The Effect Of Word Segmentation On Chinese Text Reading: Evidence From Korean Students And Thai Students' Eye Movements

Word identification refers not only the pattern recognition process in which the visual input is encoded and looked up in the mental lexicon to find the best match,but also the identification of word units from the text.In Chinese text,characters are the salient orthographic units,and word boundaries are not markd,so it's often reported that foreign students have difficulties identifying words.As physical cues,spaces were inserted into sentences to explore the effect of word segmentation on Chinese text reading for Korean students and Thai students.Their eye movements were monitored by Eyelink2000 as they read Chinese sentences under four presentation conditions.Two experiments were conducted in this study:In Experiment 1,4(presentaion conditions:normal unspaced,word spaced,single Chinese character spaced and nonword spaced)×2(language proficiency:senior, junior)ANOVAs were carried out to explore the influence of word segmentation on 30 Korean students' eye movement.In Experiment 2,4(presentaion conditions:normal unspaced,word spaced,single Chinese character spaced and nonword spaced)×2(language proficiency:senior, junior)ANOVAs were carried out to explore the influence of word segmentation on 30 Thai students' eye movement.The results showed as follows:Firstly,Korean students and Thai students had the similar eye movement pattern, and the tendency of their eye movement data was almost consistent.Secondly,for all global measures there were reliable effect of presentation condtions.Additionally,for total reading time and fixation counts,the main effect of language proficiency was significant.Junior readers had more fixations and spend more time than senior readers,though both of them understood materials well.Thirdly,the denser the text,the longer the fixations,and the shorter the saccades.Fourthly,for both Korean students and Thai students,total sentence reading time was reliably shorter under the word spacing condition than under the normal unspaced condition,and both of them read lowest under the nonword spaced condtion.There were no reliable differences between normal unspaced condition and single Chinese character spacing condition.Finally,words have phychological reality in Chinese reading.