The Effect Of The News Sound On Undergraduate Perceptual Span In Chinese Reading

In daily life,people will be accompanied by distracting and irrelevant sound(such as radio,voices,TV shows,music,etc.)in reading,office,writing assignments.According to observation,college students are often accompanied by irrelevant voice in their learning.Many students don't realize that our thinking processes(cognitive process)will be interfered by sound(especially language),and then the learning efficiency.is reduced.In previous studies,it is possible to see that the impact of irrelevant sound on cognitive tasks has been a hot topic.Many researchers have found that the interference of background sound is more common,the irrelevant sound interference effect is found in order memory task,semantic memory,writing,and reading.It is well known that the reading is a complex task,and the reading is potentially disturbed when there is irrelevant sound.The perceptual span in reading is the region of the visual field from which useful information can be acquired during a given eye fixation.The perceptual span is as a basic problem of reading and indicates the height of reading efficiency.So what about the effect of the irrelevant sound on the perceptual span?This study intends to explore the effect of irrelevant sound on the perceptual span.This study used the moving window paradigm to explore the effect of irrelevant sound on college students' reading perceptual span.28 undergraduate students were invited to participate in the experiment.Their eye movements were recorded with the EyeLink2000 eye-tracker to explore whether there was a significant difference of the reading time,reading speed and valid reading speed,fixation count on the condition of the news,the white noise and the quiet.The university students were asked to read 155 sentence materials on the eye tracker carefully.The experiment adopted 3(background sound:the news,the white noise,the quiet)×5(window size:L1R1,L2R2,L3R3,L4R4,and whole line condition)two factors within-subjects design.The results found that:(1)Compared with the white noise and the quiet,the duration was longer,the reading speed and the effective reading speed were slower,and there were more fixation counts under the news sound.There were no difference between the white noise and the quiet.(2)The perceptual span of college students were 2 character spaces to the right of the fixated character in the condition of the news sound,but 2-3 character spaces to the right of the fixated character under the white noise and the quiet.The conclusion was that the sound of news brocast made undergraduate perceptual span smaller.