Eye movements during Chinese reading Simon P. Liversedge University of Southampton, UK Jukka Hyönä University of Turku, Finland Keith Rayner University of California, San Diego, USA Chinese written language is different from alphabetic written languages in many respects, and for this reason, interest in the nature of the cognitive processes underlying Chinese reading has flourished over recent years. A number of researchers have used eye movement methodology as a measure of on-line processing to understand more about cognitive processing during Chinese text comprehension. This Special Issue focuses on current eye movement research investigating Chinese reading and this paper provides a brief background to this research area and a concise overview of the papers that appear in the Special Issue. Over the last 40 or so years, eye movement methodology has been increasingly used to in- vestigate the cognitive processes that underlie reading. Experimental psychologists have long realized that one of the most valuable characteristics of eye movement methodology as a tool to examine reading is that it provides an on-line measure of processing difficulty. When people read they make fixations where the eye pauses and is quite still (usually for about a quarter of a second), followed by saccades which are very fast rotations of the eyes in order to position the point of fixation elsewhere in the text. When people read, they make a succession of fixations and saccades in order to visually process the words of the sentence incrementally from left to right. During a fixation on a word, the reader is cogni- tively processing that word, as well as partially pre-processing words to the right of the fixated word that lie in the parafovea. Furthermore, when text becomes difficult to read, fix- ations become longer and readers make more of them. Also, readers may often make regres- sive eye movements in the text, that is, saccades backwards in the text in order to reread a portion of text that they have already read once. Thus, by conducting carefully controlled ex- periments and by very accurately measuring the duration and location of fixations in relation to the particular words of sentences, it is possible to establish which portions of a sentence cause a reader difficulty. Furthermore, and very importantly, the eye movement methodology allows insight into the time course of any such processing difficulty. Copyright © 2013 UKLA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423 DOI:10.1111/jrir.12001 Volume 36, Issue S1, 2013, pp S1–S3