Reading compound words in Finnish and Chinese: An eye-tracking study

Abstract

<p>Two eye-tracking experiments in alphabetic Finnish and two in logographic Chinese examined the recognition of two-constituent compound words in reading. In Finnish, two-constituent compound words vary greatly in length, whereas in Chinese they are identical in length. According to the visual acuity principle (<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X23000736?dgcid=rss_sd_all#b0020">Bertram & Hyönä, 2003</a>), short Finnish compound words and all two-character Chinese compound words that fit in foveal vision are recognized holistically, whereas long Finnish compound words are recognized via components. Experiment 1 in Finnish provided evidence consistent with the account, whereas the results for long compound words presented in condensed font in Experiment 2 were inconsistent with it. In Chinese, the first-character frequency effect was non-significant even when the compound words were presented in large font. The Finnish results suggest that componential processing is necessary when the compound word entails more than 10 letters. The Chinese results are compatible with the Chinese Reading Model (<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X23000736?dgcid=rss_sd_all#b0105">Li & Pollatsek, 2020</a>) that assumes whole-word representations to overrule the activation of components during compound word recognition.<br></p>