Introduction
In recent decades there has been attention to how spacing has an effect in first and second language reading, for which the development of eye-tracking technology has allowed a deeper understanding. The importance of these findings are linked to information on how readers process language and its implications to language teaching. Some researchers have explored spacing and word boundaries within writing systems, focusing on its effects on readers’ landing positions and saccades (e.g., Li, Liu, & Rayner, 2011; 2015), fixations and word frequency (e.g., Yan, Tian, Bai, & Rayner, 2006; Li et al., 2013), word identification (e.g., Li, Rayner, & Cave, 2009; Epelboim et al., 1996), acquisition of new vocabulary (e.g., Blythe et al., …show more content…
In their study, Blythe et al. (2012) presented sentences with new vocabulary to children and adult speakers of Chinese, and recorded their eye movements to analyze whether or not word spacing helped them with vocabulary acquisition. After analyzing their data, results showed that inserting spaces that delimited word boundaries did have a positive effect when learning new vocabulary. This effect was more noticeable in children than in adults, which has been indicated by Blythe et al. (2012) as a familiarity effect with the unspaced text and the already developed skills to read unspaced texts by adult readers. (p. 12). Participants in this study were not familiar with the new vocabulary that was presented in the sentences. However, other studies have examined the importance of character frequency when reading Chinese (Yan, Tian, Bai, & Rayner, 2006; Li, Rayner, & Cave, 2009; Li, Bicknell, Liu, Wei, & Rayner, 2013). High frequency words were more likely to be skipped than low frequency words when reading Chinese (Yan et al., 2006), and therefore resulted in shorter reading times. The separation of the characters that conform a high frequency word also results in disruption of reading. To illustrate this, Li, Gu, Liu, & Rayner (2012) used a variation of the moving window paradigm. In …show more content…
They also expected that this improvement would be more significant in native speakers of a spaced language than in native speakers of an unspaced language (p.194). The results confirmed their hypotheses, proving that spacing that delimits word boundaries does improve reading for learners of Chinese as a second language, independently of their language background. They also showed that spacing between characters and spacing that formed non-words influenced negatively the reading of participants. In the current study texts are presented with the same conditions as sentences in Shen et al.’s (2012) study, with the exception of non-word
In recent decades there has been attention to how spacing has an effect in first and second language reading, for which the development of eye-tracking technology has allowed a deeper understanding. The importance of these findings are linked to information on how readers process language and its implications to language teaching. Some researchers have explored spacing and word boundaries within writing systems, focusing on its effects on readers’ landing positions and saccades (e.g., Li, Liu, & Rayner, 2011; 2015), fixations and word frequency (e.g., Yan, Tian, Bai, & Rayner, 2006; Li et al., 2013), word identification (e.g., Li, Rayner, & Cave, 2009; Epelboim et al., 1996), acquisition of new vocabulary (e.g., Blythe et al., …show more content…
In their study, Blythe et al. (2012) presented sentences with new vocabulary to children and adult speakers of Chinese, and recorded their eye movements to analyze whether or not word spacing helped them with vocabulary acquisition. After analyzing their data, results showed that inserting spaces that delimited word boundaries did have a positive effect when learning new vocabulary. This effect was more noticeable in children than in adults, which has been indicated by Blythe et al. (2012) as a familiarity effect with the unspaced text and the already developed skills to read unspaced texts by adult readers. (p. 12). Participants in this study were not familiar with the new vocabulary that was presented in the sentences. However, other studies have examined the importance of character frequency when reading Chinese (Yan, Tian, Bai, & Rayner, 2006; Li, Rayner, & Cave, 2009; Li, Bicknell, Liu, Wei, & Rayner, 2013). High frequency words were more likely to be skipped than low frequency words when reading Chinese (Yan et al., 2006), and therefore resulted in shorter reading times. The separation of the characters that conform a high frequency word also results in disruption of reading. To illustrate this, Li, Gu, Liu, & Rayner (2012) used a variation of the moving window paradigm. In …show more content…
They also expected that this improvement would be more significant in native speakers of a spaced language than in native speakers of an unspaced language (p.194). The results confirmed their hypotheses, proving that spacing that delimits word boundaries does improve reading for learners of Chinese as a second language, independently of their language background. They also showed that spacing between characters and spacing that formed non-words influenced negatively the reading of participants. In the current study texts are presented with the same conditions as sentences in Shen et al.’s (2012) study, with the exception of non-word