TY - JOUR
T1 - Acquisition of linguistic information to the left of fixation during the reading of Chinese text
AU - Wang, Chin An
AU - Tsai, Jie Li
AU - Inhoff, Albrecht W.
AU - Tzeng, Ovid J.L.
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to Jie-Li Tsai, Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University, Wenshan, Taipei 11605, Taiwan. E-mail: [email protected] This research was supported by grants from the Taiwan National Science Council (95-2413-H-010-002), the theme project on brain, cognition and behavioral science from Academia Sinica (AS-93-TP-C05) and by Grant HD043405 from the National Institutes of Health (United States). We are grateful to Curtis Hardyck and Mallory Bersamira for their help with the paper. We also thank Sarah White and Barbara Juhasz for their comments on an earlier version of the article.
PY - 2009/9/1
Y1 - 2009/9/1
N2 - The linguistic properties of the first (critical) character of a two-character Chinese word were manipulated when the eyes moved to the right of the critical character during reading to determine whether character processing is strictly unidirectional. In Experiment 1, the critical character was replaced with a congruent or incongruent character or left unchanged. Critical character changes did not influence the fixation duration, but incongruent changes led to more regressions than congruent changes. In Experiment 2, the critical character was replaced with either a homophonic or a non-homophonic character when it was to the left of fixation. The fixation following the change was now longer when the replaced character and the critical character were homophones than when they were phonologically dissimilar. These results indicate that readers obtain phonological and semantic information to the left of a fixated character and that the recognition of consecutive Chinese characters is not strictly unidirectional.
AB - The linguistic properties of the first (critical) character of a two-character Chinese word were manipulated when the eyes moved to the right of the critical character during reading to determine whether character processing is strictly unidirectional. In Experiment 1, the critical character was replaced with a congruent or incongruent character or left unchanged. Critical character changes did not influence the fixation duration, but incongruent changes led to more regressions than congruent changes. In Experiment 2, the critical character was replaced with either a homophonic or a non-homophonic character when it was to the left of fixation. The fixation following the change was now longer when the replaced character and the critical character were homophones than when they were phonologically dissimilar. These results indicate that readers obtain phonological and semantic information to the left of a fixated character and that the recognition of consecutive Chinese characters is not strictly unidirectional.
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U2 - 10.1080/01690960802525392
DO - 10.1080/01690960802525392
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:75349084773
SN - 0169-0965
VL - 24
SP - 1097
EP - 1123
JO - Language and Cognitive Processes
JF - Language and Cognitive Processes
IS - 7-8
ER -