The Representation and Processing of Subjective Words for Chinese Readers

Abstract

Given that there are no visual spaces between in written Chinese and characters are the basic perceptual unit, it is intriguing how Chinese readers segment and represent words. Many studies have indicated that play an important role in Chinese reading (Yan et al., 2006; Li et al., 2005; Rayner et al., 2007; Bai et al., 2008; Yan et al., 2009), while some other research has demonstrated that characters are more important than in reading (Chen et al., 2003). However, some researchers have found that native Chinese readers have no clear concept of words, and they often disagree on how to divide the continuous string of characters within a sentence into (Hoosain, 1992; Tsai et al., 1998; Miller et al., 2007). So there is a discrepancy here: If play an important role in Chinese reading, what are the characteristics of these words? We propose that Chinese readers segment text into according to complex cognitive representations: words (e.g., representing the phrase economic development as a single word). Three studies were conducted to explore 1) whether subjective are psychologically real in readers’ minds and 2) how these subjective are processed. The first study examined how well the readers could recognize the two-character combination as a or a phrase. The results showed that the readers tend to judge phrases as subjective words. which indicated that they represented according to their own complex cognition about words, which demonstrated that subjective were real in readers’ minds. The second and third experiment investigated the characteristics of subjective processing. The second experiment explored whether subjective had a word superiority — whether the readers found the position of a character in subjective more efficiently than in non-words. The third experiment examined whether the reaction time of classifying subjective as was shorter than nonwords by using a lexical decision task. The results showed that there was no significant difference between and subjective in reaction time and accuracy. The accuracy rate of searching for the position of a character in subjective was higher than in nonwords in the second experiment. In the third experiment, we didn’t find any significant difference between subjective and nonwords in accuracy rate. To sum up, the present study indicated that native Chinese readers don’t judge a two-character combination as a or a phrase accurately, and that they often confused them. It also demonstrated that subjective are psychologically real in readers’ minds, which shows that the readers represented subjective words, and that some subjective violated the Chinese grammar rules. The second experiment found that the superiority effect in subjective is the same as in the compared with nonwords under compulsive choice task. The third experiment indicated that subjective are processed more efficiently than nonwords. Subjective are more likely to be processed as a whole.