The role of character positional frequency on Chinese word learning during natural reading

Abstract

Readers’ eye movements were recorded to examine the role of character positional frequency on Chinese lexical acquisition during reading and its possible modulation by word spacing. In Experiment 1, three types of pseudowords were constructed based on each character’s positional frequency, providing congruent, incongruent, and no positional word segmentation information. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences, for the learning and the test phases. In the learning phase, half the participants read sentences in word-spaced format, and half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read sentences in unspaced format. The results showed an inhibitory effect of character positional frequency upon the efficiency of word learning when processing incongruent pseudowords both in the learning and test phase, and also showed facilitatory effect of word spacing in the learning phase, but not at test. Most importantly, these two characteristics exerted independent influences on word segmentation. In Experiment 2, three analogous types of pseudowords were created whilst controlling for orthographic neighborhood size. The results of the two experiments were consistent, except that the effect of character positional frequency was absent in the test phase in Experiment 2. We argue that the positional frequency of a word’s constituent characters may influence the character-to-word assignment in a process that likely incorporates both lexical segmentation and identification.

The Trade-Off Between Format Familiarity and Word-Segmentation Facilitation in Chinese Reading

“…According to the following criteria which were same as that in Experiment 1 ( Rayner et al, 2006 ; Bai et al, 2008 ; Rayner, 2009 ; Li et al, 2017 ; Liang et al, 2017 ; Wang et al, 2018 ), analysis data was selected. After excluding invalid data (1.65% of the total data), data analysis was conducted.…”

Eye movements of children and adults reading in three different orthographies.

“…The overall pattern emerging from these studies is that children read more slowly than adults, tend to make shorter saccades, fixate words more frequently and for a longer time, and show higher regression probabilities, but lower word skipping rates (see Reichle et al, 2013, for a summary). These effects are consistently found and have been observed in languages as diverse as English (Blythe et al, 2006;Blythe et al, 2015;Milledge et al 2021), Finnish (Häikiö et al, 2009), German (Huestegge et al, 2009;Rau et al, 2014;Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015a), French (Mancheva et al, 2015), Chinese (Blythe et al, 2012;Chen & Ko, 2011;Zang et al, 2013;Liang et al, 2015Liang et al, , 2017Liang et al, , 2021, and Japanese (Jincho et al, 2014).…”

New Perspectives on Serialism and Parallelism in Oculomotor Control During Reading: The Multi-Constituent Unit Hypothesis

“…By contrast, if spaces are artificially introduced between words, reading is facilitated for children [50,51] and learners of Chinese as a second language [52]. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that Chinese readers use statistical lexicality cues (i.e., some characters are more likely to be a single character word-single character word likelihood [53]; and some characters are more likely to appear at the beginning or end of a word-within word character positional frequency [54][55][56]) to facilitate word segmentation processes during reading.…”