中文阅读伴随词汇学习中的视觉复杂性效应:基于笔画数和词长的证据

Visual complexity effect in Chinese incidental word learning:Evidence from number of strokes and word length

通过两个实验考查重复学习新词过程中视觉复杂性效应的变化模式。采用阅读伴随词汇学习范式,将双字假词作为新词,嵌入15个语境,分5个时间段供被试阅读。实验1操纵新词笔画数(多、少),实验2操纵新词词长(两字词、三字词),记录大学生阅读句子时的眼动轨迹。结果发现,随着新词学习次数的增加,笔画数效应并未发生显著变化,表明笔画数作为反映汉字视觉复杂性的因素之一,同时作用于词汇学习的早期和晚期,符合视觉限制性假说;相比之下,随着新词学习次数的增加,词长效应逐步减小,表现出词长的“熟悉性”效应,符合视觉和语言共同限制性假说。上述发现表明,笔画数和词长在中文阅读伴随词汇习得中的作用机制存在差异:笔画数类似于一种低水平视觉信息,作用于词汇加工的视觉层;而词长则更加类似语言信息的加工方式,作用于词汇加工的较高层级。

The visual complexity effect is considered one of the“big three effects”in word recognition.In alphabetic reading(such as English and German),visual complexity is primarily reflected in word length.It is well established that word length affects both the“when”and“where”decisions of eye movement control in alphabetic reading,yielding more and longer fixations on long words relative to short words.Some researchers have used changes in the word length effect with repeated reading as a measure of vocabulary learning outcomes in alphabetic reading.In written Chinese text,visual complexity of words is influenced not only by word length,similar to alphabetic reading,but also by the number of strokes in a word.In the present study,we conducted two parallel eye movement studies to examine how visual complexity(measured by words’number of strokes and word length)influenced novel word learning in Chinese reading.We,specifically,investigated how visual complexity effects changed with cumulative learning.Two-character or three-character pseudowords were constructed as novel words.Each novel word was embedded into 15 highly constrained contexts for readers to establish novel lexical representations.There were five learning phases in our experiment.Participants read three sentences containing one novel word per learning phase,and their eye movements were recorded during sentence reading.In Experiment 1,we examined how the number of strokes in a word influenced word identification during Chinese word learning.The number of strokes in two-character novel words was manipulated as being either high or low.In Experiment 2,we examined how word length influenced novel word learning in Chinese reading by using two-character and three-character pseudowords as novel words.We included“Learning phase”as a continuous variable into the model to further examine how the visual complexity effects changed with exposure during Chinese novel word learning.We found that both the number of strokes and word length both influenced the“when”decision of eye movement control during Chinese novel word learning,the fewer the strokes and the shorter the word length,the shorter the fixations on novel words.In terms of the“where”decision,the number of strokes determined how long the saccade length into the novel words,which was more likely to relate to parafoveal processing,whilst word length influenced how long the saccade length leaving the novel words,which was highly related to foveal processing.We suggest that the process of stroke number information might influence the decision of where to land the eyes on novel words and the process of word length information might influence the decision of where to land the eyes when leaving novel words.We also found that the effect of number of strokes did not change significantly with exposure,indicating that the process of stroke number occurs both in the early and late stages of word learning,which supports“visual constraint hypothesis”.In contrast,the word length effect gradually decreases with exposure,showing the familiarity or learning effect,which aligns with“visual and linguistic constraint hypothesis”.These findings suggest a difference in the mechanisms of number of strokes and word length in Chinese reading accompanied by vocabulary acquisition:Stroke number might function as a form of low-level visual information,impacting the visual processing of vocabulary;while word length is more similar to the processing of linguistic information,affecting vocabulary processing at a higher level.