Reverse wrap-up effects by reading scenario, boundary salience, and word position
Novel evidence from eye movements in natural Chinese reading
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21640700 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yushu Wu (0000-0002-8727-4674, City University of Hong Kong), Chunyu Kit (0000-0002-6445-7400, City University of Hong Kong, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 79-79 |
| Publication date | 2026-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1069-9384 • E-ISSN: 1531-5320 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3758/s13423-025-02766-7 |
| PMID | 41709072 |
| OpenAlex | W7130316678 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
This study investigates how wrap-up effects—sentence-final words incur heavier processing loads than sentence-internal words—manifest in natural reading of unspaced, logographic Chinese scripts. We leveraged a large-scale naturalistic reading corpus (subjects: 98; word tokens: more than 1 million by 300 individual sentences and seven passages), employed multifactorial analyses by (generalized) linear mixed-effects models, and compared four eye-movement differences (i.e., gaze duration, total reading time, skipping probability and regression-in probability) between sentence-internal and sentence-final words. The results demonstrated robust reversal of traditional wrap-up effects: sentence-final words required significantly less processing effort than sentence-internal words, such as shorter durations, higher skipping rates and lower regression-in probabilities. Further, this reversal was modulated by reading scenarios (sentence vs. passage), boundary salience (period- vs. comma-bounded), and wrap-up positions (pre-critical, critical, and spill-over). Notably, sentence-final words were processed more rapidly when associated with characteristics such as fewer stroke counts, shorter length, higher frequency, function-word status, or progress further into page at the late processing stage. Challenging classic models that attribute inflated time at clause/sentence boundaries to semantic integration, we postulate punctuation’s dual role in unspaced language processing: visual cues for word segmentation/recognition and semantic cues for integration jointly optimize language comprehension
Eye movement · Eye tracking · Gaze · Psycholinguistics · Semantic memory · Word lists by frequency · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Reading and Literacy Development · Text Readability and Simplification
| Highly cited | No |
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