Yu Lili, Zhang Qiaoming, Priest Caspian, Reichle Erik D, Sheridan Heather
a School of Psychology , University of Southampton , Southampton , UK.
b School of Educational Science , Ludong University , Yantai , China.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2017 Jan 13:1-12. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2016.1272616.
Three eye-movement experiments were conducted to examine how the complexity of characters in Chinese words (i.e., number of strokes per character) influences their processing and eye-movement behaviour. In Experiment 1, English speakers with no significant knowledge of Chinese searched for specific low-, medium-, and high-complexity target characters in a multi-page narrative containing characters of varying complexity (3-16 strokes). Fixation durations and skipping rates were influenced by the visual complexity of both the target characters and the characters being searched even though participants had no knowledge of Chinese. In Experiment 2, native Chinese speakers performed the same character-search task, and a similar pattern of results was observed. Finally, in Experiment 3, a second sample of native Chinese speakers read the same text used in Experiments 1 and 2, with text characters again exhibiting complexity effects. These results collectively suggest that character-complexity effects on eye movements may not be due to lexical processing per se but may instead reflect whatever visual processing is required to know whether or not a character corresponds to an episodically represented target. The theoretical implications of this for our understanding of normal reading are discussed.
进行了三项眼动实验，以研究中文单词中字符的复杂性（即每个字符的笔画数）如何影响其加工过程和眼动行为。在实验1中，对中文几乎一无所知的英语使用者在一篇包含不同复杂程度（3 - 16画）字符的多页叙述文中搜索特定的低、中、高复杂度目标字符。尽管参与者不懂中文，但注视持续时间和跳过率受到目标字符以及正在搜索的字符的视觉复杂性的影响。在实验2中，以中文为母语的人执行相同的字符搜索任务，并观察到了类似的结果模式。最后，在实验3中，另一组以中文为母语的人阅读了实验1和2中使用的相同文本，文本字符再次表现出复杂性效应。这些结果共同表明，字符复杂性对眼动的影响可能并非源于词汇加工本身，而是可能反映了识别一个字符是否与一个情景表征的目标相对应所需的任何视觉加工。文中讨论了这一结果对我们理解正常阅读的理论意义。
