正字法深度对汉族、维吾尔族大学生汉字词命名的影响

汉字的多音字数量众多, 种类复杂, 为维吾尔族学生学习汉语带来了困难。通过两个实验, 考察正字法深度对汉族大学生和维吾尔族大学生的汉字词命名的影响。结果表明, 无论是命名单字词还是命名双字词, 维吾尔族学生的反应时均比汉族学生显著长。对单字词, 两个民族被试的命名时间均受汉字的正字法深度和词频影响, 被试命名多音字的时间显著长于命名单音字, 命名低频字的时间显著长于命名高频字。对双字词, 两个民族被试的命名时间存在着词频与正字法深度的交互作用：对高频词, 汉族学生对由多音字组成的词与由单音字组成的词的反应时差异不显著, 维吾尔族学生对由多音字组成的词的反应时显著长于对由单音字组成的词; 对低频词, 汉族学生对由多音字组成的词的反应时显著长于对由单音字组成的词, 维吾尔族学生对由多音字组成的词与由单音字组成的词的反应时差异不显著。整个研究表明, 正字法深度对两个民族大学生的汉字词命名的影响具有不同模式。所以如此, 与两个民族的母语特点、词汇获得年龄、语言熟练程度和语言加工方式不同有关。

Effects of orthographic depth on Chinese word naming for Han and Uyghur students

China is a multi-ethnic country with a variety of languages. Successful communication among nationalities is basic and important. Hence, bilingual education is a special teaching form in which ethnic minorities inherit the national culture and familiarize Mandarin and Chinese characters. As a typical alphabetic language, Uyghur differs from Chinese. Specifically, mastering the Chinese polyphonic characters is difficult for Uyghur students, especially those with more than one pronunciation. Orthographic depth denotes the consistency in grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence. In terms of inner language, polyphonic characters are less consistent than monophonic words. In relation to cross languages, orthographic depth affects the encoding of the lexical process. The present study aims to investigate the effect of orthographic depth on Chinese word naming tasks for Uyghur and Han nationalities.The word naming task was conducted in experiments 1 and 2 to investigate the effects of orthographic depth. Thirty Han and thirty Uyghur students volunteered in each experiment, and each one participated in one experiment only. In experiment 1, eighty monosyllabic words with half poly and half monophonic characters were included. Among the poly and monophonic words, half reached high frequencies (343.3-3869.8/per million), and half had low frequencies (7.2-237.8/per million). During the experiment, the participants were asked to name words as quickly and accurately as possible. Repeated measure ANOVA was performed. The results corroborate that (a) naming latencies for polyphonic and monophonic words were longer for Uyghur than Han students, (b) monophonic words were named faster than polyphonic words for all the participants, and (c) the word frequency (WF) effect was larger for Uyghur than for Han students. Moreover, the authors recorded prepared responses using polyphonic words, which were pronounced with high frequency and named faster than the nondominant reaction but found no significant differences between the two groups.In experiment 2, eighty disyllabic words were selected, with the first syllables equally grouped into polyphonic and monophonic characters. Among the disyllable words, half reached high frequencies (222.2-2565.4/per million), and half had low frequencies (2.3-47.6/per million). The procedure was similar to that in experiment 1.The authors performed repeated measures ANOVAs by subject and item and found an interaction between WF and orthographic depth in the two groups. For the Uyghur participants, words with initial polyphonic characters were named slower than monophonic ones in high frequency disyllable words. However, significant differences did not exist between polyphonic and monophonic characters. For the Han students, words with initial polyphonic characters were named slower than monophonic ones in low frequency disyllable words and displayed the same result with high frequency disyllable words.The study validates that orthographic depth has different modes of influence on the naming of Chinese characters in the two nationalities. This finding is related to the differences in the characteristics of the mother tongue, the age of vocabulary acquisition, the level of language proficiency, and the manner of language processing between the two nationalities.