The successful comprehension of sentences is a seemingly simple but complex process in which various types of information are needed. To quickly and proficiently get the information of each sentence, it is necessary to extract the information of each word in the sentence and use the different types of concepts stored in our memory. For skilled readers, both information can be extracted from the reader's memory and immediately impact the current sentence processing. However, how and when these different types of semantic information affect children's reading comprehension is still an open question. Therefore, the present study examined the effects of world knowledge, word association, and its time course in Chinese sentence reading comprehension among children aged 10~12, using eye-tracking measures.
In the experiment, both adults (the control group) and children were asked to read the sentence with a target word congruent or incongruent with ones' world knowledge (e.g., Mother stuck the stamp on the envelope/skirt.). Additionally, congruent and incongruent sentences were further divided into two levels, according to whether there was a semantic association between the target word (e.g., envelope/skirt) and the word (e.g., stamp) in preceding context. Both target words and the words associated with it were in the same sentence. Thus, there were four conditions by crossing congruency and word association, including associated-congruent, associated-incongruent, unassociated-congruent, and unassociated-incongruent conditions.
In the experiment, participants were asked to read the sentences for comprehension, and there were some comprehension questions following some of materials, which could monitor whether children were reading for comprehension or browsing mindlessly. The second critical word in each experimental sentence was defined as the interest area. Linear Mixed Model (LMM) of R language was used to analyze each eye movement indicator. Results firstly revealed that all reading times (including first fixation duration, gaze, second reading time, and total reading time) increased significantly when the sentence meaning violated ones' world knowledge both in the adults and children. Moreover, children would spend more time processing the target words as compared with adults. However, there was no main effect of word association, but the word association significantly interacted with participants' age in the gaze duration. Further analysis revealed that word association showed the main effect on gaze duration among the adult participants, but it interacted with world knowledge among children. When the sentence was incongruent, the gaze duration of associated target words was longer, whereas there were no word association effects when the sentence was congruent.
First, findings suggest that children are less efficient in reading for comprehension and therefore need more times to finish current processing. Besides, world knowledge could affect sentence processing among children and adults with the same patterns and time courses. However, as refer to the word association effects, there are differences between children and adults. In adults, word association could play an earlier role in sentence processing. In children, word association could play a role only when the sentence semantics couldn't be integrated. In sum, both sentence-level congruency and lexical-level word association could influence children's on-line reading comprehension, but with different time courses.
Key words
children /
sentence processing /
congruency /
word association
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