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Purpose: The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity. Method: Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated the relation between the homographic parafoveal preview morphemes and the target words in Chinese and Korean, respectively, in two experiments. We tested 57 Chinese and 45 Korean university students. Together with baseline conditions in which the previews were either identical or unrelated to the target, we had two critical conditions in which the homographs shared/did not share the same morphemic meaning (i.e., same morpheme/different morpheme) with the target morpheme. Results: Across the two experiments, the differences between the same and different morpheme conditions in a number of eye movement indices were significant, consistently showing that appropriate morpho-semantic information facilitates lexical processing. The different-morpheme previews facilitated the target word processing in Chinese but not in Korean reading. Conclusion: These findings suggest that morphemic meanings are activated early on during word recognition in Chinese, a logographic orthography, and Korean Hangul, a phonologically transparent writing system, before the word is fixated upon.

The present study sets out to address two fundamental questions in the reading of continuous texts: Whether semantic and phonological information from upcoming words can be accessed during natural reading. In the present study we investigated parafoveal processing during the reading of Korean sentences, manipulating semantic and phonological information from parafoveal preview words. In addition to the first evidence for a semantic preview effect in Korean, we found that Korean readers have stronger and more long-lasting phonological than semantic activation from parafoveal words in second-pass reading. The present study provides an example that human mind can flexibly adjust processing priority to different types of information based on the linguistic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]