Effects of adding interword spacing on Chinese reading: A comparison of Chinese native readers and English readers of Chinese as a second language

B. Bassetti

doi:10.1017/S0142716409990105

Effects of adding interword spacing on Chinese reading: A comparison of Chinese native readers and English readers of Chinese as a second language

B. Bassetti

Education

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

English is written with interword spacing, and eliminating it negatively affects English readers. Chinese is written without interword spacing, and adding it does not facilitate Chinese readers. Pinyin (romanized Chinese) is written with interword spacing. This study investigated whether adding interword spacing facilitates reading in Chinese native readers and English readers of Chinese as a second language. Participants performed two sentence–picture verification tasks with sentences written with pinyin or hanzi (characters). Interword spacing facilitated pinyin reading in English readers but not in Chinese readers; it did not affect hanzi reading in either group. The effects of interword spacing on second language reading appear to be determined by characteristics of both readers' first language writing system and the writing system being read.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	757-775
Number of pages	19
Journal	Applied psycholinguistics
Volume	30
Issue number	04
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716409990105
Publication status	Published - Oct 2009

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Effects of adding interword spacing on Chinese reading: A comparison of Chinese native readers and English readers of Chinese as a second language

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