Abstract: For Chinese script, there are no explicit cues in a serial string of characters. When Chinese readers are asked to mark the boundaries between words, the results will be not consistent for different readers. Word consciousness and syntactic categories of words have been proved to be important factors which influenced the word segmentation. How these factors influence the word segmentation? Present study will explore this question from a developmental perspective. Participants who are students from the third, fifth and eighth grade, and high school were asked to segment Chinese sentences into individual words according to their prior knowledge of words. The results are as followings: 1)With the grade increased, the agreement proportion was declined and the word unites were larger, readers in higher grade were more inclined to chunk words into large information units; 2)The former tendency changes in terms of word category. It suggests that the effect of word consciousness on word segmentation is regulated by the syntactic categories of words.

Key words: word segmentation, word consciousness, word category, development

摘要： 汉语书写系统中不存在明显的词边界,中文读者对于词的划分存在较大的差异。词意识和词性均是影响这一差异的因素,本研究从发展的角度来探讨这两个因素是如何作用于词边界划分的。实验分别选取三年级、五年级、八年级及高二年级学生完成词切分任务。结果发现：（1）词切分认同率随年级的升高而降低,切分出来的词单元逐渐增大;（2）词切分认同率随年级变化的趋势会因词性的不同而发生变化,助词、形容词前、连词和介词后的切分认同率与总体趋势保持一致,但形容词前、数词、量词和介词前的切分认同率并未随年级的变化而变化。结果表明,词意识对中文读者词切分的影响受到词性的调节。

关键词: 词切分, 词意识, 词性, 发展研究