Tsai, J. 1, 2
1 Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University
2 Laboratories for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
In contrast to alphabetic scripts, the structural and functional units of Chinese written system are less transparent for word recognition in reading sentence. First, Chinese character is the basic written unit of the spoken language and usually maps onto morphemes and syllables. At the sub-lexical level, approximately 80% of the characters are phonetic compounds that are made up of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. Comparing to letters of alphabetic languages, Chinese characters encompass richer information of orthography, phonology, and semantic in a packed region. Second, over 76% of Chinese words are compounds of characters and many characters can stand alone as individual words or be the constituent of compound words. The relationship of character meaning to the meanings of words containing them is often not apparent. Extracting word in sentence is even more difficult since there is no visual space separating words. Therefore, Chinese readers need to make use of the rich lexical information and contextual constraint, in order to correctly recognize characters and extract words from the character string in a sentence. We report eye movement experiments of sentence reading to address the special features of Chinese written system. One is the parafoveal preview benefits of orthographic and phonological codes. The other is the word predictability and word frequency effects. The eye movement data provide the evidence that Chinese readers utilize the intrinsic properties (i.e. orthographic and phonological codes) and the extrinsic property (i.e. word predictability) of characters and words in the process of reading. These factors not only contribute to Chinese reading but also show their influence in early lexical processing.