The Role Of The Type And Location Of The Radicals Of Pictophonetic Characters In The Extraction Of Parafoveal Information

During the process of reading,readers can not only obtain information from current words in the fovea,but also preview some information from the words on the right in the parafovea.Previous research has shown that identification of Chinese characters is facilitated when phonetic or semantic codes are activated in the parafovea.However,it remains unclear whether any of these constituents plays a more important role in parafoveal processing during Chinese reading.In modern Chinese,over 80% of Chinese characters are comprised of a semantic radical(which provides semantic clues)and a phonetic radical(which provides phonetic clues).Because of this interesting feature,the phonogram character became an appropriate material for investigating the semantic and phonetic information processing at sub-lexical level.In the previous studies,the structure of phonogram characters was not controlled for,therefore the results of these studies may confuse the role of position and function.Using the eyemovement tracking technology,the semantic and phonetic parafoveal preview benefits at the sub-lexical was investigated in a natural reading process by 2 experiments,simultaneously.In Experiment 1,the same number of SP(which have the semantic radical on the left and the phonetic radical on the right)and PS(which have the opposite structure to SP)characters were selected and matched for word frequency and number of strokes.Four preview conditions were included(Identity,Semantic radicals masked,Phonetic radicals masked,and Both masked)to investigate the effects of semantic and phonetic radicals in reading,as well as the influence of position on both.The results showed that the masking of semantic and phonetic radicals both increased fixation time of target significantly,and the effect of phonetic masked was greater than semantic masked.When the position of radicals is considered,there is an interaction effect on gaze duration,which is shown that the gaze duration in semantic masked condition is significantly longer than in phonetic masked condition for SP characters,while the difference between the two conditions is not significant for PS characters.In Experiment 2,we only selected the SP characters which were more common in left-right structure characters.The regularity,consistency,and existence were controlled both in semantic and phonetic radicals.Six preview conditions were included(Identity,Semantic radicals at the same position,Semantic radicals at different position,Phonetic radicals at the same position,Phonetic radicals at different position,and Both masked)to investigate the influence of information extraction at sub-lexical level when the semantic and phonetic radicals are present at different positions.The results showed that when the position of phonetic radicals was exchanged,it caused great interference to its processing,but the information of phonetic radicals was still activated.While the effect of semantic radicals was not robust,and it was not sensitive to the exchange of positions.The following conclusions can be drawn from this study:(1)Chinese readers can obtain semantic and phonetic information at the sublexical in parafoveal processing.(2)In Chinese reading,the phonetic radical plays a greater role than semantic radical.But this advantage only appears in the SP characters which is more common.(3)When the phonetic radical appears at the same position as the target character,it can significantly promote the course of processing.However,when the phonetic radical appears at the different position,preview benefit will be reduced greatly.