中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

In this study, we examined eye movement guidance in Chinese reading. We embedded either a 2-character word or a 4-character word in the same sentence frame, and observed the eye movements of Chinese readers when they read these sentences. We found that when all saccades into the target words were considered that readers eyes tended to land near the beginning of the word. However, we also found that Chinese readers' eyes landed at the center of words when they made only a single fixation on a word, and that they landed at the beginning of a word when they made more than one fixation on a word. However, simulations that we carried out suggest that these findings cannot be taken to unambiguously argue for word-based saccade targeting in Chinese reading. We discuss alternative accounts of eye guidance in Chinese reading and suggest that eye movement target planning for Chinese readers might involve a combination of character-based and word-based targeting contingent on word segmentation processes. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This research was supported by the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-BR-6) and by a grant from the Natural Science Foundation of China (31070904). Preparation of the article was supported by Grant HD26765 from the National Institute of Health (US). We thank Reinhold Kliegl and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on a prior draft of the article. We also thank Simon Liversedge, Erik Reichle, and Jinmian Yang for their helpful discussions when preparing this paper. Copies of the stimuli used in the experiment are available on request to the first author.