The role of foveal and parafoveal word-processing efficiency in reading Chinese

Abstract This study examined the relationship between the processing efficiency of single-character and two-character words presented in fovea and parafovea and word-level eye-movement parameters in reading Chinese among a heterogenous sample of 70 adult readers (age 18–60 years). Foveal processing efficiency was assessed with performance accuracy in lexical decision, where one-character and two-character words of medium frequency and pseudowords were presented backward-masked for identification using different exposure times (40 ms and 60 ms). Parafoveal-processing efficiency was assessed by presenting similar stimuli for 150 ms to the right and left of the central fixation point (1.35 and 2.27 degrees of visual angle). Measures of foveal and parafoveal-processing efficiency were used to predict eye behavior in reading eight expository texts in varying topics. The Random Forests technique was used to assess the relative importance of individual difference measures in predicting readers’ eye-movement patterns. Results were further tested with (generalized) linear mixed-effects ((G)LM) modeling. The results show that the ability to recognize two-character words in fovea best predicts first fixation and gaze durations of words during reading and that both the ability to recognize single-character and two-character words in fovea best predicts word refixation and skipping probabilities during reading as well as the length of between-word saccades. The results are consistent with an analogous study conducted in Finnish, which found that efficiency in foveal word recognition was a better predictor of both foveal and parafoveal processing during reading than efficiency in parafoveal word recognition.