A Comparative Study Of Chinese College Students And Primary School Students In Lexical Processes:Evidence From Eye Movement In Loud Reading

Reading aloud is a phonatory reading form.Reading aloud is very important for early childhood's literacy improvement.Children use reading aloud to improve their literacy by adults' help.A national strategy call "Civil Reading " has been published in China.In order to help this strategy,it is important to research the cognitive mechanism of Chinese reading.In the present literature,most research about Chinese reading focus on read silently.Reading aloud is a necessary tool of any language beginner(child or foreign language learners).So,it is quite necessary to study the mechanism of reading aloud in Chinese.This research focus on the word segmentation,the word frequency,the word length,the visual complexity,the character positional frequency and the word spacing in loud reading.This paper includes three researches and five experiments.The research one focuses on the influence of the word frequency,the word length and the visual complexity.The research one include one experiment.Subjects of this research are pupils in grade three and college students.The experimental instrument is Eyelink1000plus.Experiment one focuses on the influence of the word frequency,the word length and the visual complexity in the lexical recognition of read aloud.The result show that,grade three pupils show stronger effect in the word frequency and the visual complexity than college students.It means the efficiency of lexical processes in grade thee pupils is low.In addition,the result shows stronger word frequency effect in long words and stronger visual complexity effect in short words.The research two focuses on the influence of the character positional frequency of read aloud.The research two includes two experiments,Subjects of this research are pupils in grade three and college students.The experimental instrument is Eyelink1000lus.The design of this experiment is 2(Age:pupils,college students)×2(the word-initial character positional frequency:High,Low).Experiment two focuses on the influence of the word-initial character positional frequency of read aloud.The result show that the word-initial character positional frequency is the important clue for word segmentation in read aloud.In addition,grade three pupils depend on this clue more than college students.Experiment three focuses on the influence of the word-final character positional frequency of read aloud.The design of this experiment is 2(Age:pupils,college students)×2(the word-final character positional frequency:High,Low).The result show that the word-final character positional frequency is the important clue for word segmentation in read aloud.In addition,grade three pupils depend on this clue more than college students.The research three focuses on the influence of the character positional frequency and the word spacing in read aloud.The research three includes two experiments,Subjects of this research are pupils in grade three and college students.The experimental instrument is Eyelink1000plus.Experiment four focuses on the influence of word-initial character positional frequency and the word spacing in read aloud.The design of this experiment is 2(Age:pupils,college students)×2(the word-initial character positional frequency:High,Low)x2(the word spacing:Space,Normal).The result show that the word spacing is the important clue for word segmentation in read aloud.Secondly,grade three pupils depend on this clue more than college students.Finally,the word spacing and the word-initial character positional frequency is mutually exclusive in read aloud.Experiment five focuses on the influence of word-final character positional frequency and the word spacing in read aloud.The design of this experiment is 2(Aae:pupils,college students)×2(the word-final character positional frequency:High,Low)×2(the word spacing:Space,Normal).The result show that the word spacing is the important clue for word segmentation in read aloud.Secondly,grade three pupils depend on this clue more than college students.Finally,the word spacing and the word-final character positional frequency is mutually exclusive in read aloud.The result of this research indicates that.(1)There are strong effect of the word frequency,the word length and the visual complexity in read aloud.In addition,the result of research one found a stronger effect of grade three pupils than college students.(2)The character positional frequency of word-initial and word-final is a important clue of word segmentation in read aloud.In addition,the dependence on the character positional frequency of grade three pupils is stronger than college students.(3)The word spacing is an important clue to word segmentation in read aloud.In addition,the dependence on the word spacing in grade three pupils is stronger than college students.The effect of the word spacing and the character positional frequency is independent.There are no interaction between these two factors.