On the afternoon of October 13, 2021, Professor Marcus Taft from the University of New South Wales, Australia, was invited by CCSL to give an online academic report entitled "Phonological representation in visual word recognition". This report was chaired by Dr. Lu Ji and reported by Professor Marcus Taft.
Professor Taft is an emeritus professor at the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Australia. His research focuses on the cognitive mechanism of adult vocabulary comprehension, the vocabulary process in reading, and explores how readers use vocabulary the internal structure is used to identify the vocabulary and how the orthographic structure of the word is represented in the mental dictionary. In addition to the research on English, Professor Taft also has published a large number of papers on the vocabulary comprehension process in Chinese and other languages.
In his report, Professor Taft explained two models of vocabulary processing in reading. The first is the DRC model (Dual Route Cascaded Model), which explains the process of vocabulary comprehension from the orthographic form, phonetic form and meaning of words. The second model is the Hierarchical Model. Taft believes that the Hierarchical Model is better than the DRC model, because the Hierarchical Model solves the problem of competition between orthographic and phonetic forms, and believes that the Hierarchical Model can be used to explain the vocabulary comprehension process of Chinese reading. He believes that in Chinese reading, Chinese characters are activated in silent reading, and the processing of voice information is not the purpose of Chinese vocabulary processing. Compared with the Pinyin text in Indo-European languages, there is a lack of connection between the orthographic information and phonetic information of Chinese vocabulary. Professor Taft started with the DRC model, focused on the hierarchical model, explained the hierarchical model in easy-to-understand language, and presented a wonderful academic report for the base students.
In the interactive session, Professor Taft patiently and enthusiastically answered the questions raised by the teachers and students. The students participating in the experiment said they had benefited a lot.
