The Eye Movement Research On The Influence Of Phonetic Information And Context On Chinese Auditory Vocabulary Recognition

Listeners comprehend spoken utterances quickly and effortlessly,which belies the complex cognitive processing that contributes to their understanding.A central component of this task is simply recognizing the words that have been said.We used eye tracking to examine how phonological information and the effect of sentence context influence spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese.Participants listened to sentences and looked at displays of four printed Chinese characters.In experiment 1,target sentences were written with he2ping2(peace),for example,the displays contained cohort(he2 ‘he2zuo4’),rhyme(ping2’pi1ping2’),and tonal(’zhe2xue2’)competitors,and one phonologically unrelated distracter.Target words occurred in the end of a sentence which are high constrain sentences(such as "Dove is a symbol of peace ")and were presented to subjects through headphones.A few of eye movements measures such as the first fixation duration,the total reading time and average pupil diameter were analyzed.The experiment 2 is similar to experiment 1,only the sentences which the subjects heard were low constrain sentences(such as " Birds’ fight tends to be more peace").The results showed that:(1)when the displays appeared at sentence onset,no significant effects were observed between fixations to competitors and phonologically unrelated distracters.(2)in high constrain sentences,when the target word appeared until the end,fixations to rhyme competitors were more than that of unrelated distracters,fixations to tonal competitors were more than that of unrelated distracters.In low constrain sentences,fixations to rhyme competitors were more than that of unrelated distracters,fixations to tonal competitors were more than that of unrelated distracters,fixations to cohort competitors were more than that of unrelated distracters(3)word frequency effect appears in low constrain sentences,there is no word frequency effect in high constrain sentences.(4)Based on the above two experiments,draw the following conclusions: the experimental supports for the Trace model.