Visual attention shift to printed words during spoken word recognition in Chinese: The role of phonological information

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which phonological information mediates the visual attention shift to printed Chinese words in spoken word recognition by using an eye-movement technique with a printed-word paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are visually presented with four printed words on a computer screen, which include a target word, a phonological competitor, and two distractors. Participants are then required to select the target word using a computer mouse, and the eye movements are recorded. In Experiment 1, phonological information was manipulated at the full-phonological overlap; in Experiment 2, phonological information at the partial-phonological overlap was manipulated; and in Experiment 3, the phonological competitors were manipulated to share either fulloverlap or partial-overlap with targets directly. Results of the three experiments showed that the phonological competitor effects were observed at both the full-phonological overlap and partial-phonological overlap conditions. That is, phonological competitors attracted more fixations than distractors, which suggested that phonological information mediates the visual attention shift during spoken word recognition. More importantly, we found that the mediating role of phonological information varies as a function of the phonological similarity between target words and phonological competitors.

The role of tonal information during spoken-word recognition in Chinese: Evidence from a printed-word eye-tracking study

“…Moreover, the segmental information (i.e., phonemes) was matched to be identical between the targets and the competitors to maximize the possibility of observing an effect of lexical tone. If the lexical tone does not play any role in spoken-word recognition, then we expected to observe comparable phonological competitor effects in the toneconsistent and the tone-inconsistent conditions (Shen et al, 2018). Furthermore, if tone plays a strong constraining role in spoken-word recognition (Lee, 2007), then the phonological competitor effect will only be found in the tone-consistent condition and will be absent in the tone-inconsistent condition.…”

“…Thus, two visual-world eye-tracking experiments were designed and conducted to examine the role of tonal similarity in spoken-word recognition and whether contextual predictability affects the role of lexical tone in Mandarin Chinese. As a follow-up of Shen, Qu, and Tong (2018), the present study employed a printed-word version of the visual-world paradigm (Huettig, Rommers, & Meyer, 2011;McQueen & Viebahn, 2007). In this paradigm, eye movements of participants on visual words were continuously recorded and time locked to the unfolding of the spoken target words.…”

The Effect of Salience on Chinese Pun Comprehension: A Visual World Paradigm Study

“…This variation may also partly explain why the fixation proportion on distractors at 0 ms differed in the two experimental conditions: in Figure 3, the fixation proportion curve of the distractor is higher than that of the phonological while the opposite pattern is observed in Figure 4. Shen et al (2018) demonstrated an improved version of the printed-word VWP, in which they did not use any context sentence but the target word alone. Though this method could overcome the problem stated here, it does not apply to our study since the majority of puns works on the basis of a sentence context.…”

The Processing of the Second Syllable in Recognizing Chinese Disyllabic Spoken Words: Evidence From Eye Tracking

“…In the following experiments, we adopted a printed-word paradigm with eye tracking to investigate the processing of the second syllable processing in Chinese spoken word perception ( Huettig and McQueen, 2007 ; McQueen and Viebahn, 2007 ). The visual world paradigm has been widely used to explore phonological processing in visual word recognition ( Shatzman and McQueen, 2006 ; Huettig and McQueen, 2007 ; McQueen and Viebahn, 2007 ; Weber et al, 2007 ; Ito et al, 2018 ; Shen et al, 2018 ). Compared to the ERP technique, the visual world paradigm with eye tracking has several advantages: (1) In ERPs studies, some explicit responses such as eye blinks and moving eyes would cause a great deal of electrical noise on the EEG signals ( Rayner and Clifton, 2009 ), while the eye movements recording can occur implicitly without the interferences from explicit responses ( Huettig and McQueen, 2007 ); (2) In ERP studies, incongruent spoken sentences are usually constructed when investigating the spoken comprehension (e.g., Liu et al, 2006 ), the eye movements recording can be recorded in a more natural language comprehension environment with the normal spoken sentence as stimuli; thus has higher ecological validity than the ERP technique.…”

“…This assumption predicts that the degree of word activation varies with phonological similarity. Using the eye-tracking technique, Shen et al (2018) manipulated the phonological similarity of the first syllable in Chinese disyllabic words and found that more fixations were allocated to high-similarity competitors (sharing full phonemic overlap with targets) compared to low-similarity competitors (sharing partial phonemic overlap with targets). If the mapping rule of “global similarity” also applies to second syllable processing in Chinese, we would observe a larger phonological competition effect in the syllabic overlap condition while a small effect in the sub-syllabic overlap condition.…”