Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading.

How much information can be acquired from a single fixation in normal reading-Whether words in a sentence are processed one by one (serially),or two or more words are processed in parallel,is a major dispute between serial attention shift (SAS) and distributed lexical processing models (SWIFT) of eye movement control.Assessing which type of model is more consistent with empirical data has become a hot topic in research examining eye movements during reading.The main purpose of the present study was to determine how processing of characters in the parafovea affects foveal inspection time during Chinese sentence reading.The boundary paradigm (Rayner,1975) was used in two experiments designed to examine whether processing of the fixated character was affected by the frequency of the character to the right of fixation.An invisible boundary was positioned between the two characters (N and N-1).Once the reader's eyes crossed the boundary,the incorrect preview of N was changed to the correct character,ensuring that the preview character was only available for parafoveal processing.In Experiment 1,30 university students were asked to read 48 sentences.There were two types of preview characters (high-or low-frequency),both of which were congruent with the context.When the eyes crossed the invisible boundary,both previews were changed to the same target character,which was also congruent with the context.In Experiment 2,34 university students were asked to read 76 sentences.Again,the frequency of the preview character was manipulated (high or low).Both of the two preview characters were incongruent with the sentence context,but the target character was congruent with the context.In Experiment 1,the results showed that first fixation durations and gaze durations on character n were longer with low-frequency previews than with high-frequent previews.In contrast,first fixation durations and gaze durations on character n-2 were longer in the condition where a high-frequency preview of n was being presented compared to a low-frequency preview.In Experiment 2,there were no significant differences for first fixation durations and gaze durations on character n between high or low frequency preview conditions.However,first fixation durations and gaze durations on character n-2 were longer in the condition where a low-frequency preview of n was being presented compared to a high-frequent preview-the opposite pattern observed in Experiment 1.The results showed that information about character frequency can be accessed in parafoveal preview.Furthermore,this preview information can affect processing of the currently fixated character to some extent (the results showed a strong preview effect but less stable parafoveal-on-foveal effects).The data from these experiments fit better with the theoretical assumptions of parallel processing models of eye movement control in reading.

Abstract Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of foveal processing difficulty on the perceptual span in reading. Subjects read sentences while their eye movements were recorded. By changing the text contingent on the reader's current point of fixation, foveal processing difficulty and the availability of parafoveal word information were independently manipulated. In Experiment 1, foveal processing difficulty was manipulated by lexical frequency, and in Experiment 2 foveal difficulty was manipulated by syntactic complexity. In both experiments, less parafoveal information was acquired when processing in the fovea was difficult. We conclude that the perceptual span is variable and attentionally constrained. We also discuss the implications of the results for current models of the relation between covert visual-spatial attention and eye movement control in reading.

Four experiments are reported which examined the role of interword spaces in the processing of English compound words. Normally nonspaced compounds (e.g., softball) as well as normally spaced compounds (e.g., front door) were presented with either their correct spatial layout (softball, front door) or with an incorrect spatial layout (soft ball, frontdoor). Lexical decisions and first fixations on the compounds showed an advantage for interword spaces. However, when refixations on the compounds were taken into account, inserting a space into a normally nonspaced compound significantly disrupted processing. This disruption was larger for adjective-noun compounds than for noun-noun compounds. The results indicate that spatially segmenting compounds facilitates access to the constituent lexemes while spatial unification of compounds benefits the specification of full compound meaning.

We tested the effects of word length, frequency, and predictability on inspection durations (first fixation, single fixation, gaze duration, and reading time) and inspection probabilities during first‐pass reading (skipped, once, twice) for a corpus of 144 German sentences (1138 words) and a subset of 144 target words uncorrelated in length and frequency, read by 33 young and 32 older adults. For corpus words, length and frequency were reliably related to inspection durations and probabilities, predictability only to inspection probabilities. For first‐pass reading of target words all three effects were reliable for inspection durations and probabilities. Low predictability was strongly related to second‐pass reading. Older adults read slower than young adults and had a higher frequency of regressive movements. The data are to serve as a benchmark for computational models of eye movement control in reading.

