The predictability effect on eye movement in reading Korean dative sentences

Abstract

Yun and Hong (2014) demonstrated the effect of role predictability and word predictability in the processing of Korean dative sentences. We aimed to investigate the nature of predictability effect that Yun and Hong observed, in particular, to explore whether the effect would reflect the early stage or the late stage of processing by observing readers’ eye movement in reading. The significant effect of role predictability and word predictability were addictively observed in the measurement of early processing (i.e., first pass reading times) but not in the measurement of late processing (i.e., regression rates). Of interest, the effect of word predictability was mainly based on the processing of words of low role predictability. Our results indicate that when a thematic role for an upcoming word is not highly expected, word predictability contributes to the reduction of readers’ integration difficulty, in a way that more predictable word is easier to be integrated into a sentence. We discuss our results in terms of Staub’s (2015) theoretical conclusion that the predictability effect depends on the process that multiple words are activated at once at graded degrees from the early stage.