Abstract:In an eye movement experiment employing the boundary paradigm we investigated the preview processing of punctuation during Chinese reading. The preview of the punctuation was manipulated, with three preview conditions: identical, dissimilar and non-punctuation preview. The main effect of preview type was significant, which showed that there were no differences between identical and dissimilar preview conditions on both skipping rate and fixation durations; however, the skipping rate of identical and dissimilar preview conditions was higher than non-punctuation condition, and the fixation durations of them were shorter than non-punctuation condition. The results indicate that punctuation skipping is automatic, that is, when the preview information is highly visually familiar and easy to process, it may trigger an automatic skipping programme.