The effect of contextual diversity on eye movements in Chinese sentence reading

Recent studies have demonstrated that when contextual diversity is controlled token word frequency has minimal effects on visual word recognition. With the exception of a single experiment by Plummer, Perea, & Rayner (2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 275-283), those studies have examined words in isolation. The current studies address two potential limitations of the Plummer et al. experiment. First, because Plummer et al. used different sentence frames for words in different conditions, the effects might be due to uncontrolled differences on the sentences. Second, the absence of a frequency effect might be attributed to comparing higher and lower frequency words within a limited range. Three eye-tracking experiments examined effects of contextual diversity and frequency on Mandarin Chinese, a logographic language, for words embedded in the normal sentences. In Experiment 1, yoked words were rotated through the same sentence frame. Experiments 2a and 2b used a design similar to Plummer et al., which allows use of a larger sample of words to compare results between experiments with a smaller and larger difference in log frequency (0.41 and 1.06, respectively). In all three experiments, first-pass and later eye movement measures were significantly shorter for targets with higher contextual diversity than for targets with lower contextual diversity, with no effects of frequency.