The Effect Of Visual Coding Difficulty On Lexical Processing

Previous studies of English reading have found that with the difficulty of visual coding increases,the cost of reading will increase,and this difficulty of visual processing may affect the subsequent stage of lexical processing.According to the interactive model of reading process,when the bottom-up processing information is insufficient(the difficulty of visual coding increases),readers may rely more on top-down processing(lexical access)to help to read.However,how visual coding affects lexical processing remains to be studied in Chinese reading.Therefore,two experiments were conducted to explore that,and to investigate the differences of eye movement patterns in lexical processing under different visual coding difficulties.In Experiment 1,the effects of stimulus quality on word frequency and predictability effects in Chinese reading were investigated;in Experiment 2,the effects of font type on word frequency effect and predictability effects in Chinese reading were explored.Experiment 1(a)manipulated the stimulus quality of the experimental sentence to make it faint or normal,and manipulated the word frequency of the target word.The results showed that the cost of reading was higher under faint condition,and there was a significant interaction between stimulus quality and word frequency in first fixation duration and total fixation time,and the word frequency effect was greater under faint condition.Experiment 1(b)manipulated the stimulus quality of the experimental sentences and the contextual predictability of the target words.The results showed that the interaction between stimulus quality and contextual predictability was significant in total fixation time,and the predictability effect was magnified when reading faint words.Experiment 2(a)manipulated the font types that varied in the degree of legibility(i.e.,Song,Kai and Xing script)of the experimental sentences and the word frequency of the target words.The results showed that the reading cost of Xing script was greater than the other two fonts,and the interaction between font type and word frequency occurred in gaze duration and single fixation duration.Experiment 2(b)manipulated the font type of experimental sentence and the contextual predictability of target word.The experimental results showed that the interaction between font type and contextual predictability was significant in total fixation time,and the predictability effect of Xing script was greater than that of Song script.The results suggested the increasing difficulty of visual coding will lead to the change of readers’ reading strategy weight.The bottom-up strategy weight will be smaller,while the topdown strategy weight will be larger,so as to adapt to the specific reading situation flexibly.