Activation Of Phonological Information In Children’s Sentence Comprehension:The Moderating Role Of Phonological Awareness And Lexical Knowledge

Phonological information is crucial in the process of semantic access,but findings on whether it is activated during sentence reading are inconsistent.To further investigate the processing of phonological information during the development of initial readers,the current study explored the activation of phonological information and its time course in sentence comprehension by children in third,fourth,and fifth grade as subjects,using eye-movement techniques,combined with boundary paradigms,by manipulating different types of pre-visual words(regular morphemes,irregular morphemes,orthographically dissimilar homophones,and orthographically dissimilar non-homophones),and explored the moderating effects of phonological awareness and lexical knowledge on this process.The results found that 1)orthographically dissimilar homophones had significant preview effects compared to irrelevant control characters,as evidenced by first fixation duration,gaze duration,and regression path duration.This suggests that phonological information at the character level is activated at an early stage and persists into the late integration stage.2)There is a difference in preview benefits between regular and irregular morphemic characters,reaching significant levels in gaze duration.This suggests that sub-lexical phonological information emerges at the early processing stage and that the regularity effect of morphophonemic words comes into play at an early stage.3)During the early processing stage,there was a difference in preview benefits between regular and irregular morphophonemic words for third-and fifth-grade children.Compared to third graders,fifth graders had shorter reading times for regular and irregular morphemes,and the differences between the two and irrelevant controls reached significant levels.4)Both lexical knowledge and phonological awareness influence phonological activation processes.In the early stages,children with rich vocabulary knowledge had shorter gaze duration for keywords after previewing regular morphemes,and children with greater phonological awareness had greater previewing benefits on early and late indicators.On the basis of mutual control of all factors,phonological awareness still had a moderating effect on phonological activation.This result indicates that phonological information at the character level can be activated early in semantic fluency and continues into the reading comprehension integration stage;phonological information at the sub-lexical level can also be activated early,but slightly later than at the character level;and fifth-grade children have greater previsual benefits on orthographic information than third-and fourth-grade children.Both phonological awareness and lexical knowledge modulate reading processing during phonological activation,and the influence of phonological awareness is more important.