Yan, M., Kliegl, R., Shu, H., Pan, J., & Zhou, X. (2010). Parafoveal Load of Word N+1 Modulates Preprocessing Effectiveness of Word N+2 in Chinese Reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36, 1669-1676.
Online First Publication, August 23, 2010. doi: 10.1037/a0019329
Abstract. Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N+2) and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manip- ulation of N+2-word preview with low- and high-frequency words N+1. The main findings were (a) an identity PB for word N+2 that was (b) primarily observed when word N+1 was of high frequency (i.e., an interaction between frequency of word N+1 and PB for word N+2), and (c) a parafoveal-on-foveal frequency effect of word N+1 for fixation durations on word N. We discuss implications for theories of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.