Preview fixation duration modulates identical and semantic preview benefit in Chinese reading

Semantic preview benefit from parafoveal words is critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. Semantic preview benefit has been demonstrated for Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm in which unrelated or semantically related previews of a target word N + 1 are replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N (Yan et al., 2009); for the target word in position N + 2, only identical compared to unrelated-word preview led to shorter fixation times on the target word (Yan et al., in press). A reanalysis of these data reveals that identical and semantic preview benefits depend on preview duration (i.e., the fixation duration on the preboundary word). Identical preview benefit from word N + 1 increased with preview duration. The identical preview benefit was also significant for N + 2, but did not significantly interact with preview duration. The previously reported semantic preview benefit from word N + 1 was mainly due to single- or first-fixation durations following short previews. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.