title: Eye movements and the identification of spatially ambiguous words during chinese sentence reading.
abstract: Readers of Chinese must generally determine word units in the absence of visually distinct inter-word spaces. In the present study, we examined how a sequence of Chinese characters is parsed into words under these conditions. Eye movements were monitored while participants read sentences with a critical four-character (C1234) sequence. Three partially overlapping character groupings formed legal words in the ambiguous condition (C12, C23, and C34), two of which corresponded to context-consistent words (C12 and C34). Two nonoverlapping groupings corresponded to legal words in the control conditions (C12 and C34). In two experiments, readers spent more time viewing the critical character sequence and its two center characters (C23) in the ambiguous condition. These results argue against the strictly serial assignment of characters to words during the reading of Chinese text.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Binghamton, New York 13902, USA. inhoff@binghamton.edu
authors.forename: Albrecht W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Inhoff
authors.forename: Caili
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002681:China / Q000208:ethnology; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D009518:New York; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D012691:Serial Learning; D014706:Verbal Learning