Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

The main purpose of this investigation was to examine the inhibition mechanism of skilled and less-skilled Chinese language comprehenders. Based on Multi-Media Language Comprehension Test (MMLCT), two groups of first-year university students were selected as subjects. They were classified into two groups, more and less-skilled Chinese comprehenders, according to their scores on MMLCT. Two experiments were conducted to examine the inhibition mechanism of the two groups of subjects in processing Chinese two-character words. In the experiments, an experimental paradigm of combining self-paced Moving Window and selective recognition task was used. A new method of externally inserting language distractors under self-paced reading condition was also used. The inhibition mechanism was examined from two different dimensions of distractors in the two experiments. In the first experiment, the meaningful two-character words and meaningless two-character non-words were used as distractors to examine the effect of the meaningfulness of distractors on inhibition mechanism. This was from a lower level of meaningfulness dimension. In the second experiment, the effect of semantic relevance of distractors to target items on the inhibition mechanism was examined. Semantic relevant and irrelevant two-character words were used as the distractors. This was from a higher level of meaningfulness dimension. The results showed: (1) Inhibition mechanism was affected by the properties of distractors, such as meaningfulness and semantic relevance to target words. The more meaningful and semantic relevant the distractors are, the more difficult they will be inhibited. (2) The different skilled comprehenders were also different in the efficiency to inhibit external distractors. Less-skilled comprehenders had less efficient inhibition mechanism. (3) The benefit effect of self-paced paradigm on the inhibition mechanism of less-skilled comprehenders decreased with distractive intensity. It could be concluded that at Chinese lexical processing level, subjects with different comprehension skills exhibited a difference in the effect of inhibiting external distractive information. Less-skilled comprehenders showed a weaker inhibition mechanism.

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