Increasing intercharacter spacing reduces the transposed-character effect in Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements

ABSTRACT

Spacing is a very important visual cue in alphabetic languages as well as other languages, such as Chinese, which has no special interword spacing but has equal intercharacter spacing. Studies have shown that spacing has a significant effect on letter/character identity or position processing. However, whether spacing modulates the transposed-letter/-character effect remains unknown. This study conducted an eye-movement experiment using the boundary paradigm to explore whether increasing intercharacter spacing affected the transposed-character effect in Chinese reading. The results indicate that Chinese readers have flexible adjustment strategies for intercharacter spacing and that there is an obvious transposed-character effect. Crucially, increasing intercharacter spacing by three points resulted in stricter character position processing as compared with identity processing, thus reducing the transposed-character effect. Our findings are consistent with models in which visual elements comprise an important factor in the transposed-letter/-character effect, while the existence of the transposed-character effect suggests that the orthographic abstract component is also relevant.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye movement
• intercharacter spacing
• transposed-character effect
• Chinese reading

Acknowledgments

Our research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation of China awarded to Jingxin Wang (81771823). Jingxin Wang and Yancui Zhang designed the experiment. Yancui Zhang designed the stimuli and collected the data. Yancui Zhang analyzed the data and prepared the draft manuscript. Jingxin Wang and Min Chang revised the manuscript. We would like to thank Editage for their efforts in English language editing. Data files and related resources are available here: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15066189

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 81771823].