The modulation of eye movement control by word length in reading Chinese

Food word processing in Chinese reading: A study of restrained eaters

Food-related attentional bias refers that individuals typically prioritize rewarding food-related cues (e.g. food words and food images) compared with non-food stimuli; however, the findings are inconsistent for restrained eaters. Traditional paradigms used to test food-related attentional bias, such as visual probe tasks and visual search tasks, may not directly and accurately enough to reflect individuals' food-word processing at different cognitive stages. In this study, we introduced the boundary paradigm to investigate food-word attentional bias for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. Eye movements were recorded when they performed a naturalistic sentence-reading task. The results of later-stage analyses showed that food words were fixated on for less time than non-food words, which indicated a superiority of foveal food-word processing for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. The results of early-stage analyses showed that restrained eaters spent more time on pre-target regions in the food-word valid preview conditions, which indicated a parafoveal food-word processing superiority for restrained eaters (i.e. the parafoveal-on-foveal effect). The superiority of foveal food-word processing provides new insights into explaining food-related attentional bias in general groups. Additionally, the enhanced food-word attentional bias in parafoveal processing for restrained eaters illustrates the importance of individual characteristics in studying word recognition.

Do visual word segmentation cues improve reading performance in Chinese reading？

It is controversial whether providing visual word segmentation cues can improve Chinese reading performance. This study investigated this topic by examining how visual word segmentation cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influence global sentence reading and local word recognition during reading Chinese text in three experiments. The results showed that interword spacing could facilitate local word recognition but could not increase reading speed. In contrast, grey highlighting and red colour could improve neither local word recognition nor global sentence reading performance. Instead, these cues increased the number of fixations and saccades, resulting in slower reading speed. These results suggest that even red colour is not a practically visual cue for Chinese word segmentation and the corresponding mechanisms were discussed. Practitioner Summary: We studied how visual cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influenced Chinese reading performance. Our data showed that even the red colour was not an efficient cue for Chinese word segmentation. The corresponding mechanisms and future direction were discussed regarding how to improve Chinese reading performance.