The Influence Of Contextual Diversity On Eye Movement In Chinese Sentence Reading

Recent research using English materials has revealed that contextual diversity is more important in influencing word processing than word frequency in visual word cognition and normal sentence reading. Two eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the effect of contextual diversity and frequency of both character and word in Mandarin Chinese sentence reading. Participants were required to read sentences with target characters and words embedded in the central positions.Eye-tracking data showed that:(1) When controlling for the effect of contextual diversity, we found character frequency effect not significant in all eye movement measures; but when character frequency effect was controlled, the effect of contextual diversity was significant in first-pass measures (like gaze duration) and later-processing measures (like regression path duration and total fixation time), suggesting that characters appearing in more contexts were processed with less time. (2) When controlling for the effect of contextual diversity, we found word frequency effect not significant in most eye movement measures except for first fixation duration; but when word frequency effect was controlled, the effect of contextual diversity was reliably significant in first-pass measures (like gaze duration) and later-processing measures (like total fixation time), suggesting that words appearing in more contexts were processed with less time.Conclusions:(1) In Chinese normal reading existed the effect of contextual diversity, which was found in the processing level of both character and word. The pattern of this effect on character and word was different. (2) Contextual diversity may be a better predictor of character and word processing speed relative to occurrence of frequency.