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.

为实证检验我们的多字符单元（Multi-Character Unit，MCU）假说，我们开展了一系列眼动实验。我们测试了高频双字词、不同结构的三字熟语（例如“2+1”式熟语：2字修饰语加1字名词结构；“1+2”式熟语：1字修饰语加2字名词结构；另一类“1+2”式熟语：1字动词加2字名词结构）、四字成语与高频四字短语、知名人名、地名以及网络流行语，是否会被作为MCU进行表征与加工。所有实验均得到了统计学意义上的稳健结果，为我们在立项方案中阐述的MCU假说提供了坚实支撑。本项目重塑了我们对阅读过程中眼动控制机制的认知，并为拼音文字与非拼音文字领域开辟了一系列有趣的研究课题：究竟是什么因素决定相邻词序列会被作为单一加工单元？在阅读过程中，视觉加工与词汇加工如何以灵活的文本单元而非固定的词为载体得以实现？