中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

Previous studies have found that words are identified most quickly when the eyes fixate near the word center (the Optimal Viewing Position, OVP) in alphabetic languages. Two experiments were performed to determine the presence of OVP effects during the processing of isolated Chinese words. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they performed a lexical decision task. The results suggest that Chinese readers exhibit OVP effects and that the OVP tends to be the first character for 2-character words. For 3- and 4-character words, the OVP effects appear as a U-shaped curve with a minimum towards the second character. As fixations deviate from the OVP, word processing times increase at a rate of 30-70 ms per character, and fixation duration is strongly influenced by the initial viewing position. Moreover, the present study did not observe an I-OVP effect for first fixation durations nor a fixation-duration trade-off in two-fixation cases in the case of isolated Chinese words processing. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This research was supported by the Knowledge Innovation Program of the CAS (KSCX2-YW-BR-6), by a grant from the Natural Science Foundation of China (31070904). We thank Professor Francoise Vitu and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments. We also thank Meng Zhai, Guojie Ma, Erik Reichle, and Ming Yan for the comments on the programming or data analysis.