Parafoveal Processing of Orthographic, Phonological, and Semantic Information from Chinese Characters at a Distant Position: A Parafoveal Priming Study. 2025

Xiaoyuan Yuan, and Sainan Li, and Guoli Yan
Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China.

Previous research has shown that the perceptual span in Chinese reading extends three characters to the right of the fixation point. However, little is known regarding the types of preview information that can be extracted from such a distant position; namely, the character at the N + 3 position. Using the parafoveal priming paradigm combined with eye-tracking technology, we manipulated the preview type and preview duration to examine whether Chinese readers could extract orthographic, phonological, and semantic information from the character at the N + 3 position across three experiments. Experiment 1 revealed an orthographic preview cost: orthographically similar previews delayed the target character recognition compared to unrelated previews. Experiment 2 showed no evidence of phonological preview effects. Experiment 3 demonstrated a semantic preview benefit: semantically related previews significantly facilitated the target character recognition relative to unrelated previews. Taken together, these findings indicate that Chinese readers are able to extract orthographic and semantic, but not phonological, information from a distant parafoveal position.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries

Related Publications

Xiaoyuan Yuan, and Sainan Li, and Guoli Yan
August 2025, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006),
Xiaoyuan Yuan, and Sainan Li, and Guoli Yan
April 2004, NeuroImage,
Xiaoyuan Yuan, and Sainan Li, and Guoli Yan
October 2025, Nature communications,
Xiaoyuan Yuan, and Sainan Li, and Guoli Yan
January 1992, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition,
Xiaoyuan Yuan, and Sainan Li, and Guoli Yan
October 2012, NeuroImage,
Xiaoyuan Yuan, and Sainan Li, and Guoli Yan
November 2021, Attention, perception & psychophysics,
Xiaoyuan Yuan, and Sainan Li, and Guoli Yan
January 2018, Frontiers in psychology,
Copied contents to your clipboard!