Word Skipping In Chinese Reading:The Role Of Parafoveal Complexity And Frequency

During reading,we make saccades frequently in order to place upcoming(i.e.,not yet fixated)words in a text into the center of the visual field,the fovea,where the visual acuity is highest for word identification.Whereas the majority of words in a text are fixated during first pass reading,up to 30%of them do not receive a direct fixation,but are initially skipped.What causes readers make the decision of word skipping?Previous research has clearly demonstrated that although readers do not fixated the skipped words,word identification has to be established on the basis of the preprocessing from parafovea,which means that parafoveal information has a substantial impact on the decision as to whether or not the upcoming word will be skipped.Thus the present studies used eye tracking to explore the mechanism of skipping during natural Chinese sentence reading.Two studies were carried out.Study 1 investigated how parafoveal visual factors such as word complexity influenced the word skipping.Experiment 1and 2 were included.Experiment 1 examined whether parafoveal word complexity affected word skipping during reading.Wemanipulatedtarget word complexity(high or low)and preview(identical,semantic congruent low or high complexity preview,low complex pseudocharacter,high complex pseudocharacter)using the boundary paradigm.Results showed that parafoveal word complexity affected the word skipping,and skipping rates were higher for low complex previews than high complex previews.In experiment 2 wemanipulatedtarget word complexity(high or low)and preview(identical,syntacticallyinfelicitous low or high complex preview,low complex pseudocharacte,high complex pseudocharacter)using the boundary paradigm to explore word skipping is depended on parafoveal processing or context constraint.Results showed that for the lowcomplex target,skipping rates were higher for identical previews compared to the other three previews,however for the highcomplex target,skipping rates were higher for lowcomplex previews compared to the other three previews.Furthermore,readers were likely to skip the target when they had a lowcomplex,syntactically felicitous preview compared to a lowcomplex,syntactically infelicitous preview.Study 2focused on the influence of parafovealword frequency on word skipping.In experiment 3,wemanipulatedtarget word frequency(high or low)and preview(identical,pseudocharacter,orsyntacticallyinfelicitous low or high frequency preview)using the boundary paradigm to explore word skipping is depended on parafoveal processing or context constraint.Results showed that for the high frequency target,skipping rates were higher for identical previews compared to the other two previews,however for the low frequency target,skipping rates were higher for high frequency previews compared to the other two previews.Furthermore,readers were likely to skip the target when they had a high frequency,syntactically felicitous preview compared to a high frequency,syntactically infelicitous preview.Results suggests that decisions to skip a word in Chinese reading are based mainly on parafoveal word familiarity,but that syntactic felicity of the parafoveal word may also play a limited role.Same with the findings of experiment2,the results also indicates that decisions to skip a word in Chinese reading are based mainly on parafoveal word familiarity,but that syntactic felicity of the parafoveal word may also play a limited role.The conclusion was made as follows based on the findings of the two studies:(1)The parafiveal word complexity has a important effect on word skipping.(2)The decisions to skip a word in Chinese reading are based mainly on parafoveal word familiarity,high frequency or low complex words are more likely being skipped.(3)The syntactic felicity of the parafoveal word also play a limited role in word skipping.