Eye movement guidance in Chinese reading: Is there a preferred viewing location?

Li, Xingshan; Li, Pingping; Rayner, Keith

doi:10.1016/j.visres.2011.03.004

Cited by 110 publications

(239 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…In particular targeting saccades to the middle of words (Rayner, 1979) likely produced the word length effect. Also, since high frequency words are easier to process than low frequency words, more word skipping for high frequency words (Li, Liu & Rayner, 2011), and still others have suggested that, in fact, a multitude of factors might contribute to the decision of where to move the eyes in the upcoming text in Chinese (Zang, Liang, Bai, Yan & Liversedge, 2012). Clearly, this is area of eye movement control in Chinese reading that still requires extensive research.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A final characteristic of Chinese that makes it visually distinct from Finnish and English, is that Chinese is an unspaced language, that is, there are no spaces between the words in Chinese sentences. The lack of word spacing in character-based languages has been shown to be very important in relation to eye movements, saccadic targeting and reading (see Bai, Yan, Liversedge, Zang, & Rayner, 2008;Blythe, Liang, Zang, Wang, Yan, Bai & Liversedge, 2012;Li, Liu & Rayner, 2011;Sainio, Hyönä, Bingushi & Bertram, 2007;Shen, Liversedge, Tian, Zang, Cui, Bai, Yan, & Rayner, 2012;Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann & Shu, 2010;Zang, Liang, Bai, Yan & Liversedge, 2012). The lack of spaces between words in Chinese contributes further to its reduced horizontal extent, and this also means that a process of word segmentation is required for word identification to occur that is unnecessary in English and Finnish (with the exception of long, multimorphemic compound words, Bertram, Pollatsek, & Hyönä, 2004).…”

Section: ! 8!mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

Liversedge

Drieghe

et al. 2016

Cognition

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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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ! 8!mentioning

confidence: 99%

Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

Liversedge

Drieghe

et al. 2016

Cognition

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“…However, research on this topic has been conducted primarily in languages based on the Latin alphabet (e.g., English, French, German), and, while recent research has examined non-alphabetic languages like Chinese (e.g., Li, Liu, & Rayner 2011), little is known about eye movements for alphabetic languages with fundamentally different visual characteristics. Arabic is the second-most widely read alphabetic language (after English) across the globe, yet few studies have examined eye movements when reading Arabic (e.g., Roman & Pavard, 1987;Roman, Pavard, & Asseleh, 1985) and, with the exception of a recent investigation of the perceptual span (Jordan, Almabruk, et al, 2014), have not examined fundamental visual influences on eye movement control.…”

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confidence: 99%

Effects of word length on eye movement control: The evidence from Arabic

et al. 2015

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The finding that word length plays a fundamental role in determining where and for how long readers fixate within a line of text has been central to the development of sophisticated models of eye movement control. However, research in this area is dominated by the use of Latinate languages (e.g., English, French, German), and little is known about eye movement control for alphabetic languages with very different visual characteristics. To address this issue, the present experiment undertook a novel investigation of the influence of word length on eye movement behavior when reading Arabic. Arabic is an alphabetic language that not only is read from right to left but has visual characteristics fundamentally different from Latinate languages, and so is ideally suited to testing the generality of mechanisms of eye movement control. The findings reveal that readers were more likely to fixate and refixate longer words, and also that longer words tended to be fixated for longer. In addition, word length influenced the landing positions of initial fixations on words, with the effect that readers fixated the center of short words and fixated closer to the beginning letters for longer words, and the location of landing positions affected both the duration of the first fixation and probability of refixating the word. The indication now, therefore, is that effects of word length are a widespread and fundamental component of reading and play a central role in guiding eye-movement behavior across a range of very different alphabetic systems.

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“…Second, Li and Pollatsek (2011) found that processing at the word level can feed back to low-level judgments, such as where a character is. Third, some eye movement measures in Chinese reading, such as fixation time and saccade length, are affected by word properties such as word frequency (Yan, Tian, Bai, & Rayner, 2006), predictability (Rayner, Li, Juhasz, & Yan, 2005), and length (Li, Liu, & Rayner, 2011). Fourth, a recent study (Li, Gu, Liu, & Rayner, 2012) has provided evidence that interrupting Chinese readers from simultaneously viewing two characters belonging to a word slows down their reading, as compared with when they can see both characters simultaneously.…”

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confidence: 99%

Dividing lines at the word boundary position helps reading in Chinese

Zhao

Pollatsek

2012

Psychon Bull Rev

Self Cite

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Unlike in English, the Chinese printing and writing systems usually do not respect a word boundary when they split lines; thus, characters belonging to a word can be on two different lines. In this study, we examined whether dividing a word across two lines interferes with Chinese reading and found that reading times were shorter when characters belonging to a word were on a single line rather than on adjacent lines. Eye movement data indicated that gaze durations in a region around the word boundary were longer and fixations were closer to the beginnings and ends of the lines when words were split across lines. These results suggest that words are processed as a whole in Chinese reading, so that word boundaries should be respected when deciding how to split lines in the Chinese writing system. They also suggest that the length of return sweeps in reading can be cognitively guided. Keywords Chinese reading . Line arrangement . Word processingIn English and other alphabetic writing systems, a word is not usually split across lines. If it is, a hyphen indicates that the word has been split, but the preferred typographical system is that, if a word is too long to fit at the end of a line, it will be printed at the beginning of the next line. In contrast, the Chinese printing and writing system usually does not do this. Although the current Chinese writing system is similar to the English writing system in that the characters go from left to right on a line and the lines run from the top to the bottom of the page, there is a key difference. Chinese characters are usually printed within same-sized spaces, and the right sides of the lines are aligned, so that each line has an equal number of characters, except for the first and last lines of a paragraph. (The first line in a paragraph is indented.)Not only are word boundaries at the end of a line ignored in printed material, they are ignored in hand-written material. To confirm this, we counted the numbers of lines in which a multiple-character word was shown in one line or across two lines in the essays of a zoology class of 30 students. Among the 768 lines that had a multiplecharacter word (or part of a multiple-character word) at the line end, 63 % of the words were written on one line, and 37 % were written across lines. This suggests that Chinese writers do not always keep characters belonging to a word on the same line of text.In English and in most alphabetic writing systems, the concept of a word is highlighted by the writing system, in that words are delimited by spaces. Linguistically, it isn't quite that simple, as some compound words are written with a space between the morphemes and some without, and usually there is no principled difference for the distinction (e.g., basketball vs. tennis ball). One possible reason that the English and other alphabetic writing systems do not split a word across two lines is that English readers process the letters belonging to a word as a whole (Reicher, 1969;Wheeler, 1970). Hence, presenting a word on two lines

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Eye movement guidance in Chinese reading: Is there a preferred viewing location?

Cited by 110 publications

References 30 publications

Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

Effects of word length on eye movement control: The evidence from Arabic

Dividing lines at the word boundary position helps reading in Chinese

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