Preferred Viewing Locations and Wrap-up Effects in Hong Kong Corpus of Chinese Sentence and Passage Reading

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a mushrooming of reading corpora that have been built by means of eye tracking. This dissertation showcases a recently released Chinese corpus, namely, Hong Kong Corpus of Chinese Sentence and Passage Reading (HKC for brevity), a large-scale corpus of natural reading in a within-subject design. It documents a collection of 28 eye-movement measures yielded from 98 native Chinese adults’ reading of 300 single-line sentences and 7 multiline passages (of 5,250 and 4,967 word tokens, respectively). Based on the HKC, we describe its characteristics, verify its data validity, and delve into two specific linguistic phenomena, preferred viewing location (PVL) and sentence wrap-up.

To demonstrate typical patterns of how readers read in the HKC, we chose several representative measures (e.g., reading speed, fixation durations, and skipping probability) and analysed their descriptive statistics. Moreover, the data validity of the HKC was assessed by using linear mixed-effects models (LMMs, Baayen et al., 2008; Bates, 2010) and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. We examined the predictive power of three linguistic properties on eye movements, i.e., scenarios (of sentence and passage reading), visual complexity (in types of word length, stroke, and pixel), and frequencies (in types of word frequency and character frequency). Information of the latter two properties was referred from Chinese Lexical Database (CLD, Sun et al., 2018). The results suggested that words with increased length or lower frequency were associated with significantly longer fixation durations, which corroborates previous findings (e.g., Laurinavichyute et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2022). Regarding the effect of scenarios, salient differences of eye movements were revealed between sentence and passage reading. Specifically, readers manifested shorter durations, and greater reading speeds and skipping rates for passage reading, and we speculate that readers may experience more efficient reading processes in passage reading as opposed to sentence reading.

To test the data reusability of the HKC, we launched two distinct investigations from perspectives of (1) where-decision (by measures of saccade positions) and (2) when-decision (by measures of fixation durations). On the one hand, we examined a where-decision issue, PVL, which indicates a preference for where the initial landing positions (ILPs) land within a word. One-sample t tests on mean PVLs in both sentence and passage reading disclosed a left-of-centre trend, and the fittest LMMs showed that reading words with longer length, greater complexity, or lower frequency elicited more significantly leftward ILPs in sentence reading compared to passage reading. Thus, our findings support the existence of a left-of-centre PVL in Chinese reading and suggest the trade-offs of linguistic properties on the ILPs, which goes for model integration of flexible saccade-target selection (Yan et al., 2010) and dynamic-adjustment strategy (Liu et al., 2019).

On the other hand, we inspected an issue of when-decision, sentence (clause) wrap-up, i.e., reading sentence-final words followed by the period (or comma) requires longer durations than sentence-internal ones. By fitting the LMMs, we discovered reversed wrap-up effects in Chinese reading, as opposed to those in English reading. The reading time of sentence-final (or clause-final) words was shorter than that of sentence-internal (or clause-internal) words, which were consistently observed in both sentence and passage reading with a stronger manifestation in the former. Comparing with traditional sentence wrap-up, we attributed such reversed effects to extraneous time for segmenting sentence-internal words in Chinese reading, whereas sentence-final words can be pre-segmented by the comma/period.

Collectively, the two investigations lay the groundwork for researching eye movements of Chinese paragraph reading, by highlighting the comparison of reading behaviours between single sentences and passages. Moreover, the HKC provides valuable resources for furthering studies on sentence processing, shedding new light on eye-movement controls, and advancing revelations of unique characteristics of Chinese reading and the universal nature of reading.

Date of Award	6 May 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Chun Yu KIT (Supervisor)