Predictability eliminates neighborhood effects during Chinese sentence reading

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated effects of both orthographic neighborhood size and neighbor frequency in word recognition in Chinese. A large neighborhood-where neighborhood size is defined by the number of words that differ from a target word by a single character-appears to facilitate word recognition, while the presence of a higher-frequency neighbor has an inhibitory effect. The present study investigated modulation of these effects by a word's predictability in context. In two eye-movement experiments, the predictability of a target word in each sentence was manipulated. Target words differed in their neighborhood size (Experiment 1) and in whether they had a higher-frequency neighbor (Experiment 2). The study replicated the previously observed effects of neighborhood size and neighbor frequency when the target word was unpredictable, but in both experiments neighborhood effects were absent when the target was predictable. These results suggest that when a word is preactivated by context, the activation of its neighbors may be diminished to such an extent that these neighbors do not effectively compete for selection.

Competition between parts and whole: A new approach to Chinese compound word processing.

“…The constraint might be particularly useful when the whole compound word is low frequency. Yu et al (2021), however, pointed out that family member sizes are mostly found to be facilitative in alphabetic languages (e.g., Dutch: Kuperman et al, 2009; English: Juhasz & Berkowitz, 2011; Finnish: Kuperman et al, 2008), as well as in Chinese (Yao et al, 2022). Furthermore, when they analyzed only a subset of target words to equate family member size, the inhibitory effect of first character frequency was still present.…”

Beyond quantity of experience: Exploring the role of semantic consistency in Chinese character knowledge.

“…Xiong et al (2023) reported no difference in character-level effects across lexical decision and sentence reading, and on this basis, we predict that facilitatory effects of family metrics may also be observed in sentence reading. However, this may be the case only when target words are unpredictable from the prior context (Yao et al, 2022). If target words are highly predictable, then this may lead to preactivation of the whole word, which may make recognition too rapid for a morpheme-level analysis.…”