An Eye-movement Study Of The Influence Of Shape,Phonological And Semantic Information Of Chinese Characters On Text Search Reading

Reading is the process by which readers actively acquire information from visual material.The purpose of reading and the reading task have an impact on the extent to which readers process and comprehend reading material.A large number of studies have now revealed patterns of readers’ eye-movement behaviour and potential processing mechanisms during reading comprehension;search reading as a reading mode has been found to have a shallow processing depth compared to other reading modes in the few studies on search reading,and some researchers have explored the processing depth of search reading by examining the effects of word frequency and visual complexity on search reading.However,the processing of search reading and its cognitive mechanisms have not yet been fully explored.Compared to pinyin scripts,Chinese characters are unique in that they do not follow the morpho-syntactic correspondence,It does not follow the principle of correspondence between font and voice,and the mapping relationship between font and semantic is more systematic and in-dept.In this study,three experiments were conducted to investigate the lexical access to the morphology-sound-meaning information of Chinese characters in search reading and its influence on reading processing.A variation of Rayner and Fischer’s classic research paradigm was used in all experiments,where the search target was no longer a single word,but a different search target was set before searching each sentence to clarify the processing depth and processing mechanism of search reading by exploring the depth of readers’ access to morpho-syntactic information during search reading.This study consisted of three eye-movement experiments.Experiment 1 used a single-factor,three-level(glyph similarity to the target word: same,shaped,unrelated)within-subjects design to investigate the accessibility of glyph information during search reading his suggests that the glyph characteristics of Chinese characters have an impact on the search reading process.Readers were able to obtain clear glyph information during the search reading process.Experiment 2 also used a single-factor three-level(phonological similarity to the target word: same,phonologically identical,unrelated)within-subjects design to investigate the accessibility of phonological information during search reading.Phonological similarity has significant main effect on some global and local eye movement indicators in the process of searching and reading.This suggests that readers process phonological information in Chinese characters during search and reading,and that readers are able to access phonological information during search and reading.Experiment 3 also used a single-factor,three-level(semantic similarity to the target word: same,semantic similarity,irrelevant)within-subjects design to investigate the accessibility of semantic information during search reading by comparing readers’ oculomotor indicators under different semantic information conditions.The results showed that there was a significant main effect of semantic similarity on all local eye movement indicators during search reading,but not on the overall eye movement indicators,indicating that the semantic information of local Chinese characters during search reading has an impact on the search process,but the overall semantic activation of readers during search reading has not been processed at a deeper level,in that semantic information has a certain impact on the level of lexical access to search reading The influence of the semantic information on the level of lexical access to the search reading is limited,but the influence on the overall sentence-level semantic processing is limited.In summary,the morphological,phonological and semantic information of Chinese characters affects the lexical access to the search reading process,and readers are able to process the visual features of Chinese characters during the search reading process,as well as gaining access to the phonological and semantic information of the characters;however,at the sentence level,the morphological and phonological information still affects the search reading process,but the role of semantic information disappears,which further indicates that the depth of search reading processing compared to comprehension reading This further suggests that the depth of search reading processing is shallow compared to comprehension reading,making it difficult to achieve deeper sentence-sense processing.