Flexible saccade-target selection in Chinese reading

Fixation-related fMRI analysis reveals the neural basis of natural reading of unspaced and spaced Chinese sentences

Although there are many eye-movement studies focusing on natural sentence reading and functional magnetic resonance imaging research on reading with serial visual presentation paradigms, there is a scarcity of investigations into the neural mechanism of natural sentence reading. The present study recruited 33 adults to read unspaced and spaced Chinese sentences with the eye tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging data recorded simultaneously. By using fixation-related functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis, this study showed that natural reading of Chinese sentences produced activations in ventral visual, dorsal attention, and semantic brain regions, which were modulated by the properties of words such as word length and word frequency. The multivoxel pattern analysis showed that the activity pattern in the left middle temporal gyrus could significantly predict the visual layout categories (i.e. unspaced vs. spaced conditions). Dynamic causal modeling analysis showed that there were bidirectional brain connections between the left middle temporal gyrus and the left inferior occipital cortex in the unspaced Chinese sentence reading but not in the spaced reading. These results provide a neural mechanism for the natural reading of Chinese sentences from the perspective of word segmentation.

Joint effects of individual reading skills and word properties on Chinese children's eye movements during sentence reading

Word recognition during the reading of continuous text has received much attention. While a large body of research has investigated how linguistic properties of words affect eye movements during reading, it remains to be established how individual differences in reading skills affect momentary cognitive processes during sentence reading among typically developing Chinese readers. The present study set out to test the joint influences of word properties and individual reading skills on eye movements during reading among Chinese children. We recorded eye movements of 30 grade 3 (G3) children and 27 grade 5 (G5) children when they read sentences silently for comprehension. Predictors of linear mixed models included word frequency, visual complexity, and launch site distance, in addition to the participants' offline psychometric performances in rapid naming, morphological awareness, word segmenting, and character recognition. The results showed that word properties affected word recognition during sentence reading in both G3 and G5 children. Moreover, word segmenting predicted the G3 children's fixation durations and the G5 children's fixation location, whereas rapid naming predicted the G5 children's fixation duration. Implications are discussed based on the current findings, in light of how different literacy skills contribute to reading development.

GECO-CN: Ghent Eye-tracking COrpus of sentence reading for Chinese-English bilinguals

The current work presents the very first eye-tracking corpus of natural reading by Chinese-English bilinguals, whose two languages entail different writing systems and orthographies. Participants read an entire novel in these two languages, presented in paragraphs on screen. Half of the participants first read half of the novel in their native language (Simplified Chinese) and then the rest of the novel in their second language (English), while the other half read in the reverse language order. This article presents some important basic descriptive statistics of reading times and compares the difference between reading in the two languages. However, this unique eye-tracking corpus also allows the exploration of theories of language processing and bilingualism. Importantly, it provides a solid and reliable ground for studying the difference between Eastern and Western languages, understanding the impact and consequences of having a completely different first language on bilingual processing. The materials are freely available for use by researchers interested in (bilingual) reading.

Full-form vs. combinatorial processing of Chinese compound words: Evidence from mismatch negativity

This study examined whether Chinese spoken compound words are processed via full-form access or combination through morphemes by recording mismatch negativity (MMN). MMN has been shown to be larger for linguistic units that involves full-form access (lexical MMN enhancement) and smaller for separate but combinable units (combinatorial MMN reduction). Chinse compound words were compared against pseudocompounds, which do not have full-form representations in the long-term memory and are "illegal" combinations. All stimuli were disyllabic (bimorphemic). Word frequency was manipulated with the prediction that low-frequency compounds are more likely processed combinatorially, while high-frequency ones are more likely accessed in full forms. The results showed that low-frequency words elicited smaller MMNs than pseudocompounds, which supported the prediction of combinatorial processing. However, neither MMN enhancement nor reduction was found for high-frequency words. These results were interpreted within the dual-route model framework that assumes simultaneous access to words and morphemes.

Eye movements of second language learners when reading spaced and unspaced Chinese texts

Unlike English, Chinese does not have interword spacing in written texts, which poses difficulties for Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) learners’ identification of word boundaries and affects their reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. The eye-movement literature has suggested that interword spacing is important in alphabetic languages; examining languages that lack interword spaces such as Chinese, thus, may help to inform theoretical accounts of eye-movement control and word identification during reading. Research investigating the interword spacing effect in reading Chinese showed that adding spacing facilitated CSL learners’ reading comprehension and speed as well as vocabulary learning. However, the bulk of this research mainly looked at the learning outcomes (off-line measures), with few studies focusing on L2 learners’ reading processes. Building on this background, this study seeks to provide a descriptive perspective of the eye movements of CSL learners. In this study, 24 CSL learners with intermediate Chinese proficiency were recruited as the experimental group, and 20 Chinese native speakers were recruited as the control group. The EyeLink 1,000 eye tracker was used to record their reading of four segmentation conditions of Chinese texts, namely, no space condition, word-spaced condition, non-word-spaced condition, and pinyin-spaced condition. Results show that: (1) CSL learners with intermediate Chinese proficiency generally spent less time reading Chinese texts with spaces between words, and they showed more gazes and regressions when reading texts without spaces; (2) Non-word-spaced texts and Pinyin-spaced texts interfere with CSL learners’ reading process; and (3) Intermediate CSL learners show consistent eye movement patterns in the normal no-space condition and word-spaced condition. I conclude that word boundary information can effectively guide CSL learners’ eye movement behaviors and eye saccade planning, thus improving reading efficiency.

