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Additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency on eye movements during Chinese reading

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Abstract

Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded for sentences in which high- and low-frequency target words were presented normally or with reduced stimulus quality in two experiments. We found stimulus quality and word frequency produced strong additive effects on fixation durations for target words. The results demonstrate that stimulus quality and word frequency affect different stages of processing (e.g., visual processing and lexical processing). These results are consistent with the findings of previous single-word lexical decision studies, which showed that stimulus quality manipulation primarily affects the early preattentive stage of visual processing, whereas word frequency affects lexical processes. We discuss these findings in terms of the role of stimulus quality in word recognition and in relation to the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control.

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  1. http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/index.jsp?dir=xiandai. Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academic Sciences (KSCX2-YW-BR-6), by a Grant from the Natural Science Foundation of China (31070904), and by a grant from Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y3CX121005). We thank Kevin Paterson for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. We thank Keith Rayner and an anonymous reviewer for helpful input on this paper. We also thank Yanping Liu for his helpful comments concerning statistical issues addressed in this article.

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  1. Center on Aging Psychology, Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Pingping Liu & Buxin Han

  2. Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xingshan Li

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  1. Pingping Liu
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Liu, P., Li, X. & Han, B. Additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency on eye movements during Chinese reading. Read Writ 28, 199–215 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9521-4

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