Word skipping in Chinese reading: The role of high-frequency preview and syntactic felicity

Abstract

Two experiments are reported to investigate whether Chinese readers skip a high frequency preview word without taking the syntax of the sentence context into account. In Experiment 1, we manipulated target word syntactic category, frequency and preview using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). For high frequency verb targets, there were identity and pseudocharacter previews alongside a low frequency noun preview. For low frequency verb targets, there were identity and pseudocharacter previews alongside a high frequency noun preview. Results showed that for high frequency targets, skipping rates were higher for identical previews compared to the syntactically infelicitous alternative low frequency preview and pseudocharacter previews, however for low frequency targets, skipping rates were higher for high frequency previews (even when they were syntactically infelicitous) compared to the other two previews. Furthermore, readers were more likely to skip the target when they had a high frequency, syntactically felicitous preview compared to a high frequency, syntactically infelicitous preview. The pattern of felicity effects was statistically robust when readers launched saccades from near the target. In Experiment 2, we assessed whether display change awareness influenced the patterns of results in Experiment 1. Results showed that the overall patterns held in Experiment 2 regardless of some readers being more likely to be aware of the display change than others. These results suggest that decisions to skip a word in Chinese reading are primarily based on parafoveal word familiarity, though the syntactic felicity of a parafoveal word also exerts a robust influence for high frequency previews.