An Eye Movement Study on the Different Segmentations´ Effects on Han and Tibetan College Students´ Reading Habit

Unlike Tibetan, Chinese is written without spaces between successive characters and words. One experiment was carried out to test how segmentations influence sentences reading in four conditions: sentences without segmentation, characters segmentation, words segmentation and phrases segmentation. The results indicate that characters segmentation can cause interference to Chinese college students while Tibetan college students are not affected and the highest reading efficiency goes with phrases segmentation. We can conclude that different reading habits influence reading efficiency, and assume that we comprehend Chinese based on phrases.