Eye Movement Studies Of The Subvocal Articulation Of Chinese Vocabulary

When we're reading silently,it seems that we are able to hear “the voices in our mind",this is the alleged sub-vocal articulation.Although we can feel the sound in mind,we know little about its emergence and internal mechanism,which leads to our thinking of the phenomenon as delusion even under some circumstances(for example,skilled reading).The western research found the existence of sub-vocal articulation in phoneticized words and established the hypothesis of it.However,the essence and processing time of which and other respective questions are not further studied.The study of sub-vocal articulation is still empty in Chinese,which results in utilizing the method and database of studying western languages in researching it when it comes to culture crossing fields.These two experiments in this paper are mainly around whether there is a sub-vocal articulation and the processing time of phonologial coding in Chinese vocabulary recognition.Eyes tracking technology and boundary paradigm were used with the support of Chinese sentence as the material in experiment 1,in order to find out whether there's a sub-vocal articulation in Chinese sentence reading.There are three different sounds(completely the same,similar pronunciation,completely different pronunciation and meanings)being found when the eyes were crossing the defined boundary.The results showed that the viewing time of target words are longer than post-target word under three irrespective spoken conditions;On the viewing of target word showed that there is no irrespective spoken word effect;and on the other hand on the viewing of post-target word reading,we found this effect;the three variant conditions disappeared when aiming “N+2” target words.Experiment one has proved the possible existence of sub-vocal articulation,and speech coding being activated after vocabulary got accessed,and last until on “N+2” target words after being accessed.Experiment two is based on the experiment one and combined a articulation suppression task,namely when the participants are reading sentences silently meanwhile speaking unrelated sound(for example: ABCDEFG)?The task can prevent visual vocabulary in the process of silent reading pronunciation.There are two kinds of explanation for experiment one,one suggest that it is due to the subvocal articulation of Chinese vocabulary;Others approve of a different view which is that there is no silent reading pronunciation,the results may be due to the different recognition of the three spoken words.In order to examine what is the fact,I conduct the experiment two.After analysis of the data we found that there is no any difference between the three conditions on the reading of target word and target word.It means that the result of experiment one is not because the different recognition of the three different types of sound in our brain.The results of experiment two provide further evidence to support the existence of subvocal articulation in Chinese vocabulary.This study draws three conclusions:(1)Subvocal articulation appears in Chinese reading,and it is according with sub-vocal articulation hypothesis.(2)There is a different of the appearance of the timeline of sub-vocal articulation between Chinese reading and English reading.The sub-vocal articulation of Chinese vocabulary appears after word identification,but the sub-vocal articulation of English appears before word identification.(3)The sub-vocal articulation of Chinese vocabulary appears after word identification,and still active in post-target word reading.And eventually disappears in N+2 target word reading.