While much previous work on reading in languages with alphabetic scripts has suggested that reading is word-based, reading in Chinese has been argued to be less reliant on words. This is primarily because in the Chinese writing system words are not spatially segmented, and characters are themselves complex visual objects. Here, we present a systematic characterization of the effects of a wide range of word and character properties on eye movements in Chinese reading, using a set of mixed-effects regression models. The results reveal a rich pattern of effects of the properties of the current, previous, and next words on a range of reading measures, which is strikingly similar to the pattern of effects of word properties reported in spaced alphabetic languages. This finding provides evidence that reading shares a word-based core and may be fundamentally similar across languages with highly dissimilar scripts. We show that these findings are robust to the inclusion of character properties in the regression models and are equally reliable when dependent measures are defined in terms of characters rather than words, providing strong evidence that word properties have effects in Chinese reading above and beyond characters. This systematic characterization of the effects of word and character properties in Chinese advances our knowledge of the processes underlying reading and informs the future development of models of reading. More generally, however, this work suggests that differences in script may not alter the fundamental nature of reading.

In this study, we examined eye movement guidance in Chinese reading. We embedded either a 2-character word or a 4-character word in the same sentence frame, and observed the eye movements of Chinese readers when they read these sentences. We found that when all saccades into the target words were considered that readers eyes tended to land near the beginning of the word. However, we also found that Chinese readers eyes landed at the center of words when they made only a single fixation on a word, and that they landed at the beginning of a word when they made more than one fixation on a word. However, simulations that we carried out suggest that these findings cannot be taken to unambiguously argue for word-based saccade targeting in Chinese reading. We discuss alternative accounts of eye guidance in Chinese reading and suggest that eye movement target planning for Chinese readers might involve a combination of character-based and word-based targeting contingent on word segmentation processes.Highlights? This paper deals with how Chinese readers decide where to look next in reading. ? It notes that target selection could be based on (1) word-based targeting, (2) character-based targeting, or (3) a constant distance strategy. ? An experiment is reported and a number of simulations are provided. ? It is argued that a constant distance strategy cannot account for the data and that eye movement control is a combination of word and character-based strategies.

How do readers select a landing position when they make a saccade is an interesting and important question in cognitive psychology research. For alphabetic languages(i.e., English and German) which use blank spaces to segment words, readers usually make saccades to the preferred viewing location(PVL), which is usually slightly to the left of the center of a word. For non-alphabetic languages like Chinese, however, the absence of obvious visual cues between words makes the selection of a landing position more complex. Recently, researchers have studied saccade target selection from the perspective of dynamic saccade adjustment based on foveal-parafoveal processing. They found that saccade lengths are influenced by the demands of on-going foveal and parafoveal processing. Moreover, the processing of parafoveal information directly determines the saccade lengths. However, more efforts are needed to understand precisely how saccade length is adjusted to accommodate foveal and parafoveal processing demands during the reading of both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages.

读者在阅读中面临如何选择眼跳落点位置的问题。研究者在有词间空格的字母文字中（如英语和德语）发现人们倾向于将眼跳落在词中心偏左的位置,这个位置被称为偏好注视位置（preferred viewing location,PVL）。中文文本并没有空格来标记词边界信息,这使得中文阅读的眼跳目标选择机制更加复杂。近年来,研究者从中央凹—副中央凹动态调节的角度研究了阅读中眼跳目标选择的机制。结果发现在中文阅读中眼跳目标选择受到中央凹和副中央凹信息加工的共同影响,而副中央凹的加工直接决定了眼跳落点位置。

Unlike in English, there are no spaces between printed words in Chinese. In this study, we explored how inserting a space before or after a word affects the processing of that word in Chinese reading. Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences with different presentation conditions. The results show that inserting a space after a word facilitates its processing, but inserting a space before a word does not show this effect and inhibits the processing of that word in some cases. Our results are consistent with the prediction of a word segmentation and recognition model in Chinese Li et al., 2009, Cognit. Psychol., 58, 525. Additionally, we found that a space guides the initial landing position on the word: the initial landing position was further away from the space that inserted into the text, whether it was before or after a word.

