Chinese Readers Process Word Class of Parafoveal Words During Sentence Reading

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.