Parafoveal processing of Chinese four-character idioms and phrases in reading: Evidence for multi-constituent unit hypothesis

The perceptual span in Chinese reading extends one character to the left and three to the right of the point of fixation. Thus, four-character idioms and phrases often extend rightward beyond these limits during reading. We investigated whether such idioms, frequent phrases and equibiased strings are processed parafoveally as Multi-Constituent Units (MCUs). Using the boundary paradigm in Experiments 1 and 2, we separately manipulated preview (identities or pseudocharacters) of the first two and the last two characters of idioms and frequently used phrases. In Experiment 3, we examined processing of strings judged to be a single lexical unit, equi-biased ambiguous strings and matched unambiguous multi-word strings. Experiments 1 and 2 produced greater preview benefit for the final two characters when the first two characters were presented after identity rather than pseudocharacter previews. In Experiment 3, preview effects were largest for single units, reduced for equi-biased strings and smallest for multi-word strings. Together the results demonstrate that four-character idioms and frequently used phrases are processed as MCUs.