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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 tested Grade 1, 2 and 3 children who have less reading experience than adults and manipulated four spacing conditions: normal unspaced, word spaced, character spaced, and nonword spaced text. In Experiment 2, we collected data from Grade 1 and 3 with the word spaced condition and normal unspaced condition. Overall, global analyses from both Experiments consistently showed that word spacing facilitated Grade 1 reading, with much reduced facilitation for higher grade readers; local measures (total reading time and second-pass reading time) replicated the same pattern in which word spacing effects were more pronounced among younger readers. In summary, we obtained greater facilitatory effects of word spacing for younger compared with elder readers, which provides strong evidence for the trade-off hypothesis.

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. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-017-0717-0). However, few studies have examined how the effect of word boundary information on children's oral reading develops and changes as children's grade increases. The present study asked Chinese children in grades 2-5 to read alternating-color and mono-color text orally and used eye-tracking technology to explore the developmental trajectory of the influence of word boundary information on oral reading. The results indicated that children in grade 2 and grade 3 showed faster reading speeds in the alternating-color condition than in the mono-color condition. In contrast, there was no difference between the two conditions in children in grade 4 and grade 5. We discuss the mechanisms of the findings and the implications for education.

Phonological coding plays an important role in reading for hearing students. Experimental findings regarding phonological coding in deaf readers are controversial, and whether deaf readers are able to use phonological coding remains unclear. In the current study we examined whether Chinese deaf students could use phonological coding during sentence reading. Deaf middle school students, chronological age-matched hearing students, and reading ability-matched hearing students had their eye movements recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled characters, homophones, or unrelated characters. Both hearing groups had shorter total reading times on homophones than they did on unrelated characters. In contrast, no significant difference was found between homophones and unrelated characters for the deaf students. However, when the deaf group was divided into more-skilled and less-skilled readers according to their scores on reading fluency, the homophone advantage noted for the hearing controls was also observed for the more-skilled deaf students.

The frequency and contextual predictability of words have a fundamental role in determining "where" and "when" the eyes move during reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. However, surprising little is known about the how the influence of these variables develops, although this is important for understanding how children learn to read. Accordingly, to gain insight into their use during reading development, we examined the effects of orthogonally manipulating the frequency and contextual predictability of a specific target word in sentences on the eye movements of developing Chinese readers. The findings show that both factors influence eye movement behavior associated with the early processing of words during reading, but that effects of contextual predictability are mediated by the lexical frequency of words. We consider these effects in the context of visual and linguistic demands associated with reading Chinese and in relation to current models of eye movement control during reading.

Herein the one‐pot thioesterification and hydrothiolation of α, β‐unsaturated esters with aliphatic thiols was reported at room temperature. The mechanism was indirectly revealed which α, β‐unsaturated thioester was the intermediate. The advantages of this method included transition‐metal‐free, mild conditions, broad substrate scope and good functional group tolerance. On the other hand, the hydrothiolation of α, β‐unsaturated aliphatic esters at room temperature was also developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Task-irrelevant background sound can disrupt performance of visually based cognitive tasks. The cross-modal breakdown of attentional selectivity in the context of reading was addressed using analyses of eye movements. Moreover, the study addressed whether task-sensitivity to distraction via background speech on reading was modulated by the cognitive demands of the focal task. Two randomly-assigned groups of native Chinese participants read the same set of Chinese experimental sentences while being exposed to meaningful speech, meaningless (foreign) speech, or silence. For one group, participants were instructed to judge whether the sentences made sense (i.e., semantic acceptability task); for another, participants were instructed to detect whether the sentences contained a noncharacter (i.e., noncharacter detection task). Results showed no significant effect across sound conditions for the noncharacter detection task. For the semantic acceptability task, however, there was a substantial disruptive effect of the meaningfulness of the speech. Compared with reading with meaningless speech or reading in silence, the meaningful speech increased numbers of fixations, regressions, regression path, and total reading times. These results suggest that the disruption of reading by background speech is jointly dependent on the nature of the speech and the task process deployed, thereby favoring an Interference-by-Process account over Interference-by-Content and Attentional Diversion accounts of distraction to reading by background sound.

