The role of character positional frequency in oral reading: A developmental study
How frequently a character appears in a word (positional character frequency) is used as a cue in word segmentation when reading aloud in the Chinese language. In this study we created 176 sentences with a target word in the center of each. Participants were 76 college students (mature
readers) and 76 third-grade students (beginner readers). Results show an interaction effect of age and positional frequency of the initial character in the word on gaze duration. Further analysis shows that the third-grade students' gaze duration was significantly longer in high, relative
to low, positional character frequency of the target words. This trend was consistent with refixation duration, and there was a marginally significant interaction between age and total fixation time. Overall, positional character frequency was an important cue for word segmentation in oral
reading in the Chinese language, and third-grade students relied more heavily on this cue than did college students.
Keywords: AGE EFFECT; CHINESE LANGUAGE; GAZE DURATION; ORAL READING; POSITIONAL CHARACTER FREQUENCY; READING SKILLS; WORD SEGMENTATION
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 2021
This article was made available online on 07 December 2020 as a Fast Track article with title: "The role of character positional frequency in oral reading: A developmental study".
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