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Parafoveal Processing of Orthography, Phonology, and Semantics during Chinese Reading: Effects of Foveal Load

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journal contribution
posted on 2024-07-05, 15:48 authored by Lei Zhang, Liangyue Kang, Wanying Chen, Fang Xie, Kayleigh WarringtonKayleigh Warrington
The foveal load hypothesis assumes that the ease (or difficulty) of processing the currently fixated word in a sentence can influence processing of the upcoming word(s), such that parafoveal preview is reduced when foveal load is high. Recent investigations using pseudo-character previews reported an absence of foveal load effects in Chinese reading. Substantial Chinese studies to date provide some evidence to show that parafoveal words may be processed orthographically, phonologically, or semantically. However, it has not yet been established whether parafoveal processing is equivalent in terms of the type of parafoveal information extracted (orthographic, phonological, semantic) under different foveal load conditions. Accordingly, the present study investigated this issue with two experiments. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which foveal load was manipulated by placing a low- or high-frequency word N preceding a critical word. The preview validity of the upcoming word N + 1 was manipulated in Experiment 1, and word N + 2 in Experiment 2. The parafoveal preview was either identical to word N + 1(or word N + 2); orthographically related; phonologically related; semantically related; or an unrelated pseudo-character. The results showed robust main effects of frequency and preview type on both N + 1 and N + 2. Crucially, however, interactions between foveal load and preview type were absent, indicating that foveal load does not modulate the types of parafoveal information processed during Chinese reading.

Funding

Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LQ23C090006).

History

Author affiliation

College of Life Sciences Psychology & Vision Sciences

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Brain Sciences

Volume

14

Issue

5

Pagination

512 - 512

Publisher

MDPI AG

issn

2076-3425

eissn

2076-3425

Copyright date

2024

Available date

2024-07-05

Spatial coverage

Switzerland

Language

en

Deposited by

Dr Kayleigh Warrington

Deposit date

2024-07-04

Data Access Statement

Experimental data and associated R code are available at https://osf.io/54rg2/. Accessed on 16 April 2024

Rights Retention Statement

  • No