Are letters with a diacritic (e.g., â) recognized as a variant of the base letter (e.g., a), or as a separate letter identity? Two recent masked priming studies, one in French and one in Spanish, investigated this question, concluding that this depends on the language-specific linguistic function served by the diacritic. Experiment 1 tested this linguistic function hypothesis using Japanese kana, in which diacritics signal consonant voicing, and like French and unlike Spanish, provide lexical contrast. Contrary to the hypothesis, Japanese kana yielded the pattern of diacritic priming like Spanish. Specifically, for a target kana with a diacritic (e.g., ガ, /ga/), the kana prime without the diacritic (e.g., カ, /ka/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., ガ-ガ = カ-ガ), whereas for a target kana without a diacritic, the kana prime with the diacritic produced less facilitation than the identity prime (e.g., カ-カ < ガ-カ). We suggest that the pattern of diacritic priming has little to do with linguistic function, and instead it stems from a general property of visual object recognition. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis using visually similar letters of the Latin alphabet that differ in the presence/absence of a visual feature (e.g., O and Q). The same asymmetry in priming was observed. These findings are consistent with the noisy channel model of letter/word recognition (Norris & Kinoshita, Psychological Review, 119, 517-545, 2012a).Keywords Diacritics . Masked priming . Japanese kana . Noisy channel model Recognition of a written word begins with the identification of letters that comprise the word. Research in the past decade has seen much advancement on understanding this "front-end" of reading (i.e., orthographic processing, the processing of letter identities and letter order; e.g., Adelman, 2011;Davis, 2010;Dehaene, 2009;Norris & Kinoshita, 2012a). In this domain, as in investigation of other aspects of reading and language, it is important to move beyond English, the dominant language studied, and ask whether the representation/process in question is language-universal (see Frost, 2012, and the associated commentaries).Recently, Chetail and Boursain (2019) took an important step in moving beyond English in studying letter identification: They investigated whether letters with and without diacritics (e.g., à and a)-we will refer to these as D+ and D− letters, respectively-share the same, or separate orthographic representation. This issue has not received much attention to date because most of the work on letter recognition has been conducted in English, which is written using the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, none of which contain diacritics. In contrast to English, however, many languages include letters with diacritics-within those written in the Latin script alone, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Finnish, Turkish, and Vietnamese, to name but a few; other scripts (Arabic, Japanese kana) also make extensive use of diacritics.A diacritic is a mark added to a character to indicate a...

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.

Chinese words consist of a variable number of characters that are normally written in continuous lines, without the blank spaces that are used to separate words in most alphabetic writing systems. These conventions raise questions about the relative roles of character versus whole-word processing in word identification, and how words are segmented from strings of characters for the purpose of their identification and saccade targeting. The present article attempts to address these questions by reporting an eye-movement experiment in which 60 participants read a corpus of sentences containing two-character target words that varied in terms of their overall frequency and the frequency of their initial characters. We examine participants’ eye movements using both corpus-based statistical models and more standard analyses of our target words. In addition to documenting how key lexical variables influence eye movements and highlighting a few discrepancies between the results obtained using our two statistical approaches, our experiment shows that high-frequency initial characters can actually slow word identification. We discuss the theoretical significance of this finding and others for current models of Chinese reading, and then describe a new computational model of eye-movement control during the reading of Chinese. Finally, we report simulations showing that this model can account for our findings.

Chinese reading experiments have introduced important caveats to theories of reading that have been largely informed by studies of English reading—especially in relation to our understanding of lexical processing and eye-movement control. This article provides a brief primer on Chinese reading and examples of questions that arise from its study.

Word identification is slower and less accurate outside central vision, but the precise relationship between retinal eccentricity and lexical processing is not well specified by models of either word identification or reading. In a seminal eye-movement study, Rayner and Morrison (1981) found that participants made remarkably accurate naming and lexical-decision responses to words displayed more than 3 degrees from the center of vision-even under conditions requiring fixed gaze. However, the validity of these findings is challenged by a range of methodological limitations. We report a series of gaze-contingent lexical-decision and naming experiments that replicate and extend Rayner and Morrison's study to provide a more accurate estimate of how visual constraints delimit lexical processing. Simulations were conducted using the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2012) to assess the implications for understanding eye-movement control during reading. Augmenting the model's assumptions about the impact of both eccentricity and visual crowding on the rate of lexical processing provided good fits to the observed data without impairing the model's ability to simulate benchmark eye-movement effects. The findings are discussed with a view toward the development of a complete model of reading.