Previous eye-movement studies have indicated that people tend to skip extremely high-frequency words in sen-tence reading, such as Bthe^ in English and B鐨?de^ in Chinese. Two alternative hypotheses have been proposed to explain how this frequent skipping happens in Chinese read-ing: one assumes that skipping happens when the preview has been fully identified at the word level (word-based skipping); the other assumes that skipping happens whenever the pre-view character is easy to identify regardless of whether lexical processing has been completed or not (character-based skip-ping). Using the gaze-contingent display change paradigm, we examined the two hypotheses by substituting the preview of the third character of a four-character Chinese word with the high-frequency Chinese character B鐨?de^, which should disrupt the ongoing word-level processing. The character-based skipping hypothesis predicts that this manipulation will enhance the skipping probability of the target character (i.e., the third character of the target word), because the character B /de^ has much higher character frequency than the original character. The word-based skipping hypothesis instead pre-dicts a reduction of the skipping probability of the target char-acter because the presence of the character B鐨?de^ is lexically infelicitous at word level. The results supported the character-based skipping hypothesis, indicating that in Chinese reading the decision of skipping a character can be made before inte-grating it into a word.