Memory-driven eye movements prospectively predict dementia in people at risk of Alzheimer's disease

Introduction

Oculomotor behaviors linked to cognitive performance revealed neurocognitive features of Alzheimer's disease (AD) that can enhance the accuracy of its assessment and diagnosis.

Methods

A sample of 107 participants (i.e., 65 mild cognitive impairment [MCI] and 42 controls) were recruited and followed up for 40 months. At baseline, they underwent assessment with the ViewMind digital biomarker, which draws cognitive-related patterns of eye movement while people perform the visual short-term memory binding task.

Results

Baseline data predicted that 36 patients with MCI would progress to the AD clinical syndrome (ADS Progressing). The remaining 29 MCI patients were predicted to remain as MCI or progress to other forms of dementia. After 40 months of follow-up, 94% of ADS Progressing patients had received a diagnosis of dementia, whereas none of the non-ADS Progressing had.

Discussion

The analysis of eye movement behavior combined with cognitive markers for AD can effectively predict progression to ADS among patients with MCI.

Eye Movement Control in Tibetan Reading: The Roles of Word Length and Frequency

We investigated the effects of word length and frequency on eye movement control during Tibetan reading through two experiments. A preliminary experiment examined the predictive effect of word length and frequency on fixation duration and landing position using multiple linear regression analysis. In the formal experiment, we manipulated the length and frequency of target words simultaneously to investigate the effects of word length and frequency on fixation duration and landing position in Tibetan reading. In this study, we found that: (1) there were significant word-length and word-frequency effects affecting all lexical processing in Tibetan reading; (2) there are preferred viewing locations in Tibetan reading; specifically, for short words, it is the end, whereas for long words, it spans from the center to the beginning of the word; (3) word frequency does not affect preferred viewing location in Tibetan reading; (4) the preferred viewing position and the interaction of word length and viewing position found in this study supported the “strategy-tactics” approach.

Eye movement control in reading Chinese: A matter of strength of character?

This paper explores the processes underlying eye movement control in Chinese reading among a population of young 4th and 5th grade readers. Various proposals to explain the underlying mechanisms involved in eye movement control are examined and the paper concludes that the most likely account is of a two-factor process whereby the character is the main driver for longer saccades and that the word plays a role in shorter ones. A computational model is proposed to provide an integrated account of the dynamic interaction of these two factors.

RastrOS Project: Natural Language Processing contributions to the development of an eye-tracking corpus with predictability norms for Brazilian Portuguese

This article presents RastrOS, a new eye-tracking corpus of eye movement data from university students during silent reading of paragraphs of texts in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The article shows the potential of the corpus for natural language processing (NLP) using it to evaluate the sentence complexity prediction task in BP and it also focuses on the description of NLP resources and methods developed to create the corpus. Specifically, we present: (i) the method used to select the corpus paragraphs from large corpora, using linguistic metrics and clustering algorithms; (ii) the platform for collecting the Cloze test, which is also responsible for creating the project datasets, and (iii) the hybrid semantic similarity method, based on word embedding models and contextualised word representations, used to generate semantic predictability norms. RastrOS can be downloaded from the open science framework repository with the computational infrastructure mentioned above. Datasets with predictability norms of 393 participants and eye-tracking data of 37 participants are available in the OSF repository for this work (https://osf.io/9jxg3/).

Preview frequency effects in reading: evidence from Chinese

Studies about sentence reading have shown that visual and lexical information beyond the currently fixated word can be integrated across fixations. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm has been used widely to explore the extent to which parafoveal information can be processed before a word is fixated on. However, a critical review of the current literature suggests that unrelated mask previews are an unlikely baseline control with zero lexical activation, blurring the nature of experimental effects observed in the paradigm. The present study, therefore, aimed at shedding light on the effect of parafoveal mask properties through a manipulation of preview word frequency. Low-frequency preview words that are unrelated to target words elicited a larger interference than high-frequency preview words. We discuss implications of the preview frequency effect for computational models of eye-movement control in reading.

Eye movements during text reading align with the rate of speech production

Across languages, the speech signal is characterized by a predominant modulation of the amplitude spectrum between about 4.3 and 5.5 Hz, reflecting the production and processing of linguistic information chunks (syllables and words) every ~200 ms. Interestingly, ~200 ms is also the typical duration of eye fixations during reading. Prompted by this observation, we demonstrate that German readers sample written text at ~5 Hz. A subsequent meta-analysis of 142 studies from 14 languages replicates this result and shows that sampling frequencies vary across languages between 3.9 Hz and 5.2 Hz. This variation systematically depends on the complexity of the writing systems (character-based versus alphabetic systems and orthographic transparency). Finally, we empirically demonstrate a positive correlation between speech spectrum and eye movement sampling in low-skilled non-native readers, with tentative evidence from post hoc analysis suggesting the same relationship in low-skilled native readers. On the basis of this convergent evidence, we propose that during reading, our brain's linguistic processing systems imprint a preferred processing rate-that is, the rate of spoken language production and perception-onto the oculomotor system.

The Beijing Sentence Corpus: A Chinese sentence corpus with eye movement data and predictability norms

This report introduces the Beijing Sentence Corpus (BSC). This is a Chinese sentence corpus of eye-tracking data with relatively clear word boundaries. In addition, we report predictability norms for each word in the corpus. Eye movement corpora are available in alphabetic scripts such as English, German, and French. However, there is no publicly available corpus for Chinese. Thus, to study predictive processes during reading in Chinese, it is necessary to establish such a corpus. Also, given the clear word boundaries in the sentences, BSC is especially useful to provide evidence relevant to the theoretical debate of saccade target selection in Chinese. With the large-scale predictability norms, we conducted new analyses based on 60 BSC readers, testing the influences of launch word and target word properties while controlling for visual and oculomotor constraints, as well as sentence and subject-level individual differences. We discuss implications for guidance of eye movements in Chinese reading.

