Lexical Visual Encoding And Characters And Words Processing In Chinese Reading:Evidence From Eye Movements

This academic paper contains three studies,which investigate the characters and words processing during preview and fixating phrases.By doing these we want to explore mechanism of characters and words processing in Chinese reading.The first study was conducted to explore the characteristics of text visual encoding of word n and n+1 during Chinese reading.By doing these,we want to clarify visual information encoding procession during Chinese reading is based on word or characters.If encoding procession is based on characters,the impairment to reading performance from disappearing manipulations should be mediated by number and locations of character disappeared.On the contrary,word based hypothesis deny this results.This study contain two disappearing text experiments.The first experiment was conducted to explore the visual encoding in preview frames.The results of Experiment 1 have showed that the disruption caused by disappearing manipulations was mediated by number and locations of character disappeared,thus indicated that encoding procession is based on characters in preview phrase in Chinese reading.The second experiment was conducted to explore the visual encoding in fixation frames.It was found that character of fixated word disappearing conditions disrupted the reading performance equally with the word n disappearing conditions within the same onset time which meant that encoding procession is based on word in fixation frames during Chinese reading.With mask paradigms,the first three experiments of study 2 were conduced to check how characters processing influenced on down-top word processing in in preview phrase.It were found that all the mask conditions.did not influence the word frequency effects.The fourth experiment was conduced to check how characters processing influenced on top-down word processing in in preview phrase.Specifically,we found that the manipulation in which readers are deprived of previewing processing eliminates predictability effects,and providing boundary information of the n+lth word decreases the discrepancy between words of high predictability and words of low predictability.Thus results of study 2 indicated that top-bottom processing,such as anticipation,is an important reference cue to readers of Chinese to segment the n+lth wordWith boundary paradigm,the characters of word processing in fixation frame were explored the Study 3 by investigating how character order encoding influence on word processing in fixation frame during Chinese reading.The first experiment of this study contain two display type of target word:participants preview and fixate an identical word as the control,and participants preview the target word but when the eye cross the boundary the word was changed into transposed character no-word.The results have shown that this manipulation eliminate the word frequency effect.The last experiment(Experiment 8)explored how character order encoding influence on word predictability effects.It contained three conditions(such as the condition of transposed character no-word in fixation frame,the condition of transposed character no-word in whole frame and a condition of normal display word).We have found that transposed character no-word in fixation frame condition interrupted word processing more seriously than the transposed character no-word condition,and that both of transposed character no-word conditions did not interrupted predictability effect.Thus results of study 2 indicated that characters processing did influenced on down-top word processing in fixation frame.The results of current academic paper indicated that(1)there are two levels processing for the recognition word at least,it was necessary to process characters when recognized word,and that(2)the role of characters processing is different for down-top and top-down word processing both in preview and fixation frames.