Eye movements during reading Simplified and Traditional Chinese

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The overarching goal of this research is to understand the dynamics of attention and eye movements during reading. Specifically, the problem can be summarized with the following question: When during a fixation does which kind of information (visual, sublexical, lexical) become available from the fixated word and the neighboring words? There are theoretical controversies about (1) whether words in the mental lexicon are accessed (a) in strict serial order of their appearance in sentences or (b) in parallel and (2) whether programming of eye movements is (a) strictly or (b) only partially linked to lexical access. The core differences between these theoretical positions are implemented in competing computational models. Our research tries to make the case for 1b and 2b. Due to the more direct mapping of components to the meaning of characters in Chinese than the mapping of letters to the meaning of words in alphabetic script, the Chinese writing system is uniquely suited to address the controversy about distributed lexical processing. Moreover, due to the absence of spaces between words in Chinese, eye-movement control during reading must rely more strongly on character transition probabilities for word segmentation than reading in German. Results of the first phase of this project are in support of our theoretical positions. Indeed, the results from reading of Chinese have paved the way for recent experiments with similar results from reading of German. The renewal project is again carried out in collaboration with Prof. Hua Shu, Beijing Normal University, China, and Prof. Jie-Li Tsai, Taipei, Taiwan. There are three main project goals for the extension of this project: (1) time course of parafoveal morpho-semantic activation, (2) language-independent and language-specific aspects of eye-movement control during reading, and (3) joint analysis of landing position and fixation durations as a marked point process (i.e., a special kind of spatial point process).