Effect Of Character Frequency And Word Frequency In Reading Chinese Single Character Word And Compound Word:An Eye Movement Study

Chinese writing script is composed of a series of Chinese characters,there are spaces between characters,but there is no space between words.Therefore,in the process of Chinese cognitive processing,there is an ongoing debate about whether reading is based on characters or words.In addition,there is no consensus among the researchers supporting the words,and the argument is mainly focused on the way of communication of the compound words,that is,the two morphemes that constitute the compound word are processed word by word or the whole word.In recent years,researchers have proposed that the frequency effect can be investigated.Frequency,as a basic lexical level,can affect vocabulary recognition.Therefore,the basic logic of this series of studies is that if the frequency of morphemes will affect reading processing and the frequency of the whole word does not affect reading processing,it supports the whole word model.If the frequency of the word will affect reading processing and the morpheme frequency does not affect reading processing,the decomposition model is supported.This study used eye tracking technology,through the manipulation of single words' character frequency and word frequency,to further explore the way of Chinese single access representation of single words and compound words,which is divided into three experiments: Experiment 1,by comparing the importance of Chinese charcter frequency and word frequency,attempts to explore the access mode Chinese single character words;Experiment 2,by comparing the charcter frequency effect and word frequency effect of Chinese double character compound words,tries to explore the access mode of Chinese double-word compound words;Experiment 3,by manipulating the frequency of initial character of counpound words,to further explore the access mode of Chinese double-word compound words,and to investigate the compound word processing foveal load on the parafoveal preview effect.The results of the study are as follows:1,In the process of accessing Chinese single character words,when character frequency and word frequency are inconsistent,character frequency plays a more important role.In Chinese reading,at least when processing Chinese single character words,characters are salient perceptual tokens,instead of words in western alphabetic script.2,In the process of accessing Chinese compound words,word frequency plays a more important role,and the role of constituent frequency is affected by word frequency,when the word frequency is high,constituent frequency does not affect the recognition of whole word;when the frequency is low,constituent frequency have an effect on the recognition of compound word.3,In the process of accessing Chinese compound words,exists a parafoveal preview effect,more importantly,there is a parafoveal on foveal effect,that indicate the process of accessing of compound words is parallel.