Semantic and plausibility effects on preview benefit during eye fixations in Chinese reading

Abstract

The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to examine whether high level information affects preview benefit during Chinese reading. In two experiments, readers read sentences with a 1-character target word while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, the semantic relatedness between the target word and the preview word was manipulated so that there were semantically related and unrelated preview words, both of which were not plausible in the sentence context. No significant differences between these two preview conditions were found, indicating no effect of semantic preview. In Experiment 2, we further examined semantic preview effects with plausible preview words. There were four types of previews: identical, related & plausible, unrelated & plausible, and unrelated & implausible. The results revealed a significant effect of plausibility as single fixation and gaze duration on the target region were shorter in the two plausible conditions than in the implausible condition. Moreover, there was some evidence for a semantic preview benefit as single fixation duration on the target region was shorter in the related & plausible condition than the unrelated & plausible condition. Implications of these results for processing of high level information during Chinese reading are discussed.

Cross-language parafoveal semantic processing: Evidence from Korean–Chinese bilinguals

“…Indeed, Yan et al (2009) demonstrated semantic PB using simple Chinese characters as previews. Later studies extended this effect to other character sets (Tsai, Kliegl, & Yan, 2012;Yan, Zhou, Shu, & Kliegl, 2012;Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012).…”

Parafoveal processing in reading

“…The findings above suggest that parafoveal processing depends on the amount of resources left over from requisite 8 See also Yang, Wang, Tong and Rayner (2010) for some further evidence of semantic preview benefit in Chinese. 9 Hohenstein et al (2010) argued that the lack of a semantic preview benefit in most studies is due to the previews' appearing for longer than 125 ms and that such studies do not precisely control for preview duration.…”

Integrative and predictive processes in text reading: the N400 across a sentence boundary

“…Of note, predictability and integrability are correlated; words can be highly predictable and easily integrated. However, words can also have low predictability and be easily integrated with a given context (Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012). To test predictability effects, two conditions with words that had high predictability or low predictability given a single context sentence were used.…”