In natural reading, the processing of words in fixation is influenced by semantic information obtained through preview (i.e., the semantic preview effect). Previous studies have confirmed that two types of semantic information exhibit the semantic preview effect: semantic association, which is reflected by the semantic relationship between preview…

Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. These cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character's meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the reader's processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman and Siok in…

Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. These cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character's meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the reader's processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman and Siok in…

The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information of compound words with contexts in the present…

Vocabulary is an important foundation for reading skills. Dual-route cascaded model believes that when form-sound correspondence is irregular, phonetic decoding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for word acquisition. Lexical access in syllabic scripts involves a morphological-phonetic-semantic approach, where phonological decoding is…

In Chinese reading, the possibility and mechanism of semantic parafoveal processing has been debated for a long time. To advance the topic, "semantic preview benefit" in Chinese reading was reexamined, with a specific focus on how it is affected by the semantic relatedness between preview and target words at the two-character word level.…

Learning from multiple documents is an essential ability in today's society. This experimental study used concept network analysis to consider how reading prompts and post-reading generative learning tasks can alter students' documents integration performance. Undergraduates (N = 119) read three documents about Alzheimer's disease with one of two…

Background: In the digital environment, users' academic reading behaviour has changed, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, scan, link, annotate and analyse content fragments. The semantic enhancement environment has been widely set with semantic technologies to offer additional and handy support for users and thus…

Most printed Chinese words are compounds built from the combination of meaningful characters. Yet, there is a poor understanding of how individual characters contribute to the recognition of compounds. Using a megastudy of Chinese word recognition (Tse et al., 2017), we examined how the lexical decision of existing and novel Chinese compounds was…

We examined whether word recognition accuracy and latency of words children encounter during primary school across the upper primary school grades can be predicted from word form (word length, mean Levenshtein distance, and mean frequency of neighbors), word meaning (free association network markers) and word exposure (corpus frequency and…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

Purpose: This study investigated how correlations between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading depend on characteristics of the stimuli. RAN tasks using stimuli with high phonological demands were predicted to be the strongest correlates of decoding efficiency, while high semantic demands were predicted to lead to stronger correlations with…

We segment what we read into meaningful events, each separated by a discrete boundary. How does event segmentation during encoding relate to the structure of story information in long-term memory? To evaluate this question, participants read stories of fictional historical events and then engaged in a postreading verb arrangement task. In this…

This paper explores the processes underlying verb metaphoric extension. Work on metaphor processing has largely focused on noun metaphor, despite evidence that verb metaphor is more common. Across three experiments, we collected paraphrases of simple intransitive sentences varying in semantic strain--for example, "The motor complained"…

Statistical learning (SL) plays a key role in literacy acquisition. Studies have increasingly revealed the influence of distributional statistical properties of words on visual word processing, including the effects of word frequency (lexical level) and mappings between orthography, phonology, and semantics (sub-lexical level). However, there has…