How does a word’s within-sentence predictability influence saccade length during reading? An eye-movement experiment manipulating the predictability of target words indicates that, relative to low-pre

Abstract <p>There are two accounts of how readers of unspaced writing systems (e.g., Chinese) know where to move their eyes: (a) saccades are directed toward default targets (e.g., centers of words that have been segmented in the parafovea); or (b) saccade lengths are adjusted dynamically, as a function of ongoing parafoveal processing. This article reports an eye-movement experiment supporting the latter hypothesis by demonstrating that the slope of the relationship between the saccade launch site on word N and the subsequent fixation landing site on word N + 1 is >1, suggesting that saccades are lengthened from launch sites that afford more parafoveal processing. This conclusion is then evaluated and confirmed via simulations using implementations of both hypotheses (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016), with a discussion of these results for our understanding of saccadic targeting during reading and existing models of eye-movement control.</p>

Participants' eye movements were measured while reading Chinese sentences in which target-word frequency and the availability of parafoveal processing were manipulated using a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The results of this study indicate that preview availability and its interaction with word frequency modulated the length of the saccades exiting the target words, suggesting important functional roles for parafoveal processing in determining where the eyes move during reading. The theoretical significance of these findings is discussed in relation to 2 current models of eye-movement control during reading, both of which assume that saccades are directed toward default targets (e.g., the center of the next unidentified word). A possible method for addressing these limitations (i.e., dynamic attention allocation) is also discussed.

Abstract There are currently 2 theoretical accounts of how readers of Chinese select their saccade targets: (a) by moving their eyes to specific saccade targets (i.e., the default-targeting hypothesis) and (b) by adjusting their saccade lengths to accommodate lexical processing (i.e., the dynamic-adjustment hypothesis). In this article, we first report the results of an eye-movement experiment using a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. This experiment demonstrates that both target-word frequency and its preview validity modulate the lengths of the saccades entering and exiting the target words, with longer saccades to/from high-frequency words when their preview was available. We then report the results of 2 simulations using computational models that instantiate the core theoretical assumptions of the default-targeting and dynamic-adjustment hypotheses. Comparisons of these simulations indicate that the dynamic-adjustment hypothesis provides a better quantitative account of the data from our experiment using fewer free parameters. We conclude by discussing evidence for dynamic saccade adjustment during the reading of alphabetic languages, and why such a heuristic may be necessary to fully explain eye-movement control during the reading of both alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved.

This empirical study examined whether the visual complexities of the first and second characters in two-character words play similar roles in modulating the fixation time and saccade target selection during un-spaced Chinese reading. Consistent with prior research, words with low-complexity characters were fixated for shorter times than words with high-complexity characters. Critically, saccade target selection was primarily influenced by the visual complexity of the first character of a two-character word: words with low-complexity first characters were skipped more frequently, and fixation was localized nearer to the center of the word compared with the words with high-complexity first characters. These results are important for understanding the mechanisms of eye movement control in Chinese reading and thus provide benchmark data to test models of eye movement control in Chinese reading.

In Chinese, as there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries, readers usually do not target their eyes to the centre of the word as readers of English do. Previous studies showed that the distribution of the initial landing positions on a word (the PVL curve) peaked at the beginning of a word when there was more than one fixation; but peaked at the centre of a word if there was only one fixation on the word. Based on this phenomenon, it was argued that Chinese readers move their eyes to the beginning of a word if they cannot correctly segment words in the parafovea, but move to the centre of a word if they can. In the present study, we implemented a natural sentence reading task in Experiment 1 and a shuffled-character reading task in Experiment 2 to test whether the above PVL phenomenon was in fact caused by word segmentation. In both experiments, we found that the different PVL patterns in multiple- and single-fixation cases occurred not only for a 3-character word region but also for a 3-character nonword region. These results suggest that the different PVL curves in multiple- and single-fixation cases are likely to be due to a statistical artefact instead of parafoveal word segmentation.

