Online Assessment of Parafoveal Morphological Processing/Awareness during Reading among Chinese and Korean Adults

ABSTRACT

Purpose

The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity.

Method

Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated the relation between the homographic parafoveal preview morphemes and the target words in Chinese and Korean, respectively, in two experiments. We tested 57 Chinese and 45 Korean university students. Together with baseline conditions in which the previews were either identical or unrelated to the target, we had two critical conditions in which the homographs shared/did not share the same morphemic meaning (i.e., same morpheme/different morpheme) with the target morpheme.

Results

Across the two experiments, the differences between the same and different morpheme conditions in a number of eye movement indices were significant, consistently showing that appropriate morpho-semantic information facilitates lexical processing. The different-morpheme previews facilitated the target word processing in Chinese but not in Korean reading.

Conclusion

These findings suggest that morphemic meanings are activated early on during word recognition in Chinese, a logographic orthography, and Korean Hangul, a phonologically transparent writing system, before the word is fixated upon.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Min-Sun Chang and Kunhee Kim for their efforts on Korean reading materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data and R scripts used in the current study are available at https://osf.io/fpbk3.

Notes

1. Eye-tracking during sentence reading is a closer approximation to reading compared to other methods, such as lexical decision or self-paced reading. The gaze-boundary paradigm introduces a display-change manipulation, which differs from natural reading, even if it may not be consciously registered by readers.

2. In a post-hoc analysis, the SM condition led to a shorter target viewing time than the NW conditon in TRT (b = -0.059, SE = .024, t = -2.47, p = .014).

Additional information

Funding

The work was partially supported by the Departmental Research Grant of the Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, by a FDCT grant from the Macao Science and Technology Development Fund (Project code: 0015/2021/ITP), and by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5A2A03044034).