Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2022 Oct;75(10):1932-1947. doi: 10.1177/17470218211064539. Epub 2021 Dec 27.
We conducted three eye movement experiments to investigate the mechanism for coding letter positions in a person's second language during sentence reading; we also examined the role of morphology in this process with a more rigorous manipulation. Given that readers obtain information not only from currently fixated words (i.e., the foveal area) but also from upcoming words (i.e., the parafoveal area) to guide their reading, we examined both when the targets were fixated (Exp. 1) and when the targets were seen parafoveally (Exps. 2 and 3). First, we found the classic transposed letter (TL) effect in Exp. 1, but not in Exp. 2 or 3. This implies that flexible letter position coding exists during sentence reading. However, this was limited to words located in the foveal area, suggesting that L2 readers whose L2 proficiency is not as high as skilled native readers are not able to extract and utilise the parafoveal letter identity and position information of a word, whether the word length is long (Exp. 2) or short (Exp. 3). Second, we found morphological information to influence the magnitude of the TL effect in Exp. 1. These results provide new eye movement evidence for the flexibility of L2 letter position coding during sentence reading, as well as the interactions between the different internal representations of words in this process. Future L2 reading frameworks should integrate word recognition and eye movement control models.
我们进行了三项眼动实验，以研究在阅读句子时第二语言中字母位置的编码机制；我们还通过更严格的操作检验了形态在这一过程中的作用。鉴于读者不仅从当前注视的单词（即中央凹区域）获取信息，还从即将到来的单词（即周边区域）获取信息来指导阅读，我们检查了目标被注视时（实验 1）和目标被周边注视时（实验 2 和 3）的情况。首先，我们在实验 1 中发现了经典的字母换位（TL）效应，但在实验 2 或 3 中没有发现。这意味着在句子阅读过程中存在灵活的字母位置编码。然而，这仅限于位于中央凹区域的单词，这表明 L2 熟练度不如熟练的母语读者的 L2 读者无法提取和利用单词的周边字母身份和位置信息，无论单词长度是长（实验 2）还是短（实验 3）。其次，我们发现形态信息在实验 1 中影响 TL 效应的大小。这些结果为句子阅读中 L2 字母位置编码的灵活性提供了新的眼动证据，以及在这个过程中单词不同内部表示之间的相互作用。未来的 L2 阅读框架应整合单词识别和眼动控制模型。
