Lin Li

The absence of word-boundary cues in Chinese text creates segmentation ambiguities that readers must resolve online. One example is incremental ambiguity, in which the initial characters of a longer word (e.g., 体育馆, "stadium") can also form a standalone embedded word (体育, "sport"). Previous studies manipulated the preceding verb context to render the embedded word either plausible or implausible while the longer-word analysis remained plausible, comparing these with control sentences in which the longer word was replaced by the embedded word. Plausibility effects were observed only for the control words, suggesting that readers do not access embedded-word meaning before segmentation is resolved, consistent with the Chinese Reading Model (Li & Pollatsek, 2020). However, these studies also failed to detect the early first-pass plausibility effects reported in other studies using unambiguous materials, making the absence of embedded-word effects difficult to interpret. We therefore conducted a high-powered eye-movement experiment using a larger participant sample and stimulus set, and assessed the robustness of critical effects using split-half reliability and bootstrap analyses. Embedded-word plausibility effects emerged robustly during first-pass fixations on the pre-target verb, indicating parafoveal access to an embedded-word representation. No corresponding effects emerged at the ambiguity region, suggesting that readers ultimately favored the longer-word analysis. Control-word plausibility effects emerged during first-pass fixations at both regions, confirming that the experiment was sufficiently sensitive to detect early plausibility effects. These findings show that embedded-word representations become available parafoveally during incremental ambiguity resolution, challenging current accounts of Chinese word segmentation.

The absence of word-boundary cues in Chinese text creates segmentation ambiguities that readers must resolve online. One example is incremental ambiguity, in which the initial characters of a longer word (e.g., 体育馆, "stadium") can also form a standalone embedded word (体育, "sport"). Previous studies manipulated the preceding verb context to render the embedded word either plausible or implausible while the longer-word analysis remained plausible, comparing these with control sentences in which the longer word was replaced by the embedded word. Plausibility effects were observed only for the control words, suggesting that readers do not access embedded-word meaning before segmentation is resolved, consistent with the Chinese Reading Model (Li & Pollatsek, 2020). However, these studies also failed to detect the early first-pass plausibility effects reported in other studies using unambiguous materials, making the absence of embedded-word effects difficult to interpret. We therefore conducted a high-powered eye-movement experiment using a larger participant sample and stimulus set, and assessed the robustness of critical effects using split-half reliability and bootstrap analyses. Embedded-word plausibility effects emerged robustly during first-pass fixations on the pre-target verb, indicating parafoveal access to an embedded-word representation. No corresponding effects emerged at the ambiguity region, suggesting that readers ultimately favored the longer-word analysis. Control-word plausibility effects emerged during first-pass fixations at both regions, confirming that the experiment was sufficiently sensitive to detect early plausibility effects. These findings show that embedded-word representations become available parafoveally during incremental ambiguity resolution, challenging current accounts of Chinese word segmentation.

Sentences written in Chinese are composed of continuous sequences of characters, without spaces or other visual cues to mark word boundaries. While skilled L1 readers can efficiently segment this naturally unspaced text into words, little is known about the word segmentation capabilities of L2 readers, including whether they employ the same strategies to process temporary segmental ambiguities. Accordingly, we report two eye movement experiments that investigated the processing of sentences containing temporarily ambiguous “incremental” three-character words (e.g., “体育馆,” meaning “stadium”) whose first two characters could also form a word (“体育,” meaning “sport”), comparing the performance of 48 skilled L1 Chinese readers and 48 high-proficiency L2 Chinese readers in each experiment. Our findings reveal that both groups can process this ambiguity efficiently, employing similar word segmentations strategies. We discuss our findings in relation to models of eye movement control and word recognition in Chinese reading.

Chinese lacks explicit word boundary markers, creating frequent temporary segmental ambiguities where character sequences permit multiple plausible lexical analyses. Skilled native (L1) Chinese readers resolve these ambiguities efficiently. However, mechanisms underlying word segmentation in second language (L2) Chinese reading remain poorly understood. Our study investigated: (1) whether L2 readers experience greater difficulty processing temporary segmental ambiguities compared to L1 readers, and (2) whether visual boundary cues can facilitate ambiguity resolution in L2 reading. We measured the eye movements of 102 skilled L1 and 60 high-proficiency L2 readers for sentences containing temporarily ambiguous three-character incremental words (e.g., “音乐剧” [musical]), where the initial two characters (“音乐” [music]) also form a valid word. Sentences were presented using either neutral mono-color displays providing no segmentation cues, or color-coded displays marking word boundaries. The color-coded displays employed either uniform coloring to promote resolution of the segmental ambiguity or contrasting colors for the two-character embedded word versus the final character to induce a segmental misanalysis. The L2 group read more slowly than the L1 group, employing a cautious character-by-character reading strategy. Both groups nevertheless appeared to process the segmental ambiguity effectively, suggesting shared segmentation strategies. The L1 readers showed little sensitivity to visual boundary cues, with little evidence that this influenced their ambiguity processing. By comparison, L2 readers showed greater sensitivity to these cues, with some indication that they affected ambiguity processing. The overall sentence-level effects of color coding word boundaries were nevertheless modest for both groups, suggesting little influence of visual boundary cues on overall reading fluency for either L1 or L2 readers.

College-aged readers use efficient strategies to segment and recognize words in naturally unspaced Chinese text. Whether this capability changes across the adult lifespan is unknown, although segmenting words in unspaced text may be challenging for older readers due to visual and cognitive declines in older age, including poorer parafoveal processing of upcoming characters. Accordingly, we conducted two eye movement experiments to test for age differences in word segmentation, each with 48 young (18-30 years) and 36 older (65+ years) native Chinese readers. Following Zhou and Li (2021), we focused on the processing of "incremental" three-character words, like (meaning "kindergartens"), which contain an embedded two-character word (e.g., , meaning "children"). In Experiment 1, either the three-character word or its embedded word was presented as the target word in sentence contexts where the three-character word always was plausible, and the embedded word was either plausible or implausible. Both age groups produced similar plausibility effects, suggesting age constancy in accessing the embedded word early during ambiguity processing before ultimately assigning an incremental word analysis. Experiment 2 provided further evidence that both younger and older readers access the embedded word early during ambiguity processing, but rapidly select the appropriate (incremental) word. Crucially, the findings suggest that word segmentation strategies do not differ with age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Substantial progress has been made in understanding the mostly detrimental effects of normative aging on eye movements during reading. This article provides a review of research on aging effects on eye movements during reading for different writing systems (i.e., alphabetic systems like English compared to non-alphabetic systems like Chinese), focused on appraising the importance of visual and cognitive factors, considering key methodological issues, and identifying vital questions that need to be addressed and topics for further investigation.

Research suggests that pattern complexity (number of strokes) limits the visual span for Chinese characters, and that this may have important consequences for reading. With the present research, we investigated age differences in the visual span for Chinese characters by presenting trigrams of low, medium or high complexity at various locations relative to a central point to young (18–30 years) and older (60+ years) adults. A sentence reading task was used to assess their reading speed. The results showed that span size was smaller for high complexity stimuli compared to low and medium complexity stimuli for both age groups, replicating previous findings with young adult participants. Our results additionally showed that this influence of pattern complexity was greater for the older than younger adults, such that while there was little age difference in span size for low and medium complexity stimuli, span size for high complexity stimuli was almost halved in size for the older compared to the young adults. Finally, our results showed that span size correlated with sentence reading speed, confirming previous findings taken as evidence that the visual span imposes perceptual limits on reading speed. We discuss these findings in relation to age-related difficulty reading Chinese.