Positional character frequency and word spacing facilitate the acquisition of novel words during Chinese children's reading

Abstract

Children's eye movements were recorded to examine the role of word spacing and positional character frequency on the process of Chinese lexical acquisition during reading. Three types of two-character novel pseudowords were constructed: words containing characters in positions in which they frequently occurred (congruent), words containing characters in positions they do not frequently occur in (incongruent) and words containing characters that do not have a strong position bias (balanced). There were two phases within the experiment, a learning phase and a test phase. There were also two learning groups: half the children read sentences in a word-spaced format and the other half read the sentences in an unspaced format during the learning phase. All the participants read normal, unspaced text at test. A benefit of word spacing was observed in the learning phase, but not at test. Also, facilitatory effects of positional character congruency were found both in the learning and test phase; however, this benefit was greatly reduced at test. Furthermore, we did not find any interaction between word spacing and positional character frequencies, indicating that these two types of cues affect lexical acquisition independently. With respect to theoretical accounts of lexical acquisition, we argue that word spacing might facilitate the very earliest stages of word learning by clearly demarking word boundary locations. In contrast, we argue that characters' positional frequencies might affect relatively later stages of word learning.

Keywords :

• Children
• Positional character frequency
• Word learning
• Word spacing

The authors would like to thank Raymond Bertram, Kevin Paterson and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. The authors also would like to thank for the great support from Center of Collaborative Innovation for assessment and Promotion of National Mental Health.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Whilst there is a strong association between positional probabilities and orthographic neighbours, these two variables are still distinct. For example, for a given character within a pseudoword, there might be 100 two-character words that are orthographic neighbours, within which 90 contain this character in the initial position and 10 contain this character in the end position. Thus, the positional probability of this particular character in the first position within a two-character word is 90%. For a different character within a pseudoword, there might be 180 two-character words that are orthographic neighbours, within which 90 contain this character in the initial position and 90 contain this character in the end position. Thus, the positional probability of this character in the first position within a two-character word is 50%. Given the positional probabilities of these two characters, we would have designated the first as a word-initial character for a pseudoword in the congruent condition and the second as a character in either position for a pseudoword in the balanced condition. This example demonstrates that although they have different positional probabilities, they can still have the same number of orthographic neighbours. Previous studies have shown that neighbourhood size has an effect on vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Hoover et al., 2010); however, the present study was not designed to disentangle the relative contributions of neighbourhood size and positional frequency.

² When the naturalness and the difficulty of the sentences were evaluated by participants, the pseudowords were replaced by a real word which belonged to same semantic category, in order to remove the “weirdness” of the pseudoword itself (given that the goal was to assess the sentence frames, and not the target pseudowords). For example, when the pseudoword “挑尔” was designated to be a kind of fruit, it was replaced by “苹果” (apple) when the six sentence frames which contained “挑尔” were evaluated.

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this article was supported by the Recruitment Program of Global Experts (1000 Talents Award from Tianjin); Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31100729], [grant number 81471629]; the Doctoral Scientific Research Foundation of Tianjin Normal University [grant number 52ww1409]; a postgraduate scholarship from the China Scholarship Council.