There is no relationship between preferred viewing location and word segmentation in Chinese reading

Abstract

In Chinese, as there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries, readers usually do not target their eyes to the centre of the word as readers of English do. Previous studies showed that the distribution of the initial landing positions on a word (the PVL curve) peaked at the beginning of a word when there was more than one fixation; but peaked at the centre of a word if there was only one fixation on the word. Based on this phenomenon, it was argued that Chinese readers move their eyes to the beginning of a word if they cannot correctly segment words in the parafovea, but move to the centre of a word if they can. In the present study, we implemented a natural sentence reading task in Experiment 1 and a shuffled-character reading task in Experiment 2 to test whether the above PVL phenomenon was in fact caused by word segmentation. In both experiments, we found that the different PVL patterns in multiple- and single-fixation cases occurred not only for a 3-character word region but also for a 3-character nonword region. These results suggest that the different PVL curves in multiple- and single-fixation cases are likely to be due to a statistical artefact instead of parafoveal word segmentation.