Effects of Spacing on Sentence Reading in Chinese.

Given that Chinese writing conventions lack inter-word spacing, understanding whether and how readers of Chinese segment regular unspaced Chinese writing into words is an important question for theories of reading. This study examined the processing outcomes of introducing spaces to written Chinese sentences in varying positions based on native speaker consensus. The measure of consensus for every character transition in our stimuli sentences was the percent of raters who placed a word boundary in that position. The eye movements of native readers of Chinese were recorded while they silently read original unspaced sentences and their experimentally manipulated counterparts for comprehension. We introduced two types of spaced sentences: one with spaces inserted at every probable word boundary (heavily spaced), and another with spaces placed only at highly probable word boundaries (lightly spaced). Linear mixed-effects regression models showed that heavily spaced sentences took identical time to read as unspaced ones despite the shortened fixation times on individual words (Experiment 1). On the other hand, reading times for lightly spaced sentences and words were shorter than those for unspaced ones (Experiment 2). Thus, spaces proved to be advantageous but only when introduced at highly probable word boundaries. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications of these findings.

Prevalence of spelling errors affects reading behavior across languages.

This cross-linguistic study investigated the impact of spelling errors on reading behavior in five languages (Chinese, English, Finnish, Greek, and Hebrew). Learning theories predict that correct and incorrect spelling alternatives (e.g., "tomorrow" and "tommorrow") provide competing cues to the sound and meaning of a word: The closer the alternatives are to each other in their frequency of occurrence, the more uncertain the reader is regarding the spelling of that word. An information-theoretic measure of entropy was used as an index of uncertainty. Based on theories of learning, we predicted that higher entropy would lead to slower recognition of words even when they are spelled correctly. This prediction was confirmed in eye-tracking sentence-reading experiments in five languages widely variable in their writing systems' phonology and morphology. Moreover, in each language, we observed a characteristic Entropy × Frequency interaction; arguably, its functional shape varied as a function of the orthographic transparency of a given written language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Electrophysiological evidence for the integral nature of tone in Mandarin spoken word recognition.

Current models of spoken word recognition have been predominantly based on studies of Indo-European languages. As a result, less is known about the recognition processes involved in the perception of tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin Chinese), and the role of lexical tone in speech perception. One view is that words in tonal languages are processed phonologically through individual segments, while another view is that they are processed lexically as a whole. Moreover, a recent study claimed to be the first to discover an early phonological processing stage in Mandarin (Huang et al., 2014). There seems to be a lack of investigations concerning tonal languages, as no clear conclusions have been reached about the nature of tonal processes, or a model of spoken word recognition that best incorporates lexical tone. The current study addressed these issues by presenting 18 native Mandarin speakers with aural sentences with medial target words. These either matched or mismatched the preceding visually presented sentences with medial target words (e.g, /jia1/home). Violation conditions involved target words that differed in the following ways: tone violation, where only the tone was different (e.g., /jia4/"price"), onset violation, where only the onset was different (e.g., /xia1/"shrimp"), and syllable violation, where both the tone and the onset were different (e.g., /tang2/"candy"). We did not find evidence for an early phonological processing stage in Mandarin. Instead, our findings indicate that Mandarin syllables are processed incrementally through phonological segments and that tone is strongly associated with lexical access. These results are discussed with respect to modifications for existing models in spoken word recognition to incorporate the processes involved with tonal language recognition.