Guoli Yan

The effect of word and character frequency on the eye movements of Chinese readers.

Eye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing target words that varied in terms of word frequency and character frequency. There was an effect of word frequency on fixation times on a target word and it was comparable in size to that typically found with readers of English. Furthermore, character frequency also influenced fixation time on the target word. The effect of the initial character in two character words was more pronounced than that of the second character. However, word frequency modulated the effect of character frequency. The effect of character frequency was attenuated with high frequency target words while it was quite apparent with low frequency target words.

The effect of word predictability on the eye movements of Chinese readers

Eye movements of Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing target words whose predictability from the preceding context was high, medium, or low. Readers fixated for less time on high- and medium-predictable target words than on low-predictable target words. They were also more likely to fixate on low-predictable target words than on high- or medium-predictable target words. The results were highly similar to those of a study by Rayner and Well (1996) with English readers and demonstrate that Chinese readers, like readers of English, exploit target word predictability during reading.

Processing of compound-word characters in reading Chinese: An eye-movement-contingent display change study

Readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read Chinese two-constituent compound words in sentence contexts. The first compound-word constituent was either an infrequent character with a highly predictable second constituent or a frequent character with an unpredictable second constituent. The parafoveal preview of the second constituent was manipulated, with four preview conditions: identical to the correct form; a semantically related character to the second constituent; a semantically unrelated character to the second constituent; and a pseudocharacter. An invisible boundary was set between the two constituents; when the eyes moved across the boundary, the previewed character was changed to its intended form. The main findings were that preview effects occurred for the second constituent of the compound word. Providing an incorrect preview of the second constituent affected fixations on the first constituent, but only when the second constituent was predictable from the first. The frequency of the initial character of the compound constrained the identity of the second character, and this in turn modulated the extent to which the semantic characteristics of the preview influenced processing of the second constituent and the compound word as a whole. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of Chinese compound-word recognition and the constraint hypothesis of Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek (2004). We conclude that word identification in Chinese is flexible, and parafoveal processing of upcoming characters is influenced both by the characteristics of the fixated character and by its relationship with the characters in the parafovea.

The effect of visual complexity and word frequency on eye movements during Chinese reading

Eye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored when they read sentences containing single-character target words orthogonally manipulated for frequency and visual complexity (number of strokes). Both factors yielded strong main effects on skipping probability but no interaction, with readers skipping visually simple and high frequency words more often. However, an interaction between frequency and complexity was observed on the fixation times on the target words with longer fixations for the low frequency, visually complex words. The results demonstrate that visual complexity and frequency have independent influences on saccadic targeting behaviour during Chinese reading but jointly influence fixation durations and that these two factors differently impact fixation durations and saccade targeting during reading.

Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation

Universality in language has been a core issue in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics for many years (e.g., Chomsky, 1965). Recently, Frost (2012) has argued that establishing universals of process is critical to the development of meaningful, theoretically motivated, cross-linguistic models of reading. In contrast, other researchers argue that there is no such thing as universals of reading (e.g., Coltheart & Crain, 2012). Reading is a complex, visually mediated psychological process, and eye movements are the behavioural means by which we encode the visual information required for linguistic processing. To investigate universality of representation and process across languages we examined eye movement behaviour during reading of very comparable stimuli in three languages, Chinese, English and Finnish. These languages differ in numerous respects (character based vs. alphabetic, visual density, informational density, word spacing, orthographic depth, agglutination, etc.). We used linear mixed modelling techniques to identify variables that captured common variance across languages. Despite fundamental visual and linguistic differences in the orthographies, statistical models of reading behaviour were strikingly similar in a number of respects, and thus, we argue that their composition might reflect universality of representation and process in reading.

Parafoveal preview benefit in unspaced and spaced Chinese reading

In an eye movement experiment during reading, we compared parafoveal preview benefit during the reading of Chinese sentences either in the familiar, unspaced format or with spaces inserted between the words. Single-character words or the first of a two-character word were either presented normally or were replaced by a pseudocharacter in the preview. Results indicate that word spacing increased the parafoveal preview benefit but only for the one-character target words. We hypothesized that the incorrect preview of the first character of the two-character word prevented parafoveal processing of the ensuing character(s), effectively nullifying any benefits from the spacing. Our results suggest that word boundary demarcation allows for more precise focusing of attention.

