Comparative analyses of the information content of letters, characters, and inter-word spaces across writing systems.

One difference among writing systems is how orthographic cues are used to demarcate words; although most alphabetic scripts use inter-word spaces, some Asian scripts do not explicitly mark word boundaries (e.g., Chinese). It is unclear whether these differences are arbitrary or whether they are designed to maximize reading efficiency. Here, we show that spaces inserted between words in non-demarcated scripts provide less information about word boundaries than spaces in demarcated scripts. Furthermore, despite the fact that less information is contained by inter-word spaces than characters/letters of the same size, the information content of inter-word spaces in demarcated scripts is closer to that of characters/letters compared to the information content of inter-word spaces that are inserted in non-demarcated scripts. These results suggest that the conventions used to demarcate word boundaries are sufficient to support efficient reading. Our findings provide new insights into the universals and variation across writing systems and shed light on the mental processes that support skilled reading.

Chinese readers utilize emotion information for word segmentation.

We reported a large-scale Internet-based experiment to investigate the impact of emotion information on Chinese word segmentation, in which participants completed an overlapping ambiguous string (OAS) segmentation task and the Chinese version of Beck Depression Inventory-II in a counterbalanced order. OAS is a three-character string (ABC) in which the middle character can form a distinct word with both the character on its left side (word AB) and the character on its right side (word BC). Participants were presented with isolated OASs and were asked to report the word they identified first. Emotional OAS was constructed by a combination of a neutral word and an emotional word, with the neutral and emotional words sharing character B. We orthogonally manipulated the valence of the emotional words (positive vs. negative) and their position in the OAS (left-side vs. right-side). The results showed that compared with neutral words, both positive and negative words were more likely to be segmented, and this segmentation outcome was not affected by readers with different depression tendencies. These findings suggest that emotion information can influence word segmentation, and that both positive and negative words take precedence over neutral words in the word segmentation process. This study provides a new perspective and evidence to understand the impact of emotion information on word processing.

The database of eye-movement measures on words in Chinese reading.

Eye movements are one of the most fundamental behaviors during reading. A growing number of Chinese reading studies have used eye-tracking techniques in the last two decades. The accumulated data provide a rich resource that can reflect the complex cognitive mechanisms underlying Chinese reading. This article reports a database of eye-movement measures of words during Chinese sentence reading. The database contains nine eye-movement measures of 8,551 Chinese words obtained from 1,718 participants across 57 Chinese sentence reading experiments. All data were collected in the same experimental environment and from homogenous participants, using the same protocols and parameters. This database enables researchers to test their theoretical or computational hypotheses concerning Chinese reading efficiently using a large number of words. The database can also indicate the processing difficulty of Chinese words during text reading, thus providing a way to control or manipulate the difficulty level of Chinese texts.

Early, but not overwhelming: The effect of prior context on segmenting overlapping ambiguous strings when reading Chinese.

The current study investigated how the prior context influences word segmentation of overlapping ambiguous strings when reading Chinese. Chinese readers' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a three-character overlapping ambiguous string (ABC), where both AB and BC were two-character words. In the informative condition, prior contexts provided syntactic information that supported either the first word segmentation (AB-C) or the second word segmentation (A-BC). The neutral condition did not provide syntactic constraint for word-segmentation. The post-target contexts were syntactically consistent with either the first word (AB-C) or the second word (A-BC) segmentation. The results showed that there were higher skipping rates and shorter first-fixation durations on the overlapping ambiguous string region in the informative AB-C condition than those in the informative A-BC condition, whereas no difference between the AB-C and A-BC segmentation types was found in the neutral condition. Readers still made regressions into the overlapping ambiguous string region in the informative condition. These results imply that readers use sentence context information immediately to segment the overlapping ambiguous words, but they do not use the context information fully. The first word (AB) has processing advantages over the second word (BC), suggesting a left-side word advantage.