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

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 with either high or low lexical frequency. The results revealed a significant reading mode effect, as longer fixations occurred in oral than in silent reading. Critically, a privileged status for initial character positional frequency during word segmentation was observed specifically for low-frequency target words: reliable initial character positional-frequency effects emerged in both silent and oral reading in Experiment 2 but were absent for high-frequency words in Experiment 1. 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 frequency is an important clue for readers to segment words, and this processing advantage of the character positional frequency is modulated by lexical word frequency. The findings enhance the development of the character positional decoding model across Chinese reading.