Reading Chinese Text Research Articles

Intelligent Chinese Typesetting Model Based on Information Importance Can Enhance Text Readability

In today’s era of information overload, efficiently extracting valuable information from a large volume of textual data has become a crucial challenge in reading. This study aimed to explore the enhancement of Chinese readability in the digital domain through intelligent typesetting method. This study involved two experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to achieve the machine learning-based assessment of the importance of individual words in Chinese articles and to automate typesetting based on the importance of words. For the second experiment, readability tests and eye-tracking reading tests were performed and the reading performance and reading attention between intelligent typesetting and general typesetting style was compared. This work proposed three Chinese typesetting methods that distinguished the importance of Chinese text information, based on font size and color. The results showed that first, when reading Chinese text, visual attention was more likely to be drawn to larger font sizes, darker brightness, or warmer-colored characters. Second, intelligent Chinese typography that distinguishes information importance through font size, color brightness, and color hue can enhance Chinese reading comprehension accuracy and subjective evaluation. It was concluded that using the TextRank model to distinguish importance of Chinese vocabulary and intelligent typesetting methods based on visual features of font could obviously improve text readability. Specifically, readability achieved through intelligent typesetting method distinguishing information importance through font color brightness surpasses that of general typesetting significantly. These intelligent typesetting methods can be widely applied in Chinese reading scenarios, such as web pages, e-books, information visualization, and other Chinese reading contexts.

Eye movements of second language learners when reading spaced and unspaced Chinese texts.

Unlike English, Chinese does not have interword spacing in written texts, which poses difficulties for Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) learners' identification of word boundaries and affects their reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. The eye-movement literature has suggested that interword spacing is important in alphabetic languages; examining languages that lack interword spaces such as Chinese, thus, may help to inform theoretical accounts of eye-movement control and word identification during reading. Research investigating the interword spacing effect in reading Chinese showed that adding spacing facilitated CSL learners' reading comprehension and speed as well as vocabulary learning. However, the bulk of this research mainly looked at the learning outcomes (off-line measures), with few studies focusing on L2 learners' reading processes. Building on this background, this study seeks to provide a descriptive perspective of the eye movements of CSL learners. In this study, 24 CSL learners with intermediate Chinese proficiency were recruited as the experimental group, and 20 Chinese native speakers were recruited as the control group. The EyeLink 1,000 eye tracker was used to record their reading of four segmentation conditions of Chinese texts, namely, no space condition, word-spaced condition, non-word-spaced condition, and pinyin-spaced condition. Results show that: (1) CSL learners with intermediate Chinese proficiency generally spent less time reading Chinese texts with spaces between words, and they showed more gazes and regressions when reading texts without spaces; (2) Non-word-spaced texts and Pinyin-spaced texts interfere with CSL learners' reading process; and (3) Intermediate CSL learners show consistent eye movement patterns in the normal no-space condition and word-spaced condition. I conclude that word boundary information can effectively guide CSL learners' eye movement behaviors and eye saccade planning, thus improving reading efficiency.

The Adjustment of Complexity on Sarcasm Processing in Chinese: Evidence from Reading Time Indicators

It is controversial whether sarcasm processing should go through literal meaning processing. There is also a lack of eye movement evidence for Chinese sarcasm processing. In this study, we used eye movement experiments to explore the processing differences between sarcastic and literal meaning in Chinese text and whether this was regulated by sentence complexity. We manipulated the variables of complexity and literality. We recorded 33 participants' eye movements when they were reading Chinese text and the results were analyzed by a linear mixed model. We found that, in the early stage of processing, there was no difference between the processing time of the sarcastic meaning and the literal meaning of simple remarks, whereas for complex remarks, the time needed to process the sarcastic meaning was longer than that needed to process the literal meaning. In the later stage of processing, regardless of complexity, the processing time of the sarcastic meaning was longer than that of the literal meaning. These results suggest that sarcastic speech processing in Chinese is influenced by literal meaning, and the effect of literal meaning on sarcastic remarks is regulated by complexity. Sarcastic meaning was expressed differently in different stages of processing. These results support the hierarchical salience hypothesis of the serial modular model.

