The Encoding Unit For Lexical Detection And Recognition In Reading

Is the word the basic unit in the encoding of morphology to semantics during reading? Or can a phrase, or an even larger chunk, like a sentence, form a basic unit? How do we find the encoding unit in reading? The encoding unit of language processing is far from clear yet.Chunking language material into the large encoding units can facilitates our reading efficiency, and avoid the language ambiguity. Some language chunks, however, cannot be encoded as a single unit unless segmenting into smaller chunks. And both the whole-encoding processing and the decompose-then-encoding processing are allowed in Dual-routes model, so this model is flexible to fit any case.In order to investigate the selection and recognition of encoding units during reading, we used four-character Chinese compound word here as the stimuli, sand recorded the participants’data via behavior and EEG experiments.The current data demonstrated that, the encoding units in reading processing are the familiar language chunks rather than characters or words. And there are two stages of reading encoding:chunk detection and chunk recognition. In detail, the chunk detection occurs in an early stage (about 150ms from stimulus onset) of reading material processing. All familiar word chunks are detected in this stage, but the detection involves no further deep analysis. The chunk recognition (after 200ms from the onset) happens after the chunk detection, the detected chunks are under morphology-to-semantics encoding in this stage. Our brain can run the semantic analyses of all chunks in a parallel manner, but larger chunks take the temporal priority over the smaller ones.