Reading efficiency: A comparative study of English and Chinese orthographies

This project studies variation in reading speed between languages of differ ent orthographies. Modern Chinese with logographic characters and English w ith alphabetic written systems are the two languages under study. It is hyp othesized that native Chinese readers read faster than native English reade rs on the same reading comprehension test. College freshmen (126 from Capit al Normal University in China and 111 from Brigham Young University in the USA) were asked to read 16 passages selected from standardized foreign lang uage tests (8 from TOEFL and 8 from HSK) and answer multiple choice questio ns (60 in total) that follow each of the passages. Findings indicate that t he 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 i s significant even with reading comprehension being held constant. Results have implications on teaching Chinese as foreign language and the Chinese w ritten language reform.