Skipping the structural particle de (的) in reading Chinese: The role of word frequency and sentential fit

Abstract

Previous studies suggested that readers were more likely to skip a word when it was previewed by a very-high-frequency word, like “the” in English and “de (的)” in Chinese, and they suggested that readers based skipping decisions on parafoveal word information rather than on sentence context. However, in these studies, the very-high-frequency preview word (the or de) was always implausible given the sentence context. It is an open question whether parafoveal word information interacts with sentence context to influence skipping decisions. Therefore, the current experiment orthogonally manipulated the preview information of the target character (identical or de preview) and the plausibility of de (plausible or implausible) to examine this question. The major results indicated that readers were more likely to skip the target character and made longer outgoing saccade length across the boundary in the de preview condition than in the identical preview condition. What is more important, the interaction between the plausibility of de and preview condition was significant: Readers’ higher probability of skipping the target character and longer outgoing saccade length in the de preview condition than in the identical preview condition was only significant when de was plausible, suggesting that parafoveal word information and context information can act as a joint constraint on skipping decision in reading Chinese.