Emergence and Development of Bullet Comments in China

Danmu denotes user-generated dynamic and contextualised comments scrolling across the screen. Owing to its resemblance to a bullet curtain, such a text-over-screen technology is referred to as ‘bullet comment/message’ or ‘barrage subtitling’. Since being adopted from Japan, danmu has expeditiously developed from a niche subcultural entity into a prominent property of Chinese online video culture. Danmu obtains popularity among young audiences, in that it establishes social media co-viewing, creates a sense of belonging, allows self-expression and facilitates social connectedness. Moreover, danmu enables creators to demonstrate a sense of existence, especially via informative, alerting and spoiler comments. The popularity of danmu in China is ascribed to diversified and concise literacy practice. More significantly, it is attributed to linguistic and cultural prerequisites: the Chinese written language is featured by a high information density and robust parafoveal preview effects; the Chinese culture is marked by a high level of polychronicity and collectivism, as well as conspicuous social and peer pressure.

Prediction and preview strongly affect reading times but not skipping during natural reading

In a typical text, readers look much longer at some words than at others and fixate some words multiple times, while skipping others altogether. Historically, researchers explained this variation via low-level visual or oculomotor factors, but today it is primarily explained via cognitive factors, such as how well words can be predicted from context or discerned from parafoveal preview. While the existence of these effects has been well established in experiments, the relative importance of prediction, preview and low-level factors for eye movement variation in natural reading is unclear. Here, we address this question using a deep neural network and Bayesian ideal observer to model linguistic prediction and parafoveal preview from moment to moment in natural reading (n=104, 1.5 million words). Strikingly, neither prediction nor preview was important for explaining word skipping - the vast majority of skipping was explained by a simple oculomotor model. For reading times, by contrast, we found clear but independent contributions of both prediction and preview, and effect sizes matching those from controlled experiments. Together, these results challenge dominant models of eye movements in reading by showing that linguistic prediction and parafoveal preview are not important determinants of word skipping.

Parafoveal words can modulate sentence meaning: Electrophysiological evidence from an RSVP-with-flanker task

During natural reading, readers also take up some visual information from not-yet-fixated words to the right of the current fixation and it is well-established that this parafoveal preview facilitates the subsequent foveal processing of the word. However, the extraction and integration of word meaning from the parafoveal word and its possible influence on the semantic sentence context are controversial. In the current study, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in the RSVP-with-flankers paradigm to test whether and how updates of sentential meaning that are based only on parafoveal information influence the subsequent foveal processing. Using Chinese sentences, the sentence congruency of parafoveal and foveal target words were orthogonally manipulated. In contrast to previous research, we also controlled for potentially confounding effects of parafoveal-to-foveal repetition priming (identity preview effects) on the N400. Crucially, we found that the classic effect of foveal congruency on the N400 component only appeared when the word in preview had been congruent with sentence meaning; in contrast, there was no N400 when the preview word had been incongruent. These results indicate that sentence meaning rapidly adapts to parafoveal preview, which already changes the context for the then fixated word. We also show that a correct parafoveal preview generally attenuates the N400 once a word is fixated, regardless of congruency. Taken together, our findings underline the highly generative and adaptive framework of language comprehension.

Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct

There is a growing understanding that the parafoveal preview effect during reading may represent a combination of preview benefits and preview costs due to interference from parafoveal masks. It has been suggested that visually degrading the parafoveal masks may reduce their costs, but adult readers were later shown to be highly sensitive to degraded display changes. Four experiments examined how preview benefits and preview costs are influenced by the perception of distinct parafoveal degradation at the target word location. Participants read sentences with four preview types (identity, orthographic, phonological, and letter-mask preview) and two levels of visual degradation (0% vs. 20%). The distinctiveness of the target word degradation was either eliminated by degrading all words in the sentence (Experiments 1a–2a) or remained present, as in previous research (Experiments 1b–2b). Degrading the letter masks resulted in a reduction in preview costs, but only when all words in the sentence were degraded. When degradation at the target word location was perceptually distinct, it induced costs of its own, even for orthographically and phonologically related previews. These results confirm previous reports that traditional parafoveal masks introduce preview costs that overestimate the size of the true benefit. However, they also show that parafoveal degradation has the unintended consequence of introducing additional costs when participants are aware of distinct degradation on the target word. Parafoveal degradation appears to be easily perceived and may temporarily orient attention away from the reading task, thus delaying word processing.