Sixty-six college students read two chapters from a contemporary novel while their eye movements were monitored. The eye movement data were analyzed to identify factors that influence the location of a reader's initial eye fixation on a word. When the data were partitioned according to the location of the prior fixation (i.e. launch site), the distribution of fixation locations on the word (i.e. landing site distribution) was highly constrained, normal in shape, and not influenced by word length. The locations of initial fixations on words can be accounted for on the basis of five principles of perceptuo-oculomotor control: a word-object has a specific functional target location, a saccadic range error occurs that produces a systematic deviation of landing sites from the functional target location, the saccadic range error is reduced somewhat for saccades that follow longer eye fixations, there exists perceptuo-oculomotor variability that is a second, nonsystematic source of variation in landing sites, and the perceptuo-oculomotor variability increases with distance of the launch site from the target.

For alphabetic language scripts,the decision about where to move the eyes during reading is strongly influenced by low-level visual variables such as word length,which is provided by spacing information. In contrast,high-level linguistic variables,such as word frequency and word predictability do not have an influence on where readers move their eyes( Rayner,2009). Similar to the alphabetic writing systems,there has been evidence that word frequency and word predictability do not influence initial landing positions during Chinese reading( Guo,2012; Wu et al.,2011). However,written Chinese is a kind of ideographic writing system,which differs from alphabetic writing systems in many dimensions. Chinese uses a non-alphabetic,character-based script with square-shaped forms of different levels of visual complexity( i. e.,roughly the number of strokes) as basic writing units. Yang and McConkie( 1999)obtained a flat preferred viewing location curve,and concluded that in Chinese reading,unlike other languages,saccadic target selection is not word-based. Their results also showed that the number of strokes did not influence participants' initial landing positions.However,we think that,in their study,the width of the space between adjacent characters is equivalent to half the width of a Chinese character,which maybe influences the results. Many studies have found that the number of strokes of characters influences the processing of vocabulary recognition,therefore suggesting that readers tended to fixate characters with high complexity.In the current study,48 sentences including two-character target words were adopted to examine whether the number of strokes influenced landing positions. The number of strokes of the first and the second constituent characters of target words were manipulated.The target words never occurred at the beginning or the end of the sentences. All experimental sentences were 17 to 27 characters in length( M = 19. 84 characters). The sentences were rated on a 7-point scale for their naturalness by 20 participants who did not take part in the eye-tracking study. The mean naturalness score was 5. 97( where a score of 7 was very natural). 60 participants were asked to read the experimental sentences which included target words,and their eye movements were monitored as they read texts. The participants' eye movements were recorded with an SR Research EyeLink 2000 eye tracker that monitored the position of the right eye every 1 ms. The stimuli were presented on a 19-inch ViewSonic monitor with a 1,024 768 pixel resolution. Each participant was tested individually. They were required to read the sentences and understand them to the best of their ability. When they completed reading a sentence,they pushed a button box to terminate the display. They were instructed that occasionally a comprehension question would appear after a sentence and that they should try hard to answer the question correctly.We found that eye movement behaviors were different in different fixation cases. When there was only one fixation on a target word,the first fixations mostly landed on the centre of the word. Therefore,we found a preferred viewing location in single-fixation cases during Chinese reading. While there were multiple fixations on a target word,readers first fixated at the beginning of the target word. In those multiple fixation cases,if the first fixation landed at the beginning of a target word,the probability of refixating of this word was the highest. Importantly,we found that when the number of first character's strokes is high,readers mostly fixated at the first character.In addition,the numbers of strokes of the first and second characters both influence the probability of refixation. We argued that Chinese children use the " strategy-tactics" approach during reading.

Considerable data in the literature on eye movement control in reading indicates that there is a close relation between visual characteristics of the text and the pattern of fixations. The moving-window technique developed by researchers has been instrumental in studying both the control of eye movements in reading and the size of the perceptual spam. In particular, experiments in which the moving-window technique is used have demonstrated that decreasing the amount of parafoveal information to the left of the currently fixated word has little influence on reading, whereas restricting information to the right of fixation has powerful effects on both reading rate and saccade length.

This article presents a study on optimal viewing position effect in word recognition. The result of this experiment is the finding that the optimal viewing position phenomenon also occurs with the lexical decision task. As can be seen from the slopes of the curves, the strength of the effect amounts to a penalty of slightly more than 20 ms for each additional letter by which the eye deviates from the optimal viewing position. The size of this penalty is similar to that found in our earlier work, which used gaze duration and naming latency, and is amazingly large.

