Eye movements of second language learners when reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text.

Abstract

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.

Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

“…A final characteristic of Chinese that makes it visually distinct from Finnish and English, is that Chinese is an unspaced language, that is, there are no spaces between the words in Chinese sentences. The lack of word spacing in character-based languages has been shown to be very important in relation to eye movements, saccadic targeting and reading (see Bai, Yan, Liversedge, Zang, & Rayner, 2008;Blythe, Liang, Zang, Wang, Yan, Bai & Liversedge, 2012;Li, Liu & Rayner, 2011;Sainio, Hyönä, Bingushi & Bertram, 2007;Shen, Liversedge, Tian, Zang, Cui, Bai, Yan, & Rayner, 2012;Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann & Shu, 2010;Zang, Liang, Bai, Yan & Liversedge, 2012). The lack of spaces between words in Chinese contributes further to its reduced horizontal extent, and this also means that a process of word segmentation is required for word identification to occur that is unnecessary in English and Finnish (with the exception of long, multimorphemic compound words, Bertram, Pollatsek, & Hyönä, 2004).…”

Reading is fundamentally similar across disparate writing systems: A systematic characterization of how words and characters influence eye movements in Chinese reading.

“…Bai, Yan, Liversedge, Zang, and Rayner (2008) found that while inserting spaces between words did not facilitate or interfere with reading, inserting spaces between characters did interfere with reading. Later studies showed that inserting spaces between words could help beginning readers of Chinese to read more efficiently and to learn new words (Blythe et al, 2012; Shen et al, 2012). Moreover, other studies found that reading speed was slowed down when Chinese readers could not view two characters belonging to a word simultaneously compared when they could do so (Li, Gu, Liu, & Rayner, in press; Li, Zhao, & Pollatsek, 2012).…”

Word segmentation of overlapping ambiguous strings during Chinese reading.

“…This does not mean that word boundaries are not important in Chinese reading. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that Chinese words play a very important role in reading and that words have psychological reality in Chinese (Bai, Yan, Liversedge, Zang, & Rayner, 2008; Hoosain, 1992; Li, Gu, Liu, & Rayner, 2013; Li, Bicknell, Liu, Wei, & Rayner, in press; Shen et al, 2012; Zang, Liang, Bai, Yan, & Liversedge, 2012) suggesting that word segmentation is necessary in Chinese reading. Without interword spaces, Chinese readers have to depend on high-level information to segment words.…”