Context effects and spoken word recognition of Chinese: An eye-tracking study

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to examine the effects of sentence context and other lexical information on spoken word recognition processes in Chinese. Sixty native Mandarin listeners were recruited to participate in the eye-tracking experiment. In this experiment, listeners were asked to listen carefully to a spoken sentence, ended with an ambiguous word (Chinese homophone), and look attentively at different Chinese characters or different pictures presented on the computer screen. Types of sentence context and other lexical information were manipulated in the experiment. Results revealed that (1) sentence context had an early effect on the disambiguation processes; (2) sentence context interacted with frequency of the individual meanings of the ambiguous word during lexical access; and (3) phonological information of the distracters had only a minimal effect on the spoken word recognition processes. Finally, the patterns of eye-tracking results seemed to favor an interactive approach in spoken word recognition. Copyright © 2015 Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting.