2003 Clta Annual Meeting Abstracts
2003 CLTA ANNUAL MEETING ABSTRACTS Home | 2003 Program | Meeting (arranged alphabetically by presenters' surname) Reading Chinese as a Foreign Language: The Role of the Orthographic Word Benedetta Bassetti, University of Essex, UK Psycholinguistic research repeatedly demonstrated the importance of spacing between 33words for English readers (Morris, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1989; Pollatsek & Rayner, 1982). But he insertion of interword spacing in Chinese texts does not facilitate Chinese readers (Inhoff, Liu, Wang, & Fu, 1997; Liu, Yeh, Wang, & Chang, 1974; Hsu & Huang, 2000). Research on second language reading consistently found that L2 readers transfer reading processes from their L1 to their L2 (Koda, 1988; Durgunoglu & Hancin, 1992). It is then to be expected that English native readers who read Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) should be facilitated by the insertion of interword spacing in Chinese texts, but previous research did not find any facilitative effect (Everson, 1986). A series of three experiments was performed to test the hypothesis that interword spacing facilitates English CFL readers, using different methods and materials from those used in previous research. Two on-line sentence verification tasks and one on-line cloze test were used to compare reading rates and comprehension for texts presented with either interword or intercharacter spacing in advanced English CFL readers and Chinese native readers reading both pinyin and characters texts. In line with previous findings, interword spacing did not facilitate Chinese native readers, and interestingly this also applied to pinyin reading. Unlike previous research, CFL readers were significantly faster when reading texts presented with interword spacing. The facilitative effect of interword spacing for CFL readers cannot be simply explained as a consequence of their lower reading proficiency, because Chinese readers, who were unproficient readers of pinyin, were not facilitated by interword spacing in pinyin texts.
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