An analysis of word decision strategies among learners of Chinese

Abstract: This study examines word decision strategies that 40 U.S. college beginning and advanced learners of Chinese applied during reading. It first compares similarities and differences between the two groups in choosing strategies when making word decisions, then identifies effective word decision strategies from more than a hundred strategies used by learners. Results of the study indicate that although learners use various strategies requiring multiple levels of linguistic knowledge, the strategy of matching the target item to the learners' existing mental lexicon is predominant for both beginning and advanced learners. The results also show that the strategy of using contextual information to make word decisions is more frequently employed at the advanced level. In addition, the study reveals that the strategies required to use multiple linguistic cues and context information are better predictors of accurate word decision than other strategies. Key words: word decision, word segmentation, reading comprehension, learning Chinese, learning strategies Language: Chinese (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Introduction Studies on processing words by native skilled readers in Chinese demonstrate that words are prominent processing units; automatic word segmentation and recognition occur during the reading of Chinese sentences (Chen, 1999). Processing Chinese words during reading includes at least three subprocesses: character recognition, word decision, and lexical access. In Chinese writing, characters represent lexical morphemes. Character boundaries rather than word boundaries are indicated by spaces. Character recognition in this study is defined as identifying the graphic structure of a character, activating its phonology (pronunciation) either aloud or mentally, and accessing its meaning. Chinese words can be formed by one or more characters but they have no inherent markings of lexical category or inflections. When a word is formed by multiple characters, character recognition during word identification is roughly equivalent to identifying individual morphemes in a multiple morphemic word in English. Word decision in this study refers to grouping relevant characters into lexical units and processing them as words in ongoing reading. Consider the following exchange: A: ...? (What is your nationality?) B: ... (I am [a] Chinese). According to the context, the correct word decisions for the sentence ... are that the characters should be grouped into three lexical units corresponding to three English words: ... (I) pronoun, .... (am) equative verb, and ... (Chinese) noun. Although the threecharacter word ... can also be grouped into two other ways: one in which each character serves as an individual word ... (middle) ... (country) ... (person; people), and the other as... (China) A (person; people). For this context, the three characters ... to be grouped together as one word is the right decision. Lexical access refers to the process of gaining an orthographic encoding of a word such as its meaning, syntactic properties, and pronunciation from long term memory that best fits the context (Wu & Liu, 1996). Since Chinese words, especially one-character words, have multiple meanings, choosing only a contextually relevant meaning for the word can ensure successful comprehension of the reading text. From the above description, we can tell that in this study, the concept of "word decision" differs from what we have used for reading an alphabetic language. There, there are space boundaries between words; making a "word decision" means to judge whether a string of letters bound by space is a real word or not. While reading Chinese, "word decision" means to determine whether these one, two, or more adjacent characters not bound by spaces constitute one or more word(s) in a particular sentential context. Therefore, the fundamental difference of word processing in reading between English and Chinese is that in reading English "word decision" is not a necessary step for lexical access during reading, because there are visible space boundaries between words. …