Understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying word segmentation has been an important aspect of research on Chinese reading.Accordingly,to obtain insight into the influence of character positional frequency dur-ing Chinese word segmentation,we investigated the effects of orthogonally manipulating both initial and final char-acter positional frequency for target words that were of either high or low lexical frequency through two semantic cat-egorization tasks.In Experiment 1,low-frequency words were used to examine the effect of character positional frequency.The results indicated that the initial character positional frequency was significant in reaction time,and had no effect on the final character positional frequency for target words.In Experiment 2,high-frequency words were used to investigate the effect of character positional frequency.The results showed no character positional fre-quency effect for the initial or final target words.In conclusion,the findings show that the character positional fre-quency plays a more important role in word processing,which reveals a privileged role for the initial character posi-tional frequency as a cue to word segmentation and recognition.Furthermore,this influence of character positional frequency depends on word frequency;and is only observed for words of lower lexical frequency.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
