Abstract: Unlike English (and other alphabetic writing systems), Chinese is written without spaces between successive characters and words. There is no obvious visual cue to demarcate the word except punctuation marks. Given this, it is intriguing how readers target saccades and how words are recognized in Chinese writing systems. Bai et al. (2008) monitored native Chinese readers’ eye movements as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. They found that inserting spaces between words (or highlighting word boundaries) did not facilitate reading Chinese, but more importantly, did not interfere with reading. Bai et al argued that facilitatory and inhibitory factors trade off against each other when words are clearly marked (in contrast to normal unspaced text presentation). For the adults, the normal unspaced text will be extremely familiar, but word identification may be hindered due to poor word demarcation. In contrast, the word spaced text will be visually unfamiliar but word identification will be facilitated due to good word demarcation.
The beginning readers have less experience in reading text without spaces, so the familiarity of the format is comparatively limited compared with the adults. We therefore predict that the interword spaced text may have a greater facilitatory effect for Chinese beginner readers than for adults.
Three experiments were carried out. 72 third graders participated in the research. Their eye movements were recorded with a SR Research EyeLink II eyetracker (sampling rate = 500 Hz) that monitored the position of the right eye every two milliseconds. In experiment 1, four spacing conditions were included: normal unspaced condition; single character spaced condition (text with spaces between every character); word spaced condition (text with spaces between words); and nonword spaced condition (text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords). In experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, text with highlighting used to mark words, text with highlighting that yielded nonwords, and text with highlighting to mark each character. In experiment 3, reading skills of third graders was manipulated to further examine whether the word spaced effect might be mediated by the reading skills.
The pattern of data in all three experiments was very similar. Global fixation counts and total reading time measures indicated that there were no significant difference between word spaced and normal unspaced condition, however, the reading time was longer and fixation counts were more in nonword spaced condition. Furthermore, there is no reliable interaction effect between the presentation condition and the reading skill of third graders on most of the eye movement measures except the total sentence reading time, however, the simple effect test showed that the reading time was longer in the nonword spaced condition for the unskilled readers than skilled readers.
To sum up, the present study indicated that sentences in a word spaced format were as easy to read for third graders as unspaced text. This is the same effect that has been previously observed with skilled adult readers (Bai et al., 2008). Although word-spaced text was equally easy for skilled and unskilled readers, the unskilled readers were extremely disrupted by the nonword spaced condition. These data suggest that unskilled readers are more dependent on the low level visual cue of text for initiating normal linguistic processing.

Key words: word segmentation, beginners, reading, eye movement