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Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading. KeywordsChinese reading; spaced and unspaced text; eye movements It is rather uncontroversial that in alphabetic writing systems, like English, the spaces between the words facilitate reading. When space information is eliminated, reading speed typically decreases by up to 50% (see Malt & Seamon, 1978;Morris, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1990;Pollatsek & Rayner, 1982;Rayner, Fischer, & Pollatsek, 1998;Rayner & Pollatsek, 1996;Spragins, Lefton, & Fisher, 1976). Furthermore, Rayner et al. (1998) demonstrated that spaces influence word recognition and also aid saccade programming. They found that when the spaces between words were eliminated, readers (a) fixated proportionally longer on lowfrequency words than on high-frequency words (indicating that word identification was more Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Simon P. Liversedge, School of Psychology, Shackleton Building, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom. E-mail: s.p.liversedge@soton.ac.uk. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript difficult when spaces were removed) and (b) that readers fixated much earlier in the word (as their average saccade lengths were much shorter when the spaces were removed).Given the central role that word spacing information plays in written English comprehension, it is intriguing that a number of languages do not include spaces between words in their written form. This in turn raises questions concerning how readers target saccades and how words are recognized in writing systems, like Chinese, that do not include spaces between words. Chinese text is formed by strings of equally spaced symbols called characters; Chinese characters are more like morphemes and most words are made up of two characters, though some words consist of only one character and some consist of three or more...

Eye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing target words that varied in terms of word frequency and character frequency. There was an effect of word frequency on fixation times on a target word and it was comparable in size to that typically found with readers of English. Furthermore, character frequency also influenced fixation time on the target word. The effect of the initial character in two character words was more pronounced than that of the second character. However, word frequency modulated the effect of character frequency. The effect of character frequency was attenuated with high frequency target words while it was quite apparent with low frequency target words.

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The present study examined children and adults' eye movement behavior when reading word spaced and unspaced Chinese text. The results showed that interword spacing reduced children and adults' first pass reading times and refixation probabilities indicating spaces between words facilitated word identification. Word spacing effects occurred to a similar degree for both children and adults, though there were differential landing position effects for single and multiple fixation situations in both groups; clear preferred viewing location effects occurred for single fixations, whereas landing positions were closer to word beginnings, and further into the word for adults than children for multiple fixation situations. Furthermore, adults targeted refixations contingent on initial landing positions to a greater degree than did children. Overall, the results indicate that some aspects of children's eye movements during reading show similar levels of maturity to adults, while others do not.