The Advantage Of Chinese Psychological Word Processing Effect

There is no consistent conclusion that whether characters or words are the primary units in Chinese text reading. Given there are no spaces between words in Chinese text, even native Chinese speakers often do not agree on how to divide the continuous string of characters within a sentence into word. Moreover, words play a very important role in sentence reading. Based on the previous studies, we presume that words represented in readers’mind were primary units in reading, and we refer the cognitive representation words as psychological words. Two experiments were conducted to explore the superiority effect of the psychological words, which would indicated that the psychological words had mental reality and were processed as a whole.In experiment1, we employed the forced choice task to explore the superiority effect of psychological words. The material was consists of29psychological words Ⅰ (words) and29psychological words Ⅱ (phrases) and29non-words. The results were as follows:(1) Psychological words Ⅰ and psychological words Ⅱ were processed more easily than non-words;(2) There showed the same superiority effects on psychological words Ⅱ as on psychological words.In experiment2, Eyelink2000eye tracker was used to explore whether two-character psychological words and four-character psychological words showed the same superiority effects in contract to words and non-words in sentence reading.24students participated in the experiment. A highlight manipulation used in the sentences created4conditions of the key words:normal text, word highlight condition, psychological word highlight condition and nonword highlight condition.The results were as follows:(1)There was no more superiority effect on two-character psychological words than two-character words;(2)Four-character psychological words were much easier to be processed than words and nonwords; (3)Compared with the normal text, there was facilitative effect on reading the four-character psychological words highlight text; but in reading the word highlight text and non-word highlight text, there was more distraction.(4)The size of primary unit in reading was larger than words; the psychological words were the primary unit in sentence reading.