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.