The Role Of Space Between Words In Right-to-Left Chinese Reading

In alphabetic writing systems(such as English),the spaces between the words marks the word boundary,and the basic processing unit of the reading is distinguished at the visual level The visual level of word boundary information facilitates reading.In the Chinese text,although the word is the basic unit of writing and lacks word boundary,studies have shown that the basic processing unit of Chinese reading is also a word.However,in Chinese reading,inserting spaces between words does not significantly promote reading.Researchers believe that there may be trade-off between the familiarity of text presentation and the promotion of word segmentation.Although inserting inter-word spaces in Chinese texts provides word segmentation,the reader is not familiar with the presentation of text.In order to explore this problem,this study controls the familiarity of text presentation through presenting Chinese text from right to left,and to test whether word segmentation promotes Chinese reading in the absence of reading experience.The purpose of Experiment 1 is to investigate whether spaces between words promotes Chinese reading in unfamiliar text presentation.The subjects were 40 Chinese-speaking college students.The text was presented in the form of no space text,space between words,space between characters and non-word spaces.The reading process was recorded by Eyelink1000 eye tracker.The results show that the main effect of word segmentation is significant.The total gaze time of the space between the words is significantly shorter than other text,and the reading speed is significantly faster than other presentation text.The results show that in the reading of the text presentation lacking reading experience,the space between words promotes Chinese reading.The space between words as word-segmentation clue promotes reading.If there are trade-off between promotion of the spaces and the reading experience,after increasing the reading experience,will the promotion of the space between words reduce in the text presented from right to left?In order to examine this problem,the experiment 2 took 40 Chinese-speaking college students as the subjects.Firstly,the subjects were allowed to read the reverse Chinese text,reading 30 minutes a day,and practicing for 10 days to improve the familiarity of the reverse text.The reading process of the subjects was recorded by Eyelink1000 eye tracker.Then,the same experimental method was used to record the reading process when the subject read the reverse text.In the total gaze time and the reading speed,It was found that there was no significant difference between word-spaces text and no-space text.It shows that after improving the familiarity of the text presentation,the promotion of word-space disappears.The results of this study show that there is a trade-off between the familiarity of text presentation and the promotion of word segmentation.Inserting spaces into words as segmentation cues facilitates reading,but it is disturbed by the unfamiliarity of the text presentation.