关键词: 中文阅读, 词切分, 年老化, 眼动

Abstract: Words identification is essential for both the comprehension of reading of alphabetic and logographic Chinese scripts. Although there are no interword spaces to mark word boundaries in Chinese scripts, native Chinese readers have no difficulty in reading Chinese characters. A growing number of evidence have shown that word segmentation is necessary to word and text processing in Chinese reading (Bai et al., 2008, 2013; Blythe et al., 2012; Li et al., 2009; Ma et al., 2019; Shen et al., 2012). It is also well known that age has an impact on word processing in reading (Liu et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2019). As far as we know, the literature on whether or how aging impacts word segmentation in Chinese reading is scant. Therefore, to examine this, we conducted this study—we carried out two eye-tracking experiments, manipulating age groups and word segmentation cues.
56 young and 40 old (aged over 60) native Chinese speakers participated in the experiments. There was no group difference in vision. Participants in the experimental group were asked to read a sentence having three boundary markings (e.g. red colour, gray highlighting, and spacing), and those in the control group were asked to read a sentence with no marking. Conditions with boundary markings provided correct word boundary cues in experiment 1 and incorrect word boundary cues in experiment 2. We hypothesized that if aging impacts word segmentation in Chinese reading, then the effect of word segmentation cues would be larger in the older adults than that in their younger counterparts. The eye movement measures of local two-character-word, namely total fixation time, gaze duration, and probability of skip and regression, were used to check the aforementioned hypothesis.
The results of experiment 1 showed that the sentences with correct boundary signs on words produced less total fixation time of the old group than that of young group on word areas, and there were also different patterns of word segmentation cues effects on the probability measures of skip and regression. In contrast, the results of experiment 2 showed that the conditions providing incorrect word boundary cues with gray highlighting and spacing resulted in more negative effects on the older group's total fixation time and gaze duration than those of the younger group, while the condition providing incorrect cues with red colour led to equal effects on those eye-movement measures of both groups.
In summary, we found that the older adults were more susceptible to word boundary cues. Findings suggest that boundary markings on words facilitate local word processing in older readers more than that in younger ones, which confirmed our hypothesis that aging impacts word segmentation in Chinese reading. It should be pointed out that the condition providing incorrect cues with red colour led to equal effects on those eye-movement measures of both groups, which suggests that some mechanisms of word segmentation in Chinese reading are immune to aging impacts. In this article, we present our study on how visual cues facilitate word processing in older readers, and discuss the mechanisms of word segmentation.

Key words: Chinese reading, word segmentation, aging, eye movements