Eye Movement Study On Information Acquisition And Frequency Effect In Chinese Reading

Eye movements in Chinese reading are particularly interesting because of theunique features of the Chinese writing system. Three general types of models havebeen proposed to account for eye movement control in reading: minimal controlmodels, visual control models, and cognitive control models. Disappearing textparadigm was used to investigate how early in a fixation readers are able to obtainsufficient information from the text to read and the influence of cognitive and visualfactors on eye movement control.Three experiments were conducted, readers' eye movements were monitoredwhen they read either normal sentences or disappearing text. In experiment 1 andexperiment 2, the fixated Chinese character or word disappeared after certain amountsof time, this paradigm was used to determine how rapidly during an eye fixationinformation can be fully extracted for reading. The design of the experiment 3 wasbased on the results of experiment 2. In experiment 3, participants read sentencescontaining high- or low-frequency target words under normal reading conditions ordisappearing text conditions, the goal of the experiment was to investigate whatdetermines when the eyes move during reading. The results are as follows:(1) For one Chinese character moving window, most of the visual informationnecessary for reading can be acquired within the initial 60 ms during a fixationin Chinese reading.(2) For one Chinese word moving window, most of the visual informationnecessary for reading can be acquired within the initial 80 ms during a fixationin Chinese reading.(3) It is the cognitive factors associated with understanding the fixated word thatdetermine when the eyes move in Chinese reading, the results are consistentwith the cognitive-control models.