An Eye-tracking Study Of Tongue Twister Effects In Chinese Sentence Reading

The role of phonology information in reading has always been a hot issue in the field of language processing.Many researchers have explored this issue.These studies also generally argue that phonology information is automatically activated during natural reading,but how these automatically activated phonology information affect the reader's reading comprehension process is still controversial.Previous studies found that the effect of phoneme overlap(such as the tongue twister effect)can be explored to investigate the role of phonology in reading.That is to say,the tongue twister effect is a strong evidence that reveals the role of phonology in reading.The tongue twister effect means that readers spend significantly longer reading time on tongue twisters than on normal sentences.At present,both English and Chinese have confirmed the existence of the tongue twister effect,and a lot of research has been done on the question of what is the tongue twister effect(What),when the tongue twister effect occurs(When),and how the tongue twister effect occurs(How).However,the current research findings on the "When" and "How" problems of the tongue twister effect are based on the study of the English tongue twister.There was still a lack of direct evidence in Chinese reading regarding the question of "When" the tongue twister effect occurs.Regarding the question of “How” the tongue twister effect occurs,on the one hand,the pronunciation interference interpretation believed that the automatically activated phonology features involve pronunciation position and method.How do these pronunciation positions and methods affect Chinese reading? The Chinese tongue twister effect is worthy of further clarification;on the other hand,the phonology working memory interference believed that similar or overlapping phonology representations will be stored in working memory,so how does the amount of similarity representation information affect Chinese tongue twisters?The development and change of the effect is also an important aspect worth exploring.Therefore,the present research will use eye tracking technology to carry out three studies on the "When" and "How" tongue twister effect,and systematically explore the processing characteristics of tongue twisters in Chinese sentence reading.The study 1 mainly solves the problem of "When"(Experiment 1),that is,through eye tracking technology,real-time recording of the development and change characteristics of tongue twister effect at different stages of cognitive processing.Because the tongue twister effect is closely related to phonology,compared with silent reading,reading aloud has a greater need for phonology.Previous studies had also found that there were differences in the effects of phonology on the two reading modes.Therefore,in order to better clarify the time course of the Chinese tongue twister effect,Experiment 1 simultaneously manipulated the sentence type(tongue twister and control sentence)and the reading method(oral and silent reading)two variables,to further investigate the time course of tongue twister effect and the adjustment of the reading mode to the time course of tongue twister effect.The result of Experiment 1 found that the tongue twister effect in reading aloud starts from the early word recognition stage to the sentence integration stage.In silent reading,the tongue twister effect appears relatively late,mainly in the late vocabulary processing and sentence integration stage.The study 2 mainly starts from the explanation of pronunciation interference,solves the problem of "How" the tongue twister effect occurs,and explores the influencing factors of the tongue twister effect in more detail.The interpretation of pronunciation interference argued that the automatically activated pronunciation characterization will involve pronunciation position and method.Therefore,the second study will explore the factors that influence the occurrence of Chinese tongue twisters from the perspective of phoneme position(Experiment 2)and phoneme type(Experiment 3).Experiment 2 manipulated the variable of the overlapping position of phonemes(overlapping initials,overlapping finals,and control conditions)to investigate the development and change characteristics of the Chinese tongue twister effect under different overlapping positions of phonemes.The results showed that,compared with the control conditions,the reading speed was significantly slower and the fixation time was longer under the two conditions of overlapping initials and overlapping finals.Moreover,in the late stage of word processing and sentence integration,the overlap of finals causes more interference than the overlap of initials.Experiment 3 manipulated the variable of phoneme overlap type(same phoneme overlap,similar phoneme overlaps and control conditions)to investigate the development and change characteristics of Chinese tongue twister effect in different phoneme overlap types.It was found that the overlap of the same phoneme and the overlap of similar phonemes both produced a