Study Points And Shear Semantic Processing Of Chinese Poetry

Many researchers have found that spaces between words facilitate reading in alphabetic writing systems like English and nonalphabetic scripts such as Japanese. There is no obvious boundaries to discriminate words in Chinese writing systems. Moreover, Chinese poems are special in their structure. It is interesting to examine whether visual cues can facilitate the comprehension of classical Chinese poems or not.Two experiments were carried out and four marked conditions were included:normal Chinese poem lines, lines with marked single words, lines with marked rhythm, lines with marked meanings. Gray highlighting was used to create these conditions. In experiment1, the poem lines were presented visually. There were significant differences among four conditions in saccades, total number of fixations and fixation durations. And we found that the single word highlighting increased the difficulty of reading classical Chinese poems. Global and local measures did not support the theory of an interword spacing effect that has been shown in many spaced and unspaced languages. Poem lines in the Meaning Condition had fewer saccades, fewer fixations, and shorter fixation durations as compared with other conditions. Lines in the Word Condition had the greatest number of forward saccades, the greatest total number of fixations, and the longest fixation durations. These results demonstrated that meaning units play an important role in classical Chinese poem reading.In experiment2, the poem lines with different marked conditions were presented in auditory form. The accuracy rates of different conditions were remarkably distinct. And the accuracy rate of poem lines with marked single words was higher than that of normal Chinese poems lines, and lines with marked rhythm. And the accuracy rate of poem lines with marked meanings was higher than that of lines with highlighted rhythm.So, we can get that there is a kind of effect on word segmentation in classical Chinese poems comprehension. And these effects in visual channel are different from that in auditory channel.