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. KeywordsChinese reading; spaced and unspaced text; eye movements It is rather uncontroversial that in alphabetic writing systems, like English, the spaces between the words facilitate reading. When space information is eliminated, reading speed typically decreases by up to 50% (see Malt & Seamon, 1978;Morris, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1990;Pollatsek & Rayner, 1982;Rayner, Fischer, & Pollatsek, 1998;Rayner & Pollatsek, 1996;Spragins, Lefton, & Fisher, 1976). Furthermore, Rayner et al. (1998) demonstrated that spaces influence word recognition and also aid saccade programming. They found that when the spaces between words were eliminated, readers (a) fixated proportionally longer on lowfrequency words than on high-frequency words (indicating that word identification was more Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Simon P. Liversedge, School of Psychology, Shackleton Building, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom. E-mail: s.p.liversedge@soton.ac.uk. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript difficult when spaces were removed) and (b) that readers fixated much earlier in the word (as their average saccade lengths were much shorter when the spaces were removed).Given the central role that word spacing information plays in written English comprehension, it is intriguing that a number of languages do not include spaces between words in their written form. This in turn raises questions concerning how readers target saccades and how words are recognized in writing systems, like Chinese, that do not include spaces between words. Chinese text is formed by strings of equally spaced symbols called characters; Chinese characters are more like morphemes and most words are made up of two characters, though some words consist of only one character and some consist of three or more...

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.

The availability of useful information to the right of fixation in 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.

Universality in language has been a core issue in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics for many years (e.g., Chomsky, 1965). Recently, Frost (2012) has argued that establishing universals of process is critical to the development of meaningful, theoretically motivated, cross-linguistic models of reading. In contrast, other researchers argue that there is no such thing as universals of reading (e.g., Coltheart & Crain, 2012). Reading is a complex, visually mediated psychological process, and eye movements are the behavioral means by which we encode the visual information required for linguistic processing. To investigate universality of representation and process across languages we examined eye movement behavior during reading of very comparable stimuli in three languages, Chinese, English and Finnish. These languages differ in numerous respects (character based vs. alphabetic, visual density, informational density, word spacing, orthographic depth, agglutination, etc.). We used Linear mixed modelling techniques to identify variables that captured common variance across languages. Despite fundamental visual and linguistic differences in the orthographies, statistical models of reading behavior were strikingly similar in a number of respects, and thus, we argue that their composition might reflect universality of representation and process in reading.! 3!

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Research using alphabetic languages shows that, compared to young adults, older adults employ a risky reading strategy in which they are more likely to guess word identities and skip words to compensate for their slower processing of text. However, little is known about how ageing affects reading behaviour for naturally unspaced, logographic languages like Chinese. Accordingly, to assess the generality of age-related changes in reading strategy across different writing systems we undertook an eye movement investigation of adult age differences in Chinese reading. Participants read sentences containing a target word (a single Chinese character) that had a high or low frequency of usage and was constructed from either few or many character strokes, and so either visually simple or complex. Frequency and complexity produced similar patterns of influence for both age groups on skipping rates and fixation times for target words. Both groups therefore demonstrated sensitivity to these manipulations. But compared to the young adults, the older adults made more and longer fixations and more forward and backward eye movements overall. They also fixated the target words for longer, especially when these were visually complex. Crucially, the older adults skipped words less and made shorter progressive saccades. Therefore, in contrast with findings for alphabetic languages, older Chinese readers appear to use a careful reading strategy according to which they move their eyes cautiously along lines of text and skip words infrequently. We propose they use this more careful reading strategy to compensate for increased difficulty processing word boundaries in Chinese.

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