Previous studies used the ex-Gaussian fitting technique to examine the distribution of word frequency effects in English sentence reading and lexical decision tasks. It was found that word frequency influences reaction times and eye fixation durations by both shifting the distribution to the right and increasing the skew for the low-frequency target words. We used the same method to examine the distributional effects of word frequency through a Chinese sentence reading task in Experiment 1 and a lexical decision task in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 showed that word frequency only significantly influenced rightward skew for first fixation duration, while Experiment 2 showed that word frequency influenced reaction times by both shifting the distribution to the right and increasing the skew. Our data reveal both similarities and differences between Chinese and English word recognition on the distributional level, which has certain theoretical implications for modelling Chinese reading.