Inserting spaces into Chinese text helps readers to learn new words: An eye movement study

Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

“…In particular targeting saccades to the middle of words (Rayner, 1979) likely produced the word length effect. Also, since high frequency words are easier to process than low frequency words, more word skipping for high frequency words (Li, Liu & Rayner, 2011), and still others have suggested that, in fact, a multitude of factors might contribute to the decision of where to move the eyes in the upcoming text in Chinese (Zang, Liang, Bai, Yan & Liversedge, 2012). Clearly, this is area of eye movement control in Chinese reading that still requires extensive research.…”

“…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).…”

Effects of intraword and interword spacing on eye movements during reading: Exploring the optimal use of space in a line of text

“…For instance, text with added interword spaces has been found to increase reading rate for both Thai (Kohsom & Gobet, 1997;Winskel, Radach, & Luksaneeyanawin, 2009) and Chinese (Hsu & Huang, 2000a, 2000b, as compared with traditional text without such word spaces. Additionally, novel Chinese words are learned more efficiently when presented in sentences with interword spaces (Blythe et al, 2012). However, other studies have reported faster reading of text with added interword spaces only relative to a condition with spaces added at nonword boundaries (Bai, Yan, Liversedge, Zang, & Rayner, 2008), with no difference in reading rate between traditional nonspaced text and text with interword spaces.…”

Developmental eye-tracking research in reading: Introduction to the special issue

“…A starting point for the study was the fact that in Chinese word boundaries are not demarcated by spaces as in alphabetic languages. Extending their previous work (Blythe et al, 2012), the authors investigated the effects of word spacing and positional character frequency on lexical acquisition in Chinese children. They found that both segmentation cues helped children to read new words (see also Zang, Liang, Bai, Yan, & Liversedge, 2013).…”