Effects of Spacing on Sentence Reading in Chinese

Gaisha Oralova,Victor Kuperman

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.765335

Abstract

Given that Chinese writing conventions lack inter-word spacing, understanding whether and how readers of Chinese segment regular unspaced Chinese writing into words is an important question for theories of reading. This study examined the processing outcomes of introducing spaces to written Chinese sentences in varying positions based on native speaker consensus. The measure of consensus for every character transition in our stimuli sentences was the percent of raters who placed a word boundary in that position. The eye movements of native readers of Chinese were recorded while they silently read original unspaced sentences and their experimentally manipulated counterparts for comprehension. We introduced two types of spaced sentences: one with spaces inserted at every probable word boundary (heavily spaced), and another with spaces placed only at highly probable word boundaries (lightly spaced). Linear mixed-effects regression models showed that heavily spaced sentences took identical time to read as unspaced ones despite the shortened fixation times on individual words (Experiment 1). On the other hand, reading times for lightly spaced sentences and words were shorter than those for unspaced ones (Experiment 2). Thus, spaces proved to be advantageous but only when introduced at highly probable word boundaries. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications of these findings.

Highlights

One of the differences between Chinese and many other languages is that the Chinese writing system does not have inter-word spacing, offering no overt visual cues for identifying word boundaries
With a relatively large stimulus set (220 sentences), this study aims at exploring the existing uncertainty regarding the role of spacing in Chinese sentence reading and serves as a high-power extension of previous studies
According to Chen et al (2003) the probability of skipping tends to be much higher in Chinese readers than in English readers (42 vs. 20%)

Summary

Introduction

One of the differences between Chinese and many other languages is that the Chinese writing system does not have inter-word spacing, offering no overt visual cues for identifying word boundaries. This fact gave rise to a large-scale ongoing inquiry into how Chinese readers segment print information into chunks for processing and what guides this segmentation process. The present paper contributes to this inquiry by studying the effects of introducing space symbols at specific character transitions on word and sentence recognition. A Chinese word, or ci, as defined by the traditional grammar, is a linguistic unit which denotes a meaning and a pronunciation, may stand alone to constitute a sentence and can be a grammatical unit on its own (Hoosain, 1991, 1992)

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