Syntactic boundaries and comma placement during silent reading of Chinese text: evidence from eye movements

Abstract

In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether and how a comma influences the reading of Chinese sentences comprised of different types of syntactic constituent such as word, phrase and clause. Participants read Chinese sentences that did or did not insert a comma at the end of a syntactic constituent. The results showed that the fixation times were shorter for the target word followed by a comma than for that followed by no comma, which suggests that a comma facilitated word identification during the reading of Chinese sentences. Furthermore, the insertion of commas shortened the total fixation times in the post-target region only for the clause condition. The data are consistent with previous findings concerning the role of segmentation cues in reading, and compatible with the implicit prosody hypothesis.As a logographic writing system, Chinese provides a case of high contrast for alphabetic systems, because there are no word boundaries (spaces) between Chinese words. The basic writing unit in Chinese is a character. Chinese words can be made of one, two or three characters, although most Chinese words consist of two characters. It is sometimes difficult for Chinese readers to identify which characters compose certain words within a Chinese sentence (Hoosain, 1992;Tsai, 2001). This characteristic of Chinese raises an interesting question about whether the role of segmentation cues such as spaces or commas inserted into text in Chinese reading is similar to that in English reading. Furthermore, how do the segmentation cues influence the course of Chinese reading?A number of studies on English text have demonstrated that the spaces between words facilitate reading (Morris, Rayner & Pollatsek, 1990;Pollatsek & Rayner, 1982;Rayner, Fischer & Pollatsek, 1998). proposed that space information in written text facilitates word identification and also aids eye movement control. They found that reading rate decreased by approximately 50% when space information was not available.In languages that do not use spaces between words, the evidence about the effects of spaces for reading have tended to be

Effects of punctuation on the processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences in Japanese

“…We also found significant effects of commas in R1 and R2. In both these regions, reading time increased with comma insertion, corresponding to the results of previous eye‐tracking experiments (Hill & Murray, ; Ren & Yang, ) in which readers focused more on punctuated words. If this increase in reading time derived from comma insertion reflects a pause in phonological recoding (Steinhauer, ; Steinhauer & Friederici, ), readers will naturally display a longer reading time for words preceding (R1) or following (R2) a comma.…”

“…In the garden path sentence above, “While the woman cleaned # … ,” if a comma is inserted at # instead of a prosodic boundary, readers will probably not be led down the garden path, or at least will be easily able to reanalyze the sentence correctly. However, due to a lack of online assessment methods there has not been clear evidence that commas phonologically affect syntactic analysis, and punctuation was largely ignored in psycholinguistic research until Steinhauer and Friederici (; see also Chafe, ; Hill & Murray, ; Hirotani, Frazier, & Rayner, ; Ren & Yang, ). Using ERPs, Steinhauer and Friederici () showed that, in German, commas inserted at correct syntactic boundaries reduce reanalysis cost, while commas at incorrect syntactic boundaries cause a “reversed garden path,” increasing processing effort.…”

“…Although punctuation plays a crucial role in sentence processing, similar to that of prosody, only a few studies have investigated this effect, using only limited methods (see also Hill & Murray, ; Hirotani et al., ; Ren & Yang, ) and considering few languages (see also Kerkhofs, Vonk, Schriefers, & Chwilla, ). The present study investigates this issue using self‐paced reading experiments with Japanese relative‐clause sentences.…”

Eye movements of online Chinese learners

“…Using teacherrated language levels, we tried to establish a link between learners' language skills and the length of time their attention focused on characters and Pinyin, respectively. The process for CFL learners to develop their reading skills (Ren and Yang, 2010) from Pinyin to characters varied. From Figure 5, one can see two extremes: learners at excellent level rely predominantly on characters for comprehension tasks, whereas learners at poor and average levels rely on Pinyin.…”

Empirical Investigations of the Role of Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing

“…Both Staub () and Hirotani et al () suggest that these results are due to the fact that commas are the written manifestation of implicit prosodic boundaries, such that correctly‐placed commas correspond to the location of prosodic boundaries that the reader would produce were she reading the sentence aloud. Corroborative evidence for this claim comes from Ren and Yang (), who conducted an eye‐tracking study of the role of commas in written Chinese, in which word boundaries are not explicitly marked. They observed shorter reading times after commas only when the comma marked a clause boundary, and not when the comma marked a word or phrase boundary.…”