Parafoveal-on-foveal Effects In Chinese Reading

There is one of the major controversies in the field of eye movements in reading concerns the question of whether the processing of two adjacent words in reading occurs in sequence, or in parallel. Parafoveal-on-foveal effects, which could be used to provide the evidence about this controversy, occur when lexical properties of word n+1 influence processing on word n during reading. According to the E-Z Reader model, the best known serial attention allocation model, lexical characteristics of word n+1 should not influence the processing of word n, the parafoveal-on-foveal effects were null. In contrast, the parallel model SWIFT stipulates that the words within a perceptual span can be processed in parallel. Also, parafoveal processing difficulty will slow down foveal processing, the concurrent parafoveal-on-foveal effects should be found. But Kennedy reported an inverted parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Parafoveal processing difficulty results in the reader spending less time on the foveal word. They argued that a difficult configuration of parafoveal words act as a target causing the reader to execute an early saccade. They refer to this process as magnetic attraction.The main goal of this research was to investigate parafoveal-on-foveal effects in normal Chinese reading. We examined whether the semantic information of word n+1 influenced readers' eye behavior on the word n.The whole research can be divided into three studies.The first study explored the influence of character n+1 to the processing of word n. The study adopted a new paradigm called distraction paradigm to investigate the parafoveal-on-foveal effects in reading. Experiment one examined the influence of character n+1's semantic relationship with word n on the processing of word n. The concurrent effects showed in experiment one.The second study examined whether the processing of word n could be influenced by the semantic relationship between word n and word n+1. There were three experiments in second study. The experiment two and three individually explored the influence of high and low frequency word n+l's semantic relationship with word n to the processing of word n. The third experiment manipulate the emoxional conformance to explore the parafoveal-on-foveal effects on Chinese reading. The concurrent effects were found in second study.The third study used two experiments to explore the influence of semantic transparent of word n+1 to processing of word n. The null effects should in the third study.We analyzed readers' eye fixation patterns of word n. The following eye fixation measures were employed:gaze duration, first fixation duration, duration of final fixation (Word n and two characters of word n), single fixation duration, probability of refixation and probability of skipping.To summarize the findings of the three studies, the conclusion was made as follows.(1) The low level and semantic information from the parafoveal character and word could be parallel processed with foveal word. When the adjacent words information in the perceptual span were similar, the processing of word n could be promoted.(2) The semantic transparency of parafoveal word didn't affect eye behavior prior to fixating it. The semantic relationship between morpheme and word of word n+1 couldn't be processed with word n in parallel.(3) The Chinese reading targets foveal word processing and using parallel processing as a method.(4) According to the results of research, an assumption called "all for the semantic access of word n " has been promoted for found of the eye movements control theory on Chinese reading.