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Word superiority effect for native Chinese readers and low-proficiency Chinese learners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2018

LIN CHEN ,
CHARLES PERFETTI ,
YING LENG  and
YOU LI
LIN CHEN*
Affiliation:
Sun Yat-sen University
CHARLES PERFETTI*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
YING LENG
Affiliation:
Nan Tong University
YOU LI
Affiliation:
South China Normal University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Lin Chen, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, 135 Xingangxi Road, Guangzhou 510275, China. E-mail: chenlin36@sysu.edu.cn; or Charles Perfetti, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O’Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. E-mail: Perfetti@pitt.edu
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Lin Chen, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, 135 Xingangxi Road, Guangzhou 510275, China. E-mail: chenlin36@sysu.edu.cn; or Charles Perfetti, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O’Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. E-mail: Perfetti@pitt.edu
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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.

Keywords

character frequencylow-proficiency adult Chinese learnersnative Chinese readersword superiority effect
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 1097 - 1115
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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