The Effect Of Word Predictability On Positional Information Process Of Chinese Word Morpheme

In order to discuss the specialty of word process in sentences context，this researchexplored the problem that what role the morpheme positional information played during thelanguage processing and when it happened, and investigated whether, how and when thesemantic predictability affected the position or identity information process. This study wasdraw some lessons from the transposition-letter effect study which based on alphabetlanguage, and established a new perspective on the processing mechanism of semanticpredictability in sentence context.The study involved two parts: processing transposed two-character word presented inisolation; processing transposed two-character word presented in sentence context.For the first part, two semantic priming experiments were used under two SOA(157ms\314ms) conditions. Participants were required to response a lexical decision task afterthree kinds of prime words (semantic related words, relate-transposed words, semanticunrelated words). This study found the transposed effect–the position of morpheme wasoverturned, while the sense could also be activated as the right order–during the earlyprocessing (157ms); position information played the role during the latter processing (314ms).For the second part, participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read sentenceswith the target word of the first part. In this experiment, four condition of the target were used,which were identity, transposed word, masked-beginning word and masked-ending word. Inaddition, the experiment dominated the context was predictability or unpredictability anddiscussed the effect of the context on the process of positional and identity information.Basing on the study result, some inclusions could be come to:(1)Reader can recognize the semantic of transposed word, but there will be inhibitionmore or less during the later process.(2)The influence of predictability not only arises after lexical access, but also occursduring lexical access.(3)In the sentence context, the predictability of two-character word can influent thefunction of morpheme positional information: high-predictability can eliminate the inhibitionto lexical access from wrong position information, and then, the effect of the wrong positioninformation will still appear later. But this effect is less than that come from morphemeidentity information. Low-predictability is not able to eliminate this inhibition at all.