Visual Complexity Effect in Chinese Incidental Word Learning: Evidence from Number of Strokes and Word Length

Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2024-04-25

Liang Feifei Liu Ying He Wen Feng Linlin Wang Zheng Bai Xuejun

Abstract： The visual complexity effect is considered one of the “big three effects” in word recognition. In alphabetic reading (such as English and German), visual complexity is primarily reflected in word length. It is well established that word length affects both the “when” and “where” decisions of eye movement control in alphabetic reading, yielding more and longer fixations on long words relative to short words. Some researchers have used changes in the word length effect with repeated reading as a measure of vocabulary learning outcomes in alphabetic reading. In written Chinese text, visual complexity of words is influenced not only by word length, similar to alphabetic reading, but also by the number of strokes in a word. In the present study, we conducted two parallel eye movement studies to examine how visual complexity (measured by words’ number of strokes and word length) influenced novel word learning in Chinese reading. We, specifically, investigated how visual complexity effects changed with cumulative learning. Two-character or three-character pseudowords were constructed as novel words. Each novel word was embedded into 15 highly constrained contexts for readers to establish novel lexical representations. There were five learning phases in our experiment. Participants read three sentences containing one novel word per learning phase, and their eye movements were recorded during sentence reading. In Experiment 1, we examined how the number of strokes in a word influenced word identification during Chinese word learning. The number of strokes in two-character novel words was manipulated as being either high or low. In Experiment 2, we examined how word length influenced novel word learning in Chinese reading by using two-character and three-character pseudowords as novel words. We included “Learning phase” as a continuous variable into the model to further examine how the visual complexity effects changed with exposure during Chinese novel word learning. We found that both the number of strokes and word length both influenced the “when” decision of eye movement control during Chinese novel word learning, the fewer the strokes and the shorter the word length, the shorter the fixations on novel words. In terms of the “where” decision, the number of strokes determined how long the saccade length into the novel words, which was more likely to relate to parafoveal processing, whilst word length influenced how long the saccade length leaving the novel words, which was highly related to foveal processing. We suggest that the process of stroke number information might influence the decision of where to land the eyes on novel words and the process of word length information might influence the decision of where to land the eyes when leaving novel words. We also found that the effect of number of strokes did not change significantly with exposure, indicating that the process of stroke number occurs both in the early and late stages of word learning, which supports “visual constraint hypothesis”. In contrast, the word length effect gradually decreases with exposure, showing the familiarity or learning effect, which aligns with “visual and linguistic constraint hypothesis”. These findings suggest a difference in the mechanisms of number of strokes and word length in Chinese reading accompanied by vocabulary acquisition: Stroke ßnumber might function as a form of low-level visual information, impacting the visual processing of vocabulary; while word length is more similar to the processing of linguistic information, affecting vocabulary processing at a higher level.

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

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