Parafoveal processing across different lexical constituents in Chinese reading

Abstract

We report a boundary paradigm eye movement experiment to investigate whether the linguistic category of a two-character Chinese string affects how the second character of that string is processed in the parafovea during reading. We obtained clear preview effects in all conditions but, more importantly, found parafoveal-on-foveal effects whereby a nonsense preview of the second character influenced fixations on the first character. This effect occurred for monomorphemic words, but not for compound words or phrases. Also, in a word boundary demarcation experiment, we demonstrate that Chinese readers are not always consistent in their judgements of which characters in a sentence constitute words. We conclude that information regarding the combinatorial properties of characters in Chinese is used online to moderate the extent to which parafoveal characters are processed.

Keywords:

• Chinese reading
• Parafoveal processing
• Word identification
• Fixations
• Saccades

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The research described in this article along with the write-up were supported by: a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31200765) and a grant from the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong (ZR2012CQ034) for the first author; a grant from the Social Science Foundation of China (10BYY029) for the third author; Key Research topics of the Ministry of Education Award for the 11th Five-Year Plan of National Science of Education (DBA090290) for the fourth author; and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) awards (RES-000-22-4128 and ES/I032398/1) and a Leverhulme Trust Grant (F/00 180/AN) to the sixth author. The authors also acknowledge support from the China Scholarship Council.