Skipping the structural particle de () in reading Chinese: The role of word frequency and sentential fit.

Previous studies suggested that readers were more likely to skip a word when it was previewed by a very-high-frequency word, like "the" in English and " ()" in Chinese, and they suggested that readers based skipping decisions on parafoveal word information rather than on sentence context. However, in these studies, the very-high-frequency preview word ( or ) was always implausible given the sentence context. It is an open question whether parafoveal word information interacts with sentence context to influence skipping decisions. Therefore, the current experiment orthogonally manipulated the preview information of the target character (identical or preview) and the plausibility of (plausible or implausible) to examine this question. The major results indicated that readers were more likely to skip the target character and made longer outgoing saccade length across the boundary in the preview condition than in the identical preview condition. What is more important, the interaction between the plausibility of and preview condition was significant: Readers' higher probability of skipping the target character and longer outgoing saccade length in the preview condition than in the identical preview condition was only significant when was plausible, suggesting that parafoveal word information and context information can act as a joint constraint on skipping decision in reading Chinese.