Spaces between Words as a Visual Cue when Reading Chinese: An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

In texts written in languages that use the Latin alphabet, the spaces left between words serve as visual cues to understand the text. In the written Chinese language, there are no spaces between words. Chinese differs from alphabetic languages in many respects, including its synonymous and multi-meaning symbolic language elements. The absence of a visual clue to indicate word boundaries creates ambiguity in Chinese sentences or may lead to the emergence of different meanings. A large number of Chinese characters, spelling features, and lack of boundaries between words cause various difficulties for foreign students. Turkish students who study Chinese as a foreign language may find its unfamiliar orthographic features, such as a spelling system without spaces between words, difficult to understand as Turkish is written using an alphabet. According to some studies on the early stages of Chinese language learning, artificially-triggered spaces in writing can have a positive effect on the reading process. Yet, this finding that the spaces between Chinese words facilitate reading comprehension is controversial. In this study, an eye movement tracking technique is used to investigate whether orthographically-triggered spelling differences or adding spaces between words affect the reading process of foreign language students. The results are discussed through Chinese grammatical features.