Interword spacing and landing position effects during Chinese reading in children and adults.

Abstract

The present study examined children and adults' eye movement behavior when reading word spaced and unspaced Chinese text. The results showed that interword spacing reduced children and adults' first pass reading times and refixation probabilities indicating spaces between words facilitated word identification. Word spacing effects occurred to a similar degree for both children and adults, though there were differential landing position effects for single and multiple fixation situations in both groups; clear preferred viewing location effects occurred for single fixations, whereas landing positions were closer to word beginnings, and further into the word for adults than children for multiple fixation situations. Furthermore, adults targeted refixations contingent on initial landing positions to a greater degree than did children. Overall, the results indicate that some aspects of children's eye movements during reading show similar levels of maturity to adults, while others do not.

Actes du Symposium international sur la litéracie à l’école = International Symposium for Educational Literacy (SILE/ISEL)

“…When refixating words, the eyes of adults yet systematically target parts of the word that are remote from the location of the initial fixation, whereas children's refixations aim at a smaller area, resulting in shorter saccades. Similar results were recently observed in children and adults reading Chinese (Zang et al, 2013), with differential effects of landing position for single and multiple fixation situations in both groups: for single fixations, there were clear preferred viewing location effects (i.e. closer to the beginning/center of the word), which occurred further into the word among adults compared with children, in multiple fixation situations.…”

“…Studies conducted on the eye landing position in children have shown little difference in the initial landing positions between children and adults ( Figure 2), with both groups making their first fixation near the center of the word on average (Zang, Liang, Bai, Yan, & Liversedge, 2013, children between 8 and 9 years old vs. adults; , children between 7 and 11 years old (mean age of 10 years and 4 months) vs. adults; Vitu et al, 2001, 12-year-old children vs. adults). Similarly, both children and adults are more likely to refixate a word if the initial fixation occurs away from the center of the word, presumably because their initial fixation does not allow them to retrieve the visual information necessary to complete lexical identification (Blythe & Joseph, 2011).…”

The influence of a word’s number of letters, spatial extent, and initial bigram characteristics on eye movement control during reading: Evidence from Arabic.

“…Additionally, a consistent pattern of non-significant increases in fixation durations on narrow extent words, relative to wide extent words suggests, at most, a modest cost of visual (Bouma, 1970;1973;Paterson & Jordan, 2010) or informational density (e.g., Zang et al, 2013) in the narrow conditions.…”

Effects of word frequency and visual complexity on eye movements of young and older Chinese readers

“…In particular, Chinese does not use extra spaces between characters to demarcate word boundaries, and there are no clear visual cues that might help older readers to quickly and easily determine which characters comprise a word (e.g., Bai, Yan, Liversedge, Zang, & Rayner, 2008;Zang, Liang, Bai, Yan, & Liversedge, 2013). Consequently, older adults may read Chinese more carefully than younger adults because they have particular difficulty establishing the location of the boundaries between words.…”