The prior knowledge effect on the processing of vague discourse in Mandarin Chinese

This study investigates whether prior knowledge affects the processing of vague discourse in Mandarin Chinese. Vague discourse refers to the texts using vague references and neutral descriptors (e.g. 東西 dōngxī "thing", 事情 shìqíng "item", and 物件 wùjiàn "object"), rather than naming the referred to items at the basic level. Three conditions of discourse were tested: one was vague texts preceded by congruent titles, another was texts preceded by incongruent titles and the third was texts preceded without titles. An on-line self-paced reading task was conducted. Participants were instructed to read the vague texts and rate the level of comprehensibility. The rating scores for the level of comprehensibility and the reading time of the whole texts were measured. The experimental results show that people read texts preceded by congruent titles significantly faster than those preceded by incongruent and no titles. However, the reading time of texts preceded by incongruent titles was also significantly shorter than those preceded without titles. We conclude that when people simply read vague idea at a discourse level, the appropriate information is useful for text integration. Inappropriate information, however, can be paid little attention during the text processing and do not increase too much processing load.

本研究探討先前知識是否會影響人處理模糊不清的脈絡文章和語境。模糊的脈絡文章是
指語境使用含糊、非指涉特定物件、事件，使用中性的描述和詞彙 (例如：“東西、“事
情”、和“物件”), 而不使用特定的名稱。本研究中，測試了三種模糊語境文章。第一
是模糊語境使用了合諧 (congruent) 的標題 (titles)；第二是模糊語境使用了不合諧
(incongruent) 的標題；第三種是模糊語境但沒有標題 (no titles)。我們執行了一個「線
上自主的閱讀作業」(on-line self-paced reading task) 的心理語言實驗，並測量了受試者的這三種實驗材料的閱讀時間。實驗結果顯示，受試者在處理合諧標題的模糊語境時，
閱讀時間比不合諧或沒有標題的文章時，閱讀時間顯著性較短。另外，受試者在處理不
合諧標題的模糊語境時，也比沒有標題的實驗材料的閱讀時間顯著性較短，這顯示由不
合諧標題所引起的不相干背景知識並不會讓模糊語境處理時間較久，反而是沒有標題的
文章處理時間是最長的。本研究結論為：標題的作用為背景知識的激發，可以促進理解
模糊語境文章。但是，不合諧標題未必在模糊語境處理上會造成抑制效果。