The Effect Of Dialogue From TV Series On Perceptual Span In Chinese Reading

Most of us might be experienced such a situation:you were absorbed in a book to study or work, but there is a variety of voice around. In our daily life, reading was an important cognitive activities, and one of the main access for us to getting information and knowledge. Moreover, reading was a complex cognitive activity, which need quiet environment as far as possible. Many people, however, were often reading under the background of all kinds of sound or speech, and susceptible to some potential noise interference. For example, many people in the open office worked under others colleagues’ dialogue, and some people’s reading activities would be interrupted suddenly by a question from someone. Many primary school students would be disturbed by the talking from classmates or family members around, radio and television, and other aspects of the sound when they were reading book or writing homework. Someone would ask that how do people deal with all sorts of interference information? Getting to know about the cognition process of reading in background noise could help us improve the reading efficiency, and the quality of our life.The perceptual span is the region of the visual field from which useful information can be acquired during a given eye fixation.25fourth graders participated in the experiment. Their eye movements were recorded with a SR Research EyeLink2000eye-tracker. The experiment design was2(background sound: TV series dialogue and no background sound)×5(display conditions:L1R1, L2R2, L3R3, L4R4, and whole line condition) within-subjects design. The TV series dialogue was selected as the audio background. In the experiment, participants read100sentences in ten experimental conditions. The half of the sentences were read under the background of the TV series dialogue. The others were read in a quiet environment without background sound. Participants read the sentences wearing the headphone both in the condition of no background sound and the TV series dialogue. Participants were seated69.5cm from the monitor. The size of a character was28×28 pixels, subtended0.9°of visual angle. Latin square design was adopted in the experiment. Various display condition were blocked, and the order of conditions was counterbalanced across participants.The results showed that:(1) Compared with the condition of no background sound, the reading speed was slower and the forward saccade is shorter, and there were more fixation counts and forward saccade counts under the background sound.(2)The perceptual span of fourth grader students were3character spaces to the right of the fixated character in the condition of no background sound, but3-4character spaces to the right of the fixated character under the TV series dialogue.