The Natural Stories corpus: a reading-time corpus of English texts containing rare syntactic constructions

It is now a common practice to compare models of human language processing by comparing how well they predict behavioral and neural measures of processing difficulty, such as reading times, on corpora of rich naturalistic linguistic materials. However, many of these corpora, which are based on naturally-occurring text, do not contain many of the low-frequency syntactic constructions that are often required to distinguish between processing theories. Here we describe a new corpus consisting of English texts edited to contain many low-frequency syntactic constructions while still sounding fluent to native speakers. The corpus is annotated with hand-corrected Penn Treebank-style parse trees and includes self-paced reading time data and aligned audio recordings. We give an overview of the content of the corpus, review recent work using the corpus, and release the data.

Eye-movement control during learning and scanning of English pseudoword stimuli: Exposure frequency effects and spacing effects in a visual search task

Wang et al. (Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, in press, 2021) reported a Landolt-C learning and scanning experiment. In a learning session, they simulated exposure frequency effects successfully by training participants to learn target Landolt-C clusters with different exposures. The rate of learning high-frequency (HF) targets were greater than that of learning low-frequency (LF) targets. In a subsequent scanning session, participants were required to scan text-like Landolt-C strings to detect whether any pre-learnt target was embedded in the strings. The Landolt-C strings were displayed under different spacing formats (i.e., spaced format, unspaced format, and unspaced shaded format). However, the simulated exposure frequency effect did not occur in the scanning session. Wang et al. argued one straightforward reason for this might be because participants failed to maintain the memory of pre-learnt target to the scanning session. In the current study, we employed the same learning and scanning paradigm to investigate whether exposure frequency would occur in a target search task by using easier learning materials - pseudoword stimuli. The learning of pseudoword stimuli was much more successful than Landolt-C stimuli. Interestingly, however, we found a very different rate of learning effect such that the rate of learning LF targets was greater than HF targets. To our surprise, we did not find any influence of exposure frequency on eye movements during scanning even when participants were able to identify pre-learnt pseudowords in strings. Learning rate effect, exposure frequency effects, and saccadic targeting during the scanning of strings under different spacing formats are discussed in this paper.

Deafness enhances perceptual span size in Chinese reading: Evidence from a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm

Using a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm, we investigated whether/how deafness affects perceptual processing in Chinese reading. Besides the manipulation of window size, word length of sentences used in the experiment was also manipulated to check whether deafness enhanced the word length effect on perceptual span. Significant interactions of window constraints and deafness and a three-way interaction were observed on reading rate. Smaller effects of window constraints for deaf Chinese readers and nonreliable three-way interactions were observed on forward saccade length. This suggests that deaf Chinese readers exhibit a larger perceptual span, and word length affected the span from which information was acquired for comprehension whereas both deafness and word length might have little impact on the span from which information is acquired for oculomotor targeting during natural reading of Chinese.

The Trade-Off Between Format Familiarity and Word-Segmentation Facilitation in Chinese Reading

In alphabetic writing systems (such as English), the spaces between words mark the word boundaries, and the basic unit of reading is distinguished during visual-level processing. The visual-level information of word boundaries facilitates reading. Chinese is an ideographic language whose text contains no intrinsic inter-word spaces as the marker of word boundaries. Previous studies have shown that the basic processing unit of Chinese reading is also a word. However, findings remain inconsistent regarding whether inserting spaces between words in Chinese text promotes reading performance. Researchers have proposed that there may be a trade-off between format familiarity and the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces. In order to verify this, this study manipulated the format familiarity via reversing the Chinese reading direction from right to left to investigate this issue in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to examine whether inter-word spaces facilitated Chinese reading in an unfamiliar format. Experiment 1 was conducted that 40 native Chinese undergraduates read Chinese sentences from right to left on four format conditions. The results showed faster reading speed and shorter total reading time for the inter-word spaced format. Based on this finding, Experiment 2 examined whether the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces would reduce or disappear after improving the format familiarity; this experiment was conducted that 40 native Chinese undergraduates who did not participate in Experiment 1 read Chinese sentences from right to left on four format conditions after ten-day reading training. There was no significant difference between the total reading time and reading speed in the inter-word spaced format and unspaced format, which suggests that the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces in Chinese reading changed smaller. The combined results of the two experiments suggest that there is indeed a trade-off between format familiarity and the facilitation of word segmentation, which supports the assumption of previous studies.

Lossy-Context Surprisal: An Information-Theoretic Model of Memory Effects in Sentence Processing

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation-based and memory-based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy-context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context-that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language-dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory-based theories, can be derived from lossy-context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality.

Effects of Normative Aging on Eye Movements during Reading

Substantial progress has been made in understanding the mostly detrimental effects of normative aging on eye movements during reading. This article provides a review of research on aging effects on eye movements during reading for different writing systems (i.e., alphabetic systems like English compared to non-alphabetic systems like Chinese), focused on appraising the importance of visual and cognitive factors, considering key methodological issues, and identifying vital questions that need to be addressed and topics for further investigation.

