Many studies have examined the effect of reading habits on the sequence in which items in a display are processed. They have usually employed English or Hebrew readers. The reading habits of both groups constrain them to scan horizontally, thus limiting the scope of investigation of the nature of sequential behaviour. However, the characteristics of the Chinese script enable the experimenter to extend this type of research, because sequential behaviour in Chinese readers can be investigated with a wider variety of stimulus display patterns than the horizontal arrays usally used in such research.This paper describes ar experiment in which the sequential response tendencies of Chinese readers were studied in a naming task with unrelated Chinese characters. There are two modes of reading Chinese: A and B. Mode A is the same as reading English while Mode B starts at the top‐rightmost corner of a page, descends vertically and reads from right to left column by column. All subjects were familiar with both reading modes and perhaps had greater experience with Mode B. However, when given an option, they tended to respond predominantly in Mode A. The results could not be accounted for by reading habits alone. They are attributed to the manifestation of a hypothetical sequencing mechanis