Lin Yu-Cheng, Lin Pei-Ying
Department of Psychological Science, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley, USA.
Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2016 Jun;167:52-62. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.04.001. Epub 2016 Apr 22.
Previous monolingual studies have consistently suggested that there was flexibility of letter position encoding in different alphabetic writing systems. This robust letter transposition was named the "Cambridge University" effect. However, to date whether the orthographic neighborhood and cross-language script similarity would modulate the magnitude of the Cambridge University effect during the second-language word recognition in bilingual minds was unknown. We address this question using a mouse-tracking experimental paradigm to trace the internal lexical matching processes underlying the lexical access. Our linear mixed effects models and growth curve analyses revealed that a low orthographic neighborhood can trigger a large magnitude of the Cambridge University effect for monolinguals and bilinguals on their hand trajectories. We also found that different-script bilinguals (Chinese-English bilinguals) exhibited a greater Cambridge University effect than similar-script bilinguals (Spanish-English bilinguals) and English monolinguals. The findings offer compelling evidence that a human lexical match criterion of recognition system can be modified by neighborhood density and cross-language script similarity of readers.
以往的单语研究一直表明，在不同的字母书写系统中，字母位置编码存在灵活性。这种强大的字母换位被称为“剑桥大学”效应。然而，迄今为止，在双语者的第二语言单词识别过程中，正字法邻域和跨语言脚本相似性是否会调节剑桥大学效应的大小尚不清楚。我们使用鼠标跟踪实验范式来解决这个问题，以追踪词汇访问背后的内部词汇匹配过程。我们的线性混合效应模型和生长曲线分析表明，对于单语者和双语者来说，低正字法邻域会在他们的手部轨迹上引发较大程度的剑桥大学效应。我们还发现，不同脚本的双语者（中英双语者）比相同脚本的双语者（西英双语者）和英语单语者表现出更大的剑桥大学效应。这些发现提供了令人信服的证据，表明人类识别系统的词汇匹配标准可以被读者的邻域密度和跨语言脚本相似性所改变。
