Abstract
Whether increased foveal load causes a reduction of parafoveal processing remains equivocal. The present study examined foveal load effects on parafoveal processing in natural Chinese reading. Parafoveal preview of a single-character parafoveal target word was manipulated by using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975; pseudocharacter or identity previews) under high foveal load (low-frequency pretarget word) compared with low foveal load (high-frequency pretarget word) conditions. Despite an effective manipulation of foveal processing load, we obtained no evidence of any modulatory influence on parafoveal processing in first-pass reading times. However, our results clearly showed that saccadic targeting, in relation to forward saccade length from the pretarget word and in relation to target word skipping, was influenced by foveal load and this influence occurred independent of parafoveal preview. Given the optimal experimental conditions, these results provide very strong evidence that preview benefit is not modulated by foveal lexical load during Chinese reading.
Highlights
Whether increased foveal load causes a reduction of parafoveal processing remains equivocal
Given the optimal experimental conditions, these results provide very strong evidence that preview benefit is not modulated by foveal lexical load during Chinese reading
Trials were excluded in which (a) a track loss occurred or there were fewer than five fixations in total (0.26% of the data); (b) participants blinked while the display changed or while they were fixated on the target word, as well as trials in which the display change occurred early or was delayed; (c) any observations for each fixation time measure and each participant were more than 3 standard deviations from that participant’s mean
Summary
Whether increased foveal load causes a reduction of parafoveal processing remains equivocal. Influence saccades that determine where the eyes fixate and this influence occurs regardless of preview benefit for the following word These results pertain directly to the Foveal Load Hypothesis that has received significant scrutiny in recent years. A wealth of studies have demonstrated consistently that preview of parafoveal words facilitates processing of that text when it is fixated, reducing fixation time This effect has been referred to as preview benefit (see Rayner, 1998, 2009, for reviews) and can be measured by using an eye contingent display change technique termed the Manman Zhang, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University; Simon P.
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