Can Chinese readers scan large amounts of text faster/more accurately than their alphabet-using counterparts?

Question

I was browsing one day and came across this comment in this discussion(italics mine):

I feel English is a reading language, if you are reading an English book, you watch the word and make sound in your brain. But Chinese can be a watching language, take a Chinese book, I can watch over a paragraph and get the meaning of most part. Well, you may not believe, but it's true. Compare Yahoo.com and Sina.com for example, you can see that Yahoo.com is simple and clear, but Sina.com like a mess. You maybe surprise how can Chinese find the information in this mess. Well, native Chinese will get the most part easy by scrolling down and take a glance. – Xiè Jìléi Apr 4 at 9:45

Is there any science behind this? Or does the commenter just refer to scanning text.

I checked out a number of other search engines(eg naver.com(Korean); the-search.jp(Japanese)) and found no correlations myself.

Can Chinese readers scan large amounts of text faster/more accurately than their alphabet-using counterparts? So if we placed a native Chinese speaker next to a native English speaker having the same education and literacy levels and gave them both a text of the same length and complexity in their respective languages, would one of them a) finish faster? b)comprehend more accurately? c)better retain read information?

Answer 1

This research seems to be relevant.

Your question seems to be closely related to rapid reading techniques. Looking on those techniques, you may notice that many of them don't apply to Chinese, simply because logographic writing systems naturally allow rapid reading with no extra training.
There is even an idiom, 一目十行 -- "reading ten lines at the same time"; literally, "one eye ten lines`.

• Sub-vocalization, a process of associating a text with its phonetic representation. It slows down reading in any language, but Chinese symbols are always monosyllabic, and the majority of dictionary words consist of only two syllables.
• Replacing a sequential word-by-word reading to seeing a whole page at once (or, actually, square blocks of text). Chinese text is naturally a grid by itself.
• Related to above, but different, avoiding linear reading. Alphabetic writing systems imply the words aligned horizontally. Your eyes follow a word and it's difficult to follow several lines at once.
• Seenig the shape of the wrods, not redaing them in detial. (how many typos did you see here?). In Chinese, you don't look at each stroke or radical, you just get the entire character at once. Look here: someone can recognize 300-800 characters, but admits that he/she still needs 5-10 seconds to recall a single one.

Answer 2

Adding a point to bytebuster's answer: from my own experience, "trackback cost" is another major factor. During fast scanning it is common that I need to go back a few words/characters to get the context or resolve ambiguity. In English, in most cases going back one word or two is not sufficient, I need to go further back or even reread the whole sentence which is much more expensive than in Chinese I only need to look back a few characters and with square characters my eyes can locate them quickly.

Answer 3

"You maybe surprise how can Chinese find the information in this mess." To my opinion, Chinese has much more characters than English, each character is quite different form another, and when they consist of one word, it gets more different from other words, so we can easily find some key words in a text. You can practice.

Answer 4

I remember there's a research about different ways of processing written information between Chinese and English speakers. Chinese readers have active spots in a part of the brain that deals with pictures, while a different place in the brains of English-speaking readers is responsible for reading. It might be possible that Chinese recognize all the characters on a page as a whole picture.

What's more, the Chinese translation of a book is usually shorter than its English version.