Word recognition in reading is influenced by many factors, such as word properties (including character frequency, word frequency, orthography), syntactic structure and semantic relationships. Previous studies showed that syntactic or semantic violation between two continuous words can interference reading greatly and it can be reflected on the index of ERP and eye movement. Two continuous words in sentences could form a phrase in some situations, but they cannot make up a phrase. What's the processing difference between these two situations? Can phrase processing promote word recognition in the phrase? Li et al. (2009) asked subjects to report as many characters as they can orally after presenting them with four characters for 80ms. They found that when the four characters can make up a phrase, the speed and accuracy of reporting are better than that when the four characters cannot form a phrase. They concluded that the phrase can promote word recognition. But previous research has found that transitional probability can affect word recognition. Li et al. (2009) did not control the variable. So their results may come from different transitional probabilities between these two conditions. In this study, we conducted four experiments to investigate how the processing of two continuous words affect each other during sentence reading. In Experiment 1, we controlled the transitional probability between the two words, and we found that words were read faster in higher transitional probability condition than in lower transitional probability condition. In Experiment 2, we manipulated whether two continuous words can form a phrase or not, and we carefully chose the two words so that the transitional probabilities between the two words were similar in these two conditions. We found that total reading time and second pass reading time on the second target word were longer in the phrase condition than in the non-phrase condition. In Experiment 3, after increasing the complexity of the phrase, we found the same pattern as in the Experiment 2. We also found total reading time and second pass reading time on the first target words, which are the same in two conditions, were longer in the phrase condition than in the non-phrase condition. In Experiment 4, we excluded the possibility that results of Experiments 2 and 3 were resulted from the syntactic category difference. Based on these findings, we drew two conclusions: 1) when the two pairs of two continuous words have the same transitional probabilities, word recognition in the phrase condition is not facilitated. These findings suggested that the results of Li et al. (2009) may be resulted from different transitional probabilities between the two words. Transitional probability is a kind of bottom to up information, and it can facilitate early stage of lexical access. 2) Compared with non-phrase conditions, words in phrase conditions need more cognitive resources to carry out semantic integration. And the more complex the phrase are, the more resources are needed. These findings help us to understand how Chinese readers processing two continuous word during sentence reading.
修改评论