Lexical and Sublexical Phonological Effects in Chinese Silent and Oral Reading

ABSTRACT

What is the time course of activation of phonological information in logographic writing systems like Chinese, in which meaning is prioritized over sound? We used a manipulation of phonological regularity to examine foveal and parafoveal phonological processing of Chinese phonograms at lexical and sublexical levels during Chinese sentence reading in 2 eye-tracking experiments. In Experiment 1, using an error disruption task during silent reading, we observed foveal lexical phonological activation in second-pass reading. In Experiment 2, using the boundary paradigm, both parafoveal lexical and sublexical phonological preview benefits were found in first-fixation duration in oral reading, whereas only lexical phonological benefits were found in gaze duration during silent reading. Thus, phonological information had earlier and more pronounced parafoveal effects in oral reading, and these extended to sublexical processing. These results are compatible with the view that oral reading prioritizes parafoveal phonological processing in Chinese.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Grants (LA 2884/2-1 and KL 955/18) and by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31671126). The authors declare no conflict of interest. We gratefully acknowledge comments by Reinhold Kliegl and three anonymous reviewers on earlier versions of this article. Data and R scripts used in the current study will be available at the Potsdam Mind Research Repository (http://read.psych.uni-potsdam.de/PMR2/), or from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

1. Related but different from character regularity, consistency refers to whether a character’s pronunciation agrees with those of its orthographic neighbors, which by definition contain the same phonetic radical. Although regularity describes the relationship in pronunciations between only one character and its phonetic radical, consistency takes into account a “family” of characters containing the same phonetic radical. Note that the pronunciation of a regular character can be either of high or low consistency.

2. We thank an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion of using orthogonal Helmert contrasts, instead of treatment contrasts, which would inflate type I error. The Helmert contrasts differ from previous studies with the unrelated condition as the baseline for other conditions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [KL955/18, LA2884/2-1] and National Natural Science Foundation of China [31671126].