Abstract
The present study separated radical level phonology from character level phonology to explore the reliance on phonology during Chinese sentence reading with eye movement recording in a boundary paradigm. Participants viewed sentences with either regular, irregular, orthographically dissimilar homophone, or orthographically dissimilar non-homophone previews for the targets. Both regular and irregular characters contained the target character as the phonetic radical, with the regular character sharing the identical sound with its target phonetic radical. In Experiment 1, the irregular previews were different from the target phonetic radicals both in the first consonant and final compound vowels. In Experiment 2, the irregular characters would be replaced by the semi-regular previews, which shared the same final compound vowels but not the first consonant with the target characters. The radical level phonological preview benefit was obtained by the comparison between regular and irregular characters, while the character level phonological preview benefit was shown by the visually dissimilar homophones compared with the unrelated control condition. The preview benefit from parafoveal regular characters compared with irregular characters was observed in the first fixation duration, suggesting the early activation of phonological codes at radical levels. However, this preview benefit depends on phonological overlapping between the phonetic radicals and their host characters; it could be activated only when the pronunciation of the phonogram was totally consistent with that of its phonetic radical. Furthermore, the null preview effect of visually dissimilar homophones indicates no activation of phonological codes at the character level during Chinese sentence reading.
Highlights
IntroductionA great deal of research has proved the early role of phonology in activating the meaning of the visual word (Perfetti and Bell, 1991; Ferrand and Grainger, 1993; Ashby and Martin, 2008)
Phonology is the crucial information in a word’s formation
first fixation duration (FFD) Linear Mixed-effect Model (LMM) analysis showed that the first FFD of regular phonograms was shorter than that of the unrelated control condition (b = 37.408, SE = 10.142, t = 3.688, p < 0.001)
Summary
A great deal of research has proved the early role of phonology in activating the meaning of the visual word (Perfetti and Bell, 1991; Ferrand and Grainger, 1993; Ashby and Martin, 2008). In reading Chinese, whether phonological codes can be activated and affect current processing is still an open question (Tan and Perfetti, 1998; Spinks et al, 2000; Tsai et al, 2004; Hsu et al, 2009). Chinese is characterized as an ideographic writing system. Unlike alphabetic language such as English, in which words are comprised of letters which represent phonemes, Chinese characters represent morphemic units and are composed of strokes and radicals in a square-shaped spatial configuration, which cannot be combined to represent the character’s sound.
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