The role of character positional frequency on Chinese word learning during natural reading

Readers? eye movements were recorded to examine the role of character positional frequency on Chinese lexical acquisition during reading and its possible modulation by word spacing. In Experiment 1, three types of pseudowords were constructed based on each character?s positional frequency, providing congruent, incongruent, and no positional word segmentation information. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences, for the learning and the test phases. In the learning phase, half the participants read sentences in word-spaced format, and half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read sentences in unspaced format. The results showed an inhibitory effect of character positional frequency upon the efficiency of word learning when processing incongruent pseudowords both in the learning and test phase, and also showed facilitatory effect of word spacing in the learning phase, but not at test. Most importantly, these two characteristics exerted independent influences on word segmentation. In Experiment 2, three analogous types of pseudowords were created whilst controlling for orthographic neighborhood size. The results of the two experiments were consistent, except that the effect of character positional frequency was absent in the test phase in Experiment 2. We argue that the positional frequency of a word?s constituent characters may influence the character-to-word assignment in a process that likely incorporates both lexical segmentation and identification

Visual correlates of Thai lexical tone production: Motion of the head, eyebrows, and larynx?

There is well-established evidence that visual articulatory information in the face and head aids identification and discrimination of lexical tone. However, the nature and locus of this information is only beginning to be specified. In previous work we identified a predominant role of head motion over face motion in both the perception and production of Cantonese lexical tone, the latter using OPTOTRAK motion tracking. We have now extended the set of OPTOTRAK markers to include the eyebrows and the larynx, and collected data from a corpus of Cantonese, Thai and Mandarin speakers. Here we report on a Thai speaker producing the five Thai tones on four Thai syllables in isolated words and sentences and in normal, whispered, and Lombard speech. Principal components (PCs) for the face (eyebrows, lips, jaw), the larynx and for independent head movement were extracted and linear mixed model analyses of range of PC1 scores revealed good differentiation on the basis of syllable identity and context and speech style. Of particular importance, the five Thai tones were best differentiated by head and larynx motion. So, these results add larynx motion as a possible visible cue for tone perception. Studies across speakers and the three languages will follow