1,720,993 research outputs found
Inter-word spacing and landing position effects during Chinese reading in children and adults
No full textThe present study examined children and adults' eye movement behavior when reading word spaced and unspaced Chinese text. The results showed that interword spacing reduced children and adults' first pass reading times and refixation probabilities indicating spaces between words facilitated word identification. Word spacing effects occurred to a similar degree for both children and adults, though there were differential landing position effects for single and multiple fixation situations in both groups; clear preferred viewing location effects occurred for single fixations, whereas landing positions were closer to word beginnings, and further into the word for adults than children for multiple fixation situations. Furthermore, adults targeted refixations contingent on initial landing positions to a greater degree than did children. Overall, the results indicate that some aspects of children's eye movements during reading show similar levels of maturity to adults, while others do not
The effect of visual complexity and word frequency on eye movements during Chinese reading
No full textEye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored when they read sentences containing single-character target words orthogonally manipulated for frequency and visual complexity (number of strokes). Both factors yielded strong main effects on skipping probability but no interaction, with readers skipping visually simple and high frequency words more often. However, an interaction between frequency and complexity was observed on the fixation times on the target words with longer fixations for the low frequency, visually complex words. The results demonstrate that visual complexity and frequency have independent influences on saccadic targeting behaviour during Chinese reading but jointly influence fixation durations and that these two factors differently impact fixation durations and saccade targeting during readin
Reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text: evidence from eye movements
No full textNative Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading
Universality in eye movements and reading: a trilingual investigation
Full text linkUniversality in language has been a core issue in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics for many years (e.g., Chomsky, 1965). Recently, Frost (2012) has argued that establishing universals of process is critical to the development of meaningful, theoretically motivated, cross-linguistic models of reading. In contrast, other researchers argue that there is no such thing as universals of reading (e.g., Coltheart & Crain, 2012). Reading is a complex, visually mediated psychological process, and eye movements are the behavioural means by which we encode the visual information required for linguistic processing. To investigate universality of representation and process across languages we examined eye movement behaviour during reading of very comparable stimuli in three languages, Chinese, English and Finnish. These languages differ in numerous respects (character based vs. alphabetic, visual density, informational density, word spacing, orthographic depth, agglutination, etc.). We used linear mixed modelling techniques to identify variables that captured common variance across languages. Despite fundamental visual and linguistic differences in the orthographies, statistical models of reading behaviour were strikingly similar in a number of respects, and thus, we argue that their composition might reflect universality of representation and process in reading
Parafoveal preview benefit in unspaced and spaced Chinese reading
No full textIn an eye movement experiment during reading, we compared parafoveal preview benefit during the reading of Chinese sentences either in the familiar, unspaced format or with spaces inserted between the words. Single-character words or the first of a two-character word were either presented normally or were replaced by a pseudocharacter in the preview. Results indicate that word spacing increased the parafoveal preview benefit but only for the one-character target words. We hypothesized that the incorrect preview of the first character of the two-character word prevented parafoveal processing of the ensuing character(s), effectively nullifying any benefits from the spacing. Our results suggest that word boundary demarcation allows for more precise focusing of attention
The use of probabilistic lexicality cues for word segmentation in Chinese reading
Full text linkIn an eye-tracking experiment we examined whether Chinese readers were sensitive to information concerning how often a Chinese character appears as a single-character word versus the first character in a two-character word, and whether readers use this information to segment words and adjust the amount of parafoveal processing of subsequent characters during reading. Participants read sentences containing a two-character target word with its first character more or less likely to be a single-character word. The boundary paradigm was used. The boundary appeared between the first character and the second character of the target word, and we manipulated whether readers saw an identity or a pseudocharacter preview of the second character of the target. Linear mixed-effects models revealed reduced preview benefit from the second character when the first character was more likely to be a single-character word. This suggests that Chinese readers use probabilistic combinatorial information about the likelihood of a Chinese character being single-character word or a two-character word online to modulate the extent of parafoveal processing
The morphosyntactic structure of compound words influences parafoveal processing in Chinese reading
Full text linkIn an eye movement experiment employing the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) we compared parafoveal preview benefit during the reading of Chinese sentences. The target word was a 2-character compound that had either a noun-noun or an adjective-noun structure each sharing an identical noun as the second character. The boundary was located between the two characters of the compound word. Prior to the eyes crossing the boundary the preview of the second character was presented either normally or was replaced by a pseudo-character. Previously, Juhasz, Inhoff and Rayner (2005) observed that inserting a space into a normally unspaced compound in English significantly disrupted processing and that this disruption was larger for adjective-noun compounds than for noun-noun compounds. This finding supports the hypothesis that, at least in English, for adjective-noun compounds, the noun is more important for lexical identification than the adjective, while for noun-noun compounds, both constituents are similar in importance for lexical identification. Our results indicate a similar division of the importance of compounds in reading in Chinese as the pseudo-character preview was more disruptive for the adjective-noun compounds than for the noun-noun compounds. These findings also indicate that parafoveal processing can be influenced by the morphosyntactic structure of the currently fixated character
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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