Reading a text without spaces in an alphabetic language causes disruption at the levels of word identification and eye movement control. In the present experiment, we examined how word discriminability affects the pattern of eye movements when reading unspaced text in an alphabetic language. More specifically, we designed an experiment in which participants read three types of sentences: normally written sentences, regular unspaced sentences, and alternating unspaced sentences. Although there was a reading cost in the unspaced sentences relative to the normally written sentences, this cost was much smaller in alternating unspaced sentences than in regular unspaced sentences.

Three experiments, involving 19 members of a university community, examined the functions of spaces between words in the reading of text. Certain spaces in stimulus sentences were filled contingent upon the reader's fixation: all spaces to the right of fixation, all spaces to the right of fixation except in the 1st, or only the 1st space to the right of fixation. Several space-filling characters were used: random letters, random digits, and "gratings." In addition, the onset of the space fillers was delayed 0-250 msec into the fixation. In the 1st-space-preserved conditions, the space fillers had no effect if they were delayed more than 50 msec, and there was little difference in the amount of interference resulting from the various space-filling characters. In the other 2 conditions, the space fillers produced interference at all delays studied, and letters were considerably more interfering as space fillers than were digits or gratings. Results are consistent with a 2-process theory in which filling parafoveal spaces disrupts the guidance of the next eye movement and filling foveal spaces disrupts the processing of the fixated word as well. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Eye movements are now widely used to investigate cognitive processes during reading, scene perception, and visual search. In this article, research on the following topics is reviewed with respect to reading: (a) the perceptual span (or span of effective vision), (b) preview benefit, (c) eye movement control, and (d) models of eye movements. Related issues with respect to eye movements during scene perception and visual search are also reviewed. It is argued that research on eye movements during reading has been somewhat advanced over research on eye movements in scene perception and visual search and that some of the paradigms developed to study reading should be more widely adopted in the study of scene perception and visual search. Research dealing with “real-world” tasks and research utilizing the visual-world paradigm are also briefly discussed.

Abstract Readers read sentences containing target words varying in frequency and predictability. The observed pattern of data for fixation durations only mildly departed from additivity, with predictability effects that were slightly larger for low-frequency than for high-frequency words. The pattern of data for skipping was different as predictability affected only the probability of skipping for high-frequency target words. Simulations of these data using the E-Z Reader model indicated that a single-process model was unlikely to provide a good fit for both measures. A version of the model that assumes that (a) word-encoding time is additively affected by frequency and predictability and (b) difficulty with postlexical processing of the target word causes a double take accounted for the data while indicating that the relationship between the duration of hypothesized word-encoding stages and observed fixation durations is not likely to be transparent.

In this paper, we extend our previous work (Reichle, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2012) using the principles of the E-Z Reader model to examine the factors that determine when and where the eyes move in both reading and nonreading tasks, and in particular the role that word/stimulus familiarity plays in determining when the eyes move from one word/stimulus to the next. In doing this, we first provide a brief overview of E-Z Reader, including its assumption that word familiarity is the ngine driving eye movements during reading. We then review the theoretical considerations that motivated this assumption, as well as recent empirical evidence supporting its validity. We also report the results of three new simulations that were intended to demonstrate the utility of the familiarity check in three tasks: (1) reading; (2) searching for a target word embedded in text; and (3) searching for the letter O in linear arrays of Landolt Cs. The results of these simulations suggest that the familiarity check always improves task efficiency by speeding its rate of performance. We provide several arguments as to why this conclusion is not likely to be true for the two nonreading tasks, and, in the final section of the paper, we provide a fourth simulation to test the hypothesis that problems associated with the misidentification of words may also curtail the too liberal use of word familiarity.

Assumptions on the allocation of attention during reading are crucial for theoretical models of eye guidance. The zoom lens model of attention postulates that attentional deployment can vary from a sharp focus to a broad window. The model is closely related to the foveal load hypothesis, i.e., the assumption that the perceptual span is modulated by the difficulty of the fixated word. However, these important theoretical concepts for cognitive research have not been tested quantitatively in eye movement models. Here we show that the zoom lens model, implemented in the SWIFT model of saccade generation, captures many important patterns of eye movements. We compared the model's performance to experimental data from normal and shuffled text reading. Our results demonstrate that the zoom lens of attention might be an important concept for eye movement control in reading.