KEMAMPUAN MEMBACA MEMAHAMI TEKS BAHASA MANDARIN SISWA KELAS VIII SMP FRATER MAKASSAR

INTAN MEYLENIA NAGA-ULAWENG, 2021, "The 8th Frater Junior High School Chinese Text Reading Ability in Makassar". paper. National language education in the Department of Foreign Languages. Language and Writing College. Makassar State University (supervised by Misnawaty Usman and Burhanuddin). The purpose of this research is to obtain data and information about the reading and comprehension of Chinese texts in the eighth grade of Makassar Junior High School. This study is a quantitative descriptive study. The object of this study is the eighth class of Frater Junior High School in Makassar City, with a total of eight classes and a total of 248 students. The sample of this study is the eighth grade G class with a total of 29 students. The samples were determined by random sampling method. The results of the study showed that the Chinese reading and comprehension abilities of the eighth Class G students belonged to the general category (75.4%). Keywords: reading comprehension ability, Chinese text

Effects of phonological loop on inferential processing during Chinese text reading: Evidence from a dual-task paradigm.

The role of working memory (WM) components, such as phonological loop, in online inferential processing has thus far not been empirically examined with a dual-task paradigm. The current study used an online method to examine the effects of the two components of phonological loop-the articulatory rehearsal device and the phonological store device-on online causal inference generation during Chinese text reading. Eighty-five Chinese university students read three-sentence inference and control texts and responded to comprehension questions related to targeted inferences in different reading conditions. The results showed that in the articulatory suppression condition, response times (RTs) for comprehension questions of inference texts were considerably longer, and response errors were significantly higher than those in the normal reading condition, which indicated the effects of the articulatory rehearsal device on readers' online causal inference processes during Chinese text reading. Moreover, RTs for comprehension questions of inference texts in the irrelevant speech condition were significantly shorter than those in the normal reading condition, suggesting effects of the phonological store device on readers' causal inference processes during reading. Taken together, these findings indicate that the articulatory rehearsal device plays an important role in inference processes, but readers allocate more cognitive resources to facilitate the construction of causal relations during text-based inferential comprehension when function of the phonological store device is impaired.

Exploring the Capacity of an Orderless Box Discretization Network for Multi-orientation Scene Text Detection

Multi-orientation scene text detection has recently gained significant research attention. Previous methods directly predict words or text lines, typically by using quadrilateral shapes. However, many of these methods neglect the significance of consistent labeling, which is important for maintaining a stable training process, especially when it comprises a large amount of data. Here we solve this problem by proposing a new method, Orderless Box Discretization (OBD), which first discretizes the quadrilateral box into several key edges containing all potential horizontal and vertical positions. To decode accurate vertex positions, a simple yet effective matching procedure is proposed for reconstructing the quadrilateral bounding boxes. Our method solves the ambiguity issue, which has a significant impact on the learning process. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method quantitatively. More importantly, based on OBD, we provide a detailed analysis of the impact of a collection of refinements, which may inspire others to build state-of-the-art text detectors. Combining both OBD and these useful refinements, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks, including ICDAR 2015 and MLT. Our method also won the first place in the text detection task at the recent ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge for Reading Chinese Text on Signboards, further demonstrating its superior performance. The code is available at https://git.io/TextDet .

Adaptive Multi-Scale HyperNet with Bi-Direction Residual Attention Module for Scene Text Detection

Scene text detection is an important step in the scene text reading system. There are still two problems during the existing text detection methods: (1) The small receptive of the convolutional layer in text detection is not sufficiently sensitive to the target area in the image; (2) The deep receptive of the convolutional layer in text detection lose a lot of spatial feature information. Therefore, detecting scene text remains a challenging issue. In this work, we design an effective text detector named Adaptive Multi-Scale HyperNet (AMSHN) to improve texts detection performance. Specifically, AMSHN enhances the sensitivity of target semantics in shallow features with a new attention mechanism to strengthen the region of interest in the image and weaken the region of no interest. In addition, it reduces the loss of spatial feature by fusing features on multiple paths, which significantly improves the detection performance of text. Experimental results on the Robust Reading Challenge on Reading Chinese Text on Signboard (ReCTS) dataset show that the proposed method has achieved the state-of-the-art results, which proves the ability of our detector on both particularity and universality applications.

