The Influences Of Familiarity, Transposed-Letter Effect And English Proficiency On Orthographic Processing

Reading is an important cognitive behavior of human beings and visual word recognition is the basis of reading.Visual word recognition mainly contains two important coding processes: identity coding and position coding.Identity coding refers to the composing letters within a word.And position coding is the relative order of letters within a word.One key issue for any visual word recognition is how the brain encodes letter identities and letter positions within a written word.Owing to the importance and flexibility of letter position coding in word recognition,scholars have conducted many researches on the cognitive mechanism of letter position coding and made numerous achievements in the past decades.This thesis adopts the masked transposition priming paradigm to explore the mechanism of position coding within a word and the effects of familiarity,transposed-letter effect and English proficiency on orthographic processing.Forty-six non-English major freshmen from Tianjin University of technology are recruited as participants in this experiment.Results show that:(1)There is masked transposition priming effect in the processing of English orthography and results of this research support the “context-sensitive” scheme;(2)Word familiarity can affect the priming effect.In the reorganization of high familiarity words,there exists transposition priming effect.While for low familiarity words,no transposition priming effect is found;(3)English proficiency can also influence the priming effect: the higher the level is,the stronger the priming effect is;the lower the level is,the weaker the priming effect is;(4)For high familiarity words and high level participants,participants recognize words as a whole;for low familiarity words and low level participants,participants decompose words while recognizing.The research results are of great significance to English teaching and learning.In the processing of words teaching,teachers should not only pay attention to the teaching of word knowledge,but also provide students with plentiful reading opportunities to increase the frequency of word contacting and improve the familiarity of words.This can promote the establishment and enhancement of brains' representation and help people recognize words from decomposing process to the whole-word process.And finally,the efficiency of language use will be improved.