Direct lexical control of eye movements in Chinese reading: Evidence from the co-registration of EEG and eye tracking
The direct-lexical-control hypothesis stipulates that some aspect of a word’s processing determines the duration of the fixation on that word and/or the next. Although direct lexical control is incorporated into most current models of eye-movement control in reading, conclusive empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis is lacking to date. In this article, we report the results of an eye-tracking experiment using the boundary paradigm in which native speakers of Chinese read sentences in which target words were either high- or low-frequency and preceded by a valid or invalid preview. Eye movements were co-registered with electroencephalography, allowing standard analyses of eye-movement measures, divergence point analyses of fixation-duration distributions, and fixated-related potentials on the target words. These analyses collectively provide strong behavioral and neural evidence of early lexical processing and thus strong support for the direct-lexical-control hypothesis.