Spaces enhance word segmentation and comprehension in tacit reading

  • Authors:
  • Mayumi Toshima;Tetsuo Ishikawa;Ken Mogi

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Informatics, Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Tokyo, Japan;Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Japan and Centre for Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility, Keio University, Tokyo, Japa ...;Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • ISNN'11 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Advances in neural networks - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

There are a lot of types of written language systems all over the world. The Japanese writing system uses ideographic and phonetic symbols without spaces between words, where the ability of finding the boundary between words is expected to have a positive correlation with the ability of general language comprehension. Is such a correlation to be found in languages (e.g., English) where words are conventionally separated by spaces between them? Here we report a study on how spaces put on the boundary of two adjacent words enhance tacit reading texts. We conducted a "slash task" where our subjects whose first language was Japanese were instructed to place a slash between adjacent words of sentences written continuously without spaces between the words in typical, short and easy sentences. Our data illuminate the role of "active segmentation" in language comprehension.