Dr. Jinmian Yang was invited to visit Xingshan Li’s lab
Speaker: Dr. Jinmian Yang
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego
Time: 13:30 pm
Date: May 14, 2013
Venue: 524 Meeting Room, South Building
Abstract
Written Chinese is a script that differs in many important ways from alphabetic languages. In this talk, I will first introduce the particular properties of written Chinese (e.g., spaces do not mark word boundaries) and what has been discovered about reading Chinese (as well as how it is different from reading English). Then, I will present two experiments examining the time course of semantic integration of single-character and two-character target words. Given that the same Chinese character can be a word on its own or the first character of a two-character word with totally different meanings, semantic integration is not expected to occur in an immediate manner. However, our results consistently show that semantic integration processes in reading Chinese are performed in an immediate manner and on a word-by-word basis. Moreover, these results imply that word segmentation must take place very early in the course of processing.