Using eye tracking to investigate what native Chinese speakers notice about linguistic landscape images
Zichao Wei, Yewei Qin
TL;DR
This study applies eye-tracking to examine how native Chinese readers perceive linguistic landscapes, comparing attention to textual versus image content in storefront signs. Using the Eyelink 1000+ at 1000 Hz, nine Chinese participants viewed 39 real-world LL images from Wuhan, with fixations categorized into text and image interest areas. Results show longer fixation durations and more fixations on text than on images ($p<0.01$), with early dominance of text and later partial normalization, supporting the idea that information density drives LL perception in real-world scenes. The work discusses how contextual complexity, information density, and cultural factors shape gaze behavior, and argues for expanding the informational function of LL to include perceptual processing insights from psycholinguistics. These findings advance sociolinguistic research by integrating eye-tracking into linguistic landscape analysis and have implications for language policy and urban signage design.
Abstract
Linguistic landscape is an important field in sociolinguistic research. Eye tracking technology is a common technology in psychological research. There are few cases of using eye movement to study linguistic landscape. This paper uses eye tracking technology to study the actual fixation of the linguistic landscape and finds that in the two dimensions of fixation time and fixation times, the fixation of native Chinese speakers to the linguistic landscape is higher than that of the general landscape. This paper argues that this phenomenon is due to the higher information density of linguistic landscapes. At the same time, the article also discusses other possible reasons for this phenomenon.