The Influence Of Age On Chinese Transposed Letter Effect

Transposed letter effect,known as Cambridge University effect as well,refers to a phenomenon that transposed-letter words do not affect reading.As one type of transposed letter effect,transposed letter effect across word boundary refers to the fact that the transposition of letters across word boundary will exert little influence on the process of recognizing and understanding words.At present,decades of studies on transposed letter effect have been done in English,Spanish,Hebrew,Japanese,Korean and many other languages.But in Chinese,research are rare.Chinese,unlike alphabetic languages,is lack of space between words.Chinese readers must parse characters into words by using their word knowledge.In this case,word boundary may play a vital role in Chinese reading.Therefore,more research on transposed letter effect in Chinese are demanded to be conducted,especially on transposed letter effect across word boundary.Besides,factors,including position of the transposed letter,word frequency,word familiarity,semantic predictability,etc.,which influence transposed letter effect have captured the attention of many scholars.In view of previous studies,scholars almost adopted college students as subjects.However,with the increase of age,people witness a change in their cognitive ability and in the cognitive process of word recognition at the same time.Letter transposition may exert little influence on adults.But children are in the stage of orthographic development,for whom character transposition including transposition within and across morpheme may affect their reading.Therefore,age,as a very important factor,is worthwhile to be considered in our studies.In view of the problems mentioned above,the thesis tries to explore the influence of age on Chinese transposed letter effect within and across word boundary.The subjects include sixth graders,ninth graders and freshmen.Three major research questions are: 1)Is there transposed letter effect within morpheme for all the three age levels? 2)Is there transposed letter effect across word boundary for all the three age levels? 3)What are the differences among subjects at different ages in one-word type and two-word type? Will the factor of age affect the transposed letter effect within and across word boundary in Chinese reading? In order to explore these questions,the thesis adopts priming paradigm to conduct an empirical study.The questions were investigated by applying the lexical decision task in the experiments.The results of the present study showed that: 1)In one-word type,for all the three age level participants,the reaction time of identity condition and transposed character condition werevery similar and close,which were much shorter than those of substituted character condition.It turns out that all the three age levels witnessed transposed letter effect within morpheme.2)In two-word type,for all the three age level subjects,the reaction time of identity condition and transposed character condition was very close,which was much shorter than that of substituted character condition.Transposed letter effect across word boundary existed for all the subjects at different age.Besides,there was no significant difference between one-word transposed character condition and two-word transposed character condition for all the subjects,suggesting that word boundary exerted little influence on word recognition.3)In view of results of a one-way ANOVA test,under both condition of transposition within and across morpheme,there was significant difference between sixth graders,ninth graders and freshmen,suggesting that the factor of age exerted some influence on Chinese transposed letter effect within and across word boundary.With the increasing age and cognitive level,character transposition exerted less influence on reading and the readers benefited more from transposed letter effect.