新词词素熟悉性影响视觉词切分线索在新词学习中的促进作用

The Familiarity of Morphemes Modulating Word Spacing Effects on the Acquisition of Novel Chinese Vocabulary

为考察词素熟悉性是否会影响视觉词切分线索在新词学习中的作用,本研究中新词由两类假词构成:第一类假词由两个高频字(高熟悉性词素)组成,第二类假词由两个低频字(低熟悉性词素)组成。实验采用学习-测试范式,将新词镶嵌在句子中供大学生被试阅读。结果发现,相比由低熟悉性词素构成的新词,词间空格在由高熟悉词素构成的新词中起到的促进作用更大。表明在汉语阅读过程中,词素熟悉性可能作为一种线索参与词切分。

Chinese script is normally printed as a continuous string of characters, where there are only small spaces between characters, and theseare of the same size regardless of whether they appear between or within words. There is no other visual word boundary information to help Chinesereaders separate and identify the words within sentence contexts. The lack of visual word segmentation cues, such as word spacing, leads to anintriguing but fundamental theoretical question in relation to Chinese reading How do Chinese readers separate character strings to identify words？There has been an amount of researches to examine the role word spacing played in Chinese word identification during reading. In the present study,we endeavored to explore the role of word spacing in the acquisition of Chinese novel words, especially to examine whether the word spacing effectwas modulated by the characteristics of each morpheme which composed the novel word. Two types of two-character pseudowords were constructed as novel vocabularies： the first type of novel words was made up of both familiarinitial and final constituents, which was considered as easy novel word; whilst the second type was made up with unfamiliar initial and finalconstituents, which was considered as difficult novel word. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences for the learning and the testphase separately in order to classify novel words into special semantic categories, such as fruit, animal and so on. Each sentence frame provideda chance for readers to understand the novel word＇s meaning. In the learning phase, half of the participants read a set of sentences in word-spacedformat, and the other half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read another set of sentences in unspaced format. In order to check thatadult readers were able to learn the pseudowords from the sentences that we created, we included a semantic category judgment for each target word inthe test phase of the experiment. The results showed that readers took shorter reading time on pseudowords when inserting spaces into words than that in traditional, unspacedformat in the learning phase, indicating that the facilitatory role of word spacing was observed in the leaning phase. However, the benefit of wordspacing in the learning phase did not maintain to the subsequent test phase where all readers read in the unspaced format. Furthermore, greaterbenefit of word spacing was found for pseudowords which were comprised of two familiar constituents than when pseudowords were made up of twounfamiliar constituents, indicating that the benefit of word spacing was modulated by different familiarity of constituents composing the pseudowordswhen acquiring them within sentential contexts. On the basis of the main findings in the present experiment, we suggest that it would deepen ourknowledge of word segmentation mechanism in Chinese reading and would provide important teaching counsels for Chinese children and readers ofChinese as a second language.