The Processing Of Psychological Word In Chinese Passages Reading

There are no visual spaces between words in written Chinese. It is intriguing how Chinese readers segment words. Many studies have indicated that words play an important role in Chinese reading while some other research has demonstrated that characters are more important than words in Chinese reading. However some researchers have found that native Chinese readers have no clear concept of words, and they often disagree on how to divide the continuous string of characters within a sentence into words. The character combination may be a word or may not be a word by the standard of the Chinese dictionary. For the character combination which is not a word but the reader segment it as a word, we called it psychological word. Three experiments were conducted to study if the psychological word is the possible primary unit of information in Chinese reading. In the experiment1, the word segmentation task was adopted to study if the psychological word was psychologically real. Ten short passages were used as the materials. Because of the way to make different conditions from form study is not suitable for create different unit in the passage reading, so the experiment2use the new way-relative luminance to create normal, character, word, and non-word condition, then use the eye-movement tracker technique to find the effectiveness of this new way. Experiment3was carried out to explore if psychological words are processed more quickly than the words. It used relative luminance manipulation to create four conditions:text with relative luminance to mark character, word, and psychological words, text with relative luminance that yielded non-words. We also have the normal text condition. Participants in experiment3are the students who joined in the experiment1six month ago to make sure the psychological words condition can accurately accord with the words segmentation result in experiment1.Eye tracker was used in the experiment. The results showed that the psychological word was more easily processed than the character, normal and nonwords. The result indicated that the psychological word was possibly the primary unit of information in Chinese reading.