(Mis)reading Chinese Texts in Southeast Asian History: “Moliu”, Duoluomo and the Lure of “Srivijayan” Conquests

(Mis)reading Chinese Texts in Southeast Asian History: “Moliu”, Duoluomo and the Lure of “Srivijayan” Conquests

Understanding Text Reading Comprehension of Chinese Students Who Are d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing: The Roles of Segmental Phonological Awareness and Suprasegmental Lexical Tone Awareness.

The authors investigated the roles of Chinese segmental (i.e., onset and rime) and suprasegmental (i.e., lexical tone) phonological awareness in Chinese text reading comprehension among 146 Chinese students in grades 3-9 who were d/Deaf and hard of hearing. All participants completed tasks involving onset and rime detection, lexical tone identification, sight word reading, text reading comprehension, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory. Path analyses showed that after controlling for age, grade, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory, segmental phonological awareness contributed both directly and indirectly (via sight word reading) to text reading comprehension, whereas suprasegmental lexical tone awareness only exerted only an indirect effect on text reading comprehension via sight word reading. These findings underscore the importance of phonological awareness in text reading comprehension for Chinese students who are d/Dhh.

Hemispheric processing of predictive inferences: the effects of textual constraint and metacomprehension monitoring competence

Previous research into predictive inferences making showed that textual constraint influenced hemispheric processing of the inferences. However, the relationship between metacomprehension monitoring competence (MMC) and hemispheric processing of predictive inferences has rarely been investigated. The present study employed a divided visual field (DVF) paradigm to examine the effects of textual constraint and MMC on hemispheric processing of predictive inferences with Chinese native speakers during Chinese text reading. Results showed that neither response time nor facilitation effects indicated any significant interaction for our MMC groups. MMC was unlikely to play a role in hemispheric processing of predictive inferences. The results were consistent with those of the very rare relevant previous research, in which readers’ judgments of learning failed to have significant effects on inference making performance while judgments of inferencing had. Future investigation could focus more on the study of an inference-specific dimension of metacomprehension monitoring that might be more closely related to inference making. Results also indicated that the left hemisphere (LH) showed greater facilitation for strongly constrained predictive inferences than for weakly constrained predictive inferences, and that the right hemisphere (RH) showed greater levels of facilitation for weakly constrained predictive inferences. Taken together, MMC did not seem to have a positive impact on hemispheric predictive inference making. There was a RH facilitation advantage for weakly constrained texts and an LH advantage for strongly constrained texts.

Do readers adjust their lower‐ and higher‐level language skills according to text structures? Evidence from eye movements in Chinese text reading

BackgroundReading researchers have generally considered that reading is an interactive combination of top‐down (higher‐level language skill) and bottom‐up (lower‐level language skill) processes. Nevertheless, the mechanisms through which readers apply these skills for online text comprehension are unclear.MethodsThe present study thus used eight classical Chinese (CC) texts and their corresponding vernacular translation (VT) texts for controlling the text structure and meaning to explore such mechanisms in high school students.ResultsWith partial‐out to the influences of (a) students' language achievement scores, (b) word frequency and (c) word length, we observed no significant difference in comprehension accuracy between the CC and VT texts, and the CC texts involved a significantly lower reading speed than did the VT texts. Moreover, the first fixation duration, gaze duration, rereading time and total reading time for the CC texts were longer than those for the VT texts. For all events, CC text reading required a longer fixation duration and significantly longer rereading time and total reading time than did VT text reading. Further observations show that students comprehended CC texts by adjusting their lower‐ and higher‐level language skills.ConclusionThese findings demonstrate that even if CC texts contain a relatively high number of low‐frequency words, as readers get more and more contextual information from the text, they can gradually apply higher‐level reading skills to understand the meaning of the text, which can ease the dependence on word decoding.HighlightsWhat is already known about this topic Lower‐ and higher‐level language skills—which reflect lexical access and higher order text integration, respectively—affect reading comprehension. Theory and research in reading comprehension have emphasised the interactive process of both language skills to lead to successfully understanding text. What this paper adds By using classical Chinese texts and their corresponding vernacular translations to control the meaning of texts, text event structures and the corresponding word sequence, we determined that high school students comprehended classical Chinese texts by adjusting their lower‐ and higher‐level language skills. This study also revealed students' dynamical adjustment of lower‐ and higher‐level language skills within construction and integration phases according to various events. Implications for theory, policy or practice This study demonstrated that word‐based eye‐movement measures can reflect the processing of lower‐ and higher‐level components in online reading and can reveal the even construction and integration processes of construction–integration model theory. By thoroughly examining reading strategies for texts structured according to events, this study revealed how high school students can achieve a certain degree of comprehension of classical Chinese texts through the use of higher‐level language skills.

