Impact of misplaced words in reading comprehension of Chinese sentences: Evidences from eye movement and electroencephalography

This pilot study aimed to investigate the impact of misplaced words in Chinese sentences by using eye-Tracker and electroencephalography (EEG) technology. There were 5 participants. Four of which were graduate students and one was a college student. Their average age was 24.4 years old. The participants were asked to read text with and without misplaced words. After reading, they were asked to answer a question that determined whether they understood the content of the stimulus previously displayed. Eye movement data and attention levels were recorded using an eye tracker and an EEG device. The data were saved in the background system automatically and synchronously while the experiment was performed. The findings suggest that: 1.) The number of misplaced words do not affect the reading comprehension of participants. Instead, wrong answers resulted from the question that evaluated the reading comprehension on one stimulus that contained too many information 2.) In increasing the number of misplaced words in a stimulus, participants did not spend more time gazing at them in comparison to other stimuli that had lesser or no misplaced words 3.) When asked to read a stimulus as quickly as possible, the analysis showed that most of the participants did not gaze longer at the regions of the misplaced words. They spent less than 5% of the time gazing at these regions of interest 4.) EEG data analysis yielded mixed results since some participants that gazed at misplaced words had high attention levels and some did not show an increase in their attention levels.