The Effect Of Word Boundaries On Chinese Text Reading For Different Levels Of Chinese Language Learners From Indonesia And Thailand

There are some differences between Chinese text and alphabetic language text.Oneof a obvious characteristic of chinese language is that there are no spaces betweenwords. In alphabetic language,bottom-up information provided by the spaces betweenwords can be used by readers to segment and recognize words.Given that there are nospaces between words in Chinese,it needs much more time to recognize word or eventhere is a high chance of misunderstanding the meaning of the text while reading forlearners of Chinese as a second language.The present study was conducted to examinethe effect of word boundaries on Chinese text reading for different levels of chineselanguge learners from Indonesia and Thailand by four experiments,which are wordsegmentation,sentence comprehension,text comprehension and another wordsegmentation.The experiments demonstrate that the result of word segmentation gets betterwith the development of Chinese language ability,and adding spaces between wordssomehow helps learners of elementary level to recognize words and understandtexts,while it does not make any differences for students of advanced language abilitywith or without spaces between words. For learners of advanced language ability,theyare getting used to the characteristic of chinese text.The four experiments indicate that students are tend to use the bottom-up andholistic information according to the context to help them recognize words andunderstand texts with the development of chinese language ability and perception ofnew words.Adding spaces between words helps beginners recognize wordthough,students should accept differences and get used to it,it helps in the process ofreading when acquired as much as words,in addition,it is also necessary to do someword segmentation exercise and enlarge reading unit.