Processing Multi-Constituent Units in Chinese Reading: An Eye Movement

阅读对于现代社会的成功运作至关重要，无论是专业还是社交。此外，扫盲是围绕社会包容建立的社会的核心。阅读能力有助于一个人的自尊和他们充分发挥潜力的程度。对阅读进行科学的调查对于制定与最佳教学实践相关的合理教育政策至关重要。因此，研究阅读背后的心理过程是非常重要的。在这个项目中，我们将关注中文阅读，特别是读者如何在语言上处理常见的多词短语（我们称之为多成分单位，MCU），以及他们如何在自然阅读时决定单词的开始和结束。中文书面文本的一个重要属性对这个项目至关重要，那就是它是一种基于无空格字符的语言。书面汉语不像字母语言，如英语，其中有单独的单词，它们之间的空格是由字母组成的。相反，中文书面句子采用字符串的形式，即由笔画排列组成的方框状符号。字符可以组合在一起形成单词，但与英语不同的是，单词之间没有空格指示单词的开始和结束。此外，在中文中，哪些字符构成单词单位往往存在很大的歧义。鉴于这些特性，书面汉语提供了一个研究重要的理论问题的机会，这是根本不可能用英语研究。在这里我们重点讨论两个非常重要的理论问题：（1）中国读者是否加工MCU（例如，泰迪熊;盐和胡椒粉），就像它们处理单个单词一样？(2)当读者阅读无间距的中文文本时，他们如何决定单词或MCU的开始和结束位置？为了做到这一点，我们将进行一系列实验，在这些实验中，我们测量中国参与者在阅读包含MCU的句子时的眼球运动。眼动研究是当前阅读心理过程理论形成的基础。当我们阅读时，我们的眼睛以一系列跳跃（扫视）和持续约四分之一秒的短暂停顿（注视）的方式移动。读者在注视期间视觉和语言处理文本，然后进行扫视以检查句子的新的、即将到来的部分。在我们的实验工作中，我们使用复杂的眼动追踪设备来记录读者从电脑屏幕上阅读句子时的眼球运动。我们使用的技术是无害的。我们获得的眼动数据提供了一个非常丰富和详细的在线测量，可以精确地测量读者花了多长时间来处理句子中的每个单词或MCU。我们关注中国读者如何处理MCU，以及他们如何确定词的边界，因为这些问题是阅读领域一个非常有争议的争论的核心，即读者是否一次识别一个词（串行地），或者在阅读时同时（并行地）识别多个单词。我们的论点是，这两种立场实际上可能是正确的，因为读者有时会把MCU当作单个单词来处理。如果我们的实验证明这是真的（我们相信他们会的），那么我们就可以解释相互矛盾的发现，并推动科学辩论从目前的僵局向前发展。拟议中的研究建立在南安普顿大学视觉与认知中心的研究人员和中国天津师范大学眼动实验室的研究人员之间长期成功的合作基础上。该合作研究团队已经合作了10多年，并共同发表了许多备受瞩目的文章。

Reading is vital for successful function in modern society, both professionally and socially. Furthermore, literacy is at the core of a society built around social inclusion. The ability to read contributes to an individual's self-esteem and the extent to which they develop to their full potential. Scientific investigation of reading is vital for the development of sound educational policy in relation to best teaching practice. For these reasons, research projects investigating the psychological processes underlying reading are very important.In this project we will focus on Chinese reading, particularly, how readers linguistically process common multi-word phrases (we term these Multi-Constituent Units, MCUs), and how they decide where words begin and end when they read naturally. An important property of Chinese written text that is critical to this project is that it is an unspaced character based language. Written Chinese is not like alphabetic languages such as English in which there are individual words with spaces between them that are formed from letters. Instead, Chinese written sentences take the form of strings of characters, that is, box-like symbols that are comprised of arrangements of strokes. Characters can be grouped together to form words, but unlike English, there are no spaces between words indicating where the words start and end. Also, there is often significant ambiguity as to which characters form word units in Chinese. Given these properties, written Chinese provides an opportunity to investigate important theoretical questions that it is simply impossible to investigate in English. Here we focus on two very important theoretical issues:(1) Do Chinese readers process MCUs (e.g., teddy bear; salt and pepper) in the same way that they process single words?(2) How do readers decide where words, or MCUs, begin and end as they read unspaced Chinese text?In order to do this, we will conduct a series of experiments in which we measure Chinese participants' eye movements as they read sentences that include MCUs. Eye movement research has been fundamental in shaping current theoretical accounts of the psychological processes that occur during reading. When we read, our eyes move in a series of jumps (saccades) and brief pauses lasting about a quarter of a second (fixations). Readers visually and linguistically process text during fixations before making a saccade to inspect new, upcoming portions of the sentence. In our experimental work we use sophisticated eye tracking devices to record readers' eye movements as they read sentences from a computer screen. The techniques we employ are harmless. The eye movement data we obtain provide a very rich and detailed on-line measure of exactly how long readers spend processing each word, or MCU, in a sentence. This in turn provides significant insight into the nature of the psychological processes that occur on-line in reading.We are focusing on how Chinese readers process MCUs, and how they work out where word boundaries lie because these questions are at the core of a very contentious debate in the field of reading, namely, whether readers identify words one at a time (serially), or identify multiple words simultaneously (in parallel) as they read. It is our contention that both these positions may actually be correct, in that readers sometimes process MCUs as though they are single words. If our experiments demonstrate that this is true (and we believe they will), then we can explain contradictory findings and move the scientific debate forward from the present stalemate.The proposed research is built on a longstanding successful collaboration between researchers in the Centre for Vision and Cognition at Southampton University and researchers at the Eye Movement Laboratories at Tianjin Normal University in China. The collaborative research team has worked together for over 10 years and have published many high profile articles together.