The Landing Position Effects During Chinese Reading

Two topics are discussed in the study of eye movement control:what determines when to move the eyes, and what determines where to move during reading? Is the decision of where to move controlled by low-level visual properties or guided by high-level language processing? It is still under debate. Based on the previous studies, we tried to investigate the properties of eye movement behavior during Chinese reading.Two studies including five experiments were carried out. In Study1, we examined whether there was a preferred viewing location, the targeting of readers'saccades, and whether low-level visual properties influenced readers'eye movements behavior. In Study2, on the basis of Study1, whether the high-level lexical properties influenced the landing positions was further explored. The detailed contents and main findings were shown as follows.In Study1, three experiments were included. In Experiment1, sentences including two-character target words were adopted to examine whether the number of stroke influenced the landing positions. The number of stroke of the first and the second constituent characters were manipulated. Participants'eye movements were monitored as they read texts. In Experiment2, on the basis of Experiment1, we explored whether the structure of Chinese characters influenced readers'eye movements during Chinese reading. The structure of Chinese characters (left-right and top-bottom) was manipulated. In Experiment3, the spatially ambiguous words were used as target words to investigate whether the word boundary information influenced the landing positions. The spatially ambiguous words are formed by two consistent Chinese words in which the second constituent character of the first word and the first constituent character of the second word could also form a real Chinese word but it does not semantically related to any of the two words. Highlighting was used to create four analogous conditions:normal Chinese text, text with highlighting used to mark words, text with highlighting to mark the word formed by the second constituent character of the first word and the first constituent character of the second word, and text with highlighting to mark each character.In Study2, two experiments were included to explore whether the high-level lexical properties (the semantic relation between the two constituent characters of a compound word) influenced the landing positions. In Experiment4, we manipulated the constructions of two-character compound words (coordinate and attributive structure). On the basis of Experiment4, in Experiment5, compound words pairs shared the first constituent character but of different constructions (coordinate or attributive) were used as target words to further investigate the influence on landing positions of compound words constructions.To summarize, following conclusions were made.(1) There was different eye movements behavior in different fixation cases. When there was only one fixation on target word, the first fixation mostly landed on the word' centre. While there were multiple fixations, readers first fixated at the beginning of the target words. There was a preferred viewing location in single-fixation cases during Chinese reading.(2) In multiple fixation cases, if the first fixation landed at the beginning of a target word, the probability of refixating this word was the highest, and refixations were tend to land at the end of the word. The results showed that the refixation pattern of Chinese readers was regular.(3) All forward saccade landing positions distribution curve was not parallel to the x coordinate axes. Especially, the probability of landing the eyes at the end of words decreased. This suggested that the decision about where to move the eyes during Chinese reading is word based, that is, a word object is selected as the next saccade target of Chinese readers. Words play an important role in Chinese text reading.(4) Similar to alphabetic languages, the low-level visual properties of Chinese words (the number of stroke of Chinese characters) influenced the landing positions during Chinese reading. When the number of stroke of the first constituent character was high, the first fixations tend to land on the first character, on the contrary, when the number is low, Chinese readers tended to fixate on the second character.(5) Low-level visual properties of Chinese words, such as character structures and word boundary, did not influence readers'saccades landing positions during reading. Similarly, the decision about where to move the eyes was not influenced by the high-level lexical property, characters'semantic relations of compound words in this case, as well.