Different Grammatical Knowledge Level Of The Chinese Word Segmentation

Reading is a very important cognitive activity in our daily lives. Word recognition and meaning acquisition play a very important role in reading. However, different from the English, there are no visible word boundary markers to help people divide character strings into word units. Chinese readers showed great significant inconsistencies for what a word was and for how to parse the sentences into words. It was rather controversial that what was the primary unit in reading Chinese. Now there were two opinions: reading was based on character and reading was based on word. They were not perfect because of the inconsistency in Chinese word segmentation. So, in my study, two primary questions were explored. The first one was how the mastery of Chinese grammar level influences Chinese word segmentation. And the second one was the processing of the psychological word.Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, the participants were undergraduates, undergraduates who learning some Chinese grammar knowledge before the task , the undergraduates and postgraduates in Chinese Department, as well as the teachers in Chinese Department. The five groups had different level of Chinese grammar knowledge, and 5 passages were selected as the experiment materials from China daily. It was to explore how the mastery of Chinese grammar level influenced the word segmentation. The second experiment used Eyelinkâ…¡to explore whether the psychological word was easier to be processed and whether the psychological word was the primary unit in reading Chinese. In the experiment, 32 undergratuates were selected as the participants. It used a space manipulation on the target areas which created four conditions: normal text, word spaced condition (spaces were inserted in the target area), psychological word spaced condition (there were no spaces in the target area), nonword spaced condition (spaces were inserted in the target area which could not form words). Only the target areas were manipulated, spaces were inserted between words in the remaining of the sentences in the three spaced conditions. The final results found that:(1) The mastery of Chinese grammar level had a main effect on Chinese word segmentation. There were great inconsistencies in how to parse the sentences into Chinese words.(2) According to the Modern Chinese Dictionary, the more Chinese grammar knowledge was mastered, the less discrepancies were found.(3) The numbers of "more words segmenting one word" lessened and that of " one word segmenting more words" increased with the improvement of the mastery of Chinese grammar knowledge.(4) The participants tended to segmented phrases into one word, and the mastery of Chinese grammar level had a main effect on this kind of Chinese segmentation. (5) Compared with words and nonwords , psychological word was much easier to be processed.