| Abstract: | In an eye‐tracking experiment, we investigated whether and how a comma influences the reading of Chinese sentences comprised of different types of syntactic constituent such as word, phrase and clause. Participants read Chinese sentences that did or did not insert a comma at the end of a syntactic constituent. The results showed that the fixation times were shorter for the target word followed by a comma than for that followed by no comma, which suggests that a comma facilitated word identification during the reading of Chinese sentences. Furthermore, the insertion of commas shortened the total fixation times in the post‐target region only for the clause condition. The data are consistent with previous findings concerning the role of segmentation cues in reading, and compatible with the implicit prosody hypothesis. |
