Chinese and Spanish readersare there cultural differences? a comparative study performed with Chinese and Spanish university students on syntactic and semantic processing in the native language and perception of scenes by an eye-tracking procedure

Resumen

Reading comprehension involves different levels of complex cognitive processes. Besides orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing of individual words, readers also have to build up a coherent meaning representation by integrating the semantic properties of each word according to certain syntactic rules. Recognizing a word does not mean understanding it. In certain occasions, we hear or read words that are familiar to us, that we know they are real words we have heard in other occasions, but we cannot remember their meanings. This happens especially with very low frequency words. In the present study, we ran three experiments with Chinese and Spanish university students of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) on the processing of experimental sentences in their native language and the scene perception with the same sets of images. Our aim was to find out whether there are any differences in the eye movement pattern between Chinese and Spanish readers, and to assess whether these differences are due to cultural differences or to linguistic differences such as the different syntactic rules, the different writing systems (characters and letters), etc. In the first experiment, we analyzed the time course of syntactic and semantic processing when Chinese is read. Readers' eye movements were monitored followed the paradigm used by Yang, Wang, Chen & Rayner (2009), where they examined the relation between a single-character critical word and the sentence context. Three kinds of conditions were used: congruent (CON), semantic violation (SEM), and semantic and syntactic violation (SEM + SYN). Thirty-five native Chinese speaking university students at the UAM took part in this study. Two sets of analyses were carried out: character-based analysis and region-based analysis. The eye movement data showed no differences in the condition factor in the first-pass processing, only in the Critical Word (hereafter CW) respect to CW-2 (i.e. two words ahead of the CW) and CW-1 (i.e. one word ahead of the CW) in First fixation duration, as well as Gaze duration measures. However, there was a significant effect of condition in later processing, in regressions out in the semantic + syntactic violation compared to the congruent condition. These results suggest that the effects of a semantic + syntactic violation can be detected by Chinese readers and that the processing of syntactic and semantic information is different in both first-pass and second-pass reading. In the second experiment we used the same pattern as in the Chinese experiment, by traslating the sentences into Spanish. All the rules and procedure were the same, and here we also examined the relation between a single critical word and the sentence context. Thirty-three native Spanish-speaking university students of the UAM took part in this study. The eye movement data showed that the first-pass reading times were significantly longer for the target region in the two violation conditions than in the congruent condition. Moreover, the semantic + syntactic violation caused more severe disruption than did the pure semantic violation, as reflected by longer first-pass reading times for the target region and by longer go-past times for the target region and post target region in the former (SEM + SYN) than in the latter condition (SEM). These results suggest that the effects of, at least, a semantic violation can be detected immediately by Spanish readers and that the processing of syntactic and semantic information is different in both first-pass and second-pass reading. In the third study, we examined whether there are cultural differences between Spanish and Chinese in how quickly eye movements are drawn to highly unusual aspects of a scene. The viewers examined photographic scenes while performing a preference-rating task. For each scene, participants were presented with two pictures in the same monitor either a normal or an unusual/weird version. Not only were there differences between the normal and weird versions of the scenes, according to the time of initial examination of the region of interest (ROI) and the subsequent examination of the ROI, but there was also some evidence of cultural differences while viewing either scene type between Chinese and Spanish viewers. Overall, the current research indicates that despite substantial differences between Chinese and alphabetic writing systems, there are still many similarities in sentence processing between Spanish and Chinese. First, both semantic and syntactic violations can be detected immediately, although Chinese is considered a highly context-dependent language. Second, although a syntactic violation is always accompanied by a semantic violation, evidence from eye tracking data confirms that syntactic violations yield more severe disruptions than do pure semantic violations. Further studies will be needed to elucidate the finer processing of semantic and syntactic information in the reading of Chinese. The present study at least indicates that these two types of processing can be initiated immediately and dissociated from each other under certain conditions in both reading Chinese and Spanish. The data of the scene viewing show that (a) weird regions attract fixations slightly sooner than do normal regions and (b) viewers look longer at weird regions than at normal regions. More importantly, our results are not consistent with those reported by Rayner et al. (2007), Evan et al. (2009) and Rayner et al. (2009b) where cultural differences have little influence on oculomotor control during scene perception.