Word superiority effect for nativeChinese readers and low-proficiencyChinese learners

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 theperception of its constituent characters, thus producing a word superiority effect (WSE). Inexperiments using the Reicher–Wheeler paradigm, we examined the WSE in two-character words fornative Chinese readers (Experiment 1) and low-proficiency adult Chinese learners with Thai(Experiment 2a) and Indonesian (Experiment 2b) as native language backgrounds. For native Chinesereaders, the WSE was smaller for high-frequency than low-frequency characters, reflecting rapidaccess to more frequently experienced characters and a consequent reduction of top-down word-leveleffects. 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 Chinesereaders develop strong representations at both the character and the word level, while low-proficiencyChinese learners are more dependent on the word level. We discuss the possibility that a word-levelemphasis Chinese foreign language instruction is one reason for this pattern