Abstract: Previous studies showed that eye movements characteristics during Chinