TY - JOUR A1 - Yan, Ming A1 - Pan, Jinger A1 - Belanger, Nathalie N. A1 - Shu, Hua T1 - Chinese deaf readers have early access to parafoveal semantics JF - Journal of experimental psychology : Learning, memory, and cognition N2 - In the present study, we manipulated different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined how deaf readers make use of the parafoveal information. Results clearly indicate that although the reading-level matched hearing readers make greater use of orthographic information in the parafovea, parafoveal semantic information is obtained earlier among the deaf readers. In addition, a phonological preview benefit effect was found for the better deaf readers (relative to less-skilled deaf readers), although we also provide an alternative explanation for this effect. Providing evidence that Chinese deaf readers have higher efficiency when processing parafoveal semantics, the study indicates flexibility across individuals in the mechanisms underlying word recognition adapting to the inputs available in the linguistic environment. KW - parafoveal KW - sentence reading KW - Chinese KW - deaf readers Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000035 SN - 0278-7393 SN - 1939-1285 VL - 41 IS - 1 SP - 254 EP - 261 PB - American Psychological Association CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Chen, Zhong A1 - Li, Qiang A1 - Lin, Chien-Jer Charles A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Chinese relative clauses are an important test case for pitting the predictions of expectation-based accounts against those of memory-based theories. The memory-based accounts predict that object relatives are easier to process than subject relatives because, in object relatives, the distance between the relative clause verb and the head noun is shorter. By contrast, expectation-based accounts such as surprisal predict that the less frequent object relative should be harder to process. In previous studies on Chinese relative clause comprehension, local ambiguities may have rendered a comparison between relative clause types uninterpretable. We designed experimental materials in which no local ambiguities confound the comparison. We ran two experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) to compare reading difficulty in subject and object relatives which were placed either in subject or object modifying position. The evidence from our studies is consistent with the predictions of expectation-based accounts but not with those of memory-based theories. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Sentence processing KW - Relative clause KW - Structural expectation KW - Working-memory KW - Surprisal KW - Chinese Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.10.005 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 79 SP - 97 EP - 120 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Yan, Ming T1 - Visually complex foveal words increase the amount of parafoveal information acquired JF - Vision research : an international journal for functional aspects of vision. N2 - This study investigates the effect of foveal load (i.e., processing difficulty of currently fixated words) on parafoveal information processing. Contrary to the commonly accepted view that high foveal load leads to reduced parafoveal processing efficiency, results of the present study showed that increasing foveal visual (but not linguistic) processing load actually increased the amount of parafoveal information acquired, presumably due to the fact that longer fixation duration on the pretarget word provided more time for parafoveal processing of the target word. It is therefore proposed in the present study that foveal linguistic processing load is not the only factor that determines parafoveal processing; preview time (afforded by foveal word visual processing load) may jointly influence parafoveal processing. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Reading KW - Eye movements KW - Parafoveal processing KW - Chinese Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2015.03.025 SN - 0042-6989 SN - 1878-5646 VL - 111 SP - 91 EP - 96 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Yan, Ming A1 - Sommer, Werner T1 - Parafoveal-on-Foveal Effects of Emotional Word Semantics in Reading Chinese Sentences: Evidence From Eye Movements JF - Journal of experimental psychology : Learning, memory, and cognition N2 - Despite the well-known influence of emotional meaning on cognition, relatively less is known about its effects on reading behavior. We investigated whether fixation behavior during the reading of Chinese sentences is influenced by emotional word meaning in the parafovea. Two-character target words embedded into the same sentence frames provided emotionally positive, negative, or neutral contents. Fixation durations on neutral pretarget words were prolonged for positive parafoveal words and for highly frequent negative parafoveal words. In addition, fixation durations on foveal emotional words were shorter than those on neutral words. We also found that the role of emotional words varied as a function of their valence during foveal and parafoveal processing. These findings suggest a processing advantage for emotional words relative to emotionally neutral stimuli in foveal and parafoveal vision. We discuss implications for the notion of attention attraction due to emotional content. KW - parafoveal vision KW - emotion KW - reading KW - Chinese Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000095 SN - 0278-7393 SN - 1939-1285 VL - 41 IS - 4 SP - 1237 EP - 1243 PB - American Psychological Association CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pan, Jinger A1 - Shu, Hua A1 - Wang, Yuling A1 - Yan, Ming T1 - Parafoveal activation of sign translation previews among deaf readers during the reading of Chinese sentences JF - Memory & cognition N2 - In the present study, we manipulated the different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined whether deaf readers could activate sign translations of Chinese words during reading. The main finding was that, as compared to unrelated previews, the deaf readers had longer fixation durations on the target words when sign-phonologically related preview words were presented; this preview cost effect due to sign-phonological relatedness was absent for reading-level-matched hearing individuals. These results indicate that Chinese deaf readers activate sign language translations of parafoveal words during reading. We discuss the implications for notions of parafoveal processing in reading. KW - Sign language KW - Parafoveal KW - Chinese KW - Deaf readers KW - Sentence reading Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-015-0511-9 SN - 0090-502X SN - 1532-5946 VL - 43 IS - 6 SP - 964 EP - 972 PB - Springer CY - New York ER -