The influence of foveal lexical processing load on parafoveal preview and saccadic targeting during Chinese reading

Whether increased foveal load causes a reduction of parafoveal processing remains equivocal. The present study examined foveal load effects on parafoveal processing in natural Chinese reading. Parafoveal preview of a single-character parafoveal target word was manipulated by using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975; pseudocharacter or identity previews) under high foveal load (low-frequency pretarget word) compared with low foveal load (high-frequency pretarget word) conditions. Despite an effective manipulation of foveal processing load, we obtained no evidence of any modulatory influence on parafoveal processing in first-pass reading times. However, our results clearly showed that saccadic targeting, in relation to forward saccade length from the pretarget word and in relation to target word skipping, was influenced by foveal load and this influence occurred independent of parafoveal preview. Given the optimal experimental conditions, these results provide very strong evidence that preview benefit is not modulated by foveal lexical load during Chinese reading.

The findings of the present study show that foveal processing load, as manipulated through lexical frequency, has no modulatory influence on preview benefit for the subsequent word in a sentence during natural Chinese reading. Foveal processing difficulty does, however, influence saccades that determine where the eyes fixate next, and this influence occurs regardless of preview benefit for the following word. These results pertain directly to the Foveal Load Hypothesis that has received significant scrutiny in recent years. They also directly inform current understanding of the complexities of the relationship between the oculomotor control system that is responsible for positioning the point of fixation during reading and the complex cognitive processes that occur during written Chinese language comprehension.

Alternating-color words influence Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from neural connectivity

In order to investigate how language and attention systems are affected by word boundary information during reading, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment in which text-color in naturally unspaced Chinese sentences were systematically manipulated in three experimental conditions, that is, text-color alternation consistent or inconsistent with word boundary (i.e., alternating-color word and non-word conditions), as well as a mono-color baseline condition. Twenty college students (14 females; 23.1 years old) were required to silently read 72 sentences during fMRI scanning. We found that the conditions of word boundary modulated the brain connections between the visual word form area (VWFA) and dorsal attention regions, and between the VWFA and language-related regions. These results suggest that the coordination between the VWFA and dorsal attention regions plays an important role in grouping characters and guiding the saccade according to perceptual grouping based on color, and that the connection between VWFA and MTG could be the neural mechanism of lexical access during Chinese text reading.

Word segmentation by alternating colors facilitates eye guidance in Chinese reading

During sentence reading, low spatial frequency information afforded by spaces between words is the primary factor for eye guidance in spaced writing systems, whereas saccade generation for unspaced writing systems is less clear and under debate. In the present study, we investigated whether word-boundary information, provided by alternating colors (consistent or inconsistent with word-boundary information) influences saccade-target selection in Chinese. In Experiment 1, as compared to a baseline (i.e., uniform color) condition, word segmentation with alternating color shifted fixation location towards the center of words. In contrast, incorrect word segmentation shifted fixation location towards the beginning of words. In Experiment 2, we used a gaze-contingent paradigm to restrict the color manipulation only to the upcoming parafoveal words and replicated the results, including fixation location effects, as observed in Experiment 1. These results indicate that Chinese readers are capable of making use of parafoveal word-boundary knowledge for saccade generation, even if such information is unfamiliar to them. The present study provides novel support for the hypothesis that word segmentation is involved in the decision about where to fixate next during Chinese reading.

Linguistic processes do not beat visuo-motor constraints, but they modulate where the eyes move regardless of word boundaries: Evidence against top-down word-based eye-movement control during reading

Where readers move their eyes, while proceeding forward along lines of text, has long been assumed to be determined in a top-down word-based manner. According to this classical view, readers of alphabetic languages would invariably program their saccades towards the center of peripheral target words, as selected based on the (expected) needs of ongoing (word-identification) processing, and the variability in within-word landing positions would exclusively result from systematic and random errors. Here we put this predominant hypothesis to a strong test by estimating the respective influences of language-related variables (word frequency and word predictability) and lower-level visuo-motor factors (word length and saccadic launch-site distance to the beginning of words) on both word-skipping likelihood and within-word landing positions. Our eye-movement data were collected while forty participants read 316 pairs of sentences, that differed only by one word, the prime; this was either semantically related or unrelated to a following test word of variable frequency and length. We found that low-level visuo-motor variables largely predominated in determining which word would be fixated next, and where in a word the eye would land. In comparison, language-related variables only had tiny influences. Yet, linguistic variables affected both the likelihood of word skipping and within-word initial landing positions, all depending on the words’ length and how far on average the eye landed from the word boundaries, but pending the word could benefit from peripheral preview. These findings provide a strong case against the predominant word-based account of eye-movement guidance during reading, by showing that saccades are primarily driven by low-level visuo-motor processes, regardless of word boundaries, while being overall subject to subtle, one-off, language-based modulations. Our results also suggest that overall distributions of saccades’ landing positions, instead of truncated within-word landing-site distributions, should be used for a better understanding of eye-movement guidance during reading.

Adult Age Differences in Eye Movements During Reading: The Evidence From Chinese

Objectives

Substantial evidence indicates that older readers of alphabetic languages (e.g., English and German) compensate for age-related reading difficulty by employing a more risky reading strategy in which words are skipped more frequently. The effects of healthy aging on reading behavior for nonalphabetic languages, like Chinese, are largely unknown, although this would reveal the extent to which age-related changes in reading strategy are universal. Accordingly, the present research used measures of eye movements to investigate adult age differences in Chinese reading.

Method

The eye movements of young (18-30 years) and older (60+ years) Chinese readers were recorded.

