| In the year of 2020,the publicity department of the CPC central committee issued the opinions on promoting the national reading work.The guidance noted: "Reading is a meaningful way to acquire knowledge and increase wisdom.It is a crucial way to inherit civilization and improve national quality.Further promoting national reading is of great significance in strengthening the construction of socialist spiritual civilization and promoting social progress."Word recognition is the premise of reading.Students learn about 10% of their vocabulary through classroom teaching,and most of the other words are learned through daily reading.Incidental novel word learning is the primary way of expanding vocabulary when individuals have built up their vocabulary to a certain level.Incidental novel word learning refers to the process that readers unintentionally acquire vocabularies through natural reading without any extra cognitive tasks.In studies investigating incidental vocabulary learning,gains have ranged from 7%to 63%.Compared to alphabetic writing,Chinese has been viewed as a logographic writing system,with weaker regularities for spelling-sound correspondence and stricter spelling-meaning correspondence rules.Most modern Chinese characters are compound characters with two components,one of which is semantic radical.It represents the meaning of the whole character.The overall ideographic degree of semantic radical is about 44%.This sublexical level of semantic information can provide more stable clues to the semantic categories of Chinese characters.Based on the self-teaching hypothesis of the dual-route cascaded model of reading,readers learn new words by constructing new word representations through bottom-up processing.So,how do Chinese readers construct novel words representations during reading? How does novel word form such as the number of strokes,word length and semantic radical influence the construction of novel words representation? This thesis consists of three studies with a total of seven experiments.A spaced learning-testing paradigm was used to explore the mechanisms of incidental novel word learning during Chinese reading by manipulating different levels of information about novel words forms.Study 1 aimed to examine how the number of strokes affects Chinese novel word learning.This study included experiment 1a and experiment 1b.Experiment 1a aimed to investigate the effect of the number of strokes on incidental novel word learning in long spaced learning.Forty-four undergraduate students were selected as participants and asked to read 15 informative sentences containing the same novel word for five consecutive days.We recorded eye movements during the learning phase and responses during the testing phase.Using a within-subjects experimental design,we manipulated novel words strokes(fewer strokes,more strokes)and sessions of the learning phase(the 1st,2nd,3rd,4th,5th session).The results of the learning phase revealed that:(1)the main effect of stroke number was significant on skipping rate and fixation time,such that novel words with more strokes were skipped less than fewer strokes novel words,and were fixated for longer times than their counterparts words with fewer strokes;(2)the main effect of learning phase was significant,the fixation time on both types of novel words significantly decreased across learning sessions.The results of the testing phase revealed that:(1)in the lexical decision task,only under the condition of fewer-stroke novel words were used as prime words,the response latencies on semantically related true words were significantly shorter than those for semantically unrelated target words;(2)participants performed well above the chance level at 25% in the orthographic choice task and semantic category choice task,indicating significant learning effect.Experiment 1b aimed to examine the consistency of the stroke effect in incidental novel word learning with short intervals between each learning session.Forty subjects were selected to record eye-movement data during the learning phase(half-day intervals between learning sessions)and key-press responses during the testing phase,using the same experimental design as Experiment1 a.The results of the learning phase were consistent with Experiment 1a.The results of the testing phase revealed that:(1)only under the condition of more-stroke novel words were used as prime words,the response latencies on semantically related true words were significantly shorter than those for semantically unrelated target words;(2)participants performed well above the chance level in the orthographic choice task and semantic category choice task.The purpose of study 2 was to examine the effect of word length on incidental novel word learning.It included experiment 2a and experiment 2b.Experiment 2a aimed to investigate the effect of word length on incidental novel word learning under the longer-interval spaced learning paradigm.Forty-one undergraduate student subjects were selected and asked to read 15 informative sentences containing the same novel word for five consecutive days.We recorded eye movements during the learning phase and responses during the testing phase.The experimental design was a 2(novel word length: three-character,two-character)× 5(learning phase: 1st,2nd,3rd,4th,5th)within-subjects experimental design.The results of the learning phase revealed that:(1)the main effect of novel word length was significant on skipping rate and fixation time,such that three-character novel words were skipped less than two-character novel words,and were fixated for longer times than their counterparts words with two characters;(2)the main effect of learning phase was significant,the fixation time on both types of novel words significantly decreased across learning sessions;(3)the interaction between them was also significant,especially,in the first three learning sessions,the gaze time and total reading time were significantly longer for the three-character words than for the twocharacter condition,and their total fixation count was significantly more than the two-character condition.The results of the testing phase revealed that:(1)in the lexical decision task,as both types of novel words were used as the prime stimulus,there was no significant difference between the mean RTs of the semantically related and unrelated target words;(2)participants performed well above the chance level in the orthographic choice task and semantic category choice task.Experiment 2b aimed to investigate the effect of word length on incidental novel word learning under the shorter-interval spaced learning paradigm.The same procedure