Several eye-movement studies have revealed flexibility in the parafoveal processing of character-order information in Chinese reading. In particular, studies show that processing a two-character word in a sentence benefits more from parafoveal preview of a nonword created by transposing rather than replacing its two characters. One issue that has not been investigated is whether the contextual predictability of the target word influences this processing of character order information. However, such a finding would provide novel evidence for an early influence of context on lexical processing in Chinese reading. Accordingly, we investigated this issue in an eye-movement experiment using the boundary paradigm and sentences containing two-character target words with high or low contextual predictability. Prior to the reader’s gaze crossing an invisible boundary, each target word was shown normally (i.e. a valid preview) or with its two characters either transposed or replaced by unrelated characters to create invalid nonword previews. These invalid previews reverted to the target word once the reader’s gaze crossed the invisible boundary. The results showed larger preview benefits (i.e. a decrease in fixation times) for target words following transposed-character than substituted-character previews, revealing a transposed-character effect similar to that in previous research. In addition, a word predictability effect (shorter fixation times for words with high than low predictability) was observed following both valid and transposed-character previews, but not substituted-character previews. The findings therefore reveal that context can influence an early stage of lexical processing in Chinese reading during which character order is processed flexibly.

中文翻译：

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字符顺序的灵活旁中心凹编码支持中文阅读中的单词可预测性效应：来自眼球运动的证据。

几项眼动研究揭示了中文阅读中字符顺序信息的旁中心凹处理的灵活性。特别是，研究表明，处理一个句子中的两个字符的单词从对通过转置而不是替换其两个字符创建的非单词的旁中心凹预览中获益更多。一个尚未研究的问题是目标词的上下文可预测性是否会影响字符顺序信息的这种处理。然而，这一发现将为语境对汉语阅读词汇加工的早期影响提供新的证据。因此，我们在眼动实验中研究了这个问题，使用边界范式和包含具有高或低上下文可预测性的两个字符目标词的句子。在读者的视线越过不可见边界之前，每个目标词都正常显示（即有效预览），或者其两个字符被调换或替换为无关字符以创建无效的非单词预览。一旦读者的视线越过不可见的边界，这些无效的预览就会恢复到目标词。结果表明，与替换字符预览相比，转置字符后的目标词具有更大的预览优势（即固定时间减少），揭示了与先前研究类似的转置字符效应。此外，在有效和转置字符预览后都观察到了单词可预测性效应（可预测性高的单词的固定时间比低可预测性更短），但没有替换字符预览。