Results

The older adults exhibited typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty. But rather than employing a more risky reading strategy compared with the younger readers, the older adults read more carefully by skipping words infrequently, making shorter forward eye movements, and fixating closer to the beginnings of two-character target words in sentences.

Discussion

In contrast with the findings for alphabetic languages, older Chinese readers appear to compensate for age-related reading difficulty by employing a more careful reading strategy. Age-related changes in reading strategy therefore appear to be language specific, rather than universal, and may reflect the specific visual and linguistic requirements of the writing system.

The effects of parafoveal word frequency and segmentation on saccade targeting during Chinese reading

Two eye-movement experiments are reported in which a boundary paradigm was used to manipulate the presence versus absence of boundaries for high-frequency and low-frequency target words in the parafovea. In Experiment 1, this was done by introducing a blank space after the target words, whereas in Experiment 2 this was done by rendering the target words in red. In both experiments, higher frequency targets engendered longer saccades, whereas the presence of parafoveal word boundaries engendered shorter saccades. This pattern suggests the operation of two countermanding saccade-targeting mechanisms: one that uses parafoveal processing difficulty to adjust saccade lengths and a second that uses word boundaries to direct the eyes toward specific saccade targets. The implications of these findings for models of eye-movement control during reading are discussed, as are suggestions for integrating dynamic-adjustment and default-targeting accounts.

Effects of word length on eye guidance differ for young and older Chinese readers

Effects of word length on where and for how long readers fixate within text are preserved in older age for alphabetic languages like English that use spaces to demarcate word boundaries. However, word length effects for older readers of naturally unspaced, character-based languages like Chinese are unknown. Accordingly, we examined age differences in eye movements for short (2-character) and long (4-character) words during Chinese reading. Word length effects on eye-fixation times were greater for older than younger adults. We suggest this age difference is due to older adults’ saccades landing more rarely at optimal intraword locations, especially in longer words.

Investigating word length effects in Chinese reading

A word’s length in English is fundamental in determining whether readers fixate it, and how long they spend processing it during reading. Chinese is unspaced, and most words are two characters long: Is word length an important cue to eye guidance in Chinese reading? Eye movements were recorded as participants read sentences containing a one-, two-, or three-character word matched for frequency. Results showed that longer words took longer to process (primarily driven by refixations). Furthermore, skips were fewer, incoming saccades longer, and landing positions further to the right of long than short words. Additional analyses of a three-character region (matched stroke number) showed an incremental processing cost when character(s) belonged to different, rather than the same, word. These results demonstrate that word length affects both lexical identification and saccade target selection in Chinese reading.

During reading we make saccadic eye movements in order to fixate words in the high-acuity foveal region of the retina. For each saccade, the oculomotor control system makes decisions about when a saccade should be initiated, and to where the point of fixation should be targeted. Written Chinese does not have spaces between words, and word length is quite short and less variant relative to English text. The present study provides the first well controlled demonstration of word length effects on eye movement control during natural Chinese reading. This study demonstrates that the oculomotor control system is sensitive to Chinese word length information during reading, and Chinese readers are able to use this information in deciding when and where to move the eyes during reading.

The Distinct Roles of Dorsal and Ventral Visual Systems in Naming of Chinese Characters

We aimed to investigate the role of dorsal and ventral visual systems in rapid naming of simple Chinese characters. Twenty college students (10 female; M_age = 22.5 years) were required to covertly read a character- and a cross-matrix during an fMRI experiment. A basic prosaccade and a prosaccade-naming task were also performed to confirm the functional significance of the findings. The results of whole brain analysis showed that both dorsal and ventral visual systems were activated in the character-matrix reading. The cross-matrix scanning elicited weaker activation in the left middle frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Next, whereas both top-down and bottom-up effective connectivities (ECs) were found between these two systems in the character-matrix reading, only top-down ECs were observed in the cross-matrix scanning. Moreover, in the character-matrix reading, we found a negative correlation between the reaction time of naming in the prosaccade-naming task and the EC strength from visual word form area to superior temporal gyrus and a positive correlation between the reaction time in the basic prosaccade task and the EC strength from middle frontal gyrus to intraparietal sulcus. The cross-matrix scanning did not show any brain-behavior relationship. These results suggest that while the dorsal visual system is mainly engaged in eye-movement control, the ventral system is associated more with orthographic processing and orthography-phonology mapping.

The modulation of eye movement control by word length in reading Chinese

Given there are no interword spaces marking word boundaries in Chinese text, it remains unclear how information about word length influences eye movement control during the reading of Chinese text. In this research, we set up strict controls for word frequency and other word properties, to study this knowledge gap. In Experiment 1A and Experiment 1B, a between-subjects design was used. Forty-eight pairs of one- and two-character words were selected as target words in Experiment 1A, while the same amount of two- and three-character words were selected in Experiment 1B. Conversely, a within-subjects design was used in Experiment 2. Sixty sets of one-, two- and three-character words were selected as target words. The results showed that long words were skipped less often and fixated on more often than short words. Total time was shorter for shorter than for longer words but first fixation durations were longer for one- than for two-character words. Most importantly, we did not find reliable evidence to support the view that word length could modulate initial landing position and incoming saccade length in the length-matched region analyses. These findings suggest that word length influences eye movement control during reading Chinese in a way that is slightly different from that in the process of reading English.

