Investigating the holistic processing of characters during Chinese reading

This is a dataset for an eye movement experiment investigating effects of visual blurring on the recognition of Chinese characters during reading. Characters in sentences were presented as normal or with an exterior or interior region visually degraded. As the exterior region was informative about overall character shape, this manipulation allowed us to investigate effects of preserving or degrading information that might support holistic processing. Additionally, to assess effects on the lexical processing of words, each sentence included one of a pair of interchangeable two-character target words that had either a high or low frequency of written usage.

The files provide sentence-level and word-level eye movement data. The sentence-level data are informative about the effects of visual blurring on overall sentence reading, while the word-level data are informative about effects of visual blurring on the processing of individual words in sentences, where these words are of either high or low lexical frequency.