Skipping of the very-high-frequency structural particle de () in Chinese reading

Skipping the structural particle de () in reading Chinese: The role of word frequency and sentential fit

Previous studies suggested that readers were more likely to skip a word when it was previewed by a very-high-frequency word, like "the" in English and "de ()" in Chinese, and they suggested that readers based skipping decisions on parafoveal word information rather than on sentence context. However, in these studies, the very-high-frequency preview word (the or de) was always implausible given the sentence context. It is an open question whether parafoveal word information interacts with sentence context to influence skipping decisions. Therefore, the current experiment orthogonally manipulated the preview information of the target character (identical or de preview) and the plausibility of de (plausible or implausible) to examine this question. The major results indicated that readers were more likely to skip the target character and made longer outgoing saccade length across the boundary in the de preview condition than in the identical preview condition. What is more important, the interaction between the plausibility of de and preview condition was significant: Readers' higher probability of skipping the target character and longer outgoing saccade length in the de preview condition than in the identical preview condition was only significant when de was plausible, suggesting that parafoveal word information and context information can act as a joint constraint on skipping decision in reading Chinese.

The effect of contextual plausibility on word skipping during reading

Recent eye-movement evidence suggests readers are more likely to skip a high-frequency word than a low-frequency word independently of the semantic or syntactic acceptability of the word in the sentence. This has been interpreted as strong support for a serial processing mechanism in which the decision to skip a word is based on the completion of a preliminary stage of lexical processing prior to any assessment of contextual fit. The present large-scale study was designed to reconcile these findings with the plausibility preview effect: higher skipping and reduced first-pass reading times for words that are previewed by contextually plausible, compared to implausible, sentence continuations that are unrelated to the target word. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a short (3-4 letters) or long (6 letters) target word. The boundary paradigm was used to present parafoveal previews which were either higher or lower frequency than the target, and either plausible or implausible in the sentence context. The results revealed strong, independent effects of all three factors on target skipping and early measures of target fixation duration, while frequency and plausibility interacted on later measures of target fixation duration. Simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading demonstrated that plausibility effects on skipping are potentially consistent with the assumption that higher-level contextual information only affects post-lexical integration processes. However, no current model of eye movements in reading provides an explicit account of the information or processes that allow readers to rapidly detect an integration failure.

Word skipping in Chinese reading: The role of high-frequency preview and syntactic felicity

Two experiments are reported to investigate whether Chinese readers skip a high-frequency preview word without taking the syntax of the sentence context into account. In Experiment 1, we manipulated target word syntactic category, frequency, and preview using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). For high-frequency verb targets, there were identity and pseudocharacter previews alongside a low-frequency noun preview. For low-frequency verb targets, there were identity and pseudocharacter previews alongside a high-frequency noun preview. Results showed that for high-frequency targets, skipping rates were higher for identical previews compared with the syntactically infelicitous alternative low-frequency preview and pseudocharacter previews, however for low-frequency targets, skipping rates were higher for high-frequency previews (even when they were syntactically infelicitous) compared with the other 2 previews. Furthermore, readers were more likely to skip the target when they had a high-frequency, syntactically felicitous preview compared to a high-frequency, syntactically infelicitous preview. The pattern of felicity effects was statistically robust when readers launched saccades from near the target. In Experiment 2, we assessed whether display change awareness influenced the patterns of results in Experiment 1. Results showed that the overall patterns held in Experiment 2 regardless of some readers being more likely to be aware of the display change than others. These results suggest that decisions to skip a word in Chinese reading are primarily based on parafoveal word familiarity, though the syntactic felicity of a parafoveal word also exerts a robust influence for high-frequency previews.