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

• Published in: Ergonomics 2014-11, Vol.57 (11), p.1659-1669
• Main Authors: Liu, Pingping, Li, Weijun, Han, Buxin, Li, Xingshan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied physiology; Biological and medical sciences; Chinese reading; Control systems; Ergonomics; Ergonomics. Human factors; Ergonomics. Work place. Occupational physiology; Error analysis; Eye Movement Measurements; Eye Movements; Female; Fixation, Ocular; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human physiology applied to population studies and life conditions. Human ecophysiology; Humans; Language; Male; Medical sciences; Neurology; Occupational psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Readers; Reading; Reading comprehension; saccade length; Sentences; Space life sciences; Strategy; Strokes; typographical errors; Vascular diseases and vascular malformations of the nervous system
• ISSN: 0014-0139; 1366-5847
• DOI: 10.1080/00140139.2014.945492

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. 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.