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The effects of character transposition within and across words in Chinese reading

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Abstract

Given the lack of spaces between words in Chinese text, Chinese readers must parse these characters into words using their word knowledge. In this situation, are the characters belonging to a single word or to different words understood via different character-order encoding processes? In this study, we explored the effects of word boundaries in Chinese text on character-order encoding. We used four-character words (the one-word condition) and two two-character words (the two-word condition) as our targets. We embedded the target words into sentences and then manipulated the previews of the words using the boundary paradigm. The preview was identical to the target word (identity condition), had the two middle characters of the target word transposed (TC condition), or had two middle characters that were different from those in the target word (SC condition). Fixation durations on the target word in the TC condition were much longer than those in the identity condition for the two-word condition, but they were not significantly different for the one-word condition. Furthermore, for the one-word condition, gaze durations were longer in the SC than in the TC condition, whereas for the two-word condition, the difference between the TC and SC conditions was not significant. Word boundaries were found to affect the character-order encoding in Chinese reading, further suggesting the early occurrence of word segmentation.

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Notes

  1. Luke and Christianson (2013) investigated the effect of frequency on morphological processing across the time course of lexical access using the transposed-letter paradigm. They found that frequency did not affect early morphological processing. Furthermore, when whole-word frequency increased, transposition across the morpheme boundary became less disruptive. To exclude the possible influence of word frequency in our study, we used the lme4 package to build linear mixed models including word frequency as a control factor. For the one-word condition, the word frequency was counted from an online corpus (http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/); for the two-word condition, word frequency was counted as the collocational frequency for the pair in the same corpus. In this model, word frequency did not affect the TC effects that we reported in the main text.

  2. Taft et al., (1999) also proposed a model of Chinese word processing. They provided a theoretical framework that assumes that lexical memory is viewed as a hierarchy of levels. The lexical processing system includes orthographic, phonological, and semantic subsystems. However, only the model proposed by Li et al. (2009) focuses on word segmentation during Chinese reading.

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Author note

This research was supported by the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academic Sciences (Grant No. KSCX2-YW-BR-6) and by a grant from the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31070904). We thank Yanping Liu and Guojie Ma for their help on the data analyses. We sincerely thank Manuel Perea and Qingqing Qu for advice and helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of the article. We also thank Kiel Christianson and the anonymous reviewers for their expert advice and suggestions.

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  1. Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 Lincui Road, Beijing, China

    Junjuan Gu & Xingshan Li

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  1. Junjuan Gu
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Correspondence to Xingshan Li.

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Gu, J., Li, X. The effects of character transposition within and across words in Chinese reading. Atten Percept Psychophys 77, 272–281 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-014-0749-5

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