The Influence Of Semantic Frequency On The Effect Of Contextual Diversity In Chinese Reading

Word frequency is an important predictor during reading,word frequency is one of the most studied variables in the psycholinguistic research.Both in alphabetic writing and Chinese,researchers found word-frequency effect,as frequency increases,processing time decreases.In normal reading,high frequency words have less and short fixations,less regressions and more skipping rate.However,recently research find some interesting eye movement modules,which cannot be explain with the word frequency effect.When contextual diversity is controlled,word-frequency effect will disappear.Although it is still widely used at present,whether word frequency is a good indicator to measure the difficulty of vocabulary processing still needs further research.In this research,the effects of word frequency and contextual diversity have investigated through the eye movement study of homogragh reading performance in normal sentence reading,and whether word frequency or contextual diversity can explain these effects.In Experiment 1,the purpose is to investigate whether the word-frequency effect is stable or not.The result shows that:(1)When contextual diversity is controlled,the word-frequency effect will disappear;(2)When word frequency is controlled,contextual diversity effect is stable.Experiment 2 is the further research of contextual diversity effect,the result shows that:(1)When contextual diversity is controlled,word-frequency effect disappear;(2)When contextual diversity is controlled,meaning frequency has its main effect in some eye-tracking index.According to the above results,the following conclusions were drawn:(1)In Chinese sentence reading,contextual diversity can better predict the reading performance than word frequency;(2)Meaning frequency can impact reading performance even contextual diversity is controlled;(3)In Chinese sentence reading,word-frequency effect will disappear in some conditions.