Does interword spacing influence lexical processing in Chinese reading?

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how inserting spaces between Chinese words affected word recognition in Chinese reading. Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded in a sentence reading task where high- and low-frequency target words were presented in both the spaced and normally unspaced texts. We found that fixation durations on target words were shorter in the high- than low-frequency conditions, and shorter in the spaced than unspaced conditions. The survival analysis revealed that interword spacing advanced the temporal onset of word frequency effects relative to the normally unspaced condition. However, inconsistent with the findings in English reading, there was no interaction between word frequency and interword spacing on all fixation duration measures, and the Bayes factor analyses also favoured the hypothesis of null interaction. These data suggest that interword spacing facilitates visual rather than lexical processing in Chinese reading, and thus improves our understanding on the roles of interword spacing across different writing systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Word segmentation
• interword spacing
• word recognition
• survival analysis

Acknowledgements

I thank Xiangling Zhuang for helpful discussion and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Guojie Ma http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3688-9118

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31600877) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK201603121).