The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text. Also, participants' native languages were different in terms of their basic characteristics: English and Korean are spaced, whereas the other two are unspaced; Japanese is character based whereas the other three are alphabetic. Thus, we assessed whether any spacing effects were modulated by native language characteristics. Eye movement measures showed least disruption to reading for word-spaced text and longer reading times for unspaced than character-spaced text, with nonword-spaced text yielding the most disruption. These effects were uninfluenced by native language (though reading times differed between groups as a result of Chinese reading experience). Demarcation of word boundaries through spacing reduces non-native readers' uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby speeding lexical identification, and in turn, reading. More generally, the results indicate that words have psychological reality for those who are learning to read Chinese as a second language, and that segmentation of text into words is more beneficial to successful comprehension than is separating individual Chinese characters with spaces.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Although a growing body of research provides critical information about the spatio-temporal dynamic of the brain network mediating the understanding of causality between an action and its outcome at the individual level, little remains known about this cognitive process when the action outcome has a social connotation. To address this question, we recorded electrical brain activity from 16 healthy adults while they performed an intention understanding task including actions with three different types of causality; 1) private intentions by two agents acting independently from one another; 2) communicative intentions by two agents acting in an interactive way with one another; 3) physical causality among objects. Electrophysiological results showed differential electrical activity for private compared to communicative intentions within 400 ms post-stimulus. Brain source localization of the difference waves between communicative and private actions showed a generator located in the vicinity of middle cingulate cortex, which reinforces the role of this brain area in predicting social intentions.