Processing Multi-Constituent Units in Chinese Reading: An Eye Movement Investigation, 2018-2023

We conducted a series of eye movement experiments in order to empirically examine our MCU hypothesis. We tested whether frequently occurring two-character phrases, three-character idioms with different structures (e.g., “2+1” idioms, 2-character modifier and 1-character noun structure; “1+2” idioms, 1-character modifier and 2-character noun structure; “1+2” idioms, 1-character verb and 2-character noun structure), four-character idioms and frequently occurring four-character phrases, famous people’s names, place names, and popular internet phrases, are likely to be represented and processed as MCUs. All these experiments have shown statistically robust results providing solid support for the MCU Hypothesis that we described in our proposal. The project reshaped our understanding of eye movement control during reading, and opened up a series of interesting research questions in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages – what determines a sequence of adjacent words to be processed as a single unit and how visual and lexical processing is operationalized over a flexible unit of text rather than the constant word during reading.

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 Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience Research Group at University of Central Lancashire 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.