Abstract During isolated-word reading, within-word eye-movement tactics (i.e., whether the eye makes one or more fixations on the word) depend strongly on the eye's first fixation position in the word; there exists an optimal landing position where the probability of having to refixate the word is much smaller than when the eye first fixates other parts of the word. The present experiment was designed to test whether the optimal landing position effect still exists during text reading, and to compare the nature and strength of the effect with the effect found for isolated words. The results confirmed the existence of an optimal landing position in both reading conditions, but the effect for words in texts was weaker than it was for isolated words, probably because of the presence of factors such as reading rhythm and linguistic context. However, the effect still existed in text reading; within-word tactics during text reading are dependent on the eye's initial landing position in words. Moreover, individual fixation durations were dependent on within-word tactics. Thus, the initial landing position in words must be taken into account if one wishes to understand eye-movement behavior during text reading. Further results concerned the effects of word length and word frequency in both reading conditions.

In two experiments, we investigated how forward saccades are targeted in Chinese reading. In Experiment 1, the critical region was a 4-character string which was either a word (one-word condition) or two 2-character word phrases (two-word condition). In Experiment 2, the critical region was either a high frequency word or a low frequency word. The outgoing saccade length from the last fixation on the critical region was longer in the one-word condition than the two-word condition in Experiment 1 and was longer in the high frequency condition than in the low frequency condition in Experiment 2. These results indicate that the properties of words in a fixated region affect the length of the outgoing saccade. We propose a processing-based strategy for saccade target selection in Chinese reading in which readers estimate how many characters they can process on each fixation, and then program their next saccade so that the eyes fixate somewhere beyond them. As a consequence, the easier the processing of the fixated region is, the longer the outgoing saccade is.

Saccade and fixation are the elementary ocularmotor activities during reading.The eye-movement measures in reading research can be classified into two different categories.One category is temporal dimension measure related to the time course of eye movements and it includes the measures in area of interest of character or word(such as single fixation duration,first fixation duration,second fixation duration,gaze duration,regression time and total fixation duration and so on.) and the measures in area of interest of phrase or sentence(such as first-pass reading time,forward reading time,second-pass reading time,regression path reading time,re-reading time and so on.).The other category is spatial dimension measure related to the location of eye movement and it includes saccade amplitude,landing position,number of fixations,skipping rate,refixation rate and regression count.Finally,when using the eye movement measures we should pay attention to the classification of oculomotor measures,the cutoff criterion of raw data,the psychological interpretation of the measures and so on.

Eye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing target words that varied in terms of word frequency and character frequency. There was an effect of word frequency on fixation times on a target word and it was comparable in size to that typically found with readers of English. Furthermore, character frequency also influenced fixation time on the target word. The effect of the initial character in two character words was more pronounced than that of the second character. However, word frequency modulated the effect of character frequency. The effect of character frequency was attenuated with high frequency target words while it was quite apparent with low frequency target words.

Perceptual span refers to the area of effective vision from which useful information can be obtained during a fixation in reading. Research has demonstrated that skilled adult readers of Chinese can obtain useful information from an asymmetric region extending roughly one character space to the left of fixation to about two-to-three character spaces to the right of fixation. To determine the size of the perceptual span,the classic gaze-contingent moving-window technique was developed. In this technique,the text outside a pre-defined window around the point of fixation is masked by Xs or scrambled letters. Thus,wherever the reader looks,the text is visible within the window,but outside the window the text is disrupted in some way. By varying the masking material,the researcher can find the perceptual span is different from English and other alphabetic writing systems. In the present study,gaze-contingent moving-window technique was used to explore the effect of masking materials on the perceptual span of Chinese reading. 26 college students participated. Their eye movements were recorded with a SR Research EyeLink eye tracker. 130 sentences were presented in seven viewing conditions( R1,R2,R3,R4,L1R4,L2R4 and the whole line) to examine the perceptual span of college students in different masking conditions. The results showed that( 1) Compared to the symbol masking condition,the reading efficiency in character masking condition was lower,the average fixation time was longer and the saccade amplitude was smaller.( 2) The participants obtained useful information from an asymmetric region extending roughly one character space to the left of fixation to about two-to-three character spaces to the right of fixation in the symbol masking condition,and the perceptual span extended one character space to the left of fixation to about threeto-four character spaces to the right of fixation in the character masking condition. In summary,the perceptual span is larger but the reading efficiency is lower in the character masking condition than in the symbol masking condition. Perhaps a character is more appropriate to be used as the masking material to study the perceptual span in Chinese reading.

