Plausibility effects when reading one- and two-character words in Chinese: evidence from eye movements

Eye movements of Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing a critical character that was either a 1-character word or the initial character of a 2-character word. Due to manipulation of the verb prior to the target word, the 1-character target word (or the first character of the 2-character target word) was either plausible or implausible, as an independent word, at the point at which it appeared, whereas the 2-character word was always plausible. The eye movement data showed that the plausibility manipulation did not exert an influence on the reading of the 2-character word or its component characters. However, plausibility significantly influenced reading of the 1-character target word. These results suggest that processes of semantic integration in reading Chinese are performed at a word level, instead of a character level, and that word segmentation must take place very early in the course of processing.