Phonological decoding does not affect incidental Chinese novel word learning in Uyghur readers: evidence from eye movements

Vocabulary is an important foundation for reading skills. Dual-route cascaded model believes that when form-sound correspondence is irregular, phonetic decoding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for word acquisition. Lexical access in syllabic scripts involves a morphological-phonetic-semantic approach, where phonological decoding is crucial. However, in ideographic scripts, pronunciation plays a relatively small or even no role. Further exploration is needed to determine whether the morphological-phonetic-semantic approach is commonly used as a lexical access strategy in second language learning, particularly when considering two significantly different languages like Uyghur and Chinese. These languages differ in terms of language systems, lexical morphology, and writing direction. In the paradigm of repeated learning novel words, two-pseudocharacter words were constructed as novel words to control the readability of novel words' phonetic radical, which was classified into readable and unreadable categories. Readers deduced the words meaning in different contexts. There was no difference in semantic selection correctness between phonetic radical readable and unreadable conditions, and in terms of dwell time, total fixation duration, and fixation counts, the unreadable gaze time and fixation counts were significantly less than the readable condition, and the refixation ratio was lower than the readable condition. These results show that phonological decoding doesn't change how well Uyghur readers' make semantic inferences from Chinese incidental novel word learning. They also show that Uyghur readers can rapidly activate the lexical-semantic pathway when they can't complete phonological decoding and quickly inhibit the phonological decoding process. When phonological decoding is successful, they rapidly activate the lexical-phonological-semantic.