Eye movements in reading Chinese

There are wide varieties of written languages currently used by the people around the world. For example, those in Europe typically adopt an alphabetic system in which the visual symbols are used to represent basic units in speech (i.e., phonemes). The writing system used in China, however, is constructed on the logographic principle in which the orthographic units are made to correspond to the fundamental elements of meaning (i.e., morphemes). The differences between the distinct orthographies have momentous implications for attempts to construct comprehensive theories about reading. This is because it is not self-evident that the same processes are activated and used to encode and comprehend the information written in scripts constructed on exceedingly different principles. Consequently, it is critical to conduct cross-script reading research to reveal both universal and script-specific processes associated with the reading of different orthographies.