Eye Movement Research On Chinese Homophone Effects Under Dissimilar Conditions

The development of new methods of measurement enables researchers to process information in real-time. Eye movement recording in particular, becomes a good way to study word recognition and language understanding. In this study, we utilize eye movement recording method and design experiments according to homophones characteristics and priming paradigm. We aim to explore the effect of phonological on word recognition and semantic accessibility and study homophones on two levels, namely phonological-activation and semantic-activation. The study is composed of three stages, including the preparation of experimental materials, exercises and formal experiment. The experiment consists of two parts. Part I is a two-factor full factorial experiment with replication with a 2 (word type: homophones, non-homophone)×2 (word frequency: high frequency, low frequency) matrix. Part II is a single-factor experiment, with two levels of variables:homophone and non-homophone misuse. Effective subjects were 27 randomly selected college students in Liaoning Normal University. All subjects were volunteers with normal vision (or corrected visual acuity). None of them had experience of eye movement experiments. After prior consent from subjects, two eye movement experiments were conducted in two days to evaluate homophone effect. One was lexical and phonological judgment upon phonological activation. The other was sentence true or false judgment upon semantic activation.The results are as follows:The main effects of word type and word frequency are significant on total fixation duration and number of fixations (p<0.05); The main effect of word type is significant on fixation count/total time show (p<0.05); The results of t test indicate that there're significant differences between the two patterns as for the non-homophones with low frequency on average pupil x diameter, total fixation duration, number of fixations, fixation count/total time (p<0.05). As for the using false research, there is significant difference between homophone false using and non-homophone false using (p<0.05). Based on the results of this study, conclusions can be drawn as follows:(1) Eye movement method is an effective way to study the homophone effect; (2) Both phonological and semantic tasks are found in homophone effect; (3) Total fixation duration, number of fixations and fixation count/total time show there are sensitive factors to homophone effect; (4) Eye movement experiment indicates that low-frequency non-homophones can be separated by the consistent and inconsistent tasks under phonological condition; (5) The results support Dual-route theory.