Effects of Character and Word Contextual Diversity in Chinese Beginning Readers

ABSTRACT

While recent studies find that contextual diversity (CD) is a better determinant of visual word recognition than token frequency, there is a dearth of work comparing contextual diversity and token frequency in developing readers. In two sets of character and lexical decision experiments we examined token frequency and contextual diversity effects for fourth-grade children in Chinese. Experiments 1a and 1b used Chinese characters and words from SUBTLEX-CH. Experiments 2a and 2b used characters and words from a new corpus developed from Chinese primary school textbooks and reading materials from Grade 1 to 4. In both sets of experiments, CD affected character and lexical decision times but token frequency did not. The results are discussed in terms of recent context-based accounts of word learning and lexical processing, and implications are presented for models of skilled and developing reading.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Dr. Qing Cai for help with SUBTLEX-CH and to all anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the Key Program of the Social Science Foundation of China (18AYY010 to Qingrong Chen). Michael K. Tanenhaus was supported by NIH HD 27206 and HD 073890. We are grateful to Jindi Xu, Jinghan Liang, Panke Gao for their helps in constructing a new corpus (CJC).

Competing interests statement

The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.

Notes

1. Chinese primary school students grade reading list (2018), Nanjing: Hug Chinese research group. https://www.qjmy.cn/edu/book/category2018/.

2. Notably, previous literature (e.g., Liu et al., 2017; Shu et al., 2003) showed that frequency and contextual diversity databases based on child material are unavailable in Chinese. Thus, corpora (e.g., SUBTLEX-CH, Dictionary of Chinese Character Information) based on Chinese adult material have been used to examine early reading development. Although there was an obvious contextual diversity effect in Experiments 1a and 1b, reviewers suggested that the CD effect should be re-investigated in Chinese children’s corpora. Due to the limitation of word numbers, the validation of CJC frequency and CD is detailed in Supplemental Material.