The Impact of Text Orientation on Form Effects with Chinese, Japanese and English readers
Abstract
Does visuospatial orientation influence form priming effects in parallel ways in Chinese and English? Given the differences in how orthographic symbols are presented in Chinese versus English, one might expect to find some differences in early word recognition processes and, hence, in the nature of form priming effects. According to perceptual learning accounts, form priming effects (i.e., “form” priming effects) should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, Witzel, Qiao, and Forster’s (2011) abstract letter unit account proposes that the mechanism responsible for such effect acts at a totally abstract orthographic level (i.e., the visuospatial orientation is irrelevant to the nature of the relevant orthographic code). One goal of the present research was to determine whether or not one of these accounts could explain form priming effects in both languges.
Chapter 2 (Yang, Chen, Spinelli & Lupker, 2019) expanded the debate between these positions beyond alphabetic scripts and the syllabic Kana script used by Witzel et al. (2011) to a logographic script (Chinese). I report four experiments with Chinese participants in this chapter. The experiments showed masked form priming effects with targets in four different orientations (left-to-right, top-to-bottom, right-to-left, and bottom-to-top), supporting Witzel et al.’s account.
Chapter 3 (Yang, Hino, Chen, Yoshihara, Nakayama, Xue, & Lupker, in press) provided an evaluation of whether the backward priming effect obtained in Experiment 2.3 (i.e., backward primes and forward targets) is truly an orthographic effect or whether it may be either morphologically/meaning- or syllabically/phonologically-based. Five experiments, two involving phonologically-related primes and three involving meaning-related primes, produced no evidence that either of those factors contributed to the backward priming effect, implying that it truly is an orthographic effect.
In Chapter 4 (Yang & Lupker, 2019), I examined whether text rotation to different degrees (e.g., 0°, 90°, and 180° rotations) modulated transposed-letter (TL) priming effects in two experiments with English participants. The sizes of the priming effects were similar for horizontal 0°, 90° rotated and 180° rotated words providing further support for abstract letter unit accounts of orthographic coding.
These results support abstract letter/character unit accounts of form priming effects while failing to support perceptual learning accounts. Further, these results also indicate a language difference in that Chinese readers have more flexible (i.e., less precise) letter position coding than English readers, a fact that poses an interesting new challenge to existing orthographic coding theories.