Is There A Binocular Advantage In Chinese Reading?

Reading is a basic and essential cognitive activity in daily life,and it is also one of the main ways for human to obtain external information.As we are known,80% to90% of information acquisition is based on vision.Visual input is accompanied by eye movements,which can reflect the cognitive processing in reading.Studies on alphabetical languages have shown that binocular vision has an advantage in reading.Compared to monocular vision,the binocular vision has a shorter fixation time on sentences and better reading efficiency.To explore whether there is binocular vision advantage in Chinese reading,this study borrowed the same research methods used in alphabetical reading,and investigated the eye movement index and changes of reading efficiency under different visual conditions.In experiment 1,the boundary paradigm was adopted to explore binocular advantages in Chinese reading by controlling the visual presentation mode in parafoveal and foveal vision,and manipulating the frequency(high/low frequency)of target words at the same time.With 183 experimental sentences,EyeLink1000 Plus desktop eye tracker was used to record the eye movements of 32 college students while reading.The results showed that there were significant binocular visual advantages.When reading foveal words with one eye,the first fixation time and gaze time increased.And when monocular vision directly focused on the foveal text,even if the previous parafoveal processing was presented as binocular vision,the overall reading efficiency was greatly reduced.There was also a significantly monocular visual reading cost in the parafovea,which was manifested in longer fixation time and shorter saccade length than in binocular visual reading,and the word frequency effect was enhanced.Experiment 2 also controlled the visual presentation of information in the parafoveal and foveal vision,and manipulated predictability information of target words(high predictability /low predictability).This experiment used the same experimental paradigm and instrument as experiment 1.A total of 173 experimental sentences,35 college students were tested.The results showed that there was a monocular visual cost in reading foveal information,and the fixation time increased.There is also a monocular visual cost in parafoveal reading,which was reflected in longer fixation time and shorter saccade length than in binocular reading.In addition,the predictability effect of target words under monocular vision was enhanced.