However, the most frequently encountered tokens are actually one-character words (see Li et al., 2015 Li & Pollatsek, 2020, for details). The most common word types are two-character words, which account for about 70% of the most frequently used word types (Li & Su, 2022). ![]() The word length increases with the number of characters, as in Western scripts. zi, FAN in English) and 扇动 (shān, FLAP in English).For example, the pronunciation of the character扇 is different when it is part of the words 扇子 (shàn A character can be part of different words, sometimes with different pronunciations. This unique feature allows the use of a limited number of characters (approximately 5000 unique characters commonly used) to compose an astounding number of words (about 56,000 commonly used words, based on Li & Su, 2022) and allows the creation of new words that can be widely accepted and understood. Visual complexity influences word identification to some extent, with longer fixation durations for more highly complex characters (Yang & McConkie, 1999 Su & Samuels, 2010 Liversedge et al., 2014).Ĭhinese words are comprised of characters in a flexible way, with some default rules. For example, there are two strokes in the word 二 (TWO) and thirteen strokes in word 数 (NUMBER), while the character length of these two words is one. Changing the number of strokes alters the visual complexity of the character, but not its length. Radicals denote phonological or semantic information, and their position can vary within different characters. A character is composed of radicals that are combined by strokes in a certain manner. Each character is the same square size and equally spaced. The Chinese character, however, is a type of string formed by a number of strokes. English and other alphabetic writing systems are composed of letters, and the length of a word may vary depending on the number of letters. The Chinese writing system is remarkably different from the Indo-European writing system in many ways. Investigating Chinese reading is theoretically relevant and necessary for cross-lingual comparisons that aim to understand the universal cognitive processes underlying reading. These language-specific characteristics may have a unique influence on natural reading. One such peculiarity is that Chinese does not contain spaces between words, which will be discussed in length below (Li & Pollatsek, 2020). Still, the peculiar properties of Chinese orthography (see Reichle & Yu, 2018 for a discussion) raise numerous questions that do not apply to the alphabetic writing system. They do, however, share some similar theoretical hallmark phenomena that affect reading, such as frequency and prediction effects (Rayner & Duffy, 1986 Yan et al., 2006 Liversedge et al., 2014 Zola, 1984 Balota et al., 1985 Rayner & Well, 1996 Rayner et al., 2005, 2006). This is not surprising, since Chinese and English are dramatically different in orthography, sentence structure, and grammar. The materials are freely available for use by researchers interested in (bilingual) reading.Īlthough efforts have been made in recent decades to account for Chinese reading (Taft & Zhu, 1997 Perfetti et al., 2005 Rayner et al., 2007a Li & Pollatsek, 2020), models are still limited and need to be further validated. Importantly, it provides a solid and reliable ground for studying the difference between Eastern and Western languages, understanding the impact and consequences of having a completely different first language on bilingual processing. ![]() However, this unique eye-tracking corpus also allows the exploration of theories of language processing and bilingualism. This article presents some important basic descriptive statistics of reading times and compares the difference between reading in the two languages. ![]() ![]() Half of the participants first read half of the novel in their native language (Simplified Chinese) and then the rest of the novel in their second language (English), while the other half read in the reverse language order. Participants read an entire novel in these two languages, presented in paragraphs on screen. The current work presents the very first eye-tracking corpus of natural reading by Chinese-English bilinguals, whose two languages entail different writing systems and orthographies.
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