as experiment1 b was used.Forty subjects were selected to record eye-movement data during the learning phase(in half-day increments).The experimental design was the same as in Experiment 2a.The results of the learning phase revealed that:(1)the main effect of novel word length was significant on skipping rate and fixation time,such that three-character novel words were skipped less than twocharacter novel words,and were fixated for longer times than their counterparts words with two characters;(2)the main effect of learning phase was significant,the fixation time on both types of novel words significantly decreased across learning sessions;(3)the interaction between them was also significant,especially,in the first four learning sessions,the gaze time and total reading time were significantly longer for the three-character words than for the two-character condition,and their total fixation count was significantly more than the two-character condition.The results of the testing phase revealed that:(1)under the condition of three-character novel words were used as prime words,the response latencies on semantically related true words were significantly longer than those for semantically unrelated target words;under the condition of two-character novel words were used as the prime stimulus,the mean RTs of the semantically related target words were significantly shorter than those of unrelated target words;(2)participants performed well above the chance level in the orthographic choice task and semantic category choice task;the accuracy of semantic category choice task and the score of interpretation of three-character novel words were significantly higher than two-character novel words.Study 3 aimed to examine sublexical semantic cues' effect on incidental novel word learning.It included experiment 3,experiment 4a and experiment 4b.Experiment 3 examined the effect of semantic radical transparency on incidental novel word learning.Forty university students participated in this experiment,in which,one learning session per half-day.The same procedure as experiment 1b was used.The within-subject experimental design of 2(semantic radical transparency: transparent,opaque)× 5(learning phase: 1st,2nd,3rd,4th,5th)was used.The results of the learning phase revealed that:(1)the main effect of learning phase was significant,the fixation time on both types of novel words significantly decreased across learning sessions;(2)in the first learning phase,the total fixation time and regressions in on the novel words with opaque semantic radical was significantly longer than that on transparent ones.The results of the testing phase revealed that:(1)the accuracy of semantic category choice task and the score of interpretation of transparent novel words were significantly higher than opaque novel words;(2)participants performed well above the chance level in the orthographic choice task and semantic category choice task.Experiment 4a was conducted to examine the effect of category consistency of semantic radical on incidental novel word learning.Seventy-two university students were selected to participate in this experiment.They were asked to read 15 informative sentences containing the same novel word at five sessions at 6-minute intervals.Eye movements during learning phase and responses during testing phase were recorded.The experimental design was a 2(category consistency of semantic radical: consistent,inconsistent)× 5(learning phase: 1st,2nd,3rd,4th,5th)within-subject experimental design.The results of the learning phase revealed that:(1)the main effect of learning phase was significant,the fixation time on both types of novel words significantly decreased across learning sessions;(2)in the first three learning phases,there was a significant effect of category consistency of semantic radical on probability of regressions in and total reading time on novel words;the total fixation time and probability of regressions in on the novel words under inconsistent condition were significantly higher than that of the novel words of consistent condition;in addition,the interaction between category consistency of semantic radical and learning phase was also significant,especially,in the third learning phase,the probability of regressions in of the novel words under inconsistent condition was significantly higher than that in the words of consistent condition.The results of the testing phase revealed that:(1)the accuracy of semantic category choice task and score of interpretation of semantic radical category consistency novel words were significantly higher than inconsistent novel words;(2)participants performed well above the chance level in the orthographic choice task and semantic category choice task.Experiment 4b was conducted to examine the effect of category consistency of semantic radical on incidental novel word learning.Sixty-nine university students were selected to participate in this experiment.The experiment procedure was the same as experiment 4a,except for the informative context was arranged after novel word.Eye movements during the learning phase and responses during the testing phase were recorded.The experimental design was the same as experiment 4a.The results of the learning phase revealed that: the main effect of the learning phase was significant,the fixation time on both types of novel words significantly decreased across learning sessions.The results of the testing phase revealed that:(1)the accuracy of semantic category choice task and the score of interpretation of semantic radical category consistency novel words were significantly higher than inconsistent novel words;(2)participants performed well above the chance level in the orthographic choice task and semantic category choice task.Taken together,the above findings,under the conditions of this thesis study,lead to the following conclusions.(1)Stroke affected novel words processing during the whole process of incidental vocabulary learning;this effect was consistent in long-intervals and short-intervals spaced learning paradigm.(2)Word length affected novel words processing during incidental novel word learning.Under long-intervals condition,word length had a significant impact on first three learning sessions;under short-intervals condition,word length significantly affected the first four learning sessions.(3)The semantic radical transparency affected the novel words processing at the first learning sessions.The category consistency of semantic radical affected the semantic integration of novel words at the third ssession of incidental novel word learning. |
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