词间空格促进从右向左呈现汉语文本的阅读

Interword Spaces Facilitate Chinese Reading:Evidence from Reading Right to Left

为探讨在缺少相关阅读经验的阅读情境下,词切分线索是否促进读者的阅读与词汇识别,本研究操纵了阅读方向、词切分线索与目标词的词频,采用眼动仪记录读者的阅读过程。结果发现:阅读方向与词切分线索的交互作用显著,词切分显著地促进了从右向左呈现文本的阅读,但并不影响从左向右呈现文本的阅读;词切分条件下目标词的注视时间显著地短于无词切分条件。表明词切分线索促进了缺少阅读经验时的阅读,支持词切分线索的促进与文本不熟悉干扰之间权衡作用的假设。

Inter-word spaces play very important roles in spaced alphabetic language for delimiting word boundaries.When spaces between words are removed,reader’s reading efficiency will be reduced significantly,and word identification will also be disrupted.In unspaced languages,such as Thai,inserting spaces between words was proved to improve reading.Although Chinese script is normally printed as continuous strings of characters,word identification is one of the critical processes in reading.Number of studies explored whether inserting spaces between words could improve the reading efficiency of Chinese readers but found no evidence supporting any facilitation or disruption that inter-word spaces had on reading.Researchers proposed that the null effect was due to the trade-off between the facilitation of inter-word spaces and the interference of unfamiliar inter-word spaces text.Studies were conducted using Chinese second language beginners as the participants,who were much less experienced in reading Chinese texts without spaces between words,to investigate the effect of inserting word spaces on their reading.It was found that participants benefited from introducing inter-word spaces.However,as Chinese second language beginners still have experiences in reading Chinese texts although they were less skilled Chinese readers,this may confuse the results.In the current study,we manipulated the presenting direction of Chinese text,including normal text presented from left to right as well as from right to left,where the readers had no experience in reading such a text.We also manipulated the appearance of spaces between words(presented vs.absent) and frequency of target words(high vs.low).48 undergraduate participants were asked to read the sentences and their eye movements were recorded using the Eye Link 1000 Plus Eye tracker.Results of sentence level analysis showed that the efficiency of reading the text written from right to left was significantly lower than that of reading the normal presented text written from left to right,which was manifested with longer average fixation time,more fixation counts,and longer total reading time.Inter-word spaces did not promote participants’ reading efficiency when they read normal presented text written from left to right,which was consistent with previous studies.However,when they read the text written from right to left,word spaces facilitated readers’ reading compared to reading text without spaces due to readers spent shorter total reading time and made less fixations.For the word analysis,we observed a significant frequency effect which showed that the fixation time spent on high frequency target words was significantly shorter than that on low frequency target words,but such word frequency effect was not qualified by the presentation direction or the appearances of inter-word spaces.In addition,we also obtained space effect and presenting direction effect due to readers spent shorter fixation durations on target words with inserted interword spaces(and reading from left to right) compared to process unspaced words(reading from right to left).These findings suggested that introducing word spaces as word segmentation cues facilitated Chinese reading of readers who were lack of such reading experience,which supported the tradeoffs hypothesis.Moreover,introducing inter-word spaces promotes reader’s word identification.