Effects of illuminance and contrast on the reading of Chinese text by myopes

Twenty-four young adults with myopia in both eyes and no anisometropia participated in this study. Observers were instructed to read one A4-sized page of Chinese text at different levels of illuminance and text contrast, while their reading distance, head tilt angle and reading speed were recorded using an electromagnetic motion tracking system. Four illuminances (3, 30, 300 and 600 lx) and two text contrast levels (90% and 45%) were tested in randomised order. Observers tended to shorten their reading distance and increase their head tilt angle when reading at low illuminance. In addition, their reading speed was markedly slower at low illuminance and low contrast. These effects were found for both text contrast conditions but were greater at low contrast. Illuminance and text contrast play a critical role in myope’s reading behaviour. An illuminance of 300 lx or more with high-contrast text allows for good reading posture and rapid reading of Chinese text.

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

In order to investigate how language and attention systems are affected by word boundary information during reading, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment in which text-color in naturally unspaced Chinese sentences were systematically manipulated in three experimental conditions, that is, text-color alternation consistent or inconsistent with word boundary (i.e., alternating-color word and non-word conditions), as well as a mono-color baseline condition. Twenty college students (14 females; 23.1 years old) were required to silently read 72 sentences during fMRI scanning. We found that the conditions of word boundary modulated the brain connections between the visual word form area (VWFA) and dorsal attention regions, and between the VWFA and language-related regions. These results suggest that the coordination between the VWFA and dorsal attention regions plays an important role in grouping characters and guiding the saccade according to perceptual grouping based on color, and that the connection between VWFA and MTG could be the neural mechanism of lexical access during Chinese text reading.

Method for Detecting Chinese Texts in Natural Scenes Based on Improved Faster R-CNN

In this study, a natural scene text detection method based on the improved faster region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) is proposed. This method extracts image features with the Inception-ResNet architecture, adopts a region proposal network to generate region proposals for the extracted features, merges the fine-tuned features with the region proposals, and finally, uses Fast R-CNN to classify and locate text. The proposed method solves the problems of varying text sizes and the text being obscured in the image. Compared with the original Faster R-CNN, the multilevel Inception-ResNet network model presented in this study can extract deeper text features. The extracted feature map is further sparsely represented by Reduction B, Inception ResNet C and Avg Pool, and then is fused with text regions obtained by the text feature mapping lower layer network to acquire the exact text regions. The text detection method presented in this study is tested on the 2017 dataset of ICDAR2017 Competition on Reading Chinese Text in the Wild (RCTW-17), which contains a large number of distorted, blurry, different scale and size texts. An accuracy of 76.4% is achieved in this platform, thereby proving the efficiency of the proposed method.

Do visual word segmentation cues improve reading performance in Chinese reading？

It is controversial whether providing visual word segmentation cues can improve Chinese reading performance. This study investigated this topic by examining how visual word segmentation cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influence global sentence reading and local word recognition during reading Chinese text in three experiments. The results showed that interword spacing could facilitate local word recognition but could not increase reading speed. In contrast, grey highlighting and red colour could improve neither local word recognition nor global sentence reading performance. Instead, these cues increased the number of fixations and saccades, resulting in slower reading speed. These results suggest that even red colour is not a practically visual cue for Chinese word segmentation and the corresponding mechanisms were discussed.Practitioner Summary: We studied how visual cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influenced Chinese reading performance. Our data showed that even the red colour was not an efficient cue for Chinese word segmentation. The corresponding mechanisms and future direction were discussed regarding how to improve Chinese reading performance.

