Effect of reading direction on reading fluency : is there a preferred reading direction for Chinese text?

Abstract

Lateral bias on reading alphabetic languages has been explored previously with English having a left-to-right bias. Vertical saccade movement, however, is found in Chinese population and the opposite was found in Western population. That leaves an open question for the preferred reading directionality for Chinese characters as ideographs, and also the reading performance of Hong Kong people who are generally raised in a bilingual environment. Results from current study suggested the absence of inherent reading preference at early age since there was no significant difference across four different types of stimuli in the Kindergarten group. The vertical trend on naming neutral Picture stimuli somewhat supported the vertical saccade movement for people in Hong Kong. Language system that has strong directional constitution seemed to resist the biological saccade movement tendency whereas the preference in reading directionality is proposed to be acquired, given the fact that the Secondary group demonstrated consistently better performance in reading all stimuli horizontally due to their higher exposure to horizontal reading materials. Reading fluency was also found to increase from early childhood to adolescence, and drop towards late adulthood.