Yan Ming, Zhou Wei, Shu Hua, Kliegl Reinhold
Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam.
Beijing Key Lab of Learning and Cognition, Department of Psychology, Capital Normal University.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2015 Jan;41(1):209-19. doi: 10.1037/a0038097. Epub 2014 Oct 20.
The present study explored the perceptual span (i.e., the physical extent of an area from which useful visual information is extracted during a single fixation) during the reading of Chinese sentences in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested whether the rightward span can go beyond 3 characters when visually similar masks were used. Results showed that Chinese readers needed at least 4 characters to the right of fixation to maintain a normal reading behavior when visually similar masks were used and when characters were displayed in small fonts, indicating that the span is dynamically influenced by masking materials. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked whether the perceptual span varies as a function of font size in spaced (German) and unspaced (Chinese) scripts. Results clearly suggest perceptual span depends on font size in Chinese, but we failed to find such evidence for German. We propose that the perceptual span in Chinese is flexible; it is strongly constrained by its language-specific properties such as high information density and lack of word spacing. Implications for saccade-target selection during the reading of Chinese sentences are discussed.
本研究通过两个实验探究了中文句子阅读过程中的感知跨度（即单次注视时从中提取有用视觉信息的区域的物理范围）。在实验1中，我们测试了在使用视觉上相似的掩蔽物时，向右的跨度是否能超过3个字符。结果表明，当使用视觉上相似的掩蔽物且字符以小字体显示时，中文读者在注视点右侧至少需要4个字符才能维持正常的阅读行为，这表明跨度受到掩蔽材料的动态影响。在实验2和实验3中，我们探讨了感知跨度是否会因间隔书写（德语）和无间隔书写（中文）的字体大小而变化。结果清楚地表明，中文的感知跨度取决于字体大小，但我们未在德语中找到此类证据。我们提出，中文的感知跨度是灵活的；它受到其特定语言属性的强烈限制，如高信息密度和缺乏单词间隔。文中还讨论了中文句子阅读过程中扫视目标选择的相关影响。
