AUTHOR=Lijuan Zhang , Yingying Zhang , Zhiwei Liu , Lin Li , Sha Li , Jingxin Wang 

TITLE=The role of orthographic and phonological processing during reading Chinese sentences: Evidence from eye movements

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1148815

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1148815

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=By adopting a misspelled-characters disruption paradigm and eye tracking technique, we investigated the relative role of orthographic and phonological processing on word recognition in Chinese reading. We manipulated the writing for the first characters of 2-character target words, thus forming four conditions: (a) correct character, (b) misspelled character with a stroke missing, (c) misspelled homographic character and (d) misspelled homophonic character. The results showed that homophonic errors caused more disruptions than other conditions in the early stage (first-pass reading times) and later stage (total reading time) of lexical processing during Chinese reading. Homographic errors and omitted stroke errors lead to equal disruptions at the early stage of word recognition, but homographic errors caused more disruptions at the later stage. These results suggest that orthography plays a dominant role in word recognition during Chinese reading, whereas phonology plays a weaker and more limited role. The direct access hypothesis and dual-rote hypothesis may well explain the cognitive mechanism of lexical processing in Chinese reading.