The Perceptual Span Of Middle School Students And Oculomotor Activity During The Reading Of Character Or Two-character Word Based Chinese Sentences

The perceptual span is the range of available information that can be obtained in reading processing. Studying the perceptual span of reading is the important topic in Reading Psychology. It is important to study the rules of reading processing, and promoting the effective reading.To use Eye-tracking system is one of the effective methods to explore the perceptual span in reading. To review the studies of perceptual span in reading, many studies were focus on alphabetic writing system and the writing system influences the size of the perceptual span. That is to say different language has different perceptual span. Most studies of the Chinese perceptual mainly focus on characters. So far there has been two different viewpoints in Chinese reading, one is character-based reading, the other is word-based reading. So we designed two experiments task to explore the character as well as two-character word perceptual span of senior high students and junior high school students. In this research, Eyelink II tracking system and the standard model of moving window technique-eye-movement-contingent display changes technique was used to study the two kinds of perceptual .spans in Chinese reading.Experiment one: Eye movement studies on the perceptual span of Chinese reading under the moving window condition on character. The present experiment was 2(grades: senior high school students, junior high school students) X 8(8 window sizes) mixed design. Experiment two: Eye movement studies on the perceptual span of Chinese reading under the moving window condition on two-character word. The present experiment was 2(grades: senior high school students, junior high school students)×6(6 window sizes) mixed design. We choose five major dependent variables in the studies of perceptual span in reading: fixation duration, fixation count, reading rate, forward saccade count, right saccade amplitude. According the assumption of eye-movement-contingent display changes technique theory to define the size of perceptual span.The results were as follows:(1) On character window condition, the perceptual span of senior high school students is 1 character to the left of the fixated character and 3 characters to its right; the perceptual span of junior high school students is 1 character to the left of the fixated character and 2 characters to its right.(2) On two-character word window condition, the perceptual span of senior high school students is 1 two-character word to the left of the fixated word and 2 two-character words to its right; the perceptual span of junior high school students is 1 two-character word to the left of the fixated word and 1 two-character word to its right. (3) The perceptual span was asymmetric in Chinese reading and the right size of perceptual span was larger than the left one.(4) Chinese reading is word-based reading, not character based reading.