The effects of emotional significance of foveal words on the parafoveal processing of N\u2009+\u20092 words in reading Chinese sentences

Abstract

The emotional significance of stimuli has a strong effect on lexical processing across different reading paradigms. In the present study, we investigated whether foveal and parafoveal lexical processing is influenced by foveal emotional words (positive, negative, or neutral) during the reading of Chinese sentences. We tested word N\u2009+\u20092 preview effect by manipulating the visibility of the upcoming word, located two words away from the foveal word. Processing benefits due to valid parafoveal preview were found for all three valence classes of foveal words. Most interestingly, for negative as compared to both neutral and positive foveal target words, the parafoveal preview effect was reduced when preview duration had been long. These findings suggest that negative words are more likely to attract readers’ attention, narrowing the attentional spotlight to the fovea as affected information becomes activated during word processing. We discuss implications for the notion of attention attraction due to emotional content.