Comparative analyses of the information content of letters, characters, and inter-word spaces across writing systems,Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Comparative analyses of the information content of letters, characters, and inter-word spaces across writing systems
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences ( IF 4.1 ) Pub Date : 2024-07-02 , DOI: 10.1111/nyas.15178
Linjieqiong Huang ₁ , Erik D Reichle ₂ , Xingshan Li _{1,

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Affiliation

One difference among writing systems is how orthographic cues are used to demarcate words; although most alphabetic scripts use inter-word spaces, some Asian scripts do not explicitly mark word boundaries (e.g., Chinese). It is unclear whether these differences are arbitrary or whether they are designed to maximize reading efficiency. Here, we show that spaces inserted between words in non-demarcated scripts provide less information about word boundaries than spaces in demarcated scripts. Furthermore, despite the fact that less information is contained by inter-word spaces than characters/letters of the same size, the information content of inter-word spaces in demarcated scripts is closer to that of characters/letters compared to the information content of inter-word spaces that are inserted in non-demarcated scripts. These results suggest that the conventions used to demarcate word boundaries are sufficient to support efficient reading. Our findings provide new insights into the universals and variation across writing systems and shed light on the mental processes that support skilled reading.

中文翻译：

跨书写系统的字母、字符和词间空间的信息内容比较分析

书写系统之间的一个区别是如何使用拼写提示来划分单词。尽管大多数字母文字使用字间空格，但一些亚洲文字并未明确标记字边界（例如中文）。目前尚不清楚这些差异是否是任意的，或者是否是为了最大限度地提高阅读效率而设计的。在这里，我们表明，与划界脚本中的空格相比，未划定脚本中单词之间插入的空格提供的有关单词边界的信息较少。此外，尽管字间空间所包含的信息量比相同大小的字符/字母少，但划定文字中的字间空间的信息内容比字间的信息内容更接近于字符/字母的信息内容。 - 在未划分的脚本中插入的单词空格。这些结果表明，用于划分单词边界的约定足以支持高效阅读。我们的研究结果为跨书写系统的共性和变异提供了新的见解，并揭示了支持熟练阅读的心理过程。

更新日期：2024-07-02

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