Poster A85, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Chinese Two-character-words Overcome Interocular Suppression Faster than Chinese Two-character-nonwords
Jian'e Bai1,2,3, Jinfu Shi1,2,3, Yiming Yang1,2,3,4;1School of Linguistic Sciences and Arts, Jiangsu Normal University, 2Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Language Ability, 3Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Language and Cognitive Neuroscience, 4Institute of Linguistic Science, Jiangsu Normal University
Previous studies showed that many kinds of stimuli can be processed unconsciously under interocular suppression, such as faces, numbers, and even meaning of words. In Chinese writing script, a single Chinese character is often a morpheme and has meanings by itself. However, in reading materials, most Chinese words are composed of two Chinese characters. Word level processing plays a very important role in Chinese reading. In this study, we focused on whether word level information of Chinese could be processed unconsciously under interocular suppression. We conducted a behavioral experiment with Continuous Flash Suppression(CFS) paradigm to investigate the question above. Ten college students took part in this experiment. During the experiment, in each trial, a Chinese two-character-word or a Chinese two-character-nonword was presented to one eye of the subjects while a high-contrast dynamic noise pattern was presented to the other eye. Due to the strong suppression induced by the dynamic noise pattern, the word or the nonword was not visible at the beginning of each trial. We asked the subjects to press a response key to indicate the location of the stimulus once they saw any part of a Chinese character as soon as possible. We compared the reaction time to words with that to nonwords and found that words overcame the interocular suppression significantly faster than nonwords. Then we recruited another eleven college students to take part in a control experiment. In the control experiment, same stimuli were used and the parameters were essentially the same as for the CFS experiment described above. Unlike the CFS experiment, in the control experiment, subjects viewed the stimuli binocularly (non-rivalry) rather than dichoptically. In each trial, the pattern noise was presented to both eyes and a Chinese two-character-word or a two-character-nonword was blended into the noise pattern and gradually came into view out of the noise. The ramping time of the stimuli was set at 10s in order to keep the detection time in a similar range as the suppression time in the main experiment. We also measured the response time for the subjects to detect the presence of the two-character-words or two-character-nonwords and make a button press to indicate the location of each stimulus. The result showed that there was no significant difference in reaction time between words and nonwords. This result indicated that the less suppression time for words in the main experiment was specific to the interocular competition, and was not due to a general advantage in detection. In summary, these results from the interocular suppression experiment and the control experiment indicated that word level information of Chinese writing script could be processed unconsciously under interocular suppression. Acknowledgement: This project was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China(31400866,31671170), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province(14KJB180006), Jiangsu Provincial Foundation for Philosophy and Social Sciences(12YYC015), Foundation for Doctors of Jiangsu Normal University(12XLR009), Jiangsu Province Postdoctoral Foundation. Correspondence: Jiane Bai (baije9972@gmail.com) and Yiming Yang (yangym@jsnu.edu.cn).
Themes: Reading, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Behavioral