The Role Of Syntactic Information And Repetitive Words In Parafoveal Processing During Reading

Previous evidence from studies of alphabetic languages demonstrates that readers can process the syntactic category of parafoveal words(Brothers&Traxler,2016;Veldre&Andrews,2018).Unlike English,Chinese do not have explicit markers or inflectional indicators(i.e.,lexical categories,number or tense)to specify words’syntactic properties.For example,there is no inflection with the verb 研究(investigate)no matter whether this action is going to happen or has already happened,nor whether this word is used as a verb or a noun.Thus,parafoveal syntactic cues in Chinese may be limited relative to English,meaning that the extraction and use of such information when making syntactic commitments may be delayed.Note,though,that Chinese is a densely packed written language meaning that parafoveal information is more visually available compared to English.Therefore,the time course of syntactic influences in Chinese may be more rapid than in English;there is the possibility that these influences may trade-off.Our present study included two experiments.In the first experiment,we used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm(Rayner,1975)to manipulate the syntactic congruity of previews(identical preview,syntactically congruent preview,incongruent preview,or incongruent preview formed by a repetition of a preceding word in the sentence).The results showed that although there was no reliable evidence for differences in skipping rates across the conditions,all fixation durations were significantly shorter for the identical condition than for the other three previews.The syntactic congruity yielded preview effects on gaze durations with shorter fixations for syntactically congruent previews than for incongruent previews.In addition,there was no difference between syntactically incongruent and repeated condition,suggesting that syntactic incongruence may take precedence over lexical repetition effects.In the second experiment,we manipulated the syntactic congruity(congruent vs incongurent)and repeatability of previews(repetitive vs non-repetitive),we also included an identical preview as a baseline.Most of target words were the second character of two-character words or common gerundial phrases.A syntactic preview benefit was obtained on gaze durations and a repetition effect was obtained under both conditions while the target word and pre-target word were analyzed as a whole.There was no interaction between syntactic congruity and repeatability of previews.Our study showed that syntactic preview benefit exists in the condition that the target word is a single word no matter it is a verb or a noun.When the target word is the second character of two-character words or common gerundial phrases,the phrase needs to be processed as a whole,so as to produce the syntactic preview benefit.In Chinese sentence reading,when a word appears for the second time,there will be a significant promotion effect brought by repetition.The high level syntactic information and the low level repetitive information have independent effects on the recognition and processing of the parafoveal words.The degree and depth of the processing of the parafoveal words may be influenced by the difficulty of the processing of the pre-target words.