title: Parafoveal preview benefit in unspaced and spaced Chinese reading.
abstract: In an eye movement experiment during reading, we compared parafoveal preview benefit during the reading of Chinese sentences either in the familiar, unspaced format or with spaces inserted between the words. Single-character words or the first of a two-character word were either presented normally or were replaced by a pseudocharacter in the preview. Results indicate that word spacing increased the parafoveal preview benefit but only for the one-character target words. We hypothesized that the incorrect preview of the first character of the two-character word prevented parafoveal processing of the ensuing character(s), effectively nullifying any benefits from the spacing. Our results suggest that word boundary demarcation allows for more precise focusing of attention.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Tianjin Normal University , Tianjin , China.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cui
authors.forename: Denis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Drieghe
authors.forename: Xuejun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Bai
authors.forename: Guoli
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Yan
authors.forename: Simon P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Liversedge
mesh_terms: D044466:Asian People; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Chinese reading; Eye movements; Parafoveal processing; Reading