The Beijing Sentence Corpus II: A cross-script comparison between traditional and simplified Chinese sentence reading

We introduce a sentence corpus with eye-movement data in traditional Chinese (TC), based on the original Beijing Sentence Corpus (BSC) in simplified Chinese (SC). The most noticeable difference between TC and SC character sets is their visual complexity. There are reaction time corpora in isolated TC character/word lexical decision and naming tasks. However, up to now natural TC sentence reading corpus with recorded eye movements has not been available for general public. We report effects of word frequency, visual complexity, and predictability on eye movements on fixation location and duration based on 60 native TC readers. In addition, because the current BSC-II sentences are nearly identical to the original BSC sentences, we report similarities and differences of the linguistic influences on eye movements for the two varieties of written Chinese. The results shed light on how visual complexity affects eye movements. Together, the two sentence corpora comprise a useful tool to establish cross-script similarities and differences in TC and SC.