Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There are no spaces between words in Chinese texts and this can present a challenge in reading for learners of Chineseas a second/foreign language (CSL) and native Chinese alike. We designed a self-paced reading computer platform onwhich individual words were shown or highlighted successively as participants pressed the spacebar to read a text withoutword spaces. CSL learners could read faster in this way than the traditional way where the entirety of the unspaced textappeared as a whole. Native Chinese readers did not show such a beneficiary effect. The results support the ProcessingCost Hypothesis which states that word segmentation when reading unspaced texts consumes processing resources andtherefore saving the resources by providing segmentation cues could benefit readers only when processing resources areovertaxed under certain circumstances, e.g., reading difficult texts, under time pressure, for beginner readers, and forforeign learners.