The Underlying Mechanisms Of The Parafoveal Semantic Preview Benefit In Chinese Reading

The semantic preview benefit refers to that the preview word that is semantically related to the target word would reduce the subsequent processing time of the target word compared with the semantically unrelated preview word during reading.SPB is of great significance to reveal whether readers can extract high-level semantic information from the parafovea vision and achieve efficient reading.It remains to be debated about the stability of the parafoveal SPB result patterns and the cognitive mechanism of the occurrence of SPB.Previous studies have suggested that SPB may derive from the semantic associations between the preview and target words.Other researchers have proposed that SPB is more likely to reflect the extent to which the preview word contextually fits with the sentence.This study aims to investigate the mechanism of the occurrence of parafoveal SPB in Chinese reading.It mainly focuses on the following four aspects:(1)It is still necessary to further verify and investigate whether the occurrence of SPB in Chinese reading comes from semantic associations between preview and target words,or from the plausibility of the matching between the preview word and preceding sentence context,or a combined effect of both variables.(2)Previous studies on SPB have not strictly controlled for the syntactic plausibility of preview words,which may confound the SPB results.Therefore,it needs to be further clarified whether the SPB result patterns confuse the syntactic plausibility.(3)Most of the previous studies on the SPB used the free association approach to construct semantic relatedness between the preview word and target words.However,recent researchers have pointed out its limitations and advocated for the co-occurrence association approach to construct semantic relatedness,which is more objective and contextual.It is therefore pertinent to investigate whether the use of the co-occurrence association approach to construct semantic relatedness provides a greater possibility to discover the effect of semantic relatedness on SPB.(4)Word co-occurrence types can be categorized into first-order(direct semantic association)and second-order(indirect semantic association)co-occurrence.Previous studies have demonstrated that the priming effects of direct and indirect semantic associations are separated by variations in priming time(pre-processing degree).Consequently,it is imperative to further investigate whether SPB of different semantic association types also exhibits dynamic changes across varying preprocessing degrees.To address these issues,this paper outlines three new studies with seven experiments to explore the mechanisms of the SPB effect in Chinese reading.The first study investigates the stability of the SPB result patterns in Chinese reading and its underlying mechanisms in Chinese reading.Three eye movement experiments were conducted to explore the effect of the preview plausibility and the semantic relatedness on the SPB of the simple single-character word(experiment 1),compound single-character word(experiment 2),and twocharacter word(experiment 3)respectively in the process of Chinese reading.There was a 2(preview plausibility: plausible,implausible)× 2(semantic relatedness: related,unrelated)within-subject design(and an identical preview condition was set to measure the typical preview benefit,there were five preview conditions).The results showed that there were significant plausibility main effects in all three experiments: the early fixations durations of the target word in the plausible preview condition were significantly shorter than in the implausible preview condition,and the semantic relatedness effect did not approach significantly.The interaction effect between the preview plausibility and semantic relatedness was observed only in the simple single-character word.The main effect of semantic relatedness was significant for the implausible previews but not for plausible previews.On the other hand,the main effect of the preview plausibility was significant in the semantically unrelated preview condition,but not in the semantically related preview condition.The results pattern of this study provides new evidence for the significant role of preview plausibility on SPB in Chinese reading.The results also showed that the preview plausibility preferentially influences SPB more than the semantic relatedness in Chinese reading,supporting the contextual fit account.The second study futher investigated the effect of preview plausibility and semantic relatedness on SPB in Chinese reading when the preview words were syntactically plausible.Through two experiments,we further investigated the result patterns of the SPB when the preview words were all syntactically plausible.Experiment 4 was a 2(preview plausibility: plausible,implausible)× 2(semantic relatedness: related,unrelated)within-subject design(and an identical preview condition was set to measure the typical preview benefit,there were five preview conditions).Consistent with previous studies,the free association method was used to determine semantic relatedness.Experiment5 used a similar experimental design,but further used the co-occurrence association method,which was more consistent with the frequency of sentence context usage,to measure the semantic relatedness.The results found that there was a significant plausibility preview main effect in both experiments.When using the free association approach to construct the semantic relatedness,the main effect of the semantic relatedness was only significant in the gaze duration measure(Experiment 4);When using the co-occurrence association approach to determine the semantic relatedness,the main effect of the semantic relatedness main effect was significant in the single fixation duration,and this main effect was observed only when the previews were plausible in the first fixation duration(Experiment 5).Our results further demonstrated the key role of the preview plausibility on SPB and provided new evidence that the semantic plausibility from the context affects the SPB before the semantic relatedness in Chinese reading,supporting the contextual fit account.Furthermore,this study suggested that using the co-occurrence association approach to construct semantic relatedness provides the possibility to discover the role of semantic relatedness on SPB.The third study examined the dynamic change patterns of SPB of different semantic association types(different co-occurrence association types)with the increase of the degree of preview processing to further clarify the processing mode of SPB.By manipulating the foveal visual processing load(stimulus quality,i.e.,visual contrast of text presentation)to manipulate the degree of parafoveal pre-processing,two experiments were set up to dynamic the dynamic change patterns of the SPB for direct semantic association and indirect semantic association with the increase in preprocessing degree.There was a 2(semantic relatedness: related,unrelated)× 2(stimulus quality of the pre-target word: normal,blur)within-subject design(and an identical preview condition was set to measure the typical preview benefit,there were five preview conditions).The results showed that the SPB results of experiment 6 and experiment 7 were completely consistent.The semantic relatedness main effect was significant in the gaze duration measure,and there was a significant interaction effect between the semantic relatedness and the stimulus quality of the pre-target word in regression path duration: the semantically related preview benefit was significant under the normal presentation of the pre-target word,and this benefit disappears under the blur presentation of the pretarget word.The results show that the SPB changes dynamically with the increase of pre-processing degree(from the preview word present normally to burly).The dynamic change patterns of the SPB of the direct semantic association and indirect semantic association are consistent with the increase of pre-processing degree.This study can draw the following conclusions:(1)The preview plausibility preferentially influences SPB than semantic relatedness in Chinese reading,which is significantly earlier in having an effect on the fixation durations of target words than semantic relatedness,supporting the contextual fit account.(2)In the case of strict control of the syntactic plausibility of preview words,the semantic plausibility from sentence context still has a dominant effect on the occurrence of SPB,which exerts a more preferential effect on the SPB than semantic relatedness.(3)The use of the co-occurrence association approach to construct semantic relatedness provides the possibility to discover the role of semantic relatedness on SPB.The results demonstrate the validity and superiority of the cooccurrence association approach in constructing semantic relatedness.(4)The SPB changes dynamically from the existence of the preview benefit to the preview benefit disappearance with the increase in the preview processing degree.The dynamic change pattern of the SPB processing process can be explained by the SWIFT model.