  The word-based account of saccades drawn by a central gravity of the PVL is
supported by two pillars of evidences. The first is the finding of the initial
fixation location on a word resembled a normal distribution (Rayner, 1979). The
other is the finding of a moderate slope coefficient between the launch site
and the landing site (b=0.49, see McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola, 1988). Four
simulations on different saccade targeting strategies and one eye-movement
experiment of Chinese reading have been conducted to evaluate the two findings.
We demonstrated that the current understanding of the word-based account is not
conclusive by showing an alternative strategy of the word-based account and
identifying the problem with the calculation of the slope coefficient. Although
almost all the computational models of eye-movement control during reading have
built on the two findings, future efforts should be directed to understand the
precise contribution of different saccade targeting strategies, and to know how
their weighting might vary across desperate writing systems.
