The Processing Of Network Neologisms In Chinese Reading: Evidence From Parafoveal Foresight

Reading is an important activity in our life.Readers are able to extract useful information from foveal and parafoveal during reading.However,there is still a critical issue of controversy among parafoveal processing,namely,whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel?Eye-tracking methodology is an extremely valuable tool in examining the nature of parafoveal processing.Based on previous studies and theories,we should consider a more flexible unit of text than the word in foveal and parafoveal processing.Multi-Constituent Unit（MCU）Hypothesis offers a way of reconciling parallel processing of words during reading with serial accounts.The idea behind the MCU Hypothesis is that some linguistic units that occur in the language,are comprised of multiple words.With the development and widespread of the Internet,a certain new social dialect appears,namely netspeak neologisms.It has become a non-negligible part of linguistics.Some studies have shown that some new words have reached the same level as the lexicalization of basic words.Can netspeak neologisms be represented and processed as MCU?The present study included two experiments.Experiment 1 used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm（Rayner,1975）to manipulate whether participants saw a consistent or inconsistent preview of the 1st（N+1）and 2nd（N+2）constituent of a netspeak neologism.The results showed that there was a significantly interaction between the two preview types across all fixation time measures.A significant N+2 preview benefit was observed when N+1 was consistent but not when N+1 was inconsistent,or the effect size of N+2 preview benefit under N+1 consistent preview was larger.In skipping rate,there was also an interaction between the two preview types across N+2 and the whole word regions,while N+1 and N+2 was consistent preview（as a MCU）,skipping rate were higher.Based on findings of Experiment 1,Experiment 2 manipulated the familiarity of netspeak neologisms,a 2（familiarity : High,Low）×2（N+1 preview type: consistent,inconsistent）×2（N+2preview type: consistent,inconsistent）within subject design was applied for this study.We first found a significant effect of familiarity that fixation durations of the high familiarity netspeak neologisms were shorter than the low familiarity netspeak neologisms,the skipping rate of the high familiarity netspeak neologisms were higher than the low familiarity netspeak neologisms.There were significant interaction between preview types and familiarity,such that N+2 preview benefit was larger when N+1 was a consistent preview.The research suggests that some highly familiar netspeak neologisms can be processed as a MCU in the parafovea.Familiarity plays a major role in the lexicalization of netspeak neologisms,although there is evidence for that low familiarity netspeak neologisms may be processed as a MCU in the parafovea to some degree,the effect was comparatively weak.