The role of format familiarity and semantic transparency in Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements

Unlike alphabetic language, Chinese is an ideographic language that does not contain spaces between words. Chinese readers must develop unique segmentation strategies for word recognition and reading comprehension. This study explored the role of format familiarity and semantic transparency in Chinese reading, reflecting the segmentation strategy and word processing characteristics in Chinese reading. Forty undergraduates read Chinese in familiar and unfamiliar formats, segmenting target words into semantically transparent and semantically opaque words. We used Eye Link 1000 to measure readers’ eye movement index, which can reflect processing characteristics of word recognition in Chinese reading. The following findings were made: (1) Familiarity with the text format affects Chinese reading performance. The fixation time in the familiar direction is short, the skipping rate is high, and the processing efficiency is higher when the fixation point is close to the word center; (2) Semantic transparency affects the segmentation strategy and word processing in Chinese reading. Chinese readers have shorter fixation times, higher reading efficiency, and a fixation point closer to the word center when reading semantically transparent words. It supported the combined access model. (3) There is significant interaction in the early eye movement indicators, representing word processing characteristics in the early stage of Chinese reading. Specifically, the semantic-transparency effect appeared under a familiar rather than an unfamiliar format. The format familiarity effect was found in the early processing indexes of transparent words rather than opaque words. In the familiar format, since the meaning of the morpheme and the whole word of transparent words is consistent, readers tend to segment and process them as whole words. Due to the lack of reading experience, the reading difficulty increases in the unfamiliar format. To reduce the difficulty and promote comprehension, readers change their segmentation strategy and tend to segment transparent words by character. The word segmentation process slowed, and the format-familiarity effect did not show in the early indexes under unfamiliar format. More importantly, the separability of the lexical processing stages showed in the interaction of different indexes, which means that word segmentation and lexical recognition in Chinese reading may not be completely synchronized, supporting the Chinese E-Z reader model. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s).