Does word boundary information facilitate Chinese sentence reading in children as beginning readers?

Interword spaces exist in the texts of many languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In most cases, interword spaces, as a kind of word boundary information, play an important role in the reading process of readers. Tibetan also uses alphabetic writing, its text has no spaces between words as word boundary markers. Instead, there are intersyllable tshegs (“”), which are superscript dots. Interword spaces play an important role in reading as word boundary information. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate the role of tshegs and what effect replacing tshegs with spaces will have on Tibetan reading. To answer these questions, Experiment 1 was conducted in which 72 Tibetan undergraduates read three-syllable-boundary conditions (normal, spaced, and untsheged). However, in Experiment 1, because we performed the experimental operations of deleting tshegs and replacing tshegs, the spatial information distribution of Tibetan sentences under different operating conditions was different, which may have a certain potential impact on the experimental results. To rule out the underlying confounding factor, in Experiment 2, 58 undergraduates read sentences for both untsheged and alternating-color conditions. Overall, the global and local analyses revealed that tshegs, spaces, and alternating-color markers as syllable boundaries can help readers segment syllables in Tibetan reading. In Tibetan reading, both spaces and tshegs are effective visual syllable segmentation cues, and spaces are more effective visual syllable segmentation cues than tshegs.

Word boundary cues in clear speech: A supplementary report

The present work is based on the Visual Routine theory of Shimon Ullman. This theory holds that efficient visual perception is managed by first applying spatially parallel methods to an initial input image in order to construct the basic representation-maps of features within the image. Then, this phase is followed by the application of serial methods --- visual routines --- which are applied to the most salient items in these and other subsequently created maps. Recent work in the visual routine tradition is reviewed, as well as relevant psychological work on preattentive and attentive vision. An analysis is made of the problem of devising a visual routine language for computing geometric properties and relations. The most useful basic representations to compute directly from a world of 2-D geometric shapes are determined. An argument is made for the case that an experimental program is required to establish which basic operations and which methods for controlling them will lead to the efficient computation of geometric properties and relations. A description is given of an implemented computer system which can correctly compute, in images of simple 2-D geometric shapes, the properties {\em vertical}, {\em horizontal}, {\em closed}, and {\em convex}, and the relations {\em inside}, {\em outside}, {\em touching}, {\em centred-in}, {\em connected}, {\em parallel}, and {\em being-part-of}. The visual routines which compute these, the basic operations out of which the visual routines are composed, and the important logic which controls the goal-directed application of the routines to the image are all described in detail. The entire system is embedded in a Question-and-Answer system which is capable of answering questions of an image, such as ``Find all the squares inside triangles'''' or ``Find all the vertical bars outside of closed convex shapes.'''' By asking many such questions about various test images, the effectiveness of the visual routines and their controlling logic is demonstrated.

Alternating-color words influence Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from neural connectivity

A novel ergodic multigram hidden Markov model (HMM) is introduced which models sentence production as a doubly stochastic process, in which word classes are first produced according to a first order Markov model, and then single or multi-character words are generated independently based on the word classes, without word boundary marked on the sentence. This model can be applied to languages without word boundary markers such as Chinese. With a lexicon containing syntactic classes for each word, its applications include language modeling for recognizers, and integrated word segmentation and class tagging. Pre-segmented and tagged corpus are not needed for training, and both segmentation and tagging are trained in one single model. In this paper, relevant algorithms for this model are presented, and experimental results on a Chinese news corpus are reported.

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating text-colors affects reading performance of Chinese children and how such an effect is influenced by individual differences in word segmentation ability. Results showed that across a number of eye-movement measures, grade three children overall benefited from explicit marking of word boundary. Additionally, children with highest word segmentation ability showed the largest benefits in reading speed. We discuss possible implications for education.

Most NLP applications work under the assumption that a user input is error-free; thus, word segmentation (WS) for written languages that use word boundary markers (WBMs), such as spaces, has been regarded as a trivial issue. However, noisy real-world texts, such as blogs, e-mails, and SMS, may contain spacing errors that require correction before further processing may take place. For the Korean language, many researchers have adopted a traditional WS approach, which eliminates all spaces in the user input and re-inserts proper word boundaries. Unfortunately, such an approach often exacerbates the word spacing quality for user input, which has few or no spacing errors; such is the case, because a perfect WS model does not exist. In this paper, we propose a novel WS method that takes into consideration the initial word spacing information of the user input. Our method generates a better output than the original user input, even if the user input has few spacing errors. Moreover, the proposed method significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art Korean WS model when the user input initially contains less than 10% spacing errors, and performs comparably for cases containing more spacing errors. We believe that the proposed method will be a very practical pre-processing module.

This study was undertaken to examine first grade children's perception of written word boundaries after a year of reading instruction. One hundred seventeen first grade students from a middle to upper middle class suburban community in the South were asked to mark word boundaries in a written sentence presented with no spaces between the words. The data indicated that many children who were at the end of their first year of reading instruction had little idea of what words are. It was also indicated, however, that as the subjects became better readers, they were better at marking word boundaries.

