Effects of Character Positional Frequency in Chinese Silent and Oral Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements

Abstract

Abstract The cognitive mechanisms underlying Chinese word segmentation remain obscure. However, studies have found that readers can use character position probability to facilitate word segmentation even though the Chinese script does not use spaces. Surprisingly little is known about how this ability is employed during silent and oral reading. The present study manipulated both initial and final character positional frequencies of target words of either high or low lexical frequency. The results revealed a significant reading model effect, as longer fixations occur in oral than in silent reading, and importantly showed a privileged status for initial character positional frequency during word segmentation. An effect of initial character positional frequency was found during silent and oral reading, which indicates that readers effectively use character positional frequency to boost word recognition. Moreover, the initial character’s positional frequency contributed significantly to the processing of the target word under low-frequency conditions. Taken together, the information on character location probability is an important clue for readers to segment words, and this processing advantage of the character positional frequency is driven by the word frequency. The findings are an enhancement to the development of the character positional decoding model across Chinese reading.