The Recognition Of Chinese Word In Sentence Context: The Effect Of Homophone Density

Reading is a important approach for people to obtain information.Besides,word recognition is the basic section of reading,which is also an important factor of reading.In the field of word recognition in psychology,what we have always focused are the process of word recognition and its influence in the sentence context.There are three theoretical models for the process of the word semantic access: the direct access hypothesis,phonologically mediated access hypothesis,and the dual-route hypothesis.Researchers have always focused on debating which of the three hypotheses the process of word semantic access belonged to.There was a study to find that the phonology accessed earlier than the semantic in word recognition.Lihai Tan(1997)had found in a naming task that homophones of synonyms facilitated target identification for primes with few homophones,but not for primes with many homophones,who put a concept named homophone density which referred to the number of a word' s homophone.And the study supported the phonologically mediated access hypothesis.In this research,we controlled the word where it was in sentence and its homophone density in the sentence context to find the effect of word recognition.This study used 2(homonymic density: high,low)× 3(position of the word in the sentence: the beginning of the sentence,the middle of the sentence,the end of the sentence)in the within-subject experiment.Through the analysis of the response time of junior high school students of the experiment,we examined the role of homonym density and word position which respectively in the high-restrictive contexts or low-restrictive contexts.The first experiment showed us that in the high-restrictive contexts the main effect of homophone density was significant,and the response time of the high homophone density word was significantly longer than the low;the main effect of position of word in sentence was not significant;the interaction between the homophone density and position of word in the sentence was not significant,too.In the second experiment,we found that in the lowrestrictive contexts the main effect of homophone density was significant;the main effect of position of word in sentence was significant,and the response of time of the key word in the middle of the sentence was significantly shorter than the beginning and the end of the sentence;the interaction between the homophone density and position of word in the sentence was not significant.The research obtained the following conclusions:(1)Compared with high homophone density word,the word with low homophone density was more conducive to access the semantic.(2)In the silent reading process of junior middle school students,whether the sentence was a high-restrictive context or a low-restrictive context,the phonological woundbe activated.This study supported the phonologically mediated access hypothesis.(3)There was a position effect of a word in a low-restriction context sentence,and when the word located in the middle of the sentence was easier to recognize than the word in the beginning of the sentence or in the end of the sentence.