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BackgroundDisruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. MethodsWith eye-movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers rely on orthographic or phonological cues, substitutions that contain such cues should cause less disruption reading than do unrelated substitutions. ResultsOn pretarget words, there was a reliable reduction in gaze duration due to homophonic substitution only for children. On target words, we observed reliable recovery effects due to orthographic similarity for adults. On post-target words, adults had better orthographic-based and phonological-based recovery abilities than children. ConclusionsThe combination of eye movement recording and the error detection paradigm offers a novel implicit paradigm for studying reading development: during sentence reading, beginning readers of Chinese may rely on phonological mediation, while skilled readers have more direct access to semantics from orthography.
As Chinese is written without orthographical word boundaries (i.e., spaces), it is unclear whether saccade targets are selected on the basis of characters or words and whether saccades are aimed at the beginning or the centre of words. Here, we report an experiment where 30 Chinese readers read 150 sentences while their eye movements were monitored. They exhibited a strong tendency to fixate at the word centre in single-fixation cases and at the word beginning in multiple-fixation cases. Different from spaced alphabetic script, initial fixations falling at the end of words were no more likely to be followed by a refixation than initial fixations at word centre. Further, single fixations were shorter than first fixations in two-fixation cases, which is opposite to what is found in Roman script. We propose that Chinese readers dynamically select the beginning or centre of words as saccade targets depending on failure or success with segmentation of parafoveal word boundaries.
During sentence reading, low spatial frequency information afforded by spaces between words is the primary factor for eye guidance in spaced writing systems, whereas saccade generation for unspaced writing systems is less clear and under debate. In the present study, we investigated whether word-boundary information, provided by alternating colors (consistent or inconsistent with word-boundary information) influences saccade-target selection in Chinese. In Experiment 1, as compared to a baseline (i.e., uniform color) condition, word segmentation with alternating color shifted fixation location towards the center of words. In contrast, incorrect word segmentation shifted fixation location towards the beginning of words. In Experiment 2, we used a gaze-contingent paradigm to restrict the color manipulation only to the upcoming parafoveal words and replicated the results, including fixation location effects, as observed in Experiment 1. These results indicate that Chinese readers are capable of making use of parafoveal word-boundary knowledge for saccade generation, even if such information is unfamiliar to them. The present study provides novel support for the hypothesis that word segmentation is involved in the decision about where to fixate next during Chinese reading.
What is the time course of activation of phonological information in logographic writing systems like Chinese, in which meaning is prioritized over sound? We used a manipulation of phonological regularity to examine foveal and parafoveal phonological processing of Chinese phonograms at lexical and sublexical levels during Chinese sentence reading in 2 eye-tracking experiments. In Experiment 1, using an error disruption task during silent reading, we observed foveal lexical phonological activation in second-pass reading. In Experiment 2, using the boundary paradigm, both parafoveal lexical and sublexical phonological preview benefits were found in first-fixation duration in oral reading, whereas only lexical phonological benefits were found in gaze duration during silent reading. Thus, phonological information had earlier and more pronounced parafoveal effects in oral reading, and these extended to sublexical processing. These results are compatible with the view that oral reading prioritizes parafoveal phonological processing in Chinese.
Parafoveal load of word N+1 modulates preprocessing effectiveness of word N+2 in chinese reading
(2010)
In alphabetic writing systems, saccade amplitude (a close correlate of reading speed) is independent of font size, presumably because an increase in the angular size of letters is compensated for by a decrease of visual acuity with eccentricity. We propose that this invariance may (also) be due to the presence of spaces between words, guiding the eyes across a large range of font sizes. Here, we test whether saccade amplitude is also invariant against manipulations of font size during reading Chinese, a character-based writing system without spaces as explicit word boundaries for saccade-target selection. In contrast to word-spaced alphabetic writing systems, saccade amplitude decreased significantly with increased font size, leading to an increase in the number of fixations at the beginning of words and in the number of refixations. These results are consistent with a model which assumes that word beginning (rather than word center) is the default saccade target if the length of the parafoveal word is not available.
Dyslexic children are known to be slower than normal readers in rapid automatized naming (RAN). This suggests that dyslexics encounter local processing difficulties, which presumably induce a narrower perceptual span. Consequently, dyslexics should suffer less than normal readers from removing parafoveal preview. Here we used a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm in a RAN task to experimentally test this prediction. Results indicate that dyslexics extract less parafoveal information than control children. We propose that more attentional resources are recruited to the foveal processing because of dyslexics' less automatized translation of visual symbols into phonological output, thereby causing a reduction of the perceptual span. This in turn leads to less efficient preactivation of parafoveal information and, hence, more difficulty in processing the next foveal item.
Evidence for semantic preview benefit (PB) from parafoveal words has been elusive for reading alphabetic scripts such as English. Here we report semantic PB for noncompound characters in Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm. In addition, PBs for orthographic relatedness and, as a numeric trend, for phonological relatedness were obtained. Results are in agreement with other research suggesting that the Chinese writing system is based on a closer association between graphic form and meaning than is alphabetic script. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.
We measured Chinese dyslexic and control children's eye movements during rapid automatized naming (RAN) with alphanumeric (digits) and symbolic (dice surfaces) stimuli. Both types of stimuli required identical oral responses, controlling for effects associated with speech production. Results showed that naming dice was much slower than naming digits for both groups, but group differences in eye-movement measures and in the eye-voice span (i.e. the distance between the currently fixated item and the voiced item) were generally larger in digit-RAN than in dice-RAN. In addition, dyslexics were less efficient in parafoveal processing in these RAN tasks. Since the two RAN tasks required the same phonological output and on the assumption that naming dice is less practiced than naming digits in general, the results suggest that the translation of alphanumeric visual symbols into phonological codes is less efficient in dyslexic children. The dissociation of the print-to-sound conversion and phonological representation suggests that the degree of automaticity in translation from visual symbols to phonological codes in addition to phonological processing per se is also critical to understanding dyslexia.
In the present study, we manipulated different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined how native Korean readers who learned Chinese as a second language make use of the parafoveal information. Results clearly indicate that, only identical and orthographically similar previews facilitated processing of the target words when they were subsequently fixated. More critically, more parafoveal information was obtained by subjects with higher reading proficiency. These results suggest that, mainly low-level features of the parafoveal words are obtained by the non-native Chinese readers and less attentional resources are available for the readers with lower reading proficiency, thereby causing a reduction of the perceptual span.