其他摘要 | Unlike English, there are no inter-word spaces to mark word boundaries in Chinese texts. In the absence of low-level visual cues, Chinese readers need to rely on higher-level information such as sentence context for word segmentation. In order to understand how sentence context affects word segmentation in Chinese reading, this study explored whether the prior context affects the lexical competition stage or post- competition stage of Chinese word segmentation. We also investigated whether the effects of prior context are different for different kinds of sentence contexts. To study these questions, Chinese readers’ eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing an overlapping ambiguous string (ABC), where the middle character can form a distinct word with both the characters on its left (word AB) and on its right (word BC).
In Study 1, four eye-movement experiments were conducted to investigate whether the prior context affects the lexical competition stage or post-competition stage of Chinese word segmentation. Firstly, Experiment 1 examined whether the prior context providing segmentation information was used immediately by readers. In the biased context condition, the prior context restricted the subsequent word to nouns (i.e., AB-C) or verbs (i.e., A-BC). In the neutral context condition, the overlapping ambiguous string was segmented as AB-C or A-BC according to the post- target context. The results showed that there were shorter first-fixation durations on the overlapping ambiguous string region in the biased context AB-C condition than those in the biased context A-BC condition, whereas no difference between the AB-C and A-BC segmentation types was found in the neutral context condition. Experiments 2a-2c manipulated the extent to which the right-side word BC was plausible as an immediate continuation following the prior context, resulting the more plausible and less plausible conditions, to investigate whether the word BC supported by context had more fierce competition with word AB. Compared with a less plausible word BC, first-pass reading times on the overlapping ambiguous string were longer with a more plausible word BC. However, when word frequency and left-side word advantage overwhelmingly supported word AB, no significant plausibility effect was found. These results indicated that the prior context has a strong and early influence on word segmentation in the process of Chinese reading. Context, word frequency and left-side word advantage can all affect the early stage of lexical competition. The more information supporting a word, the faster the word is activated and the faster the word competition ends.
Study 2 examined whether the effects of prior context are different for different kinds of sentence contexts using two eye-movement experiments. It mainly focused on the semantic association information of words, the information that restricts the part of speech of subsequent words, and the information that reflects the overall prior context. We compared the semantic association and sentence-level information in Experiment 3. For semantic association information, the prior context contained a word semantically related to the word AB under the semantically related conditions, while this word was replaced by an irrelevant word under the semantically unrelated conditions. The sentence-level information supported A-BC segmentation in the biased context conditions, but the prior contexts did not support any specific segmentation structure in the neutral context conditions. The results showed that when the semantically related word (supporting AB-C structure) was inconsistent with the sentence-level information (supporting A-BC structure), there were longer go-past times and higher regression-out probabilities on the overlapping ambiguous string region. In Experiment 4, we compared whether grammatical constraints and sentence- level information influence word segmentation using the same or different mechanisms. The results indicated that there was a significant grammatical constraint effect on first fixation durations, first-pass reading times and second-pass reading times, but a significant effect of sentence-level information was only found on the second-pass reading measures. These results suggested that the grammatical constraint information affects word segmentation process immediately, and the effects of semantic association exert a later effect. By contrast, the sentence-level information mainly affects the final segmentation results.
To sum up, the grammatical constraint and semantic association represented as lexical knowledge components can affect the process of word segmentation. The grammatical constraint information has more immediate impact, and the effect of semantic association information may be relatively late. However, the sentence-level information that needs to integrate multiple information sources mainly affects the final segmentation results to ensure successful comprehension. The findings are extremely important for understanding the cognitive mechanisms of Chinese reading. |
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