Abstract: The text contextual effect on Chinese word recognition in reading is exa- mined in three experiments. In experiment 1 and 2, the influence of text con- text on lexical decision task is studied with two different presentation speeds of the text, which indicates that only under highspeed (150ms per character) presentation and high predictability(above 90%) condition, there exists the fa- cilitation and inhibition effects of the context, showing an inhibition dominant pattern. A further exploration of this effect is done with proofreading task in experiment 3, which is more similar to the natural reading situation. A significant contextual effect is found in high constraint context, also showing an inhibition dominant pattern. According to these results, the processes of word recognition in the text and the machanism of the text context effect are discussed.

Key words: word recognition, contextual effect, reading, visual information processing