# Word length and frequency effects in natural Chinese reading: Evidence for character representations in lexical identification

## TL;DR

The study shows that word length and frequency independently affect eye movements during natural Chinese reading, supporting character-level processing.

## Contribution

The study disentangles the effects of word length and frequency on eye movements in Chinese reading by controlling for visual complexity.

## Key findings

- Word length and frequency both strongly affect fixation times during Chinese reading.
- Word length influences saccadic targeting and skipping probability, but frequency does not.
- Character-level representations are used in Chinese word recognition.

## Abstract

Word length and frequency are two of the “big three” factors that affect eye movements in natural reading. Although these factors have been extensively investigated, all previous studies manipulating word length have been confounded with changes in visual complexity (longer words have more letters and are more visually complex). We controlled stroke complexity across one-character (short) and two-character (long) high- and low-frequency Chinese words (to avoid complexity confounds) and recorded readers’ eye movements during sentence reading. Both word length and frequency yielded strong main effects for fixation time measures. For saccadic targeting and skipping probability, word length effects, but not word frequency effects, occurred. Critically, the interaction was not significant regardless of stroke complexity, indicating that word length and frequency independently influence lexical identification and saccade target selection during Chinese reading. The results provide evidence for character-level representations during Chinese word recognition in natural reading.