The results show that previews consistent with the target’s word class speed up recognition when the word is fixated, affecting measures that reflect both initial processing and later integration. Crucially, the previews were unrelated in meaning or sentence context, so the advantage appears tied to structural cues rather than semantics or prediction. This suggests readers of Chinese extract syntactic information early and use it to prepare for upcoming words, a finding that matters for how we model reading in character-based languages.
Understanding how grammatical properties are picked up ahead of fixation matters for teaching, accessibility technology, and models of reading that aim to support diverse learners. If the brain uses word-class cues in the parafovea, text presentation and reading interventions could be designed to reinforce those signals. Follow the full article to see the methods and data behind these claims and to explore how early syntactic processing might shape reading development and inclusive literacy tools.
Abstract
The present study aimed to investigate the parafoveal processing of word class in Chinese reading, focusing on how grammatical category consistency affects word recognition. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was adopted in an eye-tracking study. In each sentence, a parafoveal target word was replaced with three types of previews: identical to the target word, consistent in word class, or inconsistent in word class. The nonidentical previews were designed to be neither semantically nor contextually related to the target words or the surrounding sentence context. The findings revealed that consistent word class previews significantly facilitated the processing of target words when they were subsequently fixated on, compared to inconsistent word class previews, resulting in a word class preview benefit. This effect was observed across both early and late eye movement indices, regardless of the target word’s grammatical category. Our findings provide compelling evidence for the early processing of word class information in the parafovea, independently of semantics or word class predictability, highlighting a word class preview benefit. These findings emphasize the early integration of syntactic properties in Chinese, offering insights into character-based language reading.
