Materials

A picture book entitled “The Little Mouse Wants Apples” (Zhongjiang and Shangye, 2014) was used. The book tells a simple and interesting story about a small mouse who eats apples with the help of friends. Six types of animals are mentioned in turn, except the little mouse. We confirmed that all the children knew these animals and that they had not previously read the book. The book is aimed at children aged 3–6 years. Three pages of the book were excluded, and 13 pages were presented to the children. The first page (home) was the cover, and the last page contained no Chinese words. The 12th page was structured very differently from the other pages. Therefore, those three pages were not included in the analysis of the eye movement data, and 10 pages were analyzed. Blue circles on the page represented the text and protagonist zones, which did not appear on the actual page. The boundary of the text zones was defined as a visual angle away from the text, and the circular radius was 75 pixels. The boundary of the protagonist zone was defined as a visual angle away from the protagonist, and the zone’s radius was 150 pixels. The text and picture zones did not overlap, and the text was fixed on the right side of each page (see Figure ​Figure11).

Sample page of the picture book used in the experiment. The English translation of the sentence in the Chinese book is “A bird comes and takes an apple.”

The PPVT (Dunn, 1965) used in this study was translated and revised by the Shanghai Institute of Pediatrics, and its test–retest reliability was 0.95. Its correlation coefficient with the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) was 0.53 (Gong and Guo, 1984).

The sound used in the reading-with-the-narrator condition was recorded in advance by a non-professional voice dubbing artist majoring in psychology. The recording matched the picture book text. The voice artist read the book vividly, changing her tone, intonation and emotion according to the plot. There was only one sentence on each page (e.g., “A bird comes and takes an apple”). The number of words per sentence was 7–13, and the recording time for each sentence was 2–4 s (M = 3, SD = 0.67). Children heard the same recording when reading with a narrator.