The Word Age, Familiarity, Concreteness And Word Frequency Effects Of The Development Of Research,

Word recognition is the hot point in the field of psycholinguistics. There are several models concerning the eye movement control during reading: Morrison's model, O'Regan's strategy-tactics model and Reichle's E-Z reader model etc. In our study, we investigated the influences of four intercorrelated variables on word recognition using a multiple regression analysis. The four variables were age of acquisition, familiarity, concreteness and frequency of words. We also examined the time course of these variables to provide data source for eye movement control model on Chinese reading.Three experiments were conducted. Eyelink II eye tracker was used to investigate the effect of age of acquisition(AOA), familiarity, concreteness and frequency effects of words on inspection duration. The three experiments tested three groups: 43 junior high school students, 43 senior high school students, 46 college students. We discussed the development of three groups on their eye movement characteristics during reading.The results are as follows:(1) Word frequency and familiarity influenced all word recognition process. They were important variables of word recognition;(2) AOA influenced the early process of word recognition;(3) There were consistent word frequency, familiarity, AOA and concreteness effects of words of inspection duration through three grades;(4) With the growth of the grades, the inspection duration on word decreased;(5) With the growth of grades, probabilities for skipping and probabilities for single fixations increased, probabilities for multiple fixations decreased.