Reading efficiency: A comparative study of English and Chinese orthographies

This project studies variation in reading speed between languages of different orthographies. Modern Chinese with logographic characters and English with alphabetic written systems are the two languages under study. It is hypothesized that native Chinese readers read faster than native English readers on the same reading comprehension test. College freshmen (126 from Capital Normal University in China and 111 from Brigham Young University in the USA) were asked to read 16 passages selected from standardized foreign language tests (8 from TOEFL and 8 from HSK) and answer multiple choice questions (60 in total) that follow each of the passages. Findings indicate that the Chinese readers (24.7 minutes) are faster than the English readers (26.6 minutes) by about 2 minutes on the same reading material. The difference is significant even with reading comprehension being held constant. Results have implications on teaching Chinese as foreign language and the Chinese written language reform.