Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, New Territories, Hong Kong.
Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau; Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau.
Cognition. 2020 Dec;205:104452. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104452. Epub 2020 Sep 22.
How is semantic information in the mental lexicon accessed and selected during reading? Readers process information of both the foveal and parafoveal words. Recent eye-tracking studies hint at bi-phasic lexical activation dynamics, demonstrating that semantically related parafoveal previews can either facilitate, or interfere with lexical processing of target words in comparison to unrelated previews, with the size and direction of the effect depending on exposure time to parafoveal previews. However, evidence to date is only correlational, because exposure time was determined by participants' pre-target fixation durations. Here we experimentally controlled parafoveal preview exposure duration using a combination of the gaze-contingent fast-priming and boundary paradigms. We manipulated preview duration and examined the time course of parafoveal semantic activation during the oral reading of Chinese sentences in three experiments. Semantic previews led to faster lexical access of target words than unrelated previews only when the previews were presented briefly (80 ms in Experiments 1 and 3). Longer exposure time (100 ms or 150 ms) eliminated semantic preview effects, and full preview without duration limit resulted in preview cost, i.e., a reversal of preview benefit. Our results indicate that high-level semantic information can be obtained from parafoveal words and the size and direction of the parafoveal semantic effect depends on the level of lexical activation.
在阅读过程中，语义信息如何在心理词典中被访问和选择？读者处理中央凹和周边文字的信息。最近的眼动追踪研究暗示了双相词汇激活动态，表明与目标词语义相关的周边预视可以促进或干扰目标词的词汇处理，与预视的不相关相比，效果的大小和方向取决于对周边预视的暴露时间。然而，迄今为止的证据只是相关的，因为暴露时间是由参与者的前目标注视持续时间决定的。在这里，我们使用注视相关快速启动和边界范式的组合来实验控制周边预视暴露持续时间。我们在三个实验中操纵了预视持续时间，并在阅读中文句子时检查了周边语义激活的时间进程。只有当预视呈现时间很短（实验 1 和 3 中为 80 毫秒）时，语义预视才会导致目标词的词汇访问速度比不相关的预视更快。更长的暴露时间（100 毫秒或 150 毫秒）消除了语义预视效应，并且没有持续时间限制的完整预视导致了预视成本，即预视效益的逆转。我们的结果表明，来自周边文字的高级语义信息可以被获取，并且周边语义效应的大小和方向取决于词汇激活水平。
