Abstract
ABSTRACT The importance of the word as a unit of meaning is well-established for readers of both alphabetic languages and Chinese. However, the unspaced nature of written Chinese raises questions about how readers use upcoming information to guide word segmentation and to adjust the parafoveal processing of subsequent characters. Using an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether Chinese readers pre-process character C2 more when it forms a word with C1 than when they belong to separate words. The boundary paradigm was used to manipulate the preview of C2, such that readers saw either an identity (normal) or pseudo-character preview. Linear mixed-effects models revealed reduced preview benefit when C1 and C2 were separate words. These results suggest that despite the absence of visual segmentation cues, Chinese readers are able to utilise the parafoveal preview to support the identification of word boundaries and modulate the extent of their parafoveal processing to prioritise the processing of word units.
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