A Study On The Role Of Semantic Characters In Vocabulary Learning During Readin

Reading is a cognitive activity that obtains text information by visual processing,through which we can understand the world,develop thinking,and improve personal literacy.Word learning is the foundation of reading.According to statistics,children acquire about 3,000 novel words every year.More than 80% novel words are acquired incidentally during natural text reading.The self-teaching theory based on alphabetical writing argues that when the readers learn novel words in reading,they need to construct lexical representations via phonetic decoding,and this process will be affected by top-down contextual information.As logographic characters,Chinese characters have a close connection between form and meaning,which is characterized by accessing to meaning from form.So,weather readers could adopt the strategy of semantic radical decoding to learn novel words in Chinese with spelling-meaning correspondence? How does context play a role in this process? Across two experiments in this study,we adopted novel word learning paradigm,and manipulated the semantic category consistency and contextual constraint of novel words to examine these questions.Study 1 aimed to examine the effect of category consistency of semantic radical in incidental novel word learning.Sixteen pseudoword were constructed as novel words,and the category consistency(consistency/inconsistency)of novel word and semantic radical was manipulated.Each novel word was embedded into 9 high-constraint sentences to form lexical representations of novel words for participants.113 college students were asked to read sentences containing novel words while their eye movements were tracked.After reading,they completed semantic category selection test and orthographic selection test.The results showed that:(1)the fixation on novel words decreased significantly with exposure,which was consistent with the incremental learning characteristics of novel words;(2)the consistency effect of semantic radical category gradually decreases and finally disappears with exposure.It shows that readers use semantic radical information to build up lexical representations in the early stage of word learning;(3)the accuracy of novel words with consistent semantic categories is significantly higher than that of novel words with inconsistent semantic categories,indicating that semantic radical information contribute to the acquisition of semantic categories of novel words.Study 2 aim to examine the moderating effect of contextual constraint on the category consistency of semantic radical effect.Both the consistency of semantic radical category,and contextual constraint were manipulated at the same time.Each novel word embedded in 6sentences.Under the condition of strongly restricted context,all 6 contexts are strongly restricted context.Under the neutral context condition,the first 3 are neutral contexts,but the last 3 are strongly restrictive contexts.120 college students were selected as participants and asked to complete the orthographic judgment test,semantic category selection test and semantic similarity judgment test after reading.The results showed that:(1)there was no interaction between context constraint and the category consistency of semantic radical in all eye movement measurements.(2)In the semantic similarity judgment task,when the semantic radical cannot correctly represent the semantic category information of the novel word,the reader will use the contextual information to infer the semantic meaning of the novel word.The results show that the moderating effect of context restriction on semantic radical is mainly manifested in semantic acquisition.The following conclusions can be drawn from this study:(1)In the early stage of incidental novel word learning,semantic radical contributes to the construction of lexical representation of novel words.(2)Context restriction affects semantic acquisition of vocabulary to some extent by regulating the mode of action of semantic radical.