Exploring the Underlying Mechanisms of Semantic Preview Benefit in Chinese Reading From a Co‐Occurrence Perspective: An Eye Movement Study

ABSTRACT Background Research shows that skilled readers' parafoveal processing may benefit from semantically related previews compared with semantically unrelated previews (semantic preview benefit, SPB), suggesting that they can extract high‐level semantic information from parafoveal processing. However, it is unclear whether this effect occurs because of the semantic associations between the preview and target words or due to the contextual fit of the preview word. The present study investigates the underlying mechanisms of the SPB effect from a co‐occurrence perspective. Methods Eighty skilled readers ( M = 20 years, SD = 2.11) participated in this experiment. We orthogonally manipulated semantic relatedness (related vs. unrelated) and preview plausibility (plausible vs. implausible). Semantic relatedness was implemented in terms of the statistical co‐occurrence frequency of the preview and target words in each sentence context. Results We observed a significant preview plausibility effect, with lower skipping rates and shorter fixation times on target words in plausible than implausible preview conditions. Furthermore, the effect of semantic relatedness was significant for plausible but not implausible previews. Conclusions Both preview plausibility and semantic relatedness appear to influence the SPB, although preview plausibility appears to play an especially important role. Crucially, these findings provide evidence that sentence‐level contextual information plays an important role in early word recognition and validate the effectiveness of applying the co‐occurrence association approach to the study of word processing during sentence reading.