
Opaque
.80 (.03)
.54 (.03)
.26 (.03)
.57 (.04)
.87 (.02)
.59 (.04)
.29 (.03)
.70 (.04)
.08 (.02)
.02 (.003)
.06 (.01)
.06 (.01)
.05 (.01)
.01 (.003)
.05 (.01)
.05 (.01)
remember/know judgments, the superior memory for opaque
words, in comparison with transparent words, was reflected in
both the phenomenology of recollection and familiarity. These
findings suggested that the recognition advantage of opaque
words, in comparison with transparent words, could not be
exclusively attributed to the different processing levels on
these two classes of words.
Materials
The stimuli contained 80 transparent words and 80 opaque
words that were selected from the materials of Experiment 1.
For both types of words, as can be seen in Table 3, half of the
words had a large neighborhood size, and the other half had a
small neighborhood size. The frequency and degrees of concreteness of the four stimulus categories (i.e., transparent and
opaque words from small and large neighborhoods), as shown
in Table 3, were statistically equivalent (all Fs < 1). In addition
to the 160 real words, 80 nonwords were used in the lexical
decision task in the study phase.
Procedure
The procedure was identical to that in Experiment 1, except
that there were fewer trials in Experiment 3.
Experiment 3
Results and discussion
This experiment investigated whether the memory advantage
for opaque words comes from the inconsistency between the
meanings of an opaque word and its constituent characters.
This aim was achieved by simultaneously manipulating the
semantic transparency and orthographic neighborhood size.
As was mentioned previously, the orthographic neighborhood
size for a two-character Chinese word is defined as the number
of words that share one of the two constituent characters and its
position, regardless of the character meaning (Tsai et al., 2006).
It follows that transparent words with a large neighborhood size
have more conceptually related neighbors and are, therefore,
less distinctive than transparent words with a small neighborhood size. For opaque words, on the other hand, the meaning of
the whole word is unique and independent from those of its
neighbors. An opaque word is always distinctive from its
neighbors whether the neighborhood is large or small. In this
case, the neighborhood size should have subtle or no effects on
the distinctiveness of opaque words. We therefore predicted
that transparent words with a small neighborhood size would be
better remembered than transparent words with a large neighborhood size. The effect of neighborhood size on recognition
memory, however, should not be observed for opaque words.
Table 4 shows the mean proportions of old responses to the
transparent and opaque words with large and small neighborhood sizes. Three sets of a three-way repeated measure
ANOVA employing the factors of old/new status, transparency, and neighborhood size were conducted on the old response
rate, the proportion of “remember” judgments, and the
corrected proportion of “know” judgments. For the old response rates, the main effect of old/new status was significant,
F(1, 31) = 1,022.61, MSE = .032, p < .001, reflecting that the
hit rate was higher than the false alarm rate. The main effects
of transparency and neighborhood size were also significant,
F(1, 31) = 17.61, MSE = .007, p < .001, and F(1, 31) = 19.19,
MSE = .006, p < .001, respectively, reflecting that opaque
words and words with a small neighborhood size received
more old responses than did transparent words and words with
a large neighborhood size, respectively. There was a significant interaction between old/new status and transparency,
F(1, 31) = 62.82, MSE = .003, p < .001. Follow-up simple
Table 3 Word frequency, concreteness rating, and neighborhood (NB)
size of the transparent and opaque words with large and small neighborhoods in Experiment 3
Method
Transparent
Participants
Small NB
Large NB
Small NB
Large NB
24.4
5.6
14.1
24.6
5.5
45.5
24.6
5.5
14.6
24.6
5.4
45.5
Thirty-two students (between 18 and 26 years of age) from the
National Central University participated in Experiment 3. All
participants were right-handed Mandarin Chinese native
Frequency
Concreteness
NB size
Opaque
Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
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Table 4 Mean proportions (with SEs in parentheses) of the old response, “remember” judgment, and “know” judgment for transparent and opaque
words with large and small neighborhood sizes as a function of old/new status in Experiment 3
Old Items
New Items
Transparent
Opaque
Transparent
Neighborhood Size
Old response
Remember
Know
Corrected know
Opaque
Neighborhood Size
Small
Large
Small
Large
Small
Large
Small
Large
0.78 (.02)
.49 (.03)
.29 (.03)
.54 (.05)
0.67 (.03)
.41 (.03)
.26 (.03)
.44 (.04)
0.85 (.02)
.57 (.04)
.28 (.03)
.64 (.05)
0.80 (.02)
.59 (0.4)
.21 (.03)
.48 (.05)
.08 (.02)
.03 (.01)
.04 (.01)
.05 (.01)
.06 (.02)
.01 (.01)
.05 (.02)
.05 (.02)
.06 (.01)
.02 (.01)
.04 (.01)
.04 (.01)
.05 (.01)
.01 (.01)
.04 (.01)
.04 (.01)
main effect analyses found that the hit rates for opaque words
were higher than those for transparent words, F(1, 31) =
47.16, MSE = .003, p < .001. The false alarm rates for these
two types of words did not differ from each other (p = .36).
