ABSTRACT
Irrespective of whether Chinese or English text is read, reading requires that a spatially ordered sequence of visual symbols is recognized. Furthermore, irrespective of text type, reading is a dynamic task in which the perception and recognition of a sequence of spatially ordered linguistic symbols is accomplished by executing a sequence of spatially ordered eye movements, also referred to as saccades. Execution of saccades is necessary because high acuity vision is limited to a small area of text projected onto the fovea and the immediately adjacent parafovea. Readers thus need to look at-or fixate-characters and words before they can be recognized and discriminated from visually similar alternatives. In this chapter, we first review work that meatsured eye movements during the reading of alphabetic text. General issues related to oculomotor control and word recognition are of particular interest. After this, we report the results of several recent eyemovement studies with Chinese text, which pursued similar issues. Alphabetic
(English) script and Chinese script differ in a number of key characteristics, making it likely that the control of eye movements during reading and the nature of linguistic analyses applied to visible text are codetermined by script type.
