The Time Course Of Orthographical And Phonological Processing In Word Recognition Of Chinese Single-character Words With High Frequency:An Eye Movement Study

Visual word recognition is a complex information processing process and a prerequisite for successful text comprehension.Deficits or underdevelopment in the visual word recognition ability will make a serious impact on reading fluency and accuracy.Therefore,either from a theoretical or practical perspective,it is of significance to uncover the mechanism behind visual word recognition.So far,the research on visual word recognition has been conducted under alphabetic systems.Models on visual word recognition were primarily based on and tested by English word recognition studies.Although research under non-alphabetic systems has recently accumulated sufficiently,results and findings still need more supporting evidence.Besides,most of the research on Chinese visual word recognition takes two-character words as material,and research on single-character word recognition lags behind.However,mechanisms underlying two-character and single-character word recognition might be different.This thesis selected thirty-two single-character words with high frequencies as material and conducted a within-subject experiment with orthography and phonology as the independent variables.It aims to observe the effect of orthography and phonology on single-character word recognition.To this end,it adopts the error disruption paradigm to manipulate orthographical(phonetic radicals)and phonological information(segmental and tonal information).Moreover,it uses eye-tracking methods to reproduce the temporal information flow during the visual word recognition process.Research questions include:(1)How do orthography and phonology participate in the recognition process of Chinese single-character words with high frequencies?(2)How does segmental and tonal information affect the word recognition process of high-frequency words?The major findings of this study could be approached from two aspects.Firstly,behavioral data showed that error disruptions of all kinds did not slow down the reading rate of the target sentence or decrease the accuracy rate for the questions.In other words,error words had no influence on readers’ overall reading performance.Secondly,oculomotor data indicate that orthography seems to be the main route during single-character word recognition and phonology seems to have little play in the process.Since previous findings on Chinese two-character words support an early activation of orthography and phonology,including segmental and tonal information,the results of this study may indicate that the underlying mechanisms between two-character word recognition and single-character recognition are literally different.Accordingly,readers might recognize Chinese words holistically with words as the basic unit.The theoretical implication of this thesis is that the results provide support for the Minimality Hypothesis and the Lexical Constituency Model.This would deepen our understanding of Chinese visual word recognition and language comprehension.From a practical perspective,the results of this study highlight the significance of orthography in Chinese visual word recognition and provide valuable inspirations to Chinese teaching and learning.By cultivating the orthographical decoding ability or increasing exposure to diverse scripts,reading programs might improve the reading performance of our students.In conclusion,this study adopted psycholinguistic paradigms to investigate the time course of orthography and phonological processing during Chinese single-character word recognition.The results of this study support an early activation of orthography by means of radicals but no such activation of phonology,whether segmental or tonal.Therefore,this thesis supports the Minimality Hypothesis and the Lexical Constituency model and suggests that Chinese visual word recognition might be achieved in a holistic manner with words as the basic unit.