Parafoveal processing across different lexical constituents in Chinese reading

We report a boundary paradigm eye movement experiment to investigate whether the linguistic category of a two-character Chinese string affects how the second character of that string is processed in the parafovea during reading. We obtained clear preview effects in all conditions but, more importantly, found parafoveal-on-foveal effects whereby a nonsense preview of the second character influenced fixations on the first character. This effect occurred for monomorphemic words, but not for compound words or phrases. Also, in a word boundary demarcation experiment, we demonstrate that Chinese readers are not always consistent in their judgements of which characters in a sentence constitute words. We conclude that information regarding the combinatorial properties of characters in Chinese is used online to moderate the extent to which parafoveal characters are processed.

Effects of word frequency and visual complexity on eye movements of young and older Chinese readers

Research using alphabetic languages shows that, compared to young adults, older adults employ a risky reading strategy in which they are more likely to guess word identities and skip words to compensate for their slower processing of text. However, little is known about how ageing affects reading behaviour for naturally unspaced, logographic languages like Chinese. Accordingly, to assess the generality of age-related changes in reading strategy across different writing systems we undertook an eye movement investigation of adult age differences in Chinese reading. Participants read sentences containing a target word (a single Chinese character) that had a high or low frequency of usage and was constructed from either few or many character strokes, and so either visually simple or complex. Frequency and complexity produced similar patterns of influence for both age groups on skipping rates and fixation times for target words. Both groups therefore demonstrated sensitivity to these manipulations. But compared to the young adults, the older adults made more and longer fixations and more forward and backward eye movements overall. They also fixated the target words for longer, especially when these were visually complex. Crucially, the older adults skipped words less and made shorter progressive saccades. Therefore, in contrast with findings for alphabetic languages, older Chinese readers appear to use a careful reading strategy according to which they move their eyes cautiously along lines of text and skip words infrequently. We propose they use this more careful reading strategy to compensate for increased difficulty processing word boundaries in Chinese.

The use of probabilistic lexicality cues for word segmentation in Chinese reading

In an eye-tracking experiment we examined whether Chinese readers were sensitive to information concerning how often a Chinese character appears as a single-character word versus the first character in a two-character word, and whether readers use this information to segment words and adjust the amount of parafoveal processing of subsequent characters during reading. Participants read sentences containing a two-character target word with its first character more or less likely to be a single-character word. The boundary paradigm was used. The boundary appeared between the first character and the second character of the target word, and we manipulated whether readers saw an identity or a pseudocharacter preview of the second character of the target. Linear mixed-effects models revealed reduced preview benefit from the second character when the first character was more likely to be a single-character word. This suggests that Chinese readers use probabilistic combinatorial information about the likelihood of a Chinese character being single-character word or a two-character word online to modulate the extent of parafoveal processing.

Parafoveal-on-foveal Interactions in Normal Chinese Reading: Parafoveal-on-foveal Interactions in Normal Chinese Reading

How much information can be acquired from a single fixation in normal reading-Whether words in a sentence are processed one by one (serially),or two or more words are processed in parallel,is a major dispute between serial attention shift (SAS) and distributed lexical processing models (SWIFT) of eye movement control.Assessing which type of model is more consistent with empirical data has become a hot topic in research examining eye movements during reading.The main purpose of the present study was to determine how processing of characters in the parafovea affects foveal inspection time during Chinese sentence reading.The boundary paradigm (Rayner,1975) was used in two experiments designed to examine whether processing of the fixated character was affected by the frequency of the character to the right of fixation.An invisible boundary was positioned between the two characters (N and N-1).Once the readers eyes crossed the boundary,the incorrect preview of N was changed to the correct character,ensuring that the preview character was only available for parafoveal processing.In Experiment 1,30 university students were asked to read 48 sentences.There were two types of preview characters (high-or low-frequency),both of which were congruent with the context.When the eyes crossed the invisible boundary,both previews were changed to the same target character,which was also congruent with the context.In Experiment 2,34 university students were asked to read 76 sentences.Again,the frequency of the preview character was manipulated (high or low).Both of the two preview characters were incongruent with the sentence context,but the target character was congruent with the context.In Experiment 1,the results showed that first fixation durations and gaze durations on character n were longer with low-frequency previews than with high-frequent previews.In contrast,first fixation durations and gaze durations on character n-2 were longer in the condition where a high-frequency preview of n was being presented compared to a low-frequency preview.In Experiment 2,there were no significant differences for first fixation durations and gaze durations on character n between high or low frequency preview conditions.However,first fixation durations and gaze durations on character n-2 were longer in the condition where a low-frequency preview of n was being presented compared to a high-frequent preview-the opposite pattern observed in Experiment 1.The results showed that information about character frequency can be accessed in parafoveal preview.Furthermore,this preview information can affect processing of the currently fixated character to some extent (the results showed a strong preview effect but less stable parafoveal-on-foveal effects).The data from these experiments fit better with the theoretical assumptions of parallel processing models of eye movement control in reading.