Effect Of Tongue Twisters On Chinese Reading:Evidence From Eye Movements

Previous studies have found the tongue twister effect(TTE).The tongue twisters took more time than the normal sentences both in silent reading and oral reading.It is widely reported that one window on phonological processing during ordinary reading is the tongue-twister effect(TTE).There are sufficient evidences to conclude that the TTE is due to phonological interference rather than visual confusion.And there are also evidences that the TTE can influence performance in memory tasks and reading efficiency.It is an interesting question that how the phonologically similar or homophonic characters influence the Chinese reading.The current study employed two experiments to investigate the TTE in Chinese reading and effect of the tongue twister on the perceptual span in Chinese reading.In Experiment 1,the experiment design was one-way(sentence types:tongue twister,normal sentence)within-subjects design.19 undergraduate students participated in the experiment.Their eye movements were recorded with SR Research Eyelink 2000 eye tracker.In global analysis,the results showed an effect of tongue twister,that is there were longer reading time,slower reading rate,more fixations and shorter mean saccade length for tongue twisters than for normal sentences.In local analysis,the results also showed an effect of tongue twister on early and late eye movement measures.The Experiment 1 provides further evidence to demonstrate the TTE in Chinese.The results also indicated that the effect of tongue twister occurs relatively early during sentence processing.Phonological processing plays an important role on normal reading.The Experiment 2 use moving window paradigm to explore the reading perceptual span of tongue twisters and further to indicate the influence of the TTE on reading efficiency.The experiment design was 2(sentence types:tongue twisters,normal sentences)× 6(windowsize:R0,L1R1,L2R2,L3R3,L4R4,and full line)mixed design.A total of 50 undergraduate students participated in the experiment.Their eye movements were recorded with SR Research Eyelink2000 eye tracker.The result shows that the perceptual span was one to two characters to the right of the fixated word the tongue twister and the perceptual span was two-three character to the right of the fixated word for the normal sentence.The overall results show that the perceptual span of tongue twisters became smaller compared to the normal sentences.The tongue twister effect influences reading efficiency.In conclusion:(1)The results showed an effect of tongue twister in Chinese reading,that is there were more fixations,slower reading rate and shorter toward saccade length for tongue twisters than for normal sentences.(2)The perceptual span of tongue twisters became smaller compared to the normal sentences.(3)Phonological processing plays an important role in normal reading.