Eye movement control in reading unspaced text: the case of the Japanese script (original) (raw)
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Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1989
In Experiment 1, duration of eye fixations, saccade magnitude, saccade velocity, and regressive eye movements were measured during alphabet-like kana-(both katakana and hirakana) and logographic kanji-based Japanese text reading. The results suggest that katakana reading required longer fixation durations (about 240 msec) with small saccade magnitude (about 3 0 , which corresponds to 3.5 letters), whereas kanji-based reading required shorter fixation durations (about 170 msec) with larger saccade magnitude (about 50, which corresponds to 6 letters). Eye movement characteristics ofhirakana-based text fell in between. The frequency of the regressive eye movements was found to be significantly large for katakana text. In Experiment 2, interlanguage (English-Japanese) comparison was made with changing difficulty levels. The results showed that, for texts of the same difficulty, English required longer fixation durations from Japanese students than did Japanese texts, but no significant difference was found between difficulty levels. These results strongly suggest that the text processing for phonogram-based kana components and ideogram-based kanji components was different in terms of reading strategies, and that longer fixation durations were needed by Japanese students for reading English as compared with Japanese texts.
Eye movements while reading an unspaced writing system: The case of Thai
Vision Research, 2013
Thai has an alphabetic script with a distinctive feature -it has no spaces between words. Since previous research with spaced alphabetic systems (e.g., English) has suggested that readers use spaces to guide eye movements, it is of interest to investigate what physical factors might guide Thai readers' eye movements. Here the effects of word-initial and word-final position-specific character frequency, wordboundary bigram frequency, and overall word frequency on 30 Thai adults' eye movements when reading unspaced and spaced text was investigated. Linear mixed-effects model analyses of viewing time measures (first fixation duration, single fixation duration, and gaze duration) and of landing sites were conducted. Thai readers tended to land their first fixation at or near the centre of words, just as readers of spaced texts do. A critical determinant of this was word boundary characters: higher position-specific frequency of initial and of final characters significantly facilitated landing sites closer to the word centre while word-boundary bigram frequency appeared to behave as a proxy for initial and final position-specific character frequency. It appears, therefore, that Thai readers make use of the position-specific frequencies of word boundary characters in targeting words and directing eye movements to an optimal landing site.
The role of interword spacing in reading Japanese: An eye movement study
Vision research, 2007
The present study investigated the role of interword spacing in a naturally unspaced language, Japanese. Eye movements were registered of native Japanese readers reading pure Hiragana (syllabic) and mixed Kanji-Hiragana (ideographic and syllabic) text in spaced and unspaced conditions. Interword spacing facilitated both word identification and eye guidance when reading syllabic script, but not when the script contained ideographic characters. We conclude that in reading Hiragana interword spacing serves as an effective segmentation cue. In contrast, spacing information in mixed Kanji-Hiragana text is redundant, since the visually salient Kanji characters serve as effective segmentation cues by themselves.
Development of text reading in Japanese: an eye movement study
Reading and Writing, 2014
This study examined age-group differences in eye movements among third-grade, fifth-grade, and adult Japanese readers. In Experiment 1, Japanese children, but not adults, showed a longer fixation time on logographic kanji words than on phonologically transparent hiragana words. Further, an age-group difference was found in the first fixation duration on hiragana words but not on kanji words, suggesting character-type-dependent reading development in Japanese children. Examination of the distributions of saccade landing positions revealed that, like adults, both third and fifth graders fixated more on kanji than on hiragana characters, which suggests that even young children utilize the same oculomotor control strategy (the kanji targeting strategy) as Japanese adults. In Experiment 2, we examined whether the proportion of kanji characters in a text affected adult reading performance. Japanese adults made more refixations and regressions in texts with a high proportion of hiragana characters. The results of both experiments suggest that differences between kanji and kana affect the reading efficiency of school-age children and that maturation of reading skills allows adults to optimize their strategy in reading kanji and kana mixed texts.
Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2013
In English and other alphabetic systems read from left to right, the useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend 14-15 character spaces to the right of each fixation, but only 3-4 character spaces to the left, and certainly no farther than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is remarkably small and seems inconsistent with the general bilateral symmetry of vision. Accordingly, in the present study we investigated the influence of a fundamental component of text to the left of fixation-interword spaces-using a well-established eyetracking paradigm in which invisible boundaries were set up along individual sentence displays that were then read. Each boundary corresponded to the leftmost edge of a word in a sentence, so that as the eyes crossed a boundary, interword spaces in the text to the left of that word were obscured (by inserting a letter x). The proximity of the obscured text during each fixational pause w...
Eye movements when reading transposed text: The importance of word-beginning letters
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2008
Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words with transposed letters compared to the normal baseline condition, and the greatest disruption was observed for word-initial transpositions. In Experiment 1, transpositions within low frequency words led to longer reading times than when letters were transposed within high frequency words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the position of word-initial letters is most critical even when parafoveal preview of words to the right of fixation is unavailable. The findings have important implications for the roles of different letter positions in word recognition and the effects of parafoveal preview on word recognition processes.
Linguistic and nonlinguistic influences on the eyes' landing positions during reading
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2006
Two eye tracking experiments show that, for near launch sites, the eyes land nearer to the beginning of words with orthographically irregular than regular initial letter sequences. In addition, the characteristics of words, at least at the level of orthography, influence the direction and length of within word saccades. Importantly, these effects hold both for lower case and visually less distinctive upper case text.
Reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text: Evidence from eye movements
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2008
Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading.