Are there binocular advantages in Chinese reading? Evidence from eye movements

Purpose: 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.