Contribution Of Phonological Overlap On Stroke Neighbor Priming In Eye Movements During Chinese Reading

It is reported that the identification of the visual word is affected by its orthographic neighbors in alphabetic language. We have already investigated whether similar neighbor priming effects are observed in Chinese in several masked priming experiments and found that in Chinese character recognition, the target recognition is inhibited when the orthographic neighbor is presented before it in the sentence, such effect is only exist in the early process stage.In current study, we were interested in if we use different kind of stimuli (phonological characters vs. orthographic characters) weather the presence of the orthographic neighbor influence the subsequent processing of the target character in both lexical decision task and silent reading, and how? There are three variables in current experiments, the prime type (the neighbor of the target character vs. the control character), frequency of the target (high vs. low) and the type of neighbor (phonological characters vs. orthographic characters).In experiment1, the mask priming paradigm is used, we found the significant main effect of character frequency and the prime type, while the main effect of the type of neighbor is not significant, and we didn’t found any interaction. But we didn’t find inhibitory priming effect.In experiment2, we use the eye movement technique to explore the influence of the orthographic and phonological prime characters in which we embed the prime character and target character in the same sentence, we also found the frequency effect in the prime region. In the target region, the processing of the target character is inhibited when the prime is the orthographic character rather than the control character in the early measures of eye movement. We also found a main effect of the type of neighbor, and there is an interaction between the prime type and the type of neighbor. The result shows that:(1) In Chinese character recognition, the frequency effect exists.(2) In Chinese character recognition, the target recognition is inhibited when the orthographic neighbor is presented before it in the sentence, such effect only exists in the early process stage, and the phonological neighbor provides a stronger inhibitory effect than the orthographic neighbor.