The Effect Of Word Boundaries On Reading For Learners Of Chinese As A Second Language

Reading is an important part of language learning. Comparing with alphabetic languages, one characteristic of the Chinese language is that there are not any special spaces between words in conventionally written or printed text. Does this absence of word boundaries make it very difficult to identify words from the text, especially for foreign students whose first language employs alphabetic writing system? A study is conducted to explore the effects of word boundaries on reading. The results show that adding space between words could improve Chinese stentence reading speed. Though this artificial spacing has little impact on reading comprehension when reading short texts, learners could take advantage of word boundaries when reading longger texts. Besides, with the development of language ability, learners' reading unit is gradually growing.This study support Perfetti's theory of Verbal Effiency and shows that learners of Chinese at the beginning stage are apt to read in the "bottom up" way .