This study investigates whether readers can extract the glyphs and lexical information of Chinese words from the left area of the current fixation. This study uses the eye-tracking technique with a boundary paradigm to explore this question. Participants were asked to read Chinese sentences carefully, with an invisible boundary between an adjective and a noun of a well-matched attributive clause. As readers' fixation crossed the boundary, the adjective to the left of the boundary was replaced with a similar or a dissimilar pseudoword (Experiment 1), or a word with an appropriate meaning at different frequency (Experiment 2). We found that readers spent more time reading the target word under the dissimilar mask condition than the similar condition in both early- and late-stage processing indexes of eye movement. In addition, readers spent more time on processing different-frequency adjective mask conditions at the late stage processing measures of eye movement. The results suggested that readers can begin to acquire glyph information from early stages and can acquire lexical information at the late stage, from the left of the current fixation during Chinese sentence reading. The implication for oculomotor gradient processing models was discussed.
Li et al. (Mon,) studied this question.