The dynamic adjustment of saccades during Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements and simulations

This article reports an eye-movement experiment in which participants scanned continuous sequences of Landolt-Cs for target circles to examine the visual and oculomotor constraints that might jointly determine where the eyes move in a task that engages many of the perceptual and motor processes involved in Chinese reading but without lexical or linguistic processing. The lengths of the saccades entering the Landolt-C clusters were modulated by the processing difficulty (i.e., gap sizes) of those clusters. Simulations using implemented versions of default-targeting (Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu, 2010) versus dynamic-adjustment (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016) models of saccadic targeting indicated that the latter provided a better account of our participants' eye movements, further supporting the hypothesis that Chinese readers "decide" where to move their eyes by adjusting saccade length in response to processing difficulty rather than by selecting default saccade targets. We discuss this hypothesis in relation to both what is known about saccadic targeting during the reading of English versus Chinese and current models of eye-movement control in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Russian Sentence Corpus: Benchmark measures of eye movements in reading in Russian

This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading-the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC). Russian uses the Cyrillic script, which has not yet been investigated in cross-linguistic eye movement research. As in every language studied so far, we confirmed the expected effects of low-level parameters, such as word length, frequency, and predictability, on the eye movements of skilled Russian readers. These findings allow us to add Slavic languages using Cyrillic script (exemplified by Russian) to the growing number of languages with different orthographies, ranging from the Roman-based European languages to logographic Asian ones, whose basic eye movement benchmarks conform to the universal comparative science of reading (Share, 2008). We additionally report basic descriptive corpus statistics and three exploratory investigations of the effects of Russian morphology on the basic eye movement measures, which illustrate the kinds of questions that researchers can answer using the RSC. The annotated corpus is freely available from its project page at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/x5q2r/ .

The visual attention span deficit in Chinese children with reading fluency difficulty

With reading development, some children fail to learn to read fluently. However, reading fluency difficulty (RFD) has not been fully investigated. The present study explored the underlying mechanism of RFD from the aspect of visual attention span. Fourteen Chinese children with RFD and fourteen age-matched normal readers participated. The visual 1-back task was adopted to examine visual attention span. Reaction time and accuracy were recorded, and relevant d-prime (d') scores were computed. Results showed that children with RFD exhibited lower accuracy and lower d' values than the controls did in the visual 1-back task, revealing a visual attention span deficit. Further analyses on d' values revealed that the attention distribution seemed to exhibit an inverted U-shaped pattern without lateralization for normal readers, but a W-shaped pattern with a rightward bias for children with RFD, which was discussed based on between-group variation in reading strategies. Results of the correlation analyses showed that visual attention span was associated with reading fluency at the sentence level for normal readers, but was related to reading fluency at the single-character level for children with RFD. The different patterns in correlations between groups revealed that visual attention span might be affected by the variation in reading strategies. The current findings extend previous data from alphabetic languages to Chinese, a logographic language with a particularly deep orthography, and have implications for reading-dysfluency remediation.

The role of character positional frequency on Chinese word learning during natural reading

Readers’ eye movements were recorded to examine the role of character positional frequency on Chinese lexical acquisition during reading and its possible modulation by word spacing. In Experiment 1, three types of pseudowords were constructed based on each character’s positional frequency, providing congruent, incongruent, and no positional word segmentation information. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences, for the learning and the test phases. In the learning phase, half the participants read sentences in word-spaced format, and half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read sentences in unspaced format. The results showed an inhibitory effect of character positional frequency upon the efficiency of word learning when processing incongruent pseudowords both in the learning and test phase, and also showed facilitatory effect of word spacing in the learning phase, but not at test. Most importantly, these two characteristics exerted independent influences on word segmentation. In Experiment 2, three analogous types of pseudowords were created whilst controlling for orthographic neighborhood size. The results of the two experiments were consistent, except that the effect of character positional frequency was absent in the test phase in Experiment 2. We argue that the positional frequency of a word’s constituent characters may influence the character-to-word assignment in a process that likely incorporates both lexical segmentation and identification.

Word predictability affects saccade length in Chinese reading: An evaluation of the dynamic-adjustment model

How does a word's within-sentence predictability influence saccade length during reading? An eye-movement experiment manipulating the predictability of target words indicates that, relative to low-predictability target words, high-predictability targets elicit longer saccades to themselves. Simulations using computational models that respectively instantiate the targeting of saccades to default locations (Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 705-725, 2010) versus the dynamic adjustment of saccade length (Liu, Reichle, & Li in Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition, 41, 1229-1236, 2015, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 1008-1025, 2016) indicate that the latter model provides a more accurate and parsimonious account of saccade-targeting behavior in Chinese reading. The implications of these conclusions are discussed with respect to current models of eye-movement control during reading and the necessity to explain eye movements in languages as different as Chinese versus English.

Further Tests of a Dynamic-Adjustment Account of Saccade Targeting During the Reading of Chinese

There are two accounts of how readers of unspaced writing systems (e.g., Chinese) know where to move their eyes: (a) saccades are directed toward default targets (e.g., centers of words that have been segmented in the parafovea); or (b) saccade lengths are adjusted dynamically, as a function of ongoing parafoveal processing. This article reports an eye-movement experiment supporting the latter hypothesis by demonstrating that the slope of the relationship between the saccade launch site on word N and the subsequent fixation landing site on word N + 1 is > 1, suggesting that saccades are lengthened from launch sites that afford more parafoveal processing. This conclusion is then evaluated and confirmed via simulations using implementations of both hypotheses (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016), with a discussion of these results for our understanding of saccadic targeting during reading and existing models of eye-movement control.

