| During reading,readers encode and process information about the word currently under fixation(i.e.,via foveal processing),as well as the upcoming word to the right of fixation(i.e.,via parafoveal processing).The efficient parafoveal processing may be one of the key determinants of fluent reading.A large body of evidence has showed that skilled adult readers pre-process information regarding orthographic information(Bai,Zang,Yan,& Shen,2006;Pagán,Blythe,& Liversedge,2016;Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder,2015a;Yan,Wang,Wu,Bai,2011),phonological information(Ashby,Treiman,Kessler,& Rayner,2006;Liu,Inhoff,Ye,& Wu,2002;Tsai,Lee,Tzeng,Hung,& Yen,2004)and semantic information(Hohenstein & Kliegl,2014;Inhoff,Starr,& Shindler,2000;Tsai,Kliegl,& Yan,2012;Yang,Wang,Tong,& Rayner,2012).The ability of children's parafoveal processes develops as reading skill advances.With regard to the nature of parafoveal processing in children,beginning readers are able to use phonological information of upcoming words to facilitate word recognition processes in alphabetic languages,and orthographic processes become increasingly important with grade(Pagán et al.,2016;Tiffin-Richards et al.,2015a).The orthographic depth of native language can affect children's reading at early stages,and enable them to use different vocabulary recognition strategies(Rayner,Pollastsek,Ashby,& Clifton,2012).Compared to alphabetic languages,Chinese,a logographic writing system,has unique orthographic characteristics.For example,while in English and other alphabetic languages,the mapping between orthography and phonology is relatively transparent,the pronunciation of a Chinese character is largely opaque.And there is no physical mark between words in Chinese.Thus,readers have to rely on context to determine whether a character is a word by itself or if it is a morpheme of a multiple-character word,which means that readers may need to obtain more information from the right of fixation to comprehend the text on-line,and therefore,parafoveal processing is more important for Chinese readers.It is also unclear whether the results found in alphabetic languages generalise to Chinese.The present study systematically explored information processing in children's parafoveal vision in order to reveal the developmental mechanism of parafoveal processing.Study 1 focused on the development of orthographic preview benefit from Grade 2to Grade 5 and undergraduate students.In Experiment l,on each trial,a previewcharacter was first briefly presented parafoveally for 60 ms or 100 ms in the left or right visual field before a target character was displayed.The experimental task was a lexical decision task.Preview and target characters could be identical,share the orthographic information,or have no information in common.Experiment 1 showed that developing readers didn't receive orthographic benefit from parafoveal previews as expert readers,when the SOA between primes and targets was set at 60 ms,but all subjects obtained orthographic preview benefit when the SOA was at 100 ms.In Experiment 2,the preview of the first character(n+1)was manipulated by using the boundary paradigm in Chinese sentence reading,and the preview was as the same as Experiment1.The results showed that orthographic preview benefits were obtained by students from Grade 2-5 and adults in three eye movement measures of first-pass reading time(single fixation duration,first fixation duration,gaze duration).Study 2 examined the development of phonological preview benefit from Grade 2 to Grade 5 and undergraduate students.In Experiment 3,the experimental paradigm was the same as Experiment 1.Participants were asked to read target character as quickly and accurately as possible.Participants' performance was monitored by an experimenter and naming errors were recorded by hand in pre-printed scoring sheets.Preview and target characters could be identical,share the phonological information,or have no information in common.The results showed that there was no evidence for a phonological preview benefit for all subjects when the SOA was at 60 ms.Children began to show parafoveal phonological preview effect from the fourth grade when the SOA was at 100 ms,while second and third graders didn't show this effect.In Experiment 4,the boundary paradigm was used to explore phonological preview benefit in Chinese sentence reading,and the preview was as the same as Experiment3.The results showed that parafoveal phonological preview effect was not significant for second and third graders,and children began to show this effect from the fourth grade in three eye movement measures of first-pass reading time(single fixation duration,first fixation duration,gaze duration).Study 3 inspected the development of children's semantic preview benefit with students from Grade 2 to Grade 5 and undergraduate students.In Experiment 5,the experimental paradigm was also the same as Experiment 1.Participants were asked to judge whether or not target character represented animal name as quickly and accurately as possible.Preview and target characters could be identical,share the semantic information,or have no information in common.The results showed thatsemantic preview benefit didn't occur for all subjects when the SOA was at 60 ms.Children began to show parafoveal semantic preview effect from the third grade when the SOA was at 100 ms,while second graders didn't show this effect.In Experiment 6,one boundary paradigm experiment was conducted to investigate the development of parafoveal semantic processing in Chinese readers.Eye movements of primary school students and college students were recorded as they read sentences.And the preview was as the same as Experiment 5.Only children in Grade 5 and adults showed steadily a semantic preview benefit,while third and fourth graders only showed this effect under specific conditions.In Study 4,some standardized reading tests were measured for each individual.The subjects in these tests were the same as those in the three eye-movement experiments.In order to investigate which factors would predict children's orthographic,phonological and semantic preview benefit separately,the linear regression analyses were performed using the preview benefit(orthographic,phonological and semantic)for each child as the dependent variable and the factors which were significantly related to the preview benefit as the predictor variables.The conclusion was made as follow based on the findings of the four studies:(1)The SOA between preview characters and targets affected childrens' ability to obtain lexical information in parafoveal area.Only adults received orthographic preview benefit,when the SOA between primes and targets was set at 60 ms.When the SOA was at 100 ms,second graders obtained only orthographic preview benefit,senior readers obtained not only orthographic preview benefit but also phonological and semantic preview benefit.(2)Orthographic processing effects were in place even in the youngest children we tested in natural sentence reading and the nature of the effects was quite similar across grades,and phonological processes and semantic processes became increasingly important with grade.(3)Taken together,it is clear that the nature of parafoveal preview benefit changes with age.One might conclude that development of parafoveal processing in children was that development of phonological and semantic parafoveal processing was delayed in children relative to orthographic parafoveal processing.Results are not consistent with the developmental view in alphabetic languages.(4)The performance in the orthographic awareness task was the best predictor ofthe orthographic preview benefit in our sample of Chinese-reading children.The best predictors of the phonological preview benefit were the homophone awareness and phoneme awareness.And the performances in the Chinese character recognition task and the reading fluency task were the main predictors of the semantic preview benefit. |
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