The dynamic adjustment of saccades during Chinese reading: evidence from eye movements and simulations

This article reports an eye-movement experiment in which participants scanned continuous sequences of Landolt-Cs for target circles to examine the visual and oculomotor constraints that might jointly determine where the eyes move in a task that engages many of the perceptual and motor processes involved in Chinese reading but without lexical or linguistic processing. The lengths of the saccades entering the Landolt-C clusters were modulated by the processing difficulty (i.e., gap sizes) of those clusters. Simulations using implemented versions of default-targeting (Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu, 2010) versus dynamic-adjustment (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016) models of saccadic targeting indicated that the latter provided a better account of our participants' eye movements, further supporting the hypothesis that Chinese readers "decide" where to move their eyes by adjusting saccade length in response to processing difficulty rather than by selecting default saccade targets. We discuss this hypothesis in relation to both what is known about saccadic targeting during the reading of English versus Chinese and current models of eye-movement control in reading.