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Visual perception of Chinese orthography: from characters to sentences
There are different aims in this thesis. The primary aim is to investigate visual
perception in Chinese orthography, from its fundamentally distinct unit,
characters, to sentence reading. The first aim of the thesis is to investigate how
a single Chinese character is processed in many ways. We have looked into an
effect called orthographic satiation/decomposition (Cheng & Wu, 1994). It refers
to the feeling of uncertainty about the composition of some characters when
staring at a character for too long. Lee (2007) extended Cheng and Wu’s study
(1996), and the results have showed that orthographic satiation occurred faster
in females than males. We replicated Lee’s study (Experiment 1) (Chapter 3),
and have found that: (1) there was no significant difference between male and
female and (2) a radical that can stand alone as a single character makes characters
in which it occurs resistant to satiation.
Following orthographic satiation, in Chapter 4, we explored the preference
for eye/hemisphere visual pathways in Chinese characters (Experiment 2 & 3)
and words (Experiment 4). In English, researchers have reported a contralateral
preference when four-letter words were presented very quickly using a
haploscope (Obreg´on & Shillcock, 2012) . It raises the question of whether presenting
Chinese characters and words will show similar results considering
the complexity and the special characteristics of Chinese orthography. We presented
Chinese characters and words to participants using a haploscope. Our
results showed that: (1) the contralateral visual pathway was preferred in perceiving
right-left structured Chinese characters and two-character words, (2)
when a semantic radical is projected to the LH, participants are able to recognise
the semantic component better, (3) neighbourhood size (NS) (Tsai, Lee,
Lin, Tzeng & Hung, 2006) affects how participants recognise words, and(4)
males do better than females recognising characters but not words.
After investigating the recognition of Chinese characters and words, we
analysed the eye-movements in Chinese and English reading corpora. The
processes of reading are intuitively thought to be more complex than perceiving
a single character or words. The last studies in the thesis focused on the
reading behaviours in Chinese and English. The eye movement differences
and similarities between reading Chinese and English were investigated.
In Chapter 5, we showed that reading Chinese elicits more divergence of
the eyes within a fixation, compared with reading English. We interpreted
these data in terms of recent demonstrations that apparent size causes increases
in visual sensitivity (Arnold & Schindel, 2010) and engages more cortical
resource in V1 (Kersten & Murray, 2010). Our analyses were based on
movement within exactly temporally synchronized binocular fixations in the
reading of Chinese and English 5000-word multi-line texts, using monocular
calibration, with EyeLink-2 technology. When faced with visually complex
orthography, the oculomotor system ‘tricks’ the rest of the visual system into
‘zooming in’ on the text. We consolidated the relevant theorizing into the ‘Divergence
Affects Reading’ (DOLLAR) Theory.
In Chapter 6, we reported that (1) vertical movements within a fixation
tend to be smaller than horizontal ones, and (2) vertical movements within a
fixation tend to be upwards. We speculated that it is appropriate for the earlier
part of the fixation to be associated with visual recognition and for the later
part of the fixation to be associated with executive action. The tendency to
move upwards also suggested that in real-world reading, the upper part of
words/characters were informative.
In the last chapter analysing the reading corpus (Chapter 7), we reported
corrective saccades after return sweeps. We found that in English, there were
more corrective saccades after return sweeps than in Chinese. We interpreted
these data in terms of spatial coding (Kennedy & Murray, 1987). In terms of
Chinese and English differences, the stimuli that were used in our corpus show
that the length for each line was different in English. The length for each line
in Chinese was less different. Though the first character of each line was at
the same place for two languages, it was more difficult for English subjects to
locate the correct place after return sweeps because the length of return sweeps
was different.
In short, this thesis investigated visual perception in Chinese orthography,
in terms of characters, words, and real-world reading. Moreover, we compared
the differences and similarities between languages (English and Chinese). Despite
the fact that the orthographies of English and Chinese are very different,
we still found similar effects (e.g., contralateral preference) between them.
This thesis thus has contributed to a better understanding of the differences
and similarities between English and Chinese in terms of the orthographies
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