An Eye Tracking Research Of Parafoveal Preview Benefit In Fast Readers And Slow Readers

With development of technology and advancement of society,modern people's life rhythm accelerate than ever before.As people contact with each other more and more closely,and the information communication between us become more and more convenient,which leads to an amazing expansion of information.It is important for modern people to find some information they need quickly when confronting dozens of information.Over the past decades,researches investigating the process of reading have always maintained a high heat,but less in fast reading.Domestic researches on fast reading are more about fast reading training of primary and middle school students,but fewer about psychological mechanism of fast reading.With eye tracking,this research use parafoveal preview experiment to examine the preview benefits in fast readers and slow readers.First,preliminary experiments was used to distinguish fast readers and slow ones from normal,named paper-and-pencil reading speed test,which was presented by e-prime 2.0.The test consisted of 150 sentences written by author,of which readers can judge whether it was right or wrong.For example,one of the correct statements was "there are seven days in a week";and one of the incorrect statements was "A weighing machine measures the height of a person",which clearly violated common knowledge.Participants must judge these sentences in three minutes,then they were sorted by right numbers judged in three minutes.All fast readers showed a reading rate of better than 10 percent,and all slow readers show a reading rate of worse than 10 percent of all participants.The number of sentences read by fast readers was significantly different with that from slow readers(p<0.00).Parafoveal preview benefit experiment was conducted with a 2 subjects(fast readers or slow readers)x 2 preview conditions(identical or pseudocharacter)x 2 foveal frequency(high frequency or low frequency)mixed experimental design,reader with different reading speed is between-subject design,and parafoveal preview condition and foveal load are within-subject design.with EyeLink 1000 eye tracker recording the eye movements of subjects.Foveal load(low and high)was manipulated by changing the foveal frequency(high and low),and parafoveal preview conditions(identical or pseudocharacter)was manipulated as the same time.Parafoveal preview benefit in fast readers and slow readers was investigated according to foveal load with boundary paradigm.The conclusions are as follow:(1)parafoveal preview benefit from slow readers are greater than that from fast readers,indicating that information processing is parallel processing during reading sentence,so they have enough time to process parafoveal preview information.(2)the results of parafoveal preview experiment supports the SWIFT parallel processing theory.