Frequency Effect And Individual Differences In Chinese Two-character Word Recognition

Word recognition has always been an active field of psycholinguistics.Exploring the psychological mechanism of word recognition can help us arrange teaching more reasonably,make the process of language learning fit in with the mental representation model of words,so that readers can extract meaning more efficiently and improve their reading performance.But in Chinese reading,there has been a debate about whether the reader takes the word or the character as the processing unit.Therefore,what role do words and characters play in the process of reading and what is the relationship between the two have always been a research hotspot.Because word frequency effects are frequently observed in both alphabetic and Chinese texts,many scholars choose frequency characteristics of words and characters to study the issue.At the same time,Andrews and other researchers point out that there is a problem in reading research,which assumes "all readers read in a similar way".They critic that the assumption has ignored the studies of individual differences in reading.Exploring individual differences in reading can helps us to examine the eye movement models that have not yet taken individual differences into account,and provides more evidence for the adjustment of the models so as to further reform themselves.Therefore,based on the previous research,this research takes the skilled readers(college students)as the research object to explore the frequency effect of the initial character,the frequency effect of the word and the interaction of them,especially the frequency effect of initial character on the level of low frequency word was investigated.At the same time,three reading ability tests were developed: reading comprehension test,vocabulary test and dictation test.According to the median,the subjects were divided into high reading comprehension group and low reading comprehension group,high vocabulary group and low vocabulary group,high spelling group and low spelling group.By comparing the frequency effect between high-ability group and low-ability group,the research discussed their individual differences on the performance of word recognition.The results showed that the main effect of word frequency was significant on all the eye movement indices.The character frequency effect in different eye movement index was inconsistent.The main effect of character frequency on first fixation duration,single fixation duration and fixationtimes were significant,their interaction between character frequency and word frequency were also significant,which manifested the inhibition of character frequency under the condition of low frequency words.The first run dwell time,the total dwell time and the skip-rate had no significant main effect on character frequency,but their interaction between character frequency and word frequency were significant,which manifested the promotion of character frequency under the level of high frequency words and the inhibition of character frequency under the level of low frequency words.Results of analysis of individual differences found that subjects with higher reading ability showed a smaller frequency effect than those with lower reading ability.In the processing of twocharacter word recognition,the high-ability group was less affected by word frequency and only shows the inhibition of character frequency under the condition of low frequency words,while the low-ability group not only had a larger amount of word frequency effect,but also shows the promotion of character frequency under high frequency words and inhibition of character frequency under low frequency words.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)frequency is one of the main factors affecting the processing of two-character words,and the word frequency effect is robust.(2)in the process of two-character word recognition,character frequency effect appears in the early stage of word recognition,and then interacts with word frequency: under the condition of low frequency words,the higher character frequency,the slower word recognition.(3)individuals with different reading ability levels have different frequency effects: not only the high-ability group has less frequency effect than the low-ability group,moreover the high-ability group is less affected by the character frequency,while the low-ability group is more affected by the character frequency.(4)Different reading abilities have different influence on frequency effect in sentence reading task.Reading comprehension has the greatest influence on the frequency effect,while vocabulary and dictation have little influence on the frequency effect.