Abstract: Orthographic information plays an important role in reading development. Orthographic preview effect is an important component of language processing, which varies depending on the characteristics of different languages. Compared to alphabetic languages, Chinese, a logographic writing system, has unique orthographic characteristics. The mapping between orthography and phonology is not relatively transparent, and orthography plays a greater role than phonology does. The second grade in primary school is an important period for children to cultivate their decoding ability and reading fluency. Parafoveal preprocessing of upcoming words and the resultant preview benefit are key aspects of fluent reading. Thus, in the present study, two experiments were conducted to investigate whether second graders could obtain the orthographic information of upcoming words in single-word recognition task and silent sentence reading task. In Experiment 1, the participants were 35 second graders and 39 college students. The lexical decision task was used to explore if the participants could obtain the orthographic information parafoveally. The design of the experiment was 3(Preview type: identical, orthographic, unrelated)×2(Prime time: 60ms, 100ms) ×2(Age group:second graders, college students) mixed design. On each trial, one preview character was first briefly presented parafoveally in the left or right visual field before one target character was displayed. The data was analyzed using the linear mixed effects model. The results showed that, orthographic information could be obtained by second graders at 100ms SOA, and adults could obtain orthographic information in parafovea at 60ms and 100ms SOA. In addition, we compared the magnitude of orthographic preview effect of two groups of participants at 100ms SOA. The results showed that there was no significant difference. Overall, second graders had longer response times than adults did, which showing that the speed of vocabulary processing for second graders is generally slower than that for adults. In Experiment 2, the participants were 30 second graders and 30 college students. Their eye movements were recorded with a EyeLink2000 eye tracker. Three preview types (identical, orthographic, unrelated) were used to explore the parafoveal preview effect by the boundary paradigm. All the target characters were embedded in experimental sentences written to be engaging for second graders. The data was analyzed using the linear mixed effects model. The?results?were as?follows. For second graders, in first fixation duration, single fixation duration, and gaze duration, we found significant orthographic benefit effect for second graders and adults, and there was no interaction between the orthographic preview benefit effect and age group. In total fixation duration, the orthographic benefit effect of 26 ms did not reach significance for second graders, there was significant orthographic benefit effect for adults, and there was marginally significant interaction between the orthographic preview benefit effect and age group. Moreover, for second graders and adults, the fixation durations were longer in the unrelated condition than that in identical condition in all the dependent measures. And the significant interaction between the identical preview benefit effect and age group indicates that children can not process vocabulary as quickly and efficiently as adults readers because they get less information from parafoveal area. In addition, there was no significant difference between identical and orthographic conditions in all the dependent measures for second graders, but the fixation durations were longer in the orthographic condition than that in identical condition for adults. In conclusion, our data indicate that second graders can not only use orthographic information of upcoming words to facilitate word recognition processes in single-word recognition, but also in silent sentence reading. In addition, development of parafoveal processing of orthographic information is shown in the following aspects. First, children need longer preview time to process vocabulary than adults do. Secondly, the orthographic preview benefit effect shows a certain development pattern.

Key words: second graders, parafoveal processing, orthographic preview effects, reading development

摘要： 字形信息在汉语阅读中具有重要作用。小学二年级是儿童阅读流畅性发展的重要时期，而对注视点右侧字词的预加工及所获得的预视效应是影响流畅阅读的重要因素。本研究考察了字形信息在二年级学生预加工中的作用。实验1采用副中央凹启动范式发现，在词汇识别任务中，二年级学生在100ms副中央凹启动时间下,表现出字形预视效应。实验2采用边界范式发现，在句子默读任务中，二年级学生能够获取副中央凹处的字形信息。结果表明，二年级学生在阅读中能够使用副中央凹处的字形信息，促进随后中央凹处的词汇加工。

关键词: 小学二年级学生, 副中央凹加工, 字形预视效应, 阅读发展