Exploring effects of foveal load and preview restrictions for single and multiple parafoveal words in Chinese reading

• Foveal load reduces disruptive influence of restrictive parafoveal windows. • Similar but reduced foveal load modulatory effects for multiple than single words. • Foveal load reduces preview extent for multiple but not single lexical units. Two experiments are reported that used the boundary paradigm to investigate how foveal lexical processing load (high/low frequency) of a pre-target word influences parafoveal processing of upcoming target word(s) with either zero-, one-, two- or three-character, or full preview in Chinese reading. In Experiment 1, the three characters comprised a single word as the target while in Experiment 2 they formed multiple words (two or three words). Pre-target word analyses showed an effective foveal load manipulation with low frequency pre-targets being fixated for longer than high frequency pre-targets in both experiments. Both experiments showed robust preview extent effects at the target words, such that fixation times increased, and landing positions shortened dramatically with reduced preview extent. Modulatory influences of foveal load effects were obtained on both fixation times and landing positions at the target region. These effects themselves were consistent, but reduced, for parafoveal character strings comprised of multiple words relative to a single word, consistent with the MCU hypothesis ( Zang, 2019 ). Our findings demonstrate that increased foveal load reduces the disruptive influence of restrictive parafoveal windows and reduces preview extent in relation to saccadic targeting. The current findings align at a very basic level with the Foveal Load Hypothesis ( Henderson & Ferreira, 1990 ), though the results indicate that a more nuanced theoretical account is necessary to capture all aspects of the results in respect of Chinese reading.