This paper investigates the relative contributions of accentuation and of durational word boundary cues to listeners' perceived word segmentation in Dutch. A listening experiment is reported, in which 36 two-word phrases with an ambiguous word boundary were used as stimuli. Four groups of 20 subjects each had to make a forced binary choice between the two contrastive boundary positions. Accent position on either the first or second word was varied between stimulus phrases. In both contrastive realizations of each ambiguous phrase, two durational boundary cues were manipulated, viz. duration of the pivotal consonant and rise time of the postboundary vowel. Results show that durational word boundary markers are perceptually relevant for subjects' perceived word segmentation, but only if the manipulated segment is realized as word-initial. Second, accuracy in perceived word segmentation is higher if the second word (following the ambiguous boundary position) is accented. The latter result is probably due to the higher acoustic and perceptual salience of durational as well as spectral boundary cues, which occur in initial position in the second word. Hence, the contribution of accent to word segmentation may be partly due to its "enhancing" effect on phonetic word boundary markers.

Word spacing is an important indicator of word boundary in most alphabetic writing system such as English, as it can not only help readers to successfully segment each word from successive character strings in text but also help readers to acquire and recognise word. However, there is no clear word boundary information in Chinese reading, it is interesting to investigate whether it can facilitate word recognition or help readers to learn new word when providing word boundary information(i.e. word space) in Chinese reading. We reviewed the effect of word spacing on eye movement control during Chinese reading in adults, children and second language learners of Chinese. Based on the current findings reviewed in this paper, we provided some implications for constructing models of character and word recognition and eye movement control in Chinese reading, as well as prompting Chinese teaching proficiency.

We argue that people compare values in graphs with a visual routine – attending to data values in an ordered pattern over time. Do these visual routines exist to manage capacity limitations in how many values can be encoded at once, or do they actually affect the relations that are extracted? We measured eye movements while people judged configurations of a two-bar graph based on size only (“[short tall] or [tall short]?”) and contrast only (“[light dark] or [dark light]?”). Participants exhibited visual routines in which they systematically attended to a specific feature (or “anchor point”) in the graph; in the size task, most participants inspected the taller bar first, and in the contrast task, most participants attended to the darker bar first. Participants then judged configurations that varied in both size and contrast (e.g., [short-light tall-dark]); however, only one dimension was task-relevant (varied between subjects). During this orthogonal task, participants overwhelmingly relied on the same anchor point used in the single-dimension version, but only for the task-relevant dimension (e.g., taller bar for the size-relevant task). These results suggest that visual routines are associated with specific graph interpretations. Responses were also faster when task-relevant and task-irrelevant anchor points appeared on the same object (congruent) than on different objects (incongruent). This interference from the task-irrelevant dimension suggests that top-down control may be necessary to extract relevant relations from graphs. The effect of visual routines on graph comprehension has implications for both science, technology, engineering, and mathematics pedagogy and graph design.

Most current theories of spoken word perception (e.g., Cohort theory, TRACE, Shortlist, Neighborhood Activation Model) propose that multiple form‐based representations of words are activated in memory during recognition. Few of these theories, however, specify the precise nature of multiple activation of words in fluent speech or the constraints on activation imposed by information within the speech signal. The degree to which word boundary information in two‐word sequences may limit lexical hypotheses during recognition was examined. Using a cross‐modal priming technique, spoken two‐word utterances, such as NOTE‐RAIL, were presented and the activation of possible lexical items spanning the word boundary (e.g., TRAIL) was investigated. The implications of these results for current theories of spoken word recognition will be discussed. [Work supported by NIDCD.]

No abstract available.

Grammaticality decision studies show that word order is processed flexibly during reading, as participants often misread sentences containing transposed words as if they were correctly ordered (e.g., Mirault et al., Psychological Science, 29 (12), 1922-1929. 2018). The OB1-Reader model (Snell et al., Psychological Review, 125 (6), 969-984, 2018) explains this effect as arising from positional uncertainty during parallel word recognition, proposing that low-level visual cues like word length help constrain word positions, so that transpositions are easier to detect when words differ in length. In Chinese, the absence of this effect has been attributed to limited variability in word length and lack of explicit word boundaries. We therefore investigated whether marking word boundaries using interword spaces (Experiment 1) or alternating text-color (Experiment 2) would elicit a word-length effect on transposed-word detection in Chinese. Both experiments produced robust transposed-word effects, some indication that explicit boundary cues improve transposed-word detection, but with no evidence that they elicit a word-length effect on transposed-word detection. Together with converging evidence from French, these findings suggest both that boundary cues do not reliably reduce positional uncertainty in Chinese, and that low-level visual cues like word length have limited influence on positional processing in either alphabetic scripts or Chinese.

Previous research has shown that a strong–weak syllable distinction may play an important role in word segmentation. Cutler and Norris [JEP:HPP 14, 113–121 (1988)] asked subjects to identify words at the beginnings of two syllable nonwords. Subjects were faster to identify a word when the second syllable was weak than when it was strong. The present study included lax vowels in addition to the tense and neutral vowels previously used to form the second syllables. The lax vowel produces a strong syllable of short duration; something not previously present. By comparing word identification for items in which the second syllable is strong with either a tense or lax vowel to the weak syllables, the relative roles of strong versus weak syllables and vowel duration can be explored. To the extent that tense and lax vowel syllables produce equivalent effects, strong syllables act as a cue to word boundaries in English. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo.]