采用移动窗口技术,探讨了不同掩蔽材料对中文阅读知觉广度的影响,结果表明:(1)相对于"※"掩蔽,文字掩蔽条件下的阅读效率更低、平均注视时间更长、眼跳幅度更小。(2)"※"掩蔽下被试的知觉广度为注视字左侧1个字,右侧2-3个字;文字掩蔽下被试的知觉广度为注视字左侧1个字,右侧3-4个字。综合上述结果,文字掩蔽材料可以比"※"掩蔽材料获得更大的知觉广度,但阅读效率更低。在中文阅读中,文字掩蔽材料更适合探讨阅读知觉广度。

This study investigates the effect of foveal load (i.e., processing difficulty of currently fixated words) on parafoveal information processing. Contrary to the commonly accepted view that high foveal load leads to reduced parafoveal processing efficiency, results of the present study showed that increasing foveal visual (but not linguistic) processing load actually increased the amount of parafoveal information acquired, presumably due to the fact that longer fixation duration on the pretarget word provided more time for parafoveal processing of the target word. It is therefore proposed in the present study that foveal linguistic processing load is not the only factor that determines parafoveal processing; preview time (afforded by foveal word visual processing load) may jointly influence parafoveal processing.

As Chinese is written without orthographical word boundaries (i.e., spaces), it is unclear whether saccade targets are selected on the basis of characters or words and whether saccades are aimed at the beginning or the centre of words. Here, we report an experiment where 30 Chinese readers read 150 sentences while their eye movements were monitored. They exhibited a strong tendency to fixate at the word centre in single-fixation cases and at the word beginning in multiple-fixation cases. Different from spaced alphabetic script, initial fixations falling at the end of words were no more likely to be followed by a refixation than initial fixations at word centre. Further, single fixations were shorter than first fixations in two-fixation cases, which is opposite to what is found in Roman script. We propose that Chinese readers dynamically select the beginning or centre of words as saccade targets depending on failure or success with segmentation of parafoveal word boundaries.

Abstract Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N + 2) and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N + 2-word preview with low- and high-frequency words N + 1. The main findings were (a) an identity PB for word N + 2 that was (b) primarily observed when word N + 1 was of high frequency (i.e., an interaction between frequency of word N + 1 and PB for word N + 2), and (c) a parafoveal-on-foveal frequency effect of word N + 1 for fixation durations on word N. We discuss implications for theories of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.

Evidence for semantic preview benefit (PB) from parafoveal words has been elusive for reading alphabetic scripts such as English. Here we report semantic PB for noncompound characters in Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm. In addition, PBs for orthographic relatedness and, as a numeric trend, for phonological relatedness were obtained. Results are in agreement with other research suggesting that the Chinese writing system is based on a closer association between graphic form and meaning than is alphabetic script. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.

The present study examined children and adults' eye movement behavior when reading word spaced and unspaced Chinese text. The results showed that interword spacing reduced children and adults' first pass reading times and refixation probabilities indicating spaces between words facilitated word identification. Word spacing effects occurred to a similar degree for both children and adults, though there were differential landing position effects for single and multiple fixation situations in both groups; clear preferred viewing location effects occurred for single fixations, whereas landing positions were closer to word beginnings, and further into the word for adults than children for multiple fixation situations. Furthermore, adults targeted refixations contingent on initial landing positions to a greater degree than did children. Overall, the results indicate that some aspects of children's eye movements during reading show similar levels of maturity to adults, while others do not.