The Word Frequency Effect on Saccade Targeting during Chinese Reading: Evidence from a Survival Analysis of Saccade Length

Our study employs distributional analysis (i.e., survival analysis) to examine how the frequency of target words influences saccade lengths into and out of these target words in Chinese reading. The results of survival analysis indicate the survival curves in the high- and low-frequency conditions diverge for a short saccade length, with more than 80% of the lengths of incoming and outgoing saccades being larger than the divergence points. These results as well as simulations using the novel Dynamic-adjustment Model of saccadic targeting (Liu et al., 2016) are consistent with previous mean-based results and provide more precise information to support this novel model. The implications for saccade target selection during the reading of Chinese are discussed.

A Developmental Study of Chinese Children's Word and Character Reading

To investigate the relationship between Chinese children's character and word reading, 62 third and 50 fifth grade children in Hong Kong were asked to read single characters and words that were comprised of these characters. Results showed that words helped children to recognize characters for both grades of children. Compared to older children, younger children's character reading was more likely to rely on the word that the character appeared in as a component; younger children made more errors in confusing the correct character with words related to it. Younger children's greater rate of meaning-related errors also underscored the role of the word in their character learning. This study confirmed the important role of words in children's character learning, and provided evidence for a developmental pattern of character and word reading in Chinese.

Effects of adults aging on word encoding in reading Chinese: evidence from disappearing text

The effect of aging on the process of word encoding for fixated words and words presented to the right of the fixation point during the reading of sentences in Chinese was investigated with two disappearing text experiments. The results of Experiment 1 showed that only the 40-ms onset disappearance of word n disrupted young adults' reading performance. However, for old readers, the disappearance of word n caused disruptions until the onset time was 120 ms. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the disappearance of word n + 1 did not cause disruptions to young adults, but these conditions made old readers spend more time reading a sentence compared to the normal display condition. These results indicated a reliable aging effect on the process of word encoding when reading Chinese, and that the encoding process in the preview frame was more susceptible to normal aging compared to that in the fixation frame. We propose that sensory, cognitive, and specific factors related to the Chinese language are important contributors to these age-related differences.

Underlying Skills of Oral and Silent Reading Fluency in Chinese: Perspective of Visual Rapid Processing

Reading fluency is a critical skill to improve the quality of our daily life and working efficiency. The majority of previous studies focused on oral reading fluency rather than silent reading fluency, which is a much more dominant reading mode that is used in middle and high school and for leisure reading. It is still unclear whether the oral and silent reading fluency involved the same underlying skills. To address this issue, the present study examined the relationship between the visual rapid processing and Chinese reading fluency in different modes. Fifty-eight undergraduate students took part in the experiment. The phantom contour paradigm and the visual 1-back task were adopted to measure the visual rapid temporal and simultaneous processing respectively. These two tasks reflected the temporal and spatial dimensions of visual rapid processing separately. We recorded the temporal threshold in the phantom contour task, as well as reaction time and accuracy in the visual 1-back task. Reading fluency was measured in both single-character and sentence levels. Fluent reading of single characters was assessed with a paper-and-pencil lexical decision task, and a sentence verification task was developed to examine reading fluency on a sentence level. The reading fluency test in each level was conducted twice (i.e., oral reading and silent reading). Reading speed and accuracy were recorded. The correlation analysis showed that the temporal threshold in the phantom contour task did not correlate with the scores of the reading fluency tests. Although, the reaction time in visual 1-back task correlated with the reading speed of both oral and silent reading fluency, the comparison of the correlation coefficients revealed a closer relationship between the visual rapid simultaneous processing and silent reading. Furthermore, the visual rapid simultaneous processing exhibited a significant contribution to reading fluency in silent mode but not in oral reading mode. These findings suggest that the underlying mechanism between oral and silent reading fluency is different at the beginning of the basic visual coding. The current results also might reveal a potential modulation of the language characteristics of Chinese on the relationship between visual rapid processing and reading fluency.

Morphological structure influences the initial landing position in words during reading Finnish

The preferred viewing location in words [Rayner, K. (1979). Eye guidance in reading: Fixation locations within words. Perception, 8, 21-30] during reading is near the word centre. Parafoveal word length information is utilized to guide the eyes toward it. A recent study by Yan and colleagues [Yan, M., Zhou, W., Shu, H., Yusupu, R., Miao, D., Krügel, A., & Kliegl, R. (2014). Eye movements guided by morphological structure: Evidence from the Uighur language. Cognition, 132, 181-215] demonstrated that the word's morphological structure may also be used in saccadic targeting. The study was conducted in a morphologically rich language, Uighur. The present study aimed at replicating their main findings in another morphologically rich language, Finnish. Similarly to Yan et al., it was found that the initial fixation landed closer to the word beginning for morphologically complex than for monomorphemic words. Word frequency, saccade launch site, and word length were also found to influence the initial landing position. It is concluded that in addition to low-level factors (word length and saccade launch site), also higher level factors related to the word's morphological structure and frequency may be utilized in saccade programming during reading.

