Reading can be regarded as a combination of lexical decoding and linguistic comprehension (Hoover and Gough in Read Writ Interdiscip J 2:127-160, 1990). In Chinese sentence reading, skilled readers' difficulties in phonological processing significantly enhance the 'wrap-up' effect (Li and Lin in J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ 25(4):505-516, 2020). To…

Word is important in Chinese reading. However, when inter-word spaces are inserted into Chinese text, there is no facilitation or disruption to adults' reading. Researchers argued that there was a trade-off between word segmentation facilitation and disruption due to format unfamiliarity. To assess the trade-off hypothesis, in Experiment 1, we…

For Chinese students, studying in a country with different cultural components and language structures is challenging. Compared to English, the Chinese prefers shorter and simple sentence structure and allows for two sentences to be stated side by side. Different sentence structures in Chinese may influence native-Chinese readers' understanding of…

In the present article, we report two eye-tracking experiments on how Chinese readers segment incremental words while reading Chinese. Incremental words are multicharacter words containing a subset of characters that constitute another word (referred to as the "embedded word"). For example, in a word containing three characters ABC…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

Research has shown that second language (L2) learners generally lack multiword expression knowledge, and L2 researchers and practitioners have tried various techniques to assist L2 learners to acquire it more efficiently. This study adopted an under-researched technique-- repeated oral reading--to enhance the retention of high-frequency multiword…

The present study examined the components of oral reading fluency (ORF) via various indices and their relationships with comprehension and learner-perceived difficulty of oral reading among Chinese second language (L2) learners. One hundred participants read aloud paragraphs, completed the comprehension test, and rated the difficulty of the oral…

During the reading of alphabetic scripts and scene perception, eye movements are programmed more efficiently in horizontal direction than in vertical direction. We propose that such a directional advantage may be due the overwhelming reading experience in the horizontal direction. Writing orientation is highly flexible for Traditional Chinese…

To examine deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students' awareness of phoneme repetition in Chinese sentence reading, two experiments were conducted in the self-paced, moving-window reading paradigm. The materials comprised sentences in which Chinese characters that sequentially followed each other shared similar spelling initials and finals in…

This study examined structural priming during online second language (L2) comprehension. In two self-paced reading experiments, 64 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language read coordinated noun phrases where the conjuncts had either the same structure or different structures. Experiment 1 showed that the second…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

In the current study, we report two eye movement experiments investigating how Chinese readers process incremental words during reading. These are words where some of the component characters constitute another word (an embedded word). In two experiments, eye movements were monitored while the participants read sentences with incremental words…

We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses (RCs) to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience-based account of Levy, 2008) and the Dependency Locality Theory (DLT; Gibson, 2000). Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence-initial…

There is no obvious boundary information in Chinese reading. It has been shown that the introduction of word boundary information presented with alternating colors without changing the text distribution could significantly improve the reading speed of Chinese children in grade 2 (Perea and Wang in Mem Cognit 45(7):1160-1170, 2017.…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…