A Detection and Verification Model Based on SSD and Encoder-Decoder Network for Scene Text Detection

Text detection in natural scene image is challenging due to text variation in size, orientation, color and complex background, contrast, and resolution. In this paper, we focus on the long text detection in complex background. In order to deal with multi-scale text variation and exploit the recognition result to enhance the detection performance, we propose a detection and verification model based on SSD and encoder-decoder network for scene text detection. First, we present a text localization neural network based on SSD, which incorporates a text detection layer into the standard SSD model and can detect horizontal texts, especially long and dense Chinese texts in natural scenes more effectively. Second, a text verification model based on the encoder-decoder network is designed to recognize and verify the initial detection results, in order to eliminate non-text areas that are falsely detected as text areas. A series of experiments have been conducted on our constructed horizontal text detection dataset, which is composed of the horizontal text images in ICDAR 2017 Competition on Reading Chinese Text in the Wild (RCTW 2017) and some scene images taken by cameras. Compared with previous approaches, experimental results show that our method has achieved the highest recall rate of 0.784 and competitive precision rate in text detection, indicating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

The modulation of eye movement control by word length in reading Chinese.

Given there are no interword spaces marking word boundaries in Chinese text, it remains unclear how information about word length influences eye movement control during the reading of Chinese text. In this research, we set up strict controls for word frequency and other word properties, to study this knowledge gap. In Experiment 1A and Experiment 1B, a between-subjects design was used. Forty-eight pairs of one- and two-character words were selected as target words in Experiment 1A, while the same amount of two- and three-character words were selected in Experiment 1B. Conversely, a within-subjects design was used in Experiment 2. Sixty sets of one-, two- and three-character words were selected as target words. The results showed that long words were skipped less often and fixated on more often than short words. Total time was shorter for shorter than for longer words but first fixation durations were longer for one- than for two-character words. Most importantly, we did not find reliable evidence to support the view that word length could modulate initial landing position and incoming saccade length in the length-matched region analyses. These findings suggest that word length influences eye movement control during reading Chinese in a way that is slightly different from that in the process of reading English.

Eye Movement Study on Mongolian and Chinese Expository Reading Mongolian College Students

The eye tracking method is adopted, to read the Mongolian and Chinese text as the starting point of the Mongolian bilingual students were tested, to explore the native Mongolian Mongolian and Chinese bilingual learners in reading expository writing when the familiarity of the differences and characteristics of eye movement.The results show that the fixation frequency, fixation duration and twitching of the eyelid amplitude of Mongolian College Students reading Mongolian are better than reading Chinese text, but the difference was not significant. The familiarity of mother tongue will affect the eye movement index of Mongolian College students.

Effects of Chinese Font Size and Space on Efficiency of VDT Single-line Text Reading

This study investigated the factors which affect the single-line Chinese text reading efficiency on a visual display terminal (VDT) screen and in the end has given a reasonable suggestion. The efficiency of reading is dependent on how ergonomically the visual information is presented. A great quantity of investigations have shown that font size characteristics could affect readability. A detailed research of the influences of font size and space on efficiency for reading single Chinese information on a VDT screen has been carried out on young adults in this study, and reading speed as well as accuracy were used as two evaluation indicators to appraise reading efficiency. First, the calculation formula is obtained and the best range of Chinese font size and space is determined in a fixed reading distance under the VDT reading environment according to the classic theory of ergonomics. Then, Microsoft Word is used to assign a quantitative value to font size and space. Four sizes of fonts were used: 9, 10.5, 12 and 14 point, and all fonts were presented in 1, 2, 3 and 4 point spaces. In order to obtain simple and effective experimental combinations to reflect the results, an orthogonal experimental method is applied to design the experiment. Finally, the synchronous device is connected, and relevant data about reading time and accuracy is obtained by a record in E-prime 2.0 software. It shows, by statistical analysis, that the best combination for efficiently reading single Chinese information on a computer screen is 12 point font size and 2 point space. Furthermore, through further analysis, the best viewing angle is determined to be 21'. The outcome of this study will help as a guideline to all PC users, web page designers, information tips in public places so that readers can more easily grasp information accurately and rapidly.

Design Factors Affecting the Reaction Time for Identifying Toilet Signs: A Preliminary Study.

This study focused on the manner in which design factors affect the reaction time for identifying toilet signs. Taiwanese university students and staff members (50 men, 50 women; M age = 23.5 year, SD = 5.7) participated in the study. The 36 toilet signs were modified on three factors (six presenting styles, two figure-ground exchanges, and three colors), and the reaction time data of all participants were collected when the signs were presented in a simulation onscreen. Participants were quickest when reading Chinese text, followed by graphics and English texts. The findings also showed that men and women had different reaction times across various design combinations. These findings can serve as a reference for practically designing toilet signs, since design factors can lead to difficulties with comprehension based on reaction time measurements.