The Character Position Encoding of Parafoveal Semantic Previews Is Flexible in Chinese Reading

TL;DR

This study shows that Chinese readers can still understand words when characters are out of order, suggesting flexible processing in reading.

Contribution

The study clarifies the mechanism behind the transposition effect in Chinese reading using eye-tracking experiments.

Findings

Semantic and transposed semantic previews showed similar processing efficiency.

Transposed previews provided a processing advantage over unrelated previews.

Chinese readers extract meaning from disrupted character order in the parafoveal region.

Abstract

Extant Chinese studies have documented that transposing characters within two-character words (e.g., 西装 suit) yields greater parafoveal preview benefits for target words compared to replacing the characters with unrelated ones (e.g., 型间 a nonword), i.e., the Chinese character transposition effect. This effect has been interpreted as evidence for flexible positional encoding in parafoveal processing, whereby readers tolerate character order disruptions. Alternatively, it has been attributed to morpheme-to-word activation. The present study aims to further clarify the mechanism of the transposition effect. We manipulated four preview conditions of target words in a sentence, identical, semantic, transposed semantic, and control preview, using an eye tracker to record eye movements. Experiment 1 employed reversible word pairs (e.g., 领带 tie-带领 lead) as semantical and transposed previews for targets (e.g., 西装suit). Experiment 2 used non-reversible word pairs (e.g., 衬衫 shirt-衫衬 a nonword). The results revealed comparable processing for both the semantic and transposed semantic preview conditions. Critically, the transposed semantic preview yielded a processing advantage over the unrelated preview. These findings demonstrated that Chinese readers efficiently extract semantic information from the parafoveal region even when character order is disrupted, indicating flexible character position encoding.

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