Investigating transposed-character preview effects in Chinese reading

<p dir="ltr">Eye movement research has revealed flexibility in the parafoveal processing of character order in Chinese reading. Specifically, studies suggest that the identification of a forthcoming two-character target word in a sentence benefits more from parafoveal preview of a nonword created by transposing rather than substituting its characters. With the present research, we report two eye movement experiments which further explored this parafoveal transposed-character effect. With the first experiment, we observed a larger parafoveal processing benefit for transposed-character previews as compared to either visually-similar or visually dissimilar unrelated previews. With the second experiment, we observed a word frequency effect during the early processing of target words following transposed-character previews that is absent following unrelated previews. Exploratory analyses also showed effects of these variables on saccade-targeting, replicating key established findings while also revealing that outgoing saccades are longer following transposed-character previews compared to unrelated previews, and that transposed-character previews uniquely support lexical influences on landing positions in words. Taken together, the findings further demonstrate flexibility in the parafoveal processing of character order, by revealing that transposed-character previews provide larger parafoveal processing benefits compared even to visually-similar unrelated previews, and can support lexical influences on both word identification and eye guidance during Chinese reading.</p>