Processing of compound-word characters in reading Chinese: An eye-movement-contingent display change study

Abstract

Readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read Chinese two-constituent compound words in sentence contexts. The first compound-word constituent was either an infrequent character with a highly predictable second constituent or a frequent character with an unpredictable second constituent. The parafoveal preview of the second constituent was manipulated, with four preview conditions: identical to the correct form; a semantically related character to the second constituent; a semantically unrelated character to the second constituent; and a pseudocharacter. An invisible boundary was set between the two constituents; when the eyes moved across the boundary, the previewed character was changed to its intended form. The main findings were that preview effects occurred for the second constituent of the compound word. Providing an incorrect preview of the second constituent affected fixations on the first constituent, but only when the second constituent was predictable from the first. The frequency of the initial character of the compound constrained the identity of the second character, and this in turn modulated the extent to which the semantic characteristics of the preview influenced processing of the second constituent and the compound word as a whole. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of Chinese compound-word recognition and the constraint hypothesis of Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek (2004). We conclude that word identification in Chinese is flexible, and parafoveal processing of upcoming characters is influenced both by the characteristics of the fixated character and by its relationship with the characters in the parafovea.

Keywords:

• Reading
• Eye movements
• Chinese
• Compound words
• Display change

Notes

¹ In addition to these analyses, we considered fixations on the first character of the target compound word contingent on whether they were part of Inspection Pattern 1 or Inspection Pattern 2, as well as fixations on the second character of the target word contingent on whether they were part of Inspection Pattern 1 or Inspection Pattern 3 (see Figure 1). We did this to determine whether the particular way in which the target word was processed across fixations influenced the nature of the effects that occurred. In both sets of analyses, the effects were either very similar for fixations from both patterns of inspection, or were null effects. None of the analyses of the different data sets produced patterns of effects that were suggestive of anything that the overall analyses did not also show. We also examined fixations prior to the saccade launched onto the target region contingent on inspection pattern, and again effects were similar (though the power of these analyses was reduced relative to the overall analyses). Given the similarity of effects across analyses, we simply report detailed effects based on the overall data sets in the Results section.

² Curiously, the effect emerged in the nonidentical preview conditions but not in the identical preview condition. One possible explanation is that the lexical status of the entire compound word (a nonword in the nonidentical preview conditions) induced difficulty on the processing of the first character exacerbated in the low-frequency condition. We are grateful to Sarah White for this suggestion.