快速与慢速读者的中央凹加工对副中央凹预视的影响
摘要
<p id="C2">Parafoveal pre-processing contributes to highly efficient reading for skilled readers. Research has demonstrated that high-skilled or fast readers extract more parafoveal information from a wider parafoveal region more efficiently compared to less-skilled or slow readers. It is argued that individual differences in parafoveal preview are due to high-skilled or fast readers focusing less of their attention on foveal word processing than less-skilled or slow readers. In other words, foveal processing difficulty might modulate an individual's amount of parafoveal preview (i.e., Foveal Load Hypothesis). However, few studies have provided evidence in support of this claim. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore whether and how foveal lexical processing load modulates parafoveal preview of readers with different reading speeds (a commonly used measurement of reading skill or reading proficiency). <p id="C111">By using a three-minute reading comprehension task, 28 groups of fast and slow readers were selected from 300 participants (234 were valid) according to their reading speed in the current study. Participants were then asked to read sentences while their eye movements were recorded using an Eyelink 1000 eyetracker. Each experimental sentence contained a pre-target word that varied in lexical frequency to manipulate foveal processing load (low load: high frequency; high load: low frequency), and a target word manipulated for preview (identical or pseudo-character) within the boundary paradigm. <p id="C222">Global analyses showed that, although fast readers had similar accuracy of reading comprehension to slow readers, they had shorter reading times, longer forward saccades, made less fixations and regressions, and had higher reading speeds compared to slow readers, indicating that our selection of fast and slow readers was highly effective. The pre-target word analyses showed that there was a main effect of word frequency on first-pass reading times,