Abstract
Readers’ eye movements were recorded to examine the role of character positional frequency on Chinese lexical acquisition during reading and its possible modulation by word spacing. In Experiment 1, three types of pseudowords were constructed based on each character’s positional frequency, providing congruent, incongruent, and no positional word segmentation information. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences, for the learning and the test phases. In the learning phase, half the participants read sentences in word-spaced format, and half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read sentences in unspaced format. The results showed an inhibitory effect of character positional frequency upon the efficiency of word learning when processing incongruent pseudowords both in the learning and test phase, and also showed facilitatory effect of word spacing in the learning phase, but not at test. Most importantly, these two characteristics exerted independent influences on word segmentation. In Experiment 2, three analogous types of pseudowords were created whilst controlling for orthographic neighborhood size. The results of the two experiments were consistent, except that the effect of character positional frequency was absent in the test phase in Experiment 2. We argue that the positional frequency of a word’s constituent characters may influence the character-to-word assignment in a process that likely incorporates both lexical segmentation and identification.
Highlights
Unlike most alphabetic scripts, Chinese text is generally printed as a string of continuous characters, with no visually distinct interword spaces
A key theoretical question was considered in the context of these distinctive characteristics of written Chinese: which word segmentation cues do Chinese readers use when reading? To address this question, we examined learning of pseudowords embedded in sentences, allowing us to determine which of our manipulated segmentation cues impacted upon readers’ ability to identify and group together the constituent characters
We report local analyses of eye movement data from the target words, focusing on three key reading time measures: (1) first fixation duration, the duration of the initial, first pass fixation on the target word regardless of how many fixations were made in total; (2) gaze duration, the sum of all first pass fixation durations on the target word before the eyes moved to another word in the sentence; and (3) total fixation time, the sum of all fixation durations on the target word
Summary
Chinese text is generally printed as a string of continuous characters, with no visually distinct interword spaces. There is, no clear visual information available for Chinese readers to determine where the word boundaries lie within a sentence. There has been a great deal of interest in how Chinese readers segment and identify words within sentence contexts[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. There has, been less research focusing on how readers segment and acquire novel words when they are encountered during reading, though see [9,10]. The aim was to examine which word segmentation cues Chinese readers use when learning novel words in sentence contexts.
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