Does The Faster The Reading Speed, The Greater The Range Of Information Extracted?

Reading is a way for people to obtain information.The perceptual span in reading is defined as the amount of obtaining useful information during a fixation,including foveal information and parafoveal information.The perceptual span,mainly referring to the right range of the fixation in parafovea,varies with reading ability.Reading speed can be used as a comprehensive index to measure individual differences in reading.On the premise of ensuring the quality of reading comprehension,the faster the reading speed is,the higher the individual's reading ability is.In the study of Zhang et al.(2020),it has been found that there was no difference in the amount of preview benefit extracted by individuals with different reading speeds in Chinese.Is faster reading speed related to wider parafoveal pre-processing range?The current study was to investigate the differences of perceptual span between fast readers and slow readers in skilled Chinese reading.The eye tracking technique was used to record readers' eye movements while reading sentences with different window sizes(FL,R0,L1R1,L1R2,L1R3,L1R4)by using moving window paradigm.Reading group was a between-subject factor while the window size was a within-subject factor.Participants were 96 students from Tianjin Normal University.According to the reading speed of each participant in the normal reading condition(Full line),participants were divided into fast readers and slow readers by the median of reading speed.The dependent variables included average fixation time,total fixation time,total fixation times,forward saccade times,forward saccade length and reading speed.The results showed that the perceptual span of fast readers(422 words/min)was about 1 character on the left side of the fixation and 3?4 words on the right side;the perceptual span of slow readers(259 words/min)was about 1 character on the left side of fixation and 1?3 words on the right side.In conclusion,fast readers obtain information from a wider parafoveal region than that of slow readers.In addition,the reading efficiency of slow readers appears higher under conditions of large enough window than that of normal reading,indicating that effective restriction of text visual presentation may promote reading of slow readers.This study helps us to improve reading speed scientifically and understand "speed reading" correctly.In addition,for slow readers,optimizing the visual presentation of text can promote their reading effect.