The Word Length Effect And Its Development In Chinese Children's Natural Sentence Reading

Effective word recognition is the basis for the development of children’s reading skills.A large amount of evidence shows that word length is an important factor affecting the word processing efficiency of developing readers.Long words take longer to process than short words,the recognition speed is slower,and the fixation position is closer to the right side of the word,that is,word length effect.Clarifying the development of word length effect is helpful to reveal the law of children’s word processing and reading development,which has important theoretical and practical significance.However,previous Chinese studies are mainly based on isolated word recognition and lack of evidence of real-time word processing in natural text reading.Therefore,this study used eye movement tracking technology to explore the word length effect and its development in children’s natural sentence reading.There were 84 students taking part in the experiment.Adopting a mixed experimental design of 3(age group: third grade,fifth grade,college students)×3(word length: one-character words,two-character words,three-character words).Word length was manipulated and embedded in the same sentence structure to record children’s eye movement behavior when reading sentences.Word length effect was revealed from the two dimensions of lexical fixation time(when)and fixation position selection(where).At the same time,operating the children’s various reading skills to further investigate the development law of the word length effect.The main results were as follows:(1)Children had word length effect in natural sentence reading,which showed that with the increase of word length,children’s fixation time on the target word was longer,the skip rate was lower,and the fixation position was closer to the right side of the word.(2)The word length effect changed with the increase of children’s age.First of all,in the dimension of fixation time,the word length effect decreased with the increase of children’s age,and the change of word length effect on one-and two-character words begins to occur from the third grade to the fifth grade,while the change of word length effect on two-character words and three-character words occurs relatively late,after the fifth grade.Secondly,in the dimension of fixation position,the word length effect increased with the increase of children’s age.The change of word length effect on one-and two-character words had no obvious change in time node,and the change of word length effect on two-and three-character words began to occur from the third grade to the fifth grade.(3)Word length effect was more sensitive to children’s word comprehension skills.It showed that word comprehension skills regulate the development of word length effect in the early and late stages of fixation time and fixation position dimension.The results showed that children can obtain and use word length information to identify words and control eye movement behavior when reading.With the increase of age,children’s utilization efficiency of word length information gradually increase,supporting the change of word recognition strategies from analytical processing to holistic processing.The development of the word length effect is more sensitive to word comprehension skills.