Word superiority effect for native Chinese readers and low-proficiency Chinese learners. (9th October 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: CHEN, LIN; PERFETTI, CHARLES; LENG, YING; LI, YOU
• Is Part Of: Applied psycholinguistics. Volume 39:Number 6(2018)
• Page Start: 1097
• Page End: 1115
• Publication Date: 2018-10-09
• Subjects: character frequency, -- low-proficiency adult Chinese learners, -- native Chinese readers, -- word superiority effect; Psycholinguistics -- Periodicals; 401.9
• DOI: 10.1017/S0142716418000255
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0142-7164

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Written word recognition in Chinese links the perception of individual characters with whole words. With experience in reading, a high-quality word representation can provide top-down influence on the perception of its constituent characters, thus producing a word superiority effect (WSE). In experiments using the Reicher–Wheeler paradigm, we examined the WSE in two-character words for native Chinese readers (Experiment 1) and low-proficiency adult Chinese learners with Thai (Experiment 2a) and Indonesian (Experiment 2b) as native language backgrounds. For native Chinese readers, the WSE was smaller for high-frequency than low-frequency characters, reflecting rapid access to more frequently experienced characters and a consequent reduction of top-down word-level effects. Learners of Chinese, however, showed a strong WSE for both low-frequency and high-frequency characters, reflecting less well-established character representations combined with word-level knowledge sufficient to support character recognition. The results suggest that native Chinese readers develop strong representations at both the character and the word level, while low-proficiency Chinese learners are more dependent on the word level. We discuss the possibility that a word-level emphasis Chinese foreign language instruction is one reason for this pattern.