Eye Movement Control in Tibetan Reading: The Roles of Word Length and Frequency

Abstract

We investigated the effects of word length and frequency on eye movement control during Tibetan reading through two experiments. A preliminary experiment examined the predictive effect of word length and frequency on fixation duration and landing position using multiple linear regression analysis. In the formal experiment, we manipulated the length and frequency of target words simultaneously to investigate the effects of word length and frequency on fixation duration and landing position in Tibetan reading. In this study, we found that: (1) there were significant word-length and word-frequency effects affecting all lexical processing in Tibetan reading; (2) there are preferred viewing locations in Tibetan reading; specifically, for short words, it is the end, whereas for long words, it spans from the center to the beginning of the word; (3) word frequency does not affect preferred viewing location in Tibetan reading; (4) the preferred viewing position and the interaction of word length and viewing position found in this study supported the “strategy-tactics” approach.

Progress of bilingual reading studies in Tibetan and Chinese

“…The results of experiment 2 show that there are word length effect and word frequency effect in Tibetan reading, and there is a bias toward fixation position in Tibetan reading, and fixation position is mainly affected by low-level factors, while high-level factors have no effect on fixation position, which is consistent with the results of Pinyin text research. This shows that although Tibetan and Chinese belong to the Sino Tibetan language family, and their writing structure is similar to that of Chinese, Chinese is an ideographic character, while Tibetan itself is an alphabetic character, showing the same characteristics as alphabetic characters in terms of language type, pronunciation transparency, and character/word markers [9] .…”