Chinese Readers Can Perceive a Word Even When It's Composed of Noncontiguous Characters

This study explored whether readers could recognize a word composed of noncontiguous characters (a "cross-character word") in Chinese reading. All 3 experiments employed Chinese 4-character strings ABCD, where both AB and CD were 2-character words. In the cross-character word condition, AC was a word but in the control condition, AC was not a word. A character identification task was employed in Experiment 1 and sentence reading tasks were employed in Experiments 2 and 3. In all 3 experiments, an AC word produced inhibition effects. In Experiment 1, an AC word decreased the accuracy of character B identification, but increased the accuracy of character C identification. In Experiments 2 and 3, an AC word slowed reading on CD, indicating that the cross-character words were activated. These results imply that Chinese character encoding leading to word recognition does not proceed in a strictly serial way from left to right, or is strictly constrained by invisible word boundaries.