The interaction between old/new status and neighborhood size
was also significant, F(1, 31) = 9.40, MSE = .007, p = .004.
The hit rate was higher for words with small neighborhood
size than for those with large neighborhood size, F(1, 31) =
29.47, MSE = .007, p < .001. The false alarm rates, however,
were statistically identical for words with large and small
neighborhoods (p = .45). The interaction between neighborhood size and transparency was not significant (p = .09), and
neither was the interaction between old/new status, transparency, and neighborhood size (p = .2).
The analysis of the “remember” responses found a significant main effect of old/new status, F(1, 31) = 282.74, MSE =
.056, p < .001, reflecting that hits were associated with more
“remember” responses than were false alarms. The main
effects of transparency and neighborhood size were also
significant, F(1, 31) = 27.44, MSE = .009, p < .001, and
F(1, 31) = 4.18, MSE = .008, p = .04, respectively, suggesting
that opaque words received more “remember” responses than
did transparent words, as did words with a small neighborhood size in comparison with those with a large neighborhood
size. The three-way interaction between old/new status, transparency, and neighborhood size was significant, F(1, 31) =
4.538, MSE = .006, p = .04. Two supplementary ANOVAs
employing the factors of transparency and neighborhood size
were conducted on the proportion of “remember” responses to
the old words and new words, respectively. For the old words
only, the interaction between transparency and neighborhood
size was significant, F(1, 31) = 7.104, MSE = .012, p = .012.
The simple main effect analysis found that transparent words
with a small neighborhood size received more “remember”
responses than did those with a large neighborhood size, F(1,
31) = 7.72, MSE = .012, p = .009. The simple main effect of
neighborhood size was, however, not significant for the
opaque words (p = .497).
Similar to the findings of Experiments 1 and 2, the main
effects of old/new status and transparency were both significant
in the analysis of the corrected proportion of “know” judgments,
F(1, 31) = 182.96, MSE = .081, p < .001, and F(1, 31) = 5.84,
MSE = .011, p = .022, respectively, as was the interaction
between these two factors, F(1, 31) = 10.96, MSE = .008, p =
.002. The corrected proportion of “know” judgments was higher
for opaque words than for transparent words on the hit trials,
F(1, 31) = 20.05, MSE = .008, p < .001, but not for the false
alarms (p = .65). The interaction between neighborhood size
and old/new status was also significant, F(1, 31) = 19.57,
MSE = .01, p < .001. The corrected proportion of “know”
judgments was higher for words with a small neighborhood
size than for those with a large neighborhood size on the hit
trials, F(1, 31) = 52.74, MSE = .01, p < .001, but not for the false
alarms (p = .89). There were no other significant interaction
effects involving the factor of neighborhood size (all Fs < 1).
In summary, Experiment 3 replicated the findings from
Experiments 1 and 2 in showing that opaque words were
better remembered than transparent words. The finding that
words with a small neighborhood size were better remembered than those with a large neighborhood size was also in
line with the argument that words with fewer orthographic/
phonological neighbors are more distinctive than those with
more neighbors (Cortese et al., 2004; Glanc & Greene, 2007).
Importantly, although transparency and neighborhood size did
not interact with each other in the old response rates, there was
a significant interaction among these two factors and old/new
status in the “remember” judgments. A higher degree of
recollective experience was associated with the recognition
of transparent words from small neighborhoods, in comparison with those from large neighborhoods. However, neighborhood size did not affect the recollective experience associated with the opaque words. This finding was in line with our
hypothesis that opaque words are always distinct from their
neighbors and, therefore, the recognition performance for
opaque words should not be affected by the size of their
neighborhoods.
1322
General discussion
Across the three experiments that used lexical decision or
concreteness judgments as encoding tasks, we have demonstrated that semantically opaque words are better remembered
than transparent words. The robust recognition advantage for
opaque words cannot be attributed to word frequency, concreteness, neighborhood size, or other linguistic attributes that
have previously been shown to affect recognition performance
(Glanc & Greene, 2007; Jessen, Heun, Erb, Granath, Klose,
Papassotiropoulos and Grodd 2000; Joordens & Hockley,
2000), because all of these factors were statistically matched
for the opaque and transparent words used in the experiments.
