Are There Binocular Advantages in Chinese Reading? Evidence from Eye Movements

ABSTRACTPurpose This study aims to examine whether binocular vision plays a facilitating or impeding role in lexical processing during sentence reading in Chinese.Method Adopting the revised boundary paradigm, we orthogonally manipulated the parafoveal and foveal viewing conditions (monocular vs. binocular) of target words (high- vs. low-frequency) within sentences. Forty participants (30 females, mean age = 19.9 years) were recruited to read these sentences and their eye movements were monitored.Results Through directly comparing the eye movement measures in different viewing conditions, the results indicated that compared with monocular viewing, binocular viewing resulted in shorter fixation durations, thereby facilitating lexical processing. Critically, in addition to the higher information encoding speed toward the currently fixated word in the fovea, the more efficient preprocessing of the upcoming text to the right of fixation in the parafovea may also contribute to the superiority of binocular vision over monocular.Conclusion Our findings provide the first evidence to support the binocular advantages in Chinese reading, which reveals that high-quality visual input from binocular vision plays a vital role in fluent and efficient written text reading. AcknowledgmentsThis research was supported by grant from the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (18YJC190014).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Statements and declarationsThis research was supported by grants from the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (18YJC190014). Correspondence should be addressed to Yanping Liu, Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-sen University, No. 135, Xingang Xi Road, Guangzhou, 510275, P. R. China; e-mail: liuyp33@mail.sysu.edu.cn.The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [18YJC190014].