Written Chinese are different from alphabetic scripts in several features. One obvious feature is that characters are the written unit usually mapping onto morphemes. The other feature is that Chinese words have no space in between to tag word boundaries in sentences. My research work is to investigate the relationship between eye movement control and reading Chinese. The goal is to understand how the eye movement behaviors of Chinese readers while reading are accommodated to the special script properties. There are two main research themes in my lab. The first one is to investigate the dynamics of oculomotor, perceptual, lexical, and contextual factors which contribute to eye movements in reading Chinese. The second is to investigate the eye movement control in reading development, affected by perceptual and contextual factors.

In the lab, the currently research issues include: context effects in adult and children’s reading, processing of word segmentation, semantic and syntactic processing, and picture book reading of young children. We are also building a traditional Chinese sentence corpus of eye movements (Taipei Sentence Corpus, TSC). In cooperation with Professor Reinhold Kliegl in University of Potsdam (German), the corpus data will be analyzed and compared with different languages to test universal and specific processes for eye movement control in reading.