Abstract
The present study sought to establish how a word’s contextual predictability impacts the early stages of word processing when reading Chinese. Two eye-movement experiments were conducted in which the predictability of the target two-character word was manipulated; the frequency of the target’s initial character was manipulated in Experiment 1, as was the target’s end character frequency in Experiment 2. No reliable interaction effect of predictability with initial character frequency was observed in Experiment 1. Reliable interactions of word predictability with end character frequency were observed in Experiment 2. The end character frequency effects, in which the words with high-frequency end characters were fixated for a shorter time and re-fixated less often, were only observed when reading unpredictable words. Reliable interactions were also observed with incoming saccade length, as high-frequency end character words elicited longer saccades to themselves than low-frequency end character words when reading predictable words. The effects of pervasive predictability on measures of fixation time, probability, and saccade length were noted in both experiments. Our findings suggest that a word’s contextual predictability facilitates the processing of its constituent characters.
Highlights
It has been extensively documented that the contextual predictability of words in a given context is closely related to how they can be processed during reading
No significant initial character frequency effects were observed for fixation time or outgoing saccade length, while significant or marginal frequency effects were observed for skip, re-fixation, and regression in the probability measures
Frequency effects were reliable on the incoming saccade length (ISL), with longer incoming saccades observed to the target of a high initial character frequency than to a low initial character frequency
Summary
It has been extensively documented that the contextual predictability of words in a given context is closely related to how they can be processed during reading. Research has suggested that word segmentation during Chinese reading is a fast and early occurring process (Hoosain, 1992; Bai et al, 2008, 2013; Shen et al, 2012; Zang et al, 2013; Gu and Li, 2015) Both context and character processing have been linked to word segmentation (Yen et al, 2012; Liang et al, 2015; Zang et al, 2015; Su et al, 2016), and it is safe to speculate that interaction between contextual predictability and a word’s character frequency may be closely related to word segmentation mechanisms. The overall pattern of interaction on word processing stages was assessed through the total reading time and regression in probability
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