On the segmentation of Chinese words during reading

Li, Xingshan; Rayner, Keith; Cave, Kyle R.

doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.02.003

Cited by 150 publications

(266 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…In closing, we should note that prior studies have shown that words play an important role in the reading of Chinese sentences (Rayner, Li, Juhasz, & Yan, 2005) and that the context can also affect character identification (Cheng, 1981;Li, Rayner, & Cave, 2009). Thus, it is plausible that the findings from the present study could be extended to other languages such as English.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Word knowledge influences character perception

Pollatsek

2011

Psychon Bull Rev

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In two experiments, we examined whether context information can affect the activity of the nodes at the character level. Chinese readers viewed two Chinese characters; one was intact, but the other (the target) was embedded in a rectangle of visual noise and increased in visibility over time. The two characters constituted a word in one condition but did not in the other condition. The task was to press a button to indicate whether the character in the noise was at the top or bottom of the rectangle. (They did not have to identify the character.) Response times were faster in the word condition than in the nonword condition. Because the "wordness" of the stimulus was logically irrelevant to judging the location of the target character, the data indicate that processing at the word level can feed back to fairly low-level judgments, such as where a character is. Keywords Word recognition . ReadingModels of word processing in reading usually assume that the processing has multiple levels: a feature level, a character (or letter) level, and a word level (Massaro, 1998;McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). In all such models, the feature level encodes visual feature information that feeds into character (letter) identification, which in turn feeds into word identification. However, word superiority effect (WSE) studies have demonstrated that character identification is facilitated (even when guessing is controlled for) when the character is part of a word (Reicher, 1969;Wheeler, 1970) as compared with when it is embedded in a series of nonword letters or when it is shown in isolation. Such a phenomenon clearly casts doubt on whether word recognition is merely the result of the feed-forward mechanism sketched previously.Perhaps the most influential current model of word recognition is the interactive activation model (IAM, McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), which assumes that word processing is an interactive process. (The IAM model was largely proposed to explain phenomena such as the WSE.) Through the interconnections between the nodes in a threelevel network (feature level, character level, and word level), the activity of a node can affect the activity of the nodes in the same level and the other levels, including "lower" levels. Most notably, to explain the word superiority effect, IAM assumes that the activity of the nodes at the character level is affected by the activity of nodes at the word level. The activation of a character node increases faster when the character is part of a word (or even part of a pseudoword) than when it is not. Hence, a character belonging to a word is identified faster than when it is not part of word or when it is shown in isolation.However, not all of the models of word processing that can explain the WSE assume that context affects the activity in the character level. For example, the fuzzy logic model of perception (FLMP;Massaro, 1998;Massaro & Cohen, 1991) assumes that context information in the word level does not feed back to the character level and affects the activity of relat...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Word knowledge influences character perception

Pollatsek

2011

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…Thus, in terms of their formal linguistic characterization, our stimuli were clearly from three distinct categories. Hoosain, 1992;Li, Rayner & Cave, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parafoveal processing across different lexical constituents in Chinese reading

Cui

Drieghe

Yan

et al. 2013

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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We report a boundary paradigm eye movement experiment to investigate whether the linguistic category of a two-character Chinese string affects how the second character of that string is processed in the parafovea during reading. We obtained clear preview effects in all conditions but, more importantly, found parafoveal-on-foveal effects whereby a nonsense preview of the second character influenced fixations on the first character. This effect occurred for monomorphemic words, but not for compound words or phrases. Also, in a word boundary demarcation experiment, we demonstrate that Chinese readers are not always consistent in their judgements of which characters in a sentence constitute words. We conclude that information regarding the combinatorial properties of characters in Chinese is used online to moderate the extent to which parafoveal characters are processed.

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“…For instance, neither Thai nor Chinese text has interword spaces. However, despite this lack of interword spacing, word segmentation is just as important in these languages (see Li, Rayner, & Cave, 2009). For instance, text with added interword spaces has been found to increase reading rate for both Thai (Kohsom & Gobet, 1997;Winskel, Radach, & Luksaneeyanawin, 2009) and Chinese (Hsu & Huang, 2000a, 2000b, as compared with traditional text without such word spaces.…”

Section: Interword Spacing Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of intraword and interword spacing on eye movements during reading: Exploring the optimal use of space in a line of text

Slattery

Rayner

2013

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Two eye movement experiments investigated intraword spacing (the space between letters within words) and interword spacing (the space between words) to explore the influence these variables have on eye movement control during reading. Both variables are important factors in determining the optimal use of space in a line of text, and fonts differ widely in how they employ these spaces. Prior research suggests that the proximity of flanking letters influences the identification of a central letter via lateral inhibition or crowding. If so, decrements in intraword spacing may produce inhibition in word processing. Still other research suggests that increases in intraword spacing can disrupt the integrity of word units. In English, interword spacing has a large influence on word segmentation and is important for saccade target selection. The results indicate an interplay between intra-and interword spacing that influences a font's readability. Additionally, these studies highlight the importance of word segmentation processes and have implications for the nature of lexical processing (serial vs. parallel).

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On the segmentation of Chinese words during reading

Cited by 150 publications

References 36 publications

Word knowledge influences character perception

Word knowledge influences character perception

Parafoveal processing across different lexical constituents in Chinese reading

Effects of intraword and interword spacing on eye movements during reading: Exploring the optimal use of space in a line of text

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