中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

We conducted a preliminary study to examine whether Chinese readers' spontaneous word segmentation processing is consistent with the national standard rules of word segmentation based on the Contemporary Chinese language word segmentation specification for information processing (CCLWSSIP). Participants were asked to segment Chinese sentences into individual words according to their prior knowledge of words. The results showed that Chinese readers did not follow the segmentation rules of the CCLWSSIP, and their word segmentation processing was influenced by the syntactic categories of consecutive words. In many cases, the participants did not consider the auxiliary words, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs, numerals and quantifiers as single word units. Generally, Chinese readers tended to combine function words with content words to form single word units, indicating they were inclined to chunk single words into large information units during word segmentation. Additionally, the "overextension of monosyllable words" hypothesis was tested and it might need to be corrected to some degree, implying that word length have an implicit influence on Chinese readers' segmentation processing. Implications of these results for models of word recognition and eye movement control are discussed.

This study was supported in part by the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy Sciences (No. KSCX2-YW-BR-6), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31070904); and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31000505). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the article.