Reading is fundamentally similar across disparate writing systems: A systematic characterization of how words and characters influence eye movements in Chinese reading.

Abstract

While much previous work on reading in languages with alphabetic scripts has suggested that reading is word-based, reading in Chinese has been argued to be less reliant on words. This is primarily because in the Chinese writing system words are not spatially segmented, and characters are themselves complex visual objects. Here, we present a systematic characterization of the effects of a wide range of word and character properties on eye movements in Chinese reading, using a set of mixed-effects regression models. The results reveal a rich pattern of effects of the properties of the current, previous, and next words on a range of reading measures, which is strikingly similar to the pattern of effects of word properties reported in spaced alphabetic languages. This finding provides evidence that reading shares a word-based core and may be fundamentally similar across languages with highly dissimilar scripts. We show that these findings are robust to the inclusion of character properties in the regression models, and are equally reliable when dependent measures are defined in terms of characters rather than words, providing strong evidence that word properties have effects in Chinese reading above and beyond characters. This systematic characterization of the effects of word and character properties in Chinese advances our knowledge of the processes underlying reading and informs the future development of models of reading. More generally, however, this work suggests that differences in script may not alter the fundamental nature of reading.

The effect of contextual diversity on eye movements in Chinese sentence reading

“…Experiment 1 and Experiment 2b have relatively long fixation durations compared to Experiment 2a, and some other experiments in the literature (e.g., Cui, Yan, Bai, Hyönä, Wang, & Liversedge, 2013;Yan, Tian, Bai, & Rayner, 2006). As noted earlier, they are nonetheless within the range of commonly observed fixation durations (Li et al, 2014). In contrast, the first fixations in Experiment 2a are on the shorter end of the distribution.…”

“…They are, however, within the range of frequently occurring fixations for reading Mandarin (see Li, Bicknell, Liu, Wei, & Rayner, 2014 for a distribution of fixation times). We return to this issue when we present the results for Experiment 2a, which has shorter fixation durations, and Experiment 2b, where the fixation durations are similar to this Experiment.…”

Do successor effects in reading reflect lexical parafoveal processing? Evidence from corpus-based and experimental eye movement data

“…Kennedy and Pynte (2005) found successor frequency effects in an eye movement corpus consisting of data from English and French subjects reading long (2600-2800 words) newspaper articles, but this effect was only present when the parafoveal word was short. A recent study by Li, Bicknell, Liu, Wei, and Rayner (2014) that examined an eye movement corpus of reading in Chinese found that words were more likely to be fixated when their successor was higher frequency.…”

Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

“…Finally, words that are more predictable on the basis of preceding sentential context are read more quickly than words that are less predictable (Balota, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 1985;Ehrlich & Rayner, 1981;Inhoff, 1984). The fact that word frequency, word length and word predictability effects (the "big three" in reading, Clifton, Ferreira, Henderson, Inhoff, Reichle & Schotter, 2015), are found across languages provides evidence for the more general suggestion of the importance of word based processing during reading across languages (see Li, Bicknell, Liu, Wei & Rayner, 2014).…”