Compound word frequency modifies the effect of character frequency in reading Chinese

Abstract

In two eye-tracking studies, reading of two-character Chinese compound words was examined. First and second character frequency were orthogonally manipulated to examine the extent to which Chinese compound words are processed via the component characters. In Experiment 1, first and second character frequency were manipulated for frequent compound words, whereas in Experiment 2 it was done for infrequent compound words. Fixation time and skipping probability for the first and second character were affected by its frequency in neither experiment, nor in their pooled analysis. Yet, in Experiment 2 fixations on the second character were longer when a high frequency character was presented as the first character compared with when a low frequency character was presented as the first character. This reversed character frequency effect reflects a morphological family size effect and is explained by the constraint hypothesis (Hyönä, Bertram, & Pollatsek, 2004), according to which fixation time on the second component of two-component compound words is shorter when its identity is constrained by the first component. It is concluded that frequent Chinese compound words are processed holistically, whereas with infrequent compound words there is some room for the characters to play a role in the identification process.

Lexical Orthographic Knowledge Mediates the Relationship Between Character Reading and Reading Comprehension Among Learners With Chinese as a Second Language

“…While the analytical processing is surely important and indispensable, it should also be noted that due to CSL learners’ limited knowledge of Chinese morphemes, it is difficult for them to decode word meanings in an analytical way ( Gong et al, 2020b ). The growing number of studies have also shown that learners recognize words holistically in reading (e.g., Chu and Leung, 2005 ; Liu et al, 2010 ; Cui et al, 2021 ), and lexical orthographic knowledge helps to predict students’ reading comprehension performance ( Leong et al, 2011 ). Therefore, we argued that lexical orthographic knowledge may play a vital role in CSL learners’ acquisition of reading comprehension skills.…”

“…Though arrayed in line, characters are with syntagmatic relations, rather than linearly related. Therefore, to process sentences, readers need to segment words in a string of characters, which requires word and word-constituent knowledge at both form and meaning levels ( Li et al, 2009 ; Li and Pollatsek, 2020 ; Cui et al, 2021 ).…”

“…In considering the fact that there are a large number of Chinese words whose meanings are more or less opaque, the analytical approach may not be applicable in reading these words, therefore, the lexical orthographic knowledge could help readers to quickly recall the correct meaning of each word in reading texts. Recent studies conducted among primary students ( Chu and Leung, 2005 ) and undergraduate students ( Cui et al, 2021 ) have also suggested that the Chinese native students tended to adopt a holistically processing in reading frequent words. In a similar way, we could assume that with more knowledge in Chinese gained in learning, the CSL learners could be more familiar with the holistically processing.…”

A multitask comparison of word- and character-frequency effects in Chinese reading.

“…For example, readers may actively use an upcoming character to “constrain” the likely identity of the upcoming word. Because characters that occur frequently in print also tend to occur in many different words, they provide little constraint to narrow down the possible identity of a word in which the characters are embedded, thereby slowing the word-identification process relative to words with low-frequency characters (e.g., Cui et al, 2021). This hypothesis was more formally implemented by X.…”

“…The project is also supported by grants from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP190100719), National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences of China (16BYY071), Key Science and Technology Program of Henan Chinese raise the obvious question: What role does the processing of characters play in the identification of words? Although the word-frequency effect has been reliably observed in Chinese, suggesting that words are important functional units that are represented in the mental lexicon, reports of the character-frequency effect are inconsistent, making the role of characters and their possible status as functional units less clear (e.g., see Cui et al, 2021Cui et al, , 2013Ma et al, 2015;G. Yan et al, 2006;Yu et al, 2021).…”