Effects of anomalous characters and small stroke omissions on eye movements during the reading of Chinese sentences

Abstract

We investigated the influence of typographical errors (typos) on eye movements and word recognition in Chinese reading. Participants' eye movements were tracked as they read sentences in which the target words were presented (1) normally, (2) with the initial stroke of the first characters removed (the omitted stroke condition) or (3) the first characters replaced by anomalous characters (the anomalous character condition). The results indicated that anomalous characters caused longer fixation durations and shorter outgoing forward saccade lengths than the correct words. This finding is consistent with the prediction of the theory of the processing-based strategy. Additionally, anomalous characters strongly disrupted lexical processing and whole sentence comprehension, but small stroke omissions did not. Implications of the effect of processing difficulty on forward saccade targeting for models of eye movement control during Chinese reading are discussed.

Abstract

Practitioner Summary: A better understanding of the effects of different types of spelling errors on eye movements and sentence reading could provide valuable evidence to highlight the importance of correct spelling. We find that readers' oculomotor control system may be flexible and able to adapt to unusual presentation effectively.

Keywords::

• eye movements
• typographical errors
• saccade length
• Chinese reading

Acknowledgements

We thank Jinmian Yang and Meng Zhai for helpful comments on earlier version of this paper.

Notes

^1. To ensure that the properties of the first and second characters were comparable in the normal condition, 24 participants' eye movements were recorded when they read 72 normal sentences. None of them took part in the main experiment or norming tasks. The apparatus and procedure were the same as those in the main experiment described. The pair-wise t-tests showed that there was no significant difference in fixation probability on the first (0.57) and second (0.60) characters of the target words, t₁ (23) = − 1.0, p = 0.33, t₂ (71) = − 1.25, p = 0.22. The results replicated prior findings that Chinese readers do not select any special position within a word as the saccade target (Li et al. 2014; Li, Liu, and Rayner 2011; Tsai and McConkie 2003; Yang and McConkie 1999).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academic Sciences [KSCX2-YW-BR-6]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31070904], [31000505]; Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences [Y3CX121005].