The influence of foveal load on parafoveal processing of N + 2 during Chinese reading

ABSTRACT

According to the foveal load hypothesis, parafoveal processing is influenced by the difficulty of current foveal processing. It remains unclear whether foveal load may affect the extent of parafoveal processing. This is an important consideration given the evidence that Chinese readers may frequently pre-process word N + 2 when N + 1 is one character. Accordingly, the current study manipulated word frequency to explore the influence of foveal load on parafoveal processing of N + 2 using a 2 (foveal load: high-frequency, low-frequency) × 2 (preview condition: identical preview, pseudo-character preview) within-subject design. Main effects of foveal load were found for the foveal word N, with longer fixations for low- than for high-frequency words and a main effect of preview was also found for N + 2, with longer fixations for pseudo-character preview compared to identical preview. Crucially, there was no interaction between foveal load and preview condition, indicating that parafoveal processing of word N + 2 is not influenced by foveal load during natural Chinese reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Foveal load
• parafoveal processing
• Chinese reading
• eye movements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note, we deliberately selected studies that produced robust N+2 effects. Though we acknowledge that not all studies have found such clear effects, given the importance of N+2 effects in the current study, it seemed reasonable to assume robust effects, but this does leave open the possibility that a small effect may be missed in both load conditions.

2 While we do not observe effects of word N frequency on N+2, it is notable from Table 2 that such effects do appear to be present on word N+1. As N+1 was not manipulated, we do not analyse this effect. However, given the lack of interactive effects, it seems most likely that this represents a spillover effect (see Rayner & Duffy, 1986).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Open Research Fund of College of Teacher Education, Zhejiang Normal University (No. jykf21006). Experimental data and associated R code are available at https://osf.io/2fcj3/.