Eye Movement Study Of Parafoveal-on-foveal Effects

In this research we study the parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Chinese reading. Parafoveal-on-foveal effects which in called PFF effects occur when lexical properties of word N influence processing on word N+1during reading.This study consists of two experiments. Experiment I is a single-factor experiment, with three levels of variables:no space,2spaces and4spaces. Experiment II is a two-factor full factorial experiment with replication with a2(emotion valence:positive, passive)×2(word frequency:high frequency, low frequency) matrix. Effective subjects were28randomly selected college students in Liaoning Normal University, who were native speakers of Chinese with normal vision or corrected-to-normal. None of them had experience of eye movement experiments.The results are as follows:The main effects of word N is significant on total fixation duration, average fixation duration, number of fixations and probability of skip (p<0.05), there is significant difference among0space,2spaces and4spaces (p<0.05); The main effect of emotion valence and word frequency are significant on total fixation duration, average fixation duration, number of fixations and probability of skip (p<0.05); The interaction effect is significant between emotion valence and word frequency(p<0.05).Based on the results of this study, conclusions can be drawn as follows:(1) Eye movement method is an effective way to study the PFF effects;(2) Lexical properties of word N influence processing on word N+1during reading;(3) Emotion valence and frequency are sensitive factors to PFF effects;(4) The results support Parallel Processing Model.