Eye Movement Study Of Semantic Information Processing In The Parafovea During Chinese Readin

During reading,there is a great debate regarding whether word processing is sequential or parallel,which is reflected in the processing mechanism of high-level semantic information in the parafovea especially.The underlying mechanisms of the parafoveal semantic processing have become a hot and controversial issue in eye movement control models.According to the E-Z Reader model(Reichle,2011;2021),based on the serial account assumes attention,is allocated serially,the parafoveal lexical characteristic shouldn’t influence processing of the foveal word.But the SWIFT model(Engbert & Kliegl,2011;Schad & Engbert,2012),based on the parallel account,supports that parafoveal lexical characteristic can influence processing of the foveal word,which assumes attention is spatially distributed as a gradient.The OB1-Reader model(Snell,van Leipsig,Grainger,& Meeter,2018,Snell & Grainger,2019),based on the parallel account,supports that readers can extract semantic information of multiple words,but the semantic information of these words can’t be integrated in the lexical processing stage.The three specific research debates regarding parafoveal semantic processing respectively are:(1)Can Chinese readers extract the semantic information from parafovea?(2)Do the orthographic and phonological information from the parafovea activate the semantic information?(3)Can semantic processing of the parafoveal word influence fixation durations on the foveal word?Unlike alphabetic language scripts,Chinese writing system has a deeper relationship between the form and meaning and greater density in every unit space.These features can help readers to extract more semantic information from the parafovea,which are helpful to explore the mechanism of semantic information processing in the parafovea.In this research,we employed eye-tracking methodology to record changes of eye movements to explore the mechanism of the parafoveal semantic processing during natural reading.The current study consisted of three studies with a meta-analysis and four experiments.Study1 explored whether Chinese readers extract semantic information from the parafovea.This study used meta-analysis techniques to quantitatively merge and analyze previous relevant studies.The results showed that Chinese and the alphabetic language scripts readers extract semantic information from the parafovea respectively,the effect was not moderated by languages(alphabetic scripts vs.Chinese).However,the effect size in Chinese reading is larger than that in alphabetic scripts with a numerical trend.Study 2 explored whether the orthographic and phonological information can activate semantic information in parafovea.Experiment 1 used the boundary paradigm to manipulate the preview types of the parafoveal single-character word to be either identical to the target word(ID),semantically related to the target word(SEM),orthographic visually similar to the word in SEM preview(S-ORT),phonologically similar to the semantic related word in SEM preview(S-PHO),or unrelated the target word(UNR).92 participants’ eye movements were recorded by Eyelink 1000 Plus when they read the sentences.The results showed that the classical identical preview effects and the semantic preview benefits,but no significant differences in fixation measures were found between the S-ORT or S-PHO and UNR.The design of Experiment 2 was the same as Experiment 1,but the word in parafovea was a two-character word.In addition,the degree of semantic relatedness in SEM,orthographic similarity in S-ORT and phonetic similarity in S-PHO are enhanced.77 participants’ eye movements were recorded by Eyelink 1000 Plus.The pattern of the effects was consistent with Experiment 1,which didn’t show the orthographic-semantic pathway effect and the phonetic-semantic pathway effect in the parafovea.Study 3 explored whether semantic processing of the parafoveal word influences fixation durations on the foveal word from the perspective of semantic relatedness(facilitation)and oppositeness(inhibition).Experiment 3 used the boundary paradigm to manipulate the semantic relationship between the parafoveal word(preview)and the foveal word(pretarget).There are four types of preview conditions: Identical preview,the preview semantically related to the pretarget word,the preview semantically opposite to the pretarget word,and the preview unrelated to the pretarget word.82 participants’ eye movements were recorded by Eyelink 1000 Plus when they read the sentences.The results showed that there was no semantic facilitative Po F effect in the early fixation measures,but stable semantic facilitative parafoveal-on-foveal effect was found in the total fixation duration,regression path reading time and regression-in proportion of the late measures.And there was no semantic inhibitory parafoveal-on-foveal effect in all measures.The design of Experiment 4 was the same as Experiment 3,but in Experiment 4 we manipulated more specific and direct semantic information by using color-related words,such as the word "banana",whose semantic information included indirect color information.There are four types of preview conditions: Identical preview,the preview which has the congruent color information as the pretarget word,the preview which has the incongruent color information as the pretarget word,and the preview which has no color semantic relationship as the pretarget word.39 participants’ eye movements were recorded by Eyelink 1000 Plus.The results showed that there was no semantic facilitative parafoveal-on-foveal effect in the early fixation measures,but stable semantic facilitative parafoveal-on-foveal effect was found in the total fixation duration,regression path reading time and regression-out proportion of the late measures.And there was no semantic inhibitory parafoveal-on-foveal effects in all measures.The conclusions can be drawn as follows based on the results of the three studies:(1)Chinese readers can extract semantic information from parafovea,and the effect was not moderated by languages(alphabetic scripts vs.Chinese).(2)The orthographic codes in parafovea didn’t involve in the activation of semantic information,and nor did the phonological codes.The activation of semantic information in the parafovea may be due to the combined action of orthography and phonetic.(3)The semantic processing of the parafoveal word can influence fixation durations on the foveal word in late stage during Chinese natural reading.(4)These results favour the parallel processing accounts.(5)Based on the results in the current study,we formulated the Parafoveal Semantic Processing during Chinese Reading.