Two experiments are reported to investigate whether Chinese readers skip a high-frequency preview word without taking the syntax of the sentence context into account. In Experiment 1, we manipulated target word syntactic category, frequency, and preview using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). For high-frequency verb targets, there were identity and pseudocharacter previews alongside a low-frequency noun preview. For low-frequency verb targets, there were identity and pseudocharacter previews alongside a high-frequency noun preview. Results showed that for high-frequency targets, skipping rates were higher for identical previews compared with the syntactically infelicitous alternative low-frequency preview and pseudocharacter previews, however for low-frequency targets, skipping rates were higher for high-frequency previews (even when they were syntactically infelicitous) compared with the other 2 previews. Furthermore, readers were more likely to skip the target when they had a high-frequency, syntactically felicitous preview compared to a high-frequency, syntactically infelicitous preview. The pattern of felicity effects was statistically robust when readers launched saccades from near the target. In Experiment 2, we assessed whether display change awareness influenced the patterns of results in Experiment 1. Results showed that the overall patterns held in Experiment 2 regardless of some readers being more likely to be aware of the display change than others. These results suggest that decisions to skip a word in Chinese reading are primarily based on parafoveal word familiarity, though the syntactic felicity of a parafoveal word also exerts a robust influence for high-frequency previews.

The current study examined eye movement control in autistic (ASD) children. Simple targets were presented in isolation, or with central, parafoveal, or peripheral distractors synchronously. Sixteen children with ASD (47-81 months) and nineteen age and IQ matched typically developing children were instructed to look to the target as accurately and quickly as possible. Both groups showed high proportions (40%) of saccadic errors towards parafoveal and peripheral distractors. For correctly executed eye movements to the targets, centrally presented distractors produced the longest latencies (time taken to initiate eye movements), followed by parafoveal and peripheral distractor conditions. Central distractors had a greater effect in the ASD group, indicating evidence for potential atypical voluntary attentional control in ASD children.

In this study, we examined whether Chinese character structure influenced readers' saccadic targeting in Chinese reading. Readers' eye movements were recorded when they read single sentences containing one-character or two-character target words. Both the one-character words and the two constituent characters of two-character words either had a symmetrical left-right structure or a symmetrical top-bottom structure. Landing positions were very similar when readers initially fixated the target words with left-right and top-bottom structures. They targeted their initial saccades to the word centre in single fixation cases and to the word beginning in multiple fixation cases. Furthermore, there was a highly reliable effect that readers were more likely to target the lower half of a character than the upper half of the character regardless of its structure. The results suggest some vertical differentiation in initial saccadic targeting in Chinese reading, but that character structure does not modulate such targeting. (Contains 4 tables, 5 figures, and 1 note.)

We examined whether interword spacing would facilitate acquisition of new vocabulary for second language learners of Chinese. Participants' eye movements were measured as they read new vocabulary embedded in sentences during a learning session and a test session. In the learning session, participants read sentences in traditional unspaced format and half-read sentences with interword spacing. In the test session, all participants read unspaced sentences. Participants in the spaced learning group read the target words more quickly than those in the unspaced learning group. This benefit was maintained at test, indicating that the manipulation enhanced learning of the novel words and was not a transient effect limited to occasions when interword spacing was present in the printed text. The insertion of interword spaces may allow readers to form a more fully specified representation of the novel word, or to strengthen connections between representations of the constituent characters and the multi-character word. (Contains 2 tables and 2 notes.)

The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text. Also, participants' native languages were different in terms of their basic characteristics: English and Korean are spaced, whereas the other two are unspaced; Japanese is character based whereas the other three are alphabetic. Thus, we assessed whether any spacing effects were modulated by native language characteristics. Eye movement measures showed least disruption to reading for word-spaced text and longer reading times for unspaced than character-spaced text, with nonword-spaced text yielding the most disruption. These effects were uninfluenced by native language (though reading times differed between groups as a result of Chinese reading experience). Demarcation of word boundaries through spacing reduces non-native readers' uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby speeding lexical identification, and in turn, reading. More generally, the results indicate that words have psychological reality for those who are learning to read Chinese as a second language, and that segmentation of text into words is more beneficial to successful comprehension than is separating individual Chinese characters with spaces. (Contains 3 figures, 2 tables, and 4 footnotes.)

We explored the effect of stroke removal from Chinese characters on eye movements during reading to examine the role of stroke encoding in character identification. Experimental sentences were comprised of characters with different proportions of strokes removed (15, 30, and 50%), and different types of strokes removed (beginning, ending, and strokes that ensured the configuration of the character was retained). Reading times, number of fixations and regression measures all showed that Chinese characters with 15% of strokes removed were as easy to read as Chinese characters without any strokes removed. However, when 30%, or more of a character's strokes were removed, reading characters with their configuration retained was easiest, characters with ending strokes removed were more difficult, whilst characters with beginning strokes removed were most difficult to read. The results strongly suggest that not all strokes within a character have equal status during character identification, and a flexible stroke encoding system must underlie successful character identification during Chinese reading.

Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading.