Acquisition Of Age Effect On The Word Recognition Under Different Word Class And Word Frequency In Chinese

Chinese vocabulary contains the processing of various information codes including character pattern and character pronunciation, which is very suitable for exploring the internal process and mechanism of human cognition. The age of word acquisition is an important factor influencing lexical access and generation velocity and also major issue affecting adult language processing. In previous studies, few of them focus on the acquisition age effect in Chinese vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, this research is designed to investigate the effect of acquisition age effect on the word recognition under different word class and word frequency through Chinese word materials by methods to the classical task and the eye-movement tracking.The research includes two experiments. In Experiment 1, classical words are employed for word recognition to investigate the acquisition age effect under different word class and word frequency. Since the classical task is just the isolate word recognition, the eye-movement tracking is adopted in Experiment 2 to further investigate the acquisition age effect of Chinese word recognition in the context.The research results are as follows:(1) In Experiment 1, the main effect of word acquisition age and word frequency was significant. The interaction between the age and word class and frequency was not significant.(2) In Experiment 2, the main effect of word acquisition age was significant while the word frequency was not. The interaction between the age and word class and frequency was not significant.The research conclusions could be obtained as follows:(1) The word acquisition age effect played an important role in affecting Chinese word recognition in both the word decision and the reading task.(2) In word decision task, two variables, vocabulary acquisition and word frequency could independently affect the Chinese word recognition process and their effect could be accumulated.(3) The acquisition age effect existed in both the early stage and later stage of word recognition and processing.(4) The acquisition age effect was not only from the level of pronunciation but also from the level of semantic information processing.