Psychological Representation And Processing In Reading Process

Reading is closely to our daily life that we can get much more information from it. As one of the important issues in the field of reading, the primary unit of reading information has always been attention.There are natural word boundaries in the alphabetical writing system(such as English). It is uncontroversial that the alphabetic writing system reading is based on word.Chinese writing system is very different from English that character is the basic writing unit.There are no word boundaries and the primary unit of Chinese is still controversial. Even so,most studies have indicated words play an important role in Chinese reading.Readers should segment words correctly in reading if they perceive word as the basic processing unit. However,we find they have no clear word concept when they divide a string of characters into words.What is word in the concept of Chinese ? The research put forward psychological word as the primary unit of reading process.We consider the combination of character which represent semantic information are psychological words. It may be the traditional word or the combination of character which readers recognize a word. We conduct two studies to prove the reality and the efficiency of psychological word. In study one, we investigated College students’ word recognition to make them judge if the three or four character combination is word or not.The results showed they have difficult in distinguishing word and phrase and they tend to recognize phrase as word. This indicate that readers don’t have a clear word concept and they own their subjective knowledge for what is a word. In study two, we investigated the efficiency of psychological word. Shadow paradigm was adopted and four conditions were created: normal sentence condition, sentence with shadow to mark character, word and psychological word. Eye movements behavior during reading were recorded and analyzed according different conditions.It turned out that that the psychological word was processed more easily than the other three conditions.It takes more effort to process the sentence under character condition.The results indicated that reading process is not strictly in accordance with the character or word.Psychological word is more likely to be the primary unit during reading and it’s more flexible.Compared with the other three conditions, psychological word has obvious advantage.The reason is readers can process the current word more easily and locate next word under shadow mark. As a consequence, this helps readers consume less cognitive resources. In this point,psychological word is helpful to the reading. In words, two studies indicated readers’ representation of word is quite flexible. Psychological word is more likely to be the primary unit of Chinese reading and it is processed more efficiently.