Purpose: The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity. Method: Using the…

This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…

In a masked priming word-naming task, a facilitation due to the initial-segmental sound overlap for 2-character kanji prime-target pairs was affected by certain orthographic properties (Yoshihara, Nakayama, Verdonschot, & Hino, 2017). That is, the facilitation that was due to the initial mora overlap occurred only when the mora was the whole…

Purpose: Studies on reading in individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss (deaf) raise the possibility that, due to deficient phonological coding, deaf individuals may rely more on orthographic-semantic links than on orthographic-phonological links. However, the relative contribution of phonological and semantic information to visual word…

The number of orthographic neighbors of a word influences its probability of being retrieved in recognition and free recall memory tests. Even though this phenomenon is well demonstrated for English words, it has yet to be demonstrated for languages with more predictable grapheme-phoneme mappings than English. To address this issue, 4 experiments…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

In studies of visual object recognition, strong inversion effects accompany the acquisition of expertise and imply the involvement of configural processing. Chinese literacy results in sensitivity to the orthography of Chinese characters. While there is some evidence that this orthographic sensitivity results in an inversion effect, and thus…

The present work investigates whether and how morphological decomposition processes bias the reading of Hebrew heterophonic homographs, i.e., unique orthographic patterns that are associated with two separate phonological, semantic entities depicted by means of two morphological structures (linear and nonlinear). In order to reveal the nature of…

Previous studies have suggested that word processing in English as a second language (L2) is affected by first language (L1) orthographic features. However, little is known about what affects L2 Chinese character processing in adult Chinese learners with different L1 orthographies such as Japanese, Korean, and English. With a picture-character…

A lexical decision task was used with a masked priming procedure to investigate whether and to what extent neighborhood distribution influences the effect of prime duration in masked orthographic priming. French word targets had two higher frequency neighbors that were either distributed over two letter positions (e.g., "LOBE/robe-loge")…

University students participated in five experiments concerning the effects of unmasked, orthographically similar, primes on visual word recognition in the lexical decision task (LDT) and naming tasks. The modal prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 350 ms. When primes were words that were orthographic neighbors of the targets, and…

In two masked priming experiments with Chinese characters, orthographic priming effects were observed in lexical decision and naming tasks despite the fact that the primes were phonologically unrelated to the target characters. Data suggest that the recovery of lexical information for Chinese characters does not depend on the prior activation of…

Thirty-six college students read a portion of a contemporary novel presented on a cathode ray tube while their eye movements were being monitored and recorded in an effort to determine how soon after the onset of a fixation during reading the mind begins to deal with characteristics of the language being perceived. The passage contained a total of…