| Parafoveal preview effect refers to when readers are fixating on one word (parafoveal word n), they can obtain some information from the words on the right of their fixation (parafoveal word n+1or word n+2) at the same time. And those previewed information can influence the reading efficiency directly.During Chinese reading, when readers fixated on one word (foveal word n), they can obtain some information from the words on the right of their fixation (parafoveal word n+1or word n+2) at the same time. When the attention shift to the right word, it can fixated much shorter (eg, preview benefit), and promoted the reading efficiency directly. And whether the readers can obtain preview benefit from word n+2? The recent research about English has showed that only when word n+1was high frequency and short word (2-3letters word), it can obtain preview benefit from word n+2. Because there was no word-length factor in Chinese, so whether it can obtain valuable information has become the focus question in current eye movement study.Thus, the current study used Eyelink2000eye-tracker to record the experiment data, and all of the48participants are from Tianjin Normal University.Furthermore, the purpose of this study is to further explore whether Chinese readers can preview information from word n+2during sentence reading. It modulated the word n+1’s (the first character of the two-character word) probability of being a single character word (this probability was computed as the ratio of the count of a single character word to the count of the character whatever it is as a single character word or a constituent of a multiple character word occurred in the corpus), and using the boundary paradigm to further examine when n+1was easier to be used as a word; the parafoveal preview benefit was smaller. The experiment design was2(the first character:high or low probability)×2(previews:identical or nonword) within-participant design. And it also modulated the preview type to further test the hypothesis that preview type can affect how much we can obtain the preview benefits.The results were as following:Firstly, there were significant preview benefits on the two-character word and the1st character of the two-character word. In the similar preview condition, the viewing time is shorter than the nonword condition; similarly, in the high probability of being a single character word for the1st character condition, the fixation time also is shorter than the low probability condition. Those results showed readers can obtain preview benefit from word n+1and character n+1.Secondly, the probability of being a single character word could affect the preview benefit. On the total fixation duration and skipping probability, it showed a significant preview benefits from character n+2, it was compatible with the GAG model.Third, on first fixation location,in the high probability of first character condition, the landing position was farther and mainly on the second character, suggesting the preview benefit was larger; conversely, the landing position was shorter, and the preview benefit was smaller.Fourth, When the pretarget word was two-character word, there was an evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects on word n.According to the results of the experiment, we can conclude:During Chinese reading, readers can obtain preview benefit from character n+2. Preview type could affect preview information; it could obtain much more information in the same preview condition. Also the1st character’s probability of being a single character word of the two-character word could modulate the preview benefits. On the high probability of being a single character word condition, it could preview much more information, and the landing position was further; conversely, the preview benefits were smaller, and landing position was nearly. Finally, it showed parafoveal-on-foveal effect on word n, the results were generally compatible with the GAG model. |
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