Parafoveal access to embedded-word meaning during Chinese word segmentation

The absence of word-boundary cues in Chinese text creates segmentation ambiguities that readers must resolve online. One example is incremental ambiguity, in which the initial characters of a longer word (e.g., 体育馆, "stadium") can also form a standalone embedded word (体育, "sport"). Previous studies manipulated the preceding verb context to render the embedded word either plausible or implausible while the longer-word analysis remained plausible, comparing these with control sentences in which the longer word was replaced by the embedded word. Plausibility effects were observed only for the control words, suggesting that readers do not access embedded-word meaning before segmentation is resolved, consistent with the Chinese Reading Model (Li & Pollatsek, 2020). However, these studies also failed to detect the early first-pass plausibility effects reported in other studies using unambiguous materials, making the absence of embedded-word effects difficult to interpret. We therefore conducted a high-powered eye-movement experiment using a larger participant sample and stimulus set, and assessed the robustness of critical effects using split-half reliability and bootstrap analyses. Embedded-word plausibility effects emerged robustly during first-pass fixations on the pre-target verb, indicating parafoveal access to an embedded-word representation. No corresponding effects emerged at the ambiguity region, suggesting that readers ultimately favored the longer-word analysis. Control-word plausibility effects emerged during first-pass fixations at both regions, confirming that the experiment was sufficiently sensitive to detect early plausibility effects. These findings show that embedded-word representations become available parafoveally during incremental ambiguity resolution, challenging current accounts of Chinese word segmentation.