Semantic Preview Processing Of Parafovea In Chinese Reading

In the previous eye movement studies of the alphabetic scripts,it's still controversial whether the parafoveal semantic information can be extracted during normal reading.Compared with the alphabetic scripts,the features of Chinese text could drive readers to extract more information from the parafoveal words.In the past,when discussing semantic preview,it used to manipulate the semantic related conditions in the preview type,and this operation mixed the function of orthographic and phonological information.This experiment innovatively uses the color stroop boundary paradigm which controls the irrelevant information to explore semantic preview effect and parafoveal-foveal effect in Chinese reading.The study included two experiments,both using the same experiment design: 2(word preview type: identical,pseudoword)× 3(color preview type: black preview,the congruent color preview,the incongruent color preview).In Experiment 1 we used the classical Stroop color(red,yellow,blue,green)in the stimuli and recorded eye movements of 109 college students while they read the sentence containing the target word.Through the analysis of the target word,we found that(1)the congruent color preview and incongruent color preview had longer fixation time(FFD,SFD,GD and TFD)and lower skipping rates of target word than the black preview,but we didn't find any significant difference among the condition of congruent and incongruent color preview.(2)There was a significant interaction between the character preview type and color preview type in fixation time(FFD and SFD),when the target preview was the character,the difference between black and incongruent color was bigger than the pseudocharacter.Experiment 1 found the yellow and blue colors were not very effective.The analysis of effective materials revealed the interaction that could indicate the color information interfered with the processing of the parafoveal disappeared.In Experiment 2 we used the typical Stroop color(red,green)and recorded eye movements of 107 college students.Besides we found that the congruent color preview and incongruent color preview had longer fixation time(FFD,SFD,GD and TFD)and lower skipping rates of target word than the black preview,with a significant difference among the condition of congruent and incongruent color preview.We combined the data for the pretarget region from both Experiments and found that when the target preview was a character,the difference in skipping rates of pretarget between the congruent and incongruent color preview was marginally significant,incidicating that there was a weak semantic parafoveal-on-foveal effect.The conclusion was made as follows based on the findings of two experiments: Chinese readers could extract semantic information from the parafoveal words,and our results support a weak semantic parafoveal-on-foveal effect.