Abstract:  The researches pay more attention to the parafoveal preview benefits (PPB) in the field of reading and language comprehension. Most of previous studies about PPB were done in silent reading. Those studies mainly investigated whether there is PPB and what type the PPB is. Seldom researches are done about oral reading. We cannot find the literature about the extraction time of preview information during Chinese reading. Thus, present study used the boundary paradigm to explore the differences of PPB between silent and oral reading in Chinese. In experiment 1, in order to explore the effect of the preview of word N when word N-1 was fixated during silent and oral reading, we manipulated the preview condition of word N (masking preview and target preview) and reading modes (silent reading and oral reading). The results show that parafoveal preview information plays an important role in eye movement control during oral reading and silent reading. The preview benefits in oral reading are smaller than that in silent reading. In experiment 2, to explore the effect of the extraction time of preview information of word N when word N-1 was fixated during silent and oral reading, we manipulated parafoveal preview time (0 ms, 50 ms, 100 ms and 150 ms) and reading modes (silent reading and oral reading). The results show that during silent reading, the extraction of parafoveal information might start immediately at the beginning of fixating the word N, but during oral reading, it might start relatively late. In summary, during Chinese reading, parafoveal preview can extract the information during silent reading and oral reading. However, there is significant difference of parafoveal process between silent reading and oral reading. First of all, PPB in silent reading is bigger than that in oral reading. Secondly, parafoveal preview information extraction during oral reading is later than that during silent reading. The last but not least, parafoveal information extraction did not start immediately when pre-target word was fixated. This finding is consistent with the theory of sequential attention shift. But there is not the same phenomenon in silent reading.

Key words: silent reading, oral reading, preview benefit, boundary paradigm