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Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 General background
During reading, the reader’s final goal is to retrieve the meaning from each word in the text and eventually integrate all the information into the meaning of the sentence, then of the text. While most of the information was retrieved during relative steady fixation from the fixation point, it has been demonstrated that lexical information such as phonology or orthography can be extracted from the more peripheral vision called parafovea and benefit the ensuing processing. However, the extraction of semantic information parafoveally has been an issue in reading studies, not only because of its relative elusiveness to other preview benefit, but also because of its language-dependency. While alphabetic English and German, for examples, exhibit different behaviors and different degrees of effect size regarding semantic preview benefit, logographic Chinese also exhibit different reading patterns in semantic preview benefit when plausibility comes into play or when different units, such as semantic radicals, characters in words, single-character words, or two-character words are of interest. Previous studies have attributed the diverse findings to different processing load required by the different designs of the writing systems. The rigid spelling system in German requires fewer resources to resolve the texts to sounds, while English, as a writing system without rigorous correspondence
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between spelling and sounds, retain fewer resources to recode the phonological information into meanings. The proposed explanation following this rationale for positive evidence of semantic preview benefit in Chinese then usually states that in Chinese, the orthography-phonology-semantic route is not followed. Rather, Chinese readers apply the strategy of orthography-semantic route, which requires fewer resources.
Aside from the diverging findings from different writing systems, there are also theoretical implications regarding the existence of semantic preview benefit. There have been models proposed to describe reading behaviors, with mechanisms determining reading times or fixation locations or such. Two most prevailing groups of models are serial attention shift (SAS) models and attentional gradient (GAG) models. The key difference related to this issue is the different saccade target selection between the two models. While SAS models assume deterministic saccade targeting, which may exclude words that have been semantically processed not to be the target, target selection of GAG models is not deterministic and allows semantic preview benefit to occur.
The issue of reading behavior brings up another line of investigation related to preview benefit. It has been proposed that preview benefit observed in previous studies may have resulted from preview cost brought by previewing an unrelated
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preview, in addition to preview benefit, which is brought by previewing a related preview. This is supported by recent findings that the size and direction of preview effect may depend on how long the preview is parafoveally presented, how close the previewing site is to the preview, or how much foveal load is there during preview.
The elusiveness of main effect of semantic preview benefit may be attributed to the interactions with these variables. While it may be necessary to investigate semantic preview effect with these variables, one may also gain insight into how these variables come into play during reading with such investigation.
1.2 Semantic preview benefit in Chinese
Previous studies of Chinese semantic preview effects have been focusing on the processing of single character. It has been found that semantics-related information from different levels of Chinese writing unit can be extracted parafoveally. These include sub-character radicals, non-word single characters, single-character words, and homographic characters that bear different morphemic meanings when embedded in different two-character words. In language use of Chinese, however, although characters are the basic units of writing, words can consist of only one character, or be composed of more than one characters. In most alphabetic writing systems, words are separated by spaces in between, but in Chinese, such multi-character words are not
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visually separated. Among these words of different lengths, two-character words are the majority of word type and word token. The time course of resolution of meaning of such a word is thus of high importance, not only because these words are the majority of actual Chinese use, but because they lack explicit visual boundary when embedded in the sentences.
Yang (2013) addressed the issues with transposable two-character words, which, once transposed, are still words and may bear similar or different meaning to its original form. The reason for her choice of materials was to minimize orthographic difference between the targets and the transposed previews. The findings, however, suggested that Chinese two-character words exhibit plausibility effect rather than semantic preview effect. On the one hand, plausibility preview effect, which has also been demonstrated for single-character words (Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012), may indicate an ongoing integration process as early as during parafoveal preview. On the other hand, the effect observed in her study may suffer from other interference.
First of all, the use of transposable words risks blurring the effect when the lexical representation of the transpose is activated. Second, her conclusion was drawn from comparing the effects between identical and transpose preview across different groups of materials, rather than directly from the benefit brought by previewing a related item compared to the unrelated one. Lastly, transposable two-character words only
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represent a small part of Chinese lexicon or of Chinese two-character words. It remains unknown whether the effect found in the study is applicable to general two-character words. (Schotter, Lee, Reiderman, & Rayner, 2015; Yang, 2013; Yang et al., 2012).
1.3 Research questions
The present study therefore presents two experiments in investigating the time course of semantic access of Chinese two-character words and its interaction with the context. The study addresses the specific research questions as follows:
(1) Can semantic information be extracted from a general Chinese two-character word, rather than the specific type of transposable words, prior to the fixation of eyes on the word?
(2) Does semantic preview benefit stand when the pre-context supports both semantically related and unrelated previews?
The inference from the answer of the questions above will help us answer a third more general question of:
(3) How do Chinese readers process parafoveally the meaning of a two-character word during reading? That is, what is the time course of two-character word processing during parafoveal preview?