A Study On Eye Movement Of Mongolian College Students Reading Chinese Texts With Or Without Word Boundaries

Mongolian belongs to the Altaic language family and Mongolian characters are phonetic characters.In Mongolian,there are obvious word boundaries.Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and Chinese characters are ideograms..Chinese sentences consist of a series of consecutive characters and words with no obvious word boundaries.In terms of typesetting,Mongolian is arranged in a vertical arrangement from left to right,and Chinese is arranged in a horizontal arrangement from left to right.The native language of Mongolian college students is Mongolian,and Chinese as their second language is presented in a different way from their native language.Correspondingly,they also have a gap with Chinese in their knowledge of their mother tongue.This study studies Mongolian college students' reading of Chinese texts with or without word boundaries,and examines their Chinese reading eye movement characteristics under different word segmentation and different typesetting.In this study,Chinese short sentences and long sentences were selected as experimental materials.Each sentence is presented in the form of normal no spaces,inter-word spaces,inter-character spaces and non-word spaces.This paper studies the characteristics of Chinese reading eye movements of Mongolian college students in each presentation form.At the same time,short sentences and long sentences are presented in horizontal and vertical typesetting.Compare the eye movement characteristics of Mongolian college students reading sentences under different typesetting in each presentation mode.According to the Mongolian students' native language reading habits,Chinese vertical sentences are arranged from left to right according to the Mongolian typography,and they are presented in different word boundaries to explore whether the native language reading habits will affect the reading of the second language.The study has the following conclusions:(1)When Mongolian college students read Chinese sentences in four presentation forms,Chinese sentences without spaces and spaces between characters did not promote or hinder the reading of Mongolian college students.The space between words clearly divides Chinese sentences into individual units,which provides a good word segmentation clue for Mongolian college students to recognize Chinese sentence vocabulary.On the contrary,the artificially incorrectly dividing the word boundaries has hindered the Mongolian college students' recognition of vocabulary in Chinesesentences to a certain extent,but the difference in reading between the two is not significant.(2)When Mongolian college students read sentences in two typesetting,they read the horizontal sentences slightly better than the vertical sentences,which is more obvious in the reading of long sentences.It shows that Mongolian college students are more inclined to read in a horizontal way when reading Chinese texts with greater difficulty.Although the vertical sentences are arranged according to their native language reading habits,their native language reading habits have not affected Chinese reading.On the contrary,they have fully adapted to the Chinese reading mode.(3)In view of the fact that the insertion of inter-word spaces in Chinese text is beneficial to Mongolian college students' segmentation of words,it is suggested that in the future,when formatting Chinese primary textbooks for Mongolian students,the existing typesetting methods will be changed,and inter-word spaces will improve their Chinese learning efficiency.