Evidence of Visual Statistical Learning in the Reading of Unspaced Chinese Sentences

Chinese texts are renowned for the lack of physical spaces between words in a sentence. Reading these sentences requires a stage of word segmentation, the mechanism of which may involve visual statistical learning. In three experiments employing the RSVP task along with the Saffran et al. (1997) paradigm, we provided evidence that foreign learners of Chinese could capture the statistical information embedded in a string of characters and use that information to tell apart a “word” from a “nonword”. The statistical learning effect (.57) was comparable to that observed previously in an auditory task using the same stimuli. The results of the experiments also suggested that significant visual statistical learning required a conscious level of processing that directed the participants’ attention at the characters as well as an unconscious level, at which the distributional information across the characters can be continuously computed and accumulated.