Encoding the target or the plausible preview word? The nature of the plausibility preview benefit in reading Chinese

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that a plausible preview word can facilitate the processing of a target word as compared to an implausible preview word (a plausibility preview benefit effect) when reading Chinese (Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012; Yang, 2013). Regarding the nature of this effect, it is possible that readers processed the meaning of the plausible preview word and did not actually encode the target word (given that the parafoveal preview word lies close to the fovea). The current experiment examined this possibility with three conditions wherein readers received a preview of a target word that was either (1) identical to the target word (identical preview), (2) a plausible continuation of the pre-target text, but the post-target text in the sentence was incompatible with it (initially plausible preview), or (3) not a plausible continuation of the pre-target text, nor compatible with the post-target text (implausible preview). Gaze durations on target words were longer in the initially plausible condition than the identical condition. Overall, the results showed a typical preview benefit, but also implied that readers did not encode the initially plausible preview. Also, a plausibility preview benefit was replicated: gaze durations were longer with implausible previews than the initially plausible ones. Furthermore, late eye movement measures did not reveal differences between the initially plausible and the implausible preview conditions, which argues against the possibility of misreading the plausible preview word as the target word. In sum, these results suggest that a plausible preview word provides benefit in processing the target word as compared to an implausible preview word, and this benefit is only present in early but not late eye movement measures.

Keywords:

• Plausibility preview benefit
• Eye movements
• Chinese

The research reported here partially fulfilled the requirements for Jinmian Yang's doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Preparation of the article was supported by Grants from the Natural Science Foundation of China [NSF 31271086] and Pearl River Scholar Funded Scheme [GDUPS 2011] to the third author, and from the National Institute of Health [Grant HD26765] to the fifth author.

The research reported here partially fulfilled the requirements for Jinmian Yang's doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Preparation of the article was supported by Grants from the Natural Science Foundation of China [NSF 31271086] and Pearl River Scholar Funded Scheme [GDUPS 2011] to the third author, and from the National Institute of Health [Grant HD26765] to the fifth author.

Notes

¹ Plausibility preview benefit was based on the difference between the plausible and implausible preview condition. It may actually reflect a penalty from the implausible preview word, instead of a benefit from plausible preview word for the processing of the target word. We still refer to it as “benefit” to be consistent with the literature.

² We also performed analyses on log transformed fixation durations. However, log transforming the fixation duration variables did not change the pattern of effects. We prefer to report the analyses on un-transformed data so that the effects are more transparently mapped onto the observed data (i.e., so that the b estimates of the LMMs are in milliseconds and can be compared to the raw means).