The Effect Of Morpheme Position Information On Lexical Processing In Tibetan Reading

In order to attain comprehensive comprehension while reading,readers must integrate information such as characters and words,consequently,the stage of word recognition is a basic prerequisite for reading.A morpheme is the smallest phonological unit that can be used independently in the process of word recognition.In addition to the identity information,readers must process the position information of morpheme while processing words.In the studies on the processing mechanism of position information of morpheme,researchers have found the transposed-letter effect.The transposed-letter effect shows that the transposed-nonword promote activation of the base word more than the replaced-nonword,which indicates that the position information of morpheme flexibly influence reading.Studies on the transposed-letter effect have been involved in a variety of languages,but no relevant study have been reported in Tibetan.Tibetan is a unique language combining the characteristics of both alphabetic writing and ideographic writing.So,is there a morpheme position information processing stage and is there a transposed-letter effect while reading Tibetan? Also,in what way is the representation of the access to two-character words in Tibetan reading? All these remain to be examined.Based on the above questions,this study selected Tibetan undergraduates as participants,took the two-character words with the highest proportion in Tibetan as materials,and designed three experiments.The purpose is to explore the effect of morpheme position information on word recognition in Tibetan reading from the perspective of transposed morpheme.In experiment 1,using the word decision task,a single-factor three-level(presentation type: identical,transposed,replaced)experimental design was adopted to explore whether there is a processing stage for morpheme position information and whether there is the transposed-letter effect in the processing of Tibetan words with response time and accuracy as dependent variables.Experiment 2explored whether the transposed-morpheme affect reading in sentences,and further verified whether the transposed-letter effect exist in Tibetan reading.By manipulating the frequency and presentation type of the target words,Experiment 3 explored the effect of transposed-morpheme on the representation of Tibetan two-character words access in natural reading and the way in which two-character words are represented in Tibetan reading,that is,whether morpheme position information affect the processing of position information of Tibetan two-character words with different word frequency.Through the analysis of experimental results,this study draws the following conclusions:(1)In Tibetan reading,there is a processing stage of morpheme position information,and the transposition of morpheme position information affect reading;(2)In Tibetan reading,readers have flexibility in processing Tibetan morpheme position information,that is,there is the transposed-letter effect;(3)In the recognition of Tibetan multi-morpheme words,the processing of morpheme is a necessary process,which support the decomposed-morphological representation.