Does interword spacing influence lexical processing in Chinese reading?. Issue 7 (14th September 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ma, Guojie
• Is Part Of: Visual cognition. Volume 25:Issue 7/8(2018)
• Page Start: 815
• Page End: 824
• Publication Date: 2017-09-14
• Subjects: Word segmentation -- interword spacing -- word recognition -- survival analysis; Visual perception -- Periodicals; Cognition -- Periodicals; Vision -- Periodicals; 152.14
• DOI: 10.1080/13506285.2017.1338322
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1350-6285

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This study investigated how inserting spaces between Chinese words affected word recognition in Chinese reading. Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded in a sentence reading task where high- and low-frequency target words were presented in both the spaced and normally unspaced texts. We found that fixation durations on target words were shorter in the high- than low-frequency conditions, and shorter in the spaced than unspaced conditions. The survival analysis revealed that interword spacing advanced the temporal onset of word frequency effects relative to the normally unspaced condition. However, inconsistent with the findings in English reading, there was no interaction between word frequency and interword spacing on all fixation duration measures, and the Bayes factor analyses also favoured the hypothesis of null interaction. These data suggest that interword spacing facilitates visual rather than lexical processing in Chinese reading, and thus improves our understanding on the roles of interword spacing across different writing systems.