Eye movement control in reading unspaced text: the case of the Japanese script

The present study examines the landing-site distributions of the eyes durin g natural reading of Japanese script: a script that mixes three different w riting systems (Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana) and that misses regular spac ing between words. The results show a clear preference of the eyes to land at the beginning rather than the center of the word. In addition, it was fo und that the eyes land on Kanji characters more frequently than on Hiragana or Katakana characters. Further analysis for two- and three-character word s indicated that the eye's landing-site distribution differs depending on t ype of the characters in the word: the eyes prefer to land at the word begi nning only when the initial character of the word is a Kanji character. For pure Hiragana words, the proportion of initial fixations did not differ be tween character positions. Thus, as already indicated by Kambe (National In stitute of Japanese Language Report 85 (1986) 29), the visual distinctivene ss of the three Japanese scripts plays a role in guiding eye movements in r eading Japanese. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.