How Quotation Types Shape Classic Novel Reading in Chinese: A Comparison Between Human Eye-Movements and Large...

Quotations play a central role in shaping narrative perspective, as they guide readers' adoption and shifting of character and narrator viewpoints. While direct speech (DS) is often assumed to enhance vividness and emotional engagement, its cognitive demands relative to free direct speech (FDS) and free indirect speech (FIS) remain unclear, particularly in Chinese classical literature. Using eye-tracking, we investigated how Chinese readers process DS, FDS, and FIS in the Four Great Classical Novels, manipulating perspective congruency through address terms versus proper names. The results revealed two key findings. First, DS consistently incurred longer fixation times than FIS, demonstrating its higher processing cost. Second, congruency effects emerged robustly across all quotation types (including FIS) in later measures, suggesting that in the specific context of classical Chinese novels, FIS does not exhibit the dual-voice effect proposed in narrative theory for this particular manipulation. Complementary analyses with large language models (LLMs) further showed that DS yielded higher surprisal and entropy than both FDS and FIS, indicating greater contextual unpredictability. By integrating human eye-movement evidence with computational modeling, this study provides evidence about the cognitive processing of DS in Chinese classical texts and raises questions about the universality of dual-voice processing in FIS across different languages and text types.