No wrap-up effect in Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements

Research conducted on alphabetic languages has yielded findings suggesting that readers tend to allocate more time toward processing the final words of a sentence or clause, commonly referred to as the wrap-up effect. Several theoretical accounts of the wrap-up effect advocate causal mechanisms that are supposed to generalize over readers of all languages, yet they are based on a small selection of written languages and writing systems. Whether the wrap-up effect occurs in naturally unspaced, logographic languages such as Chinese remains unclear. We carried out an eye movement study focused on simplified Chinese reading, intending to discern whether the wrap-up effect at the end of the sentence is modulated by visual complexity. Native readers of Mandarin Chinese were tasked with reading sentences featuring target words manipulated in terms of visual complexity (high vs. low) and word position (final or medial) in the sentence. We found that words at the end of sentences were processed as quickly or even faster than those in the sentence-medial position, depending on the eye movement measure, and that the complexity of characters did not affect the wrap-up effect. This reversed or null wrap-up effect calls for a revision of proposed theoretical accounts grounded in the processing of alphabetic languages. The findings suggest that sentence processing in simplified Chinese is highly incremental, and the information-theoretical account is the one that does not contradict the observed direction of the wrap-up effect.