EFFECTS OF TEXT SEGMENTATION ON SILENT READING OF CHINESE REGULATED POEMS: EVIDENCE FROM EYE MOVEMENTS

Interword spaces have been reported to play an important role in silent reading of alphabetic languages. However, it has not yet been clear whether text spacing/segmentation facilitates the cognitive process in silent reading of Chinese, a logographic language, especially in reading Chinese regulated poems which have predefined rhythmic structures. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to monitor eye movements of native participants in reading Chinese regulated poems in four segmenting conditions: normal text, character segmentation, rhythmic segmentation, and syntactic segmentation. By comparing a set of measures of eye movements, both global and local analyses showed that syntactic segmentation boosted reading efficiency, while rhythmic segmentation did not. The findings demonstrate that not rhythmic but syntactic structure plays major roles in the cognitive process in reading Chinese regulated poems, suggesting an intrinsic difference in the information structure between spoken and written languages.