Parafoveal Processing Of Chinese Compound Word Morpheme During Chinese Reading:Evidence From Boundary Paradigm

The processing of compound words and the Chinese reading processing model have been the focus of Chinese studies.Among them,whether the compound word adopted morpheme processing or whole word processing was related to the way of compound word lexical accessing,and the compound word processing style during Chinese reading was parallel processing or parallel processing that was related to Chinese reader how to process the information in natural reading?To this end,the relationship between the compound word lexical accessing and the distribution of cognition resource during Chinese reading still need further study.Investigating this problem had important theoretical and practical significance for explaining compound word processing theory and Chinese reading processing model.Therefore,the current research following predecessors based on the use of boundary paradigm to reveal the rule of compound word parafoveal processing.The purpose was to further examine the adaptability of the existing compound word processing theory in parafoveal.Current study explores how the linguistic factors in the Chinese reading effected the reader's processing in parafoveal through three experiments.Mainly from the low level of linguistic factors(such as:word frequency)and high levels of linguistic factors(such as:semantics)two aspects.Which Experiment 1 to verify the impact of low-level linguistic factors,Experimental 2 or 3 explored the characteristics of compound word morpheme processing from the perspective of high-level linguistic factors.In Experiment 1,the classical boundary paradigm(Rayner,1978)was used to explore the effect of word frequency information on the preview effect of compound word morpheme by manipulating the whole word frequency of the word.The experiment used 2(word frequency:high/low)× 5(preview conditions:identical/reverse/the first character same and the last character replaced/the first word character replaced and last character same/control)two factors repeated design,while controlling the extra variables such as word frequency,morpheme word frequency,semantic predictability and stroke number.Experiment 1 discussed the influence of the semantic transparency of the whole word on the preview effect of compound words by manipulating the semantic transparency of the whole word and the preview condition.The experiment used 2(semantic transparency of semantics:semantic transparency/semantic blur)x5(preview conditions:identical/reverse/the first character same and the last character replaced/the first word character replaced and last character same/control)two factors repeated design.As the morpheme of semantic opaque compound words were not directly related to the compound word semantics,but semantic transparency compound were obvious,however,the semantic-headedness words were semantic transparency words.Therefore,experiment 3 was based on the experiment 2 to further explore the compound word morpheme semantic structure and location information processing on the compound word preview effects.Experiment 3 used 3(semantic headedness:double-headedness word/left-headedness word/right-headedness word)×5(preview conditions:identical/reverse/the first character same and the last character replaced/the first word character replaced and last character same/control)two factors design within subjects.The study drawed the following conclusions:(1)Chinese readers can extract the morpheme order information of the compound words and the morpheme information at different positions in parafoveal.(2)Compound word processing in parafoveal showed stable word frequency effect,weaker semantic transparency effect and stable semantic headedness effect.(3)Compound word morpheme order and morpheme information were not affected by word frequency factors,but they were influenced by semantic transparency and semantic headedness.(4)The compound words were processed serially in parafoveal during Chinese reading,and compound word processing theory can not fully explain the phenomenon of processing in parafoveal.