| A lot of studies demonstrate that skipped words are processed in the visual area of the parafovea,although they are not looked at,which indicates that the generation of word skipping depends on the processing of the parafovea to a great extent.Unlike alphabetic languages such as English,Chinese characters occupy the same length without word spacing,readers are able to obtain more information parafoveally during Chinese reading.However,it is still controversial regarding whether word skipping is based on partial lexical processing or complete processing of the parafoveal word in Chinese reading.The purpose of this study is to explore whether parafoveal word skipping in Chinese reading is due to their full or partial recognition in the parafovea,and to what extent it determines whether an upcoming word is skipped or fixated.Two experiments were included using the priming paradigm and the boundary paradigm(Rayner,1975),to explore the mechanism of word skipping in Chinese reading.The eye movement technique was used to examine how lexical activation combining with visual information of parafoveal words affect word skipping.Lexical activation is manipulated by repeated priming of the “Prime-Target” word pairs embedded in the sentence.The boundary technique was used to determine whether preview words that provided only partial information(for example,the word“?”in Experiment 1 was changed to“ ”,and the word“?”in Experiment 2 was changed to “ ”)affected word skipping.In Experiment 1,we manipulated the preview type(full preview vs.transposed radical preview)and the priming condition(repeat priming vs.control priming).The results showed that the main effect of preview type was reliable in skipping rate with higher skipping probability for the full preview condition than the transposed radical preview condition,indicating that full preview promotes parafoveal word identification.No difference was found between the transposed radical-repeat condition and the transposed radical-control condition on the skipping rate,that is,there was no repetition effect on the skipping rate.Fixation times only showed standard preview benefit.The above results show that word skipping is due to the full identification in parafovea,but no repetition priming effect was observed,nor interaction was observed in Experiment 1.In Experiment 2 we used a similar experimental design as in Experiment 1.But the target word with strokes removed was used as the preview condition to ensure that only partial information of the target word is available during the preview.Similar to Experiment 1,Experiment 2 also showed a standard preview effect.Furthermore,the skipping rate differed in the repeated priming and control priming conditions,but this is an early processing because such a faciliation of repetition is only observed in the skipping rate.There was no interaction in Experiment 2,such that no significant difference between repeat priming and control priming was found for different stroke reduction previews.Critically,skipping rate of strokes removed-repeated conditions was significantly lower than that of full preview-repeated conditions.In general,we conclude that word skipping during Chinese reading is mainly determined on the basis of full identification in the parafovea. |
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