significant tongue twister effect,that is,the reader's reading speed is slower and the fixation time is longer under the condition of similar phonemes and the same phoneme overlap.There is no significant difference in the interference degree of tongue twister effect produced by the same phoneme and similar phoneme.Study 3 further explored the "How" problem of tongue twister effect from the perspective of phonology working memory interference.Study 3 mainly manipulated the variable of the number of phonemes overlaps to investigate the development and change characteristics of the Chinese tongue twister effect,including two experiments(Experiment 4 and Experiment 5).Experiment 4manipulated the number of consecutive phoneme overlaps(overlapped 2 characters,overlapped 4characters,overlapped 8 characters,overlapped 12 characters),and investigated the development and change characteristics of the Chinese tongue twister effect as the number of phoneme overlaps increased.The results showed that compared with overlapping 2 characters and overlapping 4characters,readers had longer fixation time on overlapping 8 characters and overlapping 12 characters,and the difference in fixation time mainly appeared in the late stage of vocabulary processing and sentence integration stage.The overall data shows that as the number of overlapped characters increases,the reading speed gradually slows down,and the fixation time gradually increases.Considering that in natural tongue twister sentences,continuous phoneme overlaps often insert some phonetic irrelevant characters,so in Experiment 5,the variable of interval phoneme overlap was also manipulated(interval 0 phonetic irrelevant characters,interval 1 phonetic Irrelevant characters,2 phonetic irrelevant characters,3 phonetic irrelevant characters),in order to investigate the development and change characteristics of Chinese tongue twister effect with the addition of phonetic irrelevant words.The results found that inserting speech-independent characters in tongue twisters will affect the strength of the tongue twister effect,and as the number of phonetic irrelevant characters increases,the strength of the tongue twister effect will gradually decrease,and this significant impact mainly occurs in the late stage of word recognition and sentence integration stage.From the comparison of the three phonetic irrelevant conditions and the no phonetic irrelevant conditions,at least three characters must be inserted in the tongue twister to induce a significant change in the strength of the tongue twister effect.The results of the comprehensive study are as follows:(1)There is a stable tongue twister effect in Chinese reading,and the time course of tongue twister effect is different under different reading modes.For silent reading,the tongue twister effect mainly appears in the late stage of word processing,until the sentence integration stage;for reading aloud,the tongue twister effect has always existed from the early word recognition to the sentence integration stage.(2)The findings on the "How" effect of Chinese tongue twister further support the interpretation of pronunciation interference and phonology working memory interference.Firstly,from the perspective of pronunciation interference,the occurrence of the Chinese tongue twister effect will be affected by the pronunciation characteristics of the phoneme,such as the pronunciation position and method.The interference caused by the overlapping tongue twister effect of finals is greater than that of the overlapping tongue twisters of initials,and this interference mainly occurs in the late sentence integration stage.There is no significant difference in tongue twister effect induced by the same phoneme and similar phoneme.Secondly,from the perspective of phonology working memory interference,the intensity of the Chinese tongue twister effect will also be affected by the number of phoneme overlaps.The more the phoneme overlaps,the stronger the Chinese tongue twister effect will be,and the more interference it will cause to readers.Within the range of working memory capacity,the Chinese tongue twister effect may show a tendency of accumulation to a certain extent.In addition,the insertion of the number of unrelated characters will reduce the strength of the Chinese tongue twister effect,and the insertion of at least 3 phonology unrelated characters will have a significant impact on the strength of the Chinese tongue twister effect.(3)The cognitive processing characteristics of the Chinese tongue twister effect indicate that phonology has an important influence in Chinese reading.On the one hand,Chinese reading will also be affected by fine phonetic representations(such as pronunciation position and method,etc.).On the other hand,the influence of phonetic information in Chinese reading appears relatively late,mainly in the late vocabulary processing,but the influence is more lasting,until the sentence comprehension and integration stage.Based on the above findings,the present study tentatively proposed a cognitive processing model of tongue twister effect in Chinese sentence reading.