A Study On The Mastery And Usage Characteristics Of Chinese Morpheme Position Probability By Uyghur Reader

In 2021,The General Office of the State Council issued "Opinions on Comprehensively Strengthening Spoken and Written Language Work in the New Era",which pointed out that the cause of spoken and written language concerns national unity and ethnic solidarity,is an important support for the country’s comprehensive strength,and plays an important role in the overall work of the Party and the country.We need to comprehensively strengthen education in standard spoken and written Chinese in ethnic minority areas,further promote teaching in standard Chinese,and ensure that ethnic minorities can master and use it.Nowadays,more and more Uyghur compatriots are learning and using Chinese,but they often encounter difficulties in learning Chinese due to the great linguistic differences between Chinese and Uyghur,and their cognitive processing characteristics of Chinese reading may be somewhat different from those of native Chinese speakers.It is found that Uygur readers can use visual cues(such as spaces in the text)to promote Chinese word segmentation and word identification.However,it remains unclear whether Uygur readers can acquire high-level linguistic cues(such as character’s position frequency)and use this information to promote Chinese reading.This study will explore these issues through two experiments.In Experiment 1,Uygur readers participate in a lexical decision task to investigate their acquisition of character’s position frequency information.The results show that the Uyghur readers are very sensitive to the characters with extreme position frequency(such as the probability of being at the beginning of a word is higher than 80% or lower than 20%),and the accuracy of deciding those characters is higher.As the character’s position frequency changes,Uighur readers will adjust their reaction strategies accordingly.This indicates that Uyghur readers implicitly acquire and grasp certain character’s position frequency information during the process of learning and using Chinese.In Experiment 2,by manipulating the character’s position frequency of target words(for HH,the frequency of being the first character of words for the initial character and the frequency of being the last character of words for the final character are both high;for LL,the frequency of being the first character of words for the initial character and the frequency of being the last character of words for the final character are both low),we want to investigate whether Uighur readers will utilize character’s position frequency information in Chinese reading.The results show that Uyghur readers read and process HH words more easily,which is shown as shorter fixation time,lower regression in probability and regression out probability,fewer fixation counts,and closer landing position to the center of HH words.To summarize the finds of the two experiments,the conclusions are drawn as follows.(1)Character’s position frequency is an effective word segmentation clue in Chinese reading.Uygur readers can acquire character’s position frequency information in the process of Chinese learning and reading,but their awareness of morpheme position is vague.(2)Character’s position frequency can promote word segmentation and word recognition of Uygur readers,and this effect appears in the late stage of word processing.