Semantic and plausibility preview benefit effects in English: Evidence from eye movements

Theories of preview benefit in reading hinge on integration across saccades and the idea that preview benefit is greater the more similar the preview and target are. Schotter (2013) reported preview benefit from a synonymous preview, but it is unclear whether this effect occurs because of similarity between the preview and target (i.e., integration), or because of contextual fit of the preview-synonyms satisfy both accounts. Studies in Chinese have found evidence for preview benefit for words that are unrelated to the target, but are contextually plausible (Yang, Li, Wang, Slattery, & Rayner, 2014; Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012), which is incompatible with an integration account but supports a contextual fit account. Here, we used plausible and implausible unrelated previews in addition to plausible synonym, antonym, and identical previews to further investigate these accounts for readers of English. Early reading measures were shorter for all plausible preview conditions compared to the implausible preview condition. In later reading measures, a benefit for the plausible unrelated preview condition was not observed. In a second experiment, we asked questions that probed whether the reader encoded the preview or target. Readers were more likely to report the preview when they had skipped the word and not regressed to it, and when the preview was plausible. Thus, under certain circumstances, the preview word is processed to a high level of representation (i.e., semantic plausibility) regardless of its relationship to the target, but its influence on reading is relatively short-lived, being replaced by the target word, when fixated. (PsycINFO Database Record

No Evidence for a Saccadic Range Effect for Visually Guided and Memory-Guided Saccades in Simple Saccade-Targeting Tasks

Saccades to single targets in peripheral vision are typically characterized by an undershoot bias. Putting this bias to a test, Kapoula [1] used a paradigm in which observers were presented with two different sets of target eccentricities that partially overlapped each other. Her data were suggestive of a saccadic range effect (SRE): There was a tendency for saccades to overshoot close targets and undershoot far targets in a block, suggesting that there was a response bias towards the center of eccentricities in a given block. Our Experiment 1 was a close replication of the original study by Kapoula [1]. In addition, we tested whether the SRE is sensitive to top-down requirements associated with the task, and we also varied the target presentation duration. In Experiments 1 and 2, we expected to replicate the SRE for a visual discrimination task. The simple visual saccade-targeting task in Experiment 3, entailing minimal top-down influence, was expected to elicit a weaker SRE. Voluntary saccades to remembered target locations in Experiment 3 were expected to elicit the strongest SRE. Contrary to these predictions, we did not observe a SRE in any of the tasks. Our findings complement the results reported by Gillen et al. [2] who failed to find the effect in a saccade-targeting task with a very brief target presentation. Together, these results suggest that unlike arm movements, saccadic eye movements are not biased towards making saccades of a constant, optimal amplitude for the task.

Word processing during reading sentences in patients with schizophrenia: evidences from the eyetracking technique

PURPOSE

The current study analyze the effect of word properties (i.e., word length, word frequency and word predictability) on the eye movement behavior of patients with schizophrenia (SZ) compared to age-matched controls.

METHOD

18 SZ patients and 40 age matched controls participated in the study. Eye movements were recorded during reading regular sentences by using the eyetracking technique. Eye movement analyses were performed using linear mixed models.

FINDINGS

Analysis of eye movements revealed that patients with SZ decreased the amount of single fixations, increased their total number of second pass fixations compared with healthy individuals (Controls). In addition, SZ patients showed an increase in gaze duration, compared to Controls. Interestingly, the effects of current word frequency and current word length processing were similar in Controls and SZ patients. The high rate of second pass fixations and its low rate in single fixation might reveal impairments in working memory when integrating neighbor words. In contrast, word frequency and length processing might require less complex mechanisms, which were functioning in SZ patients.

CONCLUSION

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study measuring how patients with SZ process dynamically well-defined words embedded in regular sentences. The findings suggest that evaluation of the resulting changes in eye movement behavior may supplement current symptom-based diagnosis.

The effect of word frequency and parafoveal preview on saccade length during the reading of Chinese

There are currently 2 theoretical accounts of how readers of Chinese select their saccade targets: (a) by moving their eyes to specific saccade targets (i.e., the default-targeting hypothesis) and (b) by adjusting their saccade lengths to accommodate lexical processing (i.e., the dynamic-adjustment hypothesis). In this article, we first report the results of an eye-movement experiment using a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. This experiment demonstrates that both target-word frequency and its preview validity modulate the lengths of the saccades entering and exiting the target words, with longer saccades to/from high-frequency words when their preview was available. We then report the results of 2 simulations using computational models that instantiate the core theoretical assumptions of the default-targeting and dynamic-adjustment hypotheses. Comparisons of these simulations indicate that the dynamic-adjustment hypothesis provides a better quantitative account of the data from our experiment using fewer free parameters. We conclude by discussing evidence for dynamic saccade adjustment during the reading of alphabetic languages, and why such a heuristic may be necessary to fully explain eye-movement control during the reading of both alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages. (PsycINFO Database Record

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.

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.

Verbal Short-Term Memory Deficits in Chinese Children with Dyslexia may not be a Problem with the Activation of Phonological Representations

This study explored the underlying mechanism of the verbal short-term memory deficit in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia. Twenty-four children with dyslexia and 28 age-matched normal readers participated in the study. They were required to memorize a visually presented series of six Chinese characters and identify them from a list also including code-specific distracters and non-code-specific distracters. Error rates were recorded and were higher for code-specific distracters in all three conditions, revealing phonological, visual, and semantic similarity effects respectively. Group comparisons showed a stronger phonological similarity effect in dyslexic group, suggesting intact activation of phonological representations of target characters. Children with dyslexia also exhibited a greater semantic similarity effect, revealing stronger activation of semantic representations, while visual similarity effects were equivalent to controls. These results suggest that the verbal short-term memory deficit in Chinese dyslexics might not stem from insufficient activation of phonological information. Based the semantic activation of target characters in dyslexics is greater than in controls, it is possible that the memory deficit of dyslexia is related with deficient inhibition of target semantic representations in short-term memory.