Parafoveal processing across different lexical constituents in Chinese reading

Abstract

We report a boundary paradigm eye movement experiment to investigate whether the linguistic category of a two character Chinese string affects how the second character of that string is processed in the parafovea during reading. We obtained clear preview effects in all conditions, but more importantly, found parafoveal-on-foveal effects whereby a nonsense preview of the second character influenced fixations on the first character. This effect occurred for monomorphemic words, but not for compound words or phrases. Also, in a word boundary demarcation experiment, we demonstrate that Chinese readers are not always consistent in their judgments of which characters in a sentence comprise words. We conclude that information regarding the combinatorial properties of characters in Chinese is used on-line to moderate the extent to which parafoveal characters are processed.