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 existed no significant differences between the identical and dissimilar preview conditions on both the skipping rate and the fixation durations; however,the skipping rate of the identical and dissimilar preview conditions was higher than the non-punctuation condition,and the fixation durations of them were shorter than the non-punctuation conditions. 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 program.