The perceptual span in Chinese reading extends one character to the left and three to the right of the point of fixation. Thus, four-character idioms and phrases often extend rightward beyond these limits during reading. We investigated whether such idioms, frequent phrases and equibiased strings are processed parafoveally as Multi-Constituent Units (MCUs). Using the boundary paradigm in Experiments 1 and 2, we separately manipulated preview (identities or pseudocharacters) of the first two and the last two characters of idioms and frequently used phrases. In Experiment 3, we examined processing of strings judged to be a single lexical unit, equi-biased ambiguous strings and matched unambiguous multi-word strings. Experiments 1 and 2 produced greater preview benefit for the final two characters when the first two characters were presented after identity rather than pseudocharacter previews. In Experiment 3, preview effects were largest for single units, reduced for equi-biased strings and smallest for multi-word strings. Together the results demonstrate that four-character idioms and frequently used phrases are processed as MCUs.

中文翻译：

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阅读中汉语四字成语和短语的中央凹处理：多成分单元假说的证据

汉语阅读的知觉跨度是从注视点向左延伸一个字符，向右延伸三个字符。因此，四字成语和短语在阅读过程中常常会向右延伸超出这些限制。我们研究了这些习语、频繁短语和均衡字符串是否被作为多成分单元 (MCU) 进行旁中心处理。使用实验1和2中的边界范式，我们分别操纵成语和常用短语的前两个和最后两个字符的预览（身份或伪字符）。在实验3中，我们检查了被判断为单个词汇单元的字符串、等偏歧义字符串和匹配的明确多词字符串的处理。当前两个角色在身份而不是伪角色预览之后呈现时，实验 1 和 2 为最后两个角色带来了更大的预览效果。在实验 3 中，单个单元的预览效果最大，等偏置字符串的预览效果减小，多词字符串的预览效果最小。结果表明，四字符习语和常用短语被作为 MCU 进行处理。