Serial Or Parallel Of Eye Movement Control Models

On the basis of previous researches, we conducted three experiments,four sub-experiments, to explore the parafoveal-on-foveal interactionsduring the Chinese normal reading with the boundary technology andnegative priming paradigm. The boundary paradigm was used in twoexperiments designed to determine how the processing of parafovealcharacters affects foveal inspection time during Chinese sentencereading.Whether words in a line are processed one by one, or two or morewords could be processed in parallel, is a major dispute between serialattention shift (SAS) and distributed lexical processing models of eyemovement control. To test which type of models are more consistent withempirical research has become a heat topic in eye movement researchduring reading. The present study aimed to test the two types of modelsby examining their different predictions on preview processing duringreading: (1) whether readers attain high-level information, such assemantic information, from parafovea; (2) Whether lexical informationextracted from parafovea could exert influence on the processing offoveal.Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of the unfixed parafpvealcharacters and the frequency of foveal in abnormal reading. The resultsshowed, while the foveal was high frequency, measured gaze on fovealcharacters was longer when the frequency of the parafoveal characterswere high frequency.Experiment 2 manipulated the frequency of the unfixed parafoveal characters to explore the parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Experiment 2amanipulated the frequency of the unfixed parafoveal characters whichwere always congruent with the context of the sentences. The resultsshowed measured gaze on foveal characters was longer when theparafoveal preview characters were high frequency. Experiment 2bmanipulated the frequency of the unfixed parafoveal characters whichwere always incongruent with the context of the sentences. There weretwo kinds of parafoveal characters (high- or low-frequent) in Experiment2b, both of which were incongruent with the context. Gaze duration onthe foveal characters was longer with low-frequent previews than withhigh-frequent ones.In Experiment 3, the semantic relation between the previewcharacters and the context (congruent or incongruent) was manipulatedwhile the frequency of the preview characters was matched. The semanticrelation had no effect on foveal processing, but inspection time on theparafoveal characters was shorter with congruent previews.These results suggested readers could obtain high-level informationfrom parafovea and process more than one word during Chinese sentencereading. The difficulty of parafoveal may act as a target for an earlyinter-word saccade, processing a process referred to as 'magneticattraction'. In all, the current study support that more than onecharacter could be processed during Chinese reading.