These findings suggest that the recognition performance for
two-character Chinese words is affected by semantic transparency—that is, whether the meaning of a whole word can be
derived from the meanings of its constituent characters.
The question of interest is why opaque words are better
remembered than transparent words. One possible answer lies
in the structures of these two types of words. It has been argued
that opaque words are morphologically more complex and
harder to process than transparent words during lexical access
(Libben, 1998; Libben et al., 2003). A greater effort could have
been allocated to opaque words during encoding such that they
were subsequently processed to a deeper level and better remembered than transparent words. The longer lexical decision time
required to process opaque words than transparent words observed in Experiment 1 could be viewed as evidence that the
recognition advantage for opaque words was indeed one case of
the level-of-processing effect (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). If this
were the case, the recognition advantage for opaque words
should have vanished when the efforts required to process the
two classes of words were equivalent. However, as was shown in
Experiment 2, the recognition advantage for opaque words
remained. One could argue that the concreteness judgment might
still be shallower than the kind of processing elicited by opaque
words; the transparent words might still be processed to a
shallower level than the opaque words in Experiment 2.
Nevertheless, the encoding times for the transparent and opaque
words were equivalent in the concreteness judgment task, revealing no evidence that different amounts of efforts were devoted to the encoding of these two types of words. The recognition advantage for opaque words, in comparison with transparent words, therefore cannot simply reflect a level-ofprocessing effect for these two types of words. Instead, we argue
that the incongruence between the meanings of opaque words
and that of their constituent characters might be a possible reason
for the superior memory performance. The incongruence marked
the representations of opaque words during encoding, therefore
exhibiting a greater degree of distinctiveness in recognition.
It has been shown that distinctive items tend to elicit a
greater degree of recollective experience than do others in
recognition memory decisions (Rajaram, 1996, 1998). Indeed,
Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
the recognition advantage for opaque words in all three experiments was associated with the phenomenology of recollection
as indexed by the proportion of “remember” judgments.
However, the recognition advantage induced by the distinctiveness of the opaque words was not exclusively associated with
the phenomenology of recollection. As indexed by the
corrected proportion of “know” judgments, opaque words also
elicited a stronger feeling of familiarity than did transparent
words. This finding is in line with previous studies showing
that distinctiveness enhances not only recollective experience,
but also the phenomenology of familiarity (Kishiyama &
Yonelinas, 2003; Ozubko, Gopie, & MacLeod, 2012).
One might argue that the present study could not be exempt
from the criticism of tautology when it was argued that opaque
words are more distinctive and, hence, better remembered than
transparent words. In Experiment 3, the variable of neighborhood size was manipulated together with semantic transparency
to examine whether the distinctiveness of opaque words comes
from the inconsistency between the meanings of an opaque
word and its constituent characters. The rationale was that a
transparent word with fewer neighbors will be more distinctive
than that with more neighbors because the meanings of transparent words and their neighbors can be derived from their
common constituent characters. In contrast, the distinctiveness
of an opaque word is not affected by the number of its neighbors
because its meaning is unique and independent from its neighbors. Indeed, the effect of neighborhood size on recognition
memory performance was observed for the “remember” judgments on transparent words but not opaque words. The findings
of Experiment 3 therefore helped to define distinctiveness and
suggested that an opaque word is distinctive because its meaning is unique in comparison with its phonological and orthographic neighbors, whose meanings are conceptually related to
each other but unrelated and do not compete with the opaque
words during retrieval. The modulation of semantic transparency on the effect of neighborhood size, however, was observed in
the phenomenology of recollection, but not in familiarity, since
the interaction between these two factors was not found in the
overall hit rate3 and the corrected proportion of “know” judgments. This finding suggests that the competition between
meanings might involve only the recollection process proposed
by the dual-process models (e.g., Diana, Reber, Ardnt & Park
2006; Mandler, 1980; Yonelinas, 2002) or items with strong
memory strengths to elicit the phenomenology of recollection,
as would be argued by the single-process models (e.g.,
Donaldsons 1996; Dunn, 2004; Wixted & Stretch, 2004). The
“know” judgments and overall hit rates are not of sufficient
3
Note that despite the interactions involving both the factors of neighborhood size and transparency in the analysis of the old/new response
were not significant, similar to the analysis of the “remember” responses,
there was a greater tendency for the transparent words than for the opaque
words for the overall hit rate to be higher for words with small neighborhood size than for those with large neighborhood size.
Mem Cogn (2014) 42:1315–1324
sensitivity to detect the modulation of neighborhood size on the
distinctiveness of transparent words. A related issue is the
interpretation of the “remember” and “know” judgments.
There has been a long debate about whether these two types
of judgments should be linked to distinct processes or different
degrees of memory strength (for recent reviews, see Migo,
Mayes, & Montaldi, 2012; Wixted & Mickes, 2010). The
present study was not designed to investigate whether recognition is based on strength along a single dimension or two distinct
processes. The remember/know judgment was employed to
examine whether opaque words would elicit more recollective
experience and/or feelings of familiarity than would transparent
words. Nevertheless, the fact that the interaction between transparency and neighborhood size was found in the “remember”
but not “know” judgments could be interpreted by the dualprocess models in the way that the recollection process was
selected influenced by the competition between the words and
their neighbors. Further studies are needed to examine how
theoretical models that are based on single- or dual-process
theories can be applied to explain this dissociation effect.
It is worth noting that the finding of a recognition advantage
for opaque words, in comparison with transparent words, differed from the results of a previous study that used English
compound words to investigate memory conjunction errors.
As was mentioned in the introduction, Wong and Rotello
(2010) examined the effect of semantic transparency on memory
conjunction errors. Although they mainly focused on the false
alarms to the conjunction lures, rather than the veridical recognition of studied words, it was revealed in their two experiments
that the hit rate of the opaque words and that of the transparent
words did not differ from each other. The inconsistent findings
between these two studies cannot be simply due to language
variations, although alphabetic and nonalphabetic writing systems may indeed have differences for the encoding of the two
types of words. Examining the materials used in the two studies
might shed some light on why there were different findings. To
make a contrast with conjunction errors, Wong and Rotello
employed a number of “singletons” that can be used to assemble
compound words in both the study and test phases. In addition,
there were compounds that were studied as compounded but
split into their component lexemes at tests, as well as compounds
that were split into lexemes at study but tested as compounded
words. It is possible that the presentation of these singletons,
together with the assembling of the lexemes and the split of the
compound words at study and test, led participants to pay
attention to the meanings of the compound words and their
constituents regardless of whether the compound words were
transparent or opaque, hence decreasing the distinctiveness of
the opaque words. It would be interesting to examine whether
the opaque words used by Wong and Rotello would be better
remembered than transparent words when the singletons are not
used as materials alongside the compound words. If there remains no recognition advantage for the opaque words, it would
1323
suggest that the different morphological structures between alphabetic and nonalphabetic writing systems modulate the difference between the encoding of opaque and transparent words.
Finally, a mirror effect was observed in Experiment 1, with
opaque words eliciting not only a higher hit rate, but also a lower
false alarm rate than did transparent words. The false alarm part
of the mirror effect, however, was not significant in Experiments
2 and 3, although there remained a trend that the transparent
words received more false alarms than did the opaque words. It
is not clear whether this inconsistency was due to variations
across experiments or the floor effect for the false alarms, but it
does not compromise our conclusion that the conceptual incongruence between the meanings of a whole word and its constituent characters makes opaque words more distinctive and,
hence, better remembered than transparent words.
Acknowledgments Yi-Jhong Han and Shuo-chieh Huang made equal
contributions to this study. This research was supported by grants from
Academia Sinica and the National Science Council, Taiwan to Shih-kuen
Cheng (NSC 98-2517-S-004-001, NSC 101-2410-H-008-034, AS-102TP-C06).
Appendix
The instructions for the “remember” and “know” judgments
(translated from Mandarin Chinese)
A “remember” response is given when you have specific
sensational, perceptual, or cognitive experience associated with
the prior occurrence of the two-character word. This experience
could be from the environment (e.g., the physical properties of
the words, sounds heard during the prior presence, and the
words appearing before or after its presentation) or from your
subjective feeling (e.g., thoughts when you saw the words). If
you retrieve any of those images, thoughts, or appearances,
please give a “remember” response. In contrast, if you are very
sure that the word has been presented in the study phase but you
cannot find any sensational, perceptual, or cognitive experience
associated with its prior occurrence, please give a “know”
response. Please feel free to give your own responses. Please
distinguish between these two responses, because you will be
asked to explain why you gave a “remember” or “know”
response during the practice before the formal section.
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