Do Chinese Readers Follow the National Standard Rules for Word Segmentation during Reading?

Ping-Ping Liu,Wei-Jun Li,Nan Lin,Xing-Shan Li,Denis G Pelli

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0055440

Ping-Ping Liu, Wei-Jun Li + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055440

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Abstract

We conducted a preliminary study to examine whether Chinese readers’ spontaneous word segmentation processing is consistent with the national standard rules of word segmentation based on the Contemporary Chinese language word segmentation specification for information processing (CCLWSSIP). Participants were asked to segment Chinese sentences into individual words according to their prior knowledge of words. The results showed that Chinese readers did not follow the segmentation rules of the CCLWSSIP, and their word segmentation processing was influenced by the syntactic categories of consecutive words. In many cases, the participants did not consider the auxiliary words, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs, numerals and quantifiers as single word units. Generally, Chinese readers tended to combine function words with content words to form single word units, indicating they were inclined to chunk single words into large information units during word segmentation. Additionally, the “overextension of monosyllable words” hypothesis was tested and it might need to be corrected to some degree, implying that word length have an implicit influence on Chinese readers’ segmentation processing. Implications of these results for models of word recognition and eye movement control are discussed.

Highlights

Words are generally considered to be the basic meaningful unit of language
Following Hoosain’s (1992) research method, we examined the rules of word segmentation by native Chinese readers who were invited to segment Chinese sentences into individual words
We conducted a preliminary study to examine whether Chinese readers follow the national standard rules of word segmentation based on the CCLWSSIP when they were asked to segment sentences into individual words

Summary

Introduction

Most printed alphabetic writing systems provide readers with unambiguous markers that segment sentences into individual words, such as interword spaces in English. If a group of readers is given an English sentence and asked to count the number of words in the sentence, the answer must be definite in most cases. For some ideographic scripts, such as Chinese, there are no explicit cues to tell readers where a word begins or ends in a serial string of characters. If a group of native Chinese speakers are asked to count the number of words in a Chinese sentence, the answers must be diverse.

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