关键词: 阅读速度, 知觉广度, 副中央凹预视, 中文阅读

Abstract: Previous studies have revealed that perceptual span, mainly the right range of the fixation in parafovea, increases with the development of reading skill (Häikiö et al., 2009; Rayner, 1986; Yan et al., 2018). As foveal lexical processing is highly automatic for high skilled readers, more attention is allocated to parafoveal region, leading to highly efficient parafoveal processing and a larger extent of parafoveal preview compared to less skilled readers (Rayner, 2010). However, whether or not the perceptual span varies as reading speed during skilled reading is controversial. It is argued that individual differences in linguistic processing cause different reading speeds among readers which might be stable or increasing across lifespan (i.e., the nonuniformity view; Sperlich et al., 2016; Reichle et al., 2013). Thus, fast readers would have wider perceptual span than slow readers. In contrast, according to the uniformity assumption (Andrews, 2015), all skilled readers use similar reading processes and only show differences in degrees rather than types (Ashby et al., 2005). Therefore, fast readers would extract useful information from parafovea extending to the same area with slow readers. Research in alphabetic language proved that, during skilled reading, high skilled or fast readers had wider perceptual span than less skilled or slow readers, providing evidence in support of the former claim (Rayner et al., 2010; Veldre & Andrews, 2014).
Unlike alphabetic language, Chinese script is densely packed with no space between words, resulting in deeply parafoveal processing (Li & Pollatsek, 2020; Zang et al., 2019). Notably, there was no differences in relation to the amount of parafoveal preview between fast and slow readers during skilled Chinese reading (Zhang et al., 2020). However, it is unclear whether the two groups obtain parafoveal information from similar preview span or not. Therefore, the current study was to investigate this issue by using moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). Ninety sentences were created, each of which was displayed in a window size of either full line (FL), the current fixated character (R0), or one character leftwards of the fixation to one (L1R1), two (L1R2), three (L1R3), or four characters (L1R4) the rightwards of the fixation. Twenty-four fast readers and 24 slow readers were selected from a group of 96 participants according to their reading rates during normal sentences reading.
The results on average fixation duration and overall reading rate showed that fast readers obtained parafoveal information from 2~4 characters to the right of the fixation while slow readers only obtained information from 1 character to the right of the fixation. Therefore, in line with previous findings in English reading (Rayner et al., 2010; Veldre & Andrews, 2014), our findings indicate that fast readers obtain parafoveal information from a wider region than slow readers during skilled Chinese reading, supporting the nonuniformity view of perceptual span development as well as the linguistic-proficiency hypothesis in the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2013). Besides, we found that the reading rate of slow readers increased dramatically under a considerable window (larger than one character to the right of the fixation) compared to that in normal reading with no window, indicating that slow readers modulate their eye movement patterns to adapt to the current reading display and are more sensitive to the visual display of the text.

Key words: reading speed, perceptual span, parafoveal preview, Chinese reading