Abstract:

The present study examined the role of character positional frequency by using the lexical overlapping paradigm. In Experiment 1, three-character strings were presented and the middle characters were polyphones. Participants were asked to report the pronunciation and tone of the middle character. The results showed that the middle characters were more likely to pronounce as high character positional frequency. In Experiment 2, the manipulation was the same as in Experiment 1, except that the middle characters were not polyphones. The results showed that readers tended to report the pronunciation of the word based on high character positional frequency conditions. The findings reveal both the initial and the final character positional frequency play vital roles in word processing and support the multiple activation hypothesis of Chinese word recognition.

Key words: positional frequency, overlapping ambiguous strings, Chinese reading, word segmentation

摘要：

采用模糊词报告范式，探究词素位置概率在中文词汇识别中的作用。实验1操纵重叠歧义词（如“邮差距”）首、尾的词素位置概率，被试任务是快速报告重叠歧义词中间字的读音，结果发现，读者倾向于报告词素位置概率高的一侧字的读音。实验2操纵重叠歧义词（如“惹祸害”）首、尾的词素位置概率，被试任务是报告重叠歧义词其中的一个词，结果发现，读者倾向于报告词素位置概率高的一侧词的读音。结果表明，词素位置概率是中文词切分的有效线索，首、尾词素位置概率在词汇加工中均发挥了作用。

关键词: 词素位置概率, 重叠歧义词, 中文阅读, 词切分