Morphological structure influences saccade generation in Chinese reading

Recent studies have demonstrated that saccadic programming in reading is not only determined by low-level visual factors. High-level morphological effects on saccade have been shown in two morphologically rich languages. In the present study, we examined the underlying mechanism of such morphological influences by comparing the processes of reading three-character Chinese compound words that differ in their structures in terms of morphological decomposition. Consistent with earlier reports, our results showed an effect of morphological structure on saccade. The readers' first-fixation location shifted further away from the beginning of the word, when the last two characters were more morphologically bounded and thus formed a [1 + 2] structure, than when the first two characters were more bounded (i.e., a [2 + 1] structure). The results are not accountable by a processing difficulty hypothesis, which proposes that saccade amplitude is determined by morphological complexity; rather, they suggest that Chinese readers parafoveally decompose a word and spontaneously target its longer stem, thus reflecting parafoveal access to words' stems.

Automated summary

Recent studies have shown that saccadic programming in reading is influenced not only by low-level visual factors, but also by high-level morphological effects. This study examined the mechanism underlying such morphological influences by comparing the reading processes of three-character Chinese compound words with different morphological structures. The results revealed that morphological structure affects saccade, as readers tend to fixate further away from the beginning of a word when the last two characters are more morphologically bounded and form a [1 + 2] structure.