Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2024-04-25
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.
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Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-11-07
Abstract： In natural unspaced Chinese reading, there are no salient visual word segmentation cues (like word spaces) to demark where words begin or end, yet Chinese skilled readers process a comparable amount of text content as efficiently as English readers, processing roughly 400 characters (equal to 260 words) per minute (see Liversedge et al., 2016). This raises the question of how Chinese readers engage in such word segmentation processing efficiently and effectively. Liang et al (2015, 2017) have shown that the positional probability information associated with a character, might offer a cue to the likely positions of word boundaries during Chinese incidental word learning. Given that they simultaneously manipulated the positional probabilities of both word initial and word final characters to make their manipulations maximally effective, it is unclear whether the initial, the final, or both constituent characters' positional probabilities contribute to the word segmentation and word identification effects during incidental word learning in Chinese reading. For this reason, in the present study, two parallel experiments were designed to directly investigate whether word initial, or word ending characters are more or less important for word segmentation word learning in Chinese reading. Two-character pseudowords were constructed as novel words. Each novel word was embedded into six high-constraint contexts for readers to establish novel lexical representation. In Experiment 1, we examined how word’s initial character positional probability influenced word segmentation and word identification during Chinese word learning. The initial character’s positional probability of target words was manipulated as being either high or low, and the final character was kept identical across the two conditions. In Experiment 2, an analogous manipulation was made for the final character of the target word to check whether the final character positional probability of two-character words can be used as word segmentation cue. We also included “Exposure” as a continuous variable into the model to further examine how the process of initial and final character positional probabilities changed with exposure. In both experiments, the participants spent shorter reading times and made fewer fixations on targets that comprised initial and final characters with high relative to low positional probabilities, suggesting that the positional probability of both the initial and final character of a word influences segmentation commitments in novel word learning in Chinese reading. Furthermore, both the effect of initial and final character positional probabilities of novel words decreased with exposure, showing the typical familiarity effect. To be somewhat different, the familiarity effect associated with the initial character had a slower time course relative to final character. This finding suggests that the role of word’s initial character positional probability is of more importance than that of final character’s, supporting the concurrent standpoint that word beginning constituents might be more influential than word final constituents during two-character word identification in Chinese reading. Based on the findings above, the time course of the process of initial and final character positional probabilities of novel words is argued and summarized as follows. During the early stage of word learning, both the statistical properties of word’s initial and final character positional probabilities are processed as segmentation cue. As lexical familiarity increases, the extent to such segmentation roles decreases, which initially begins with final character, and then occurs with initial character. Later, both the roles of initial and final character positional probabilities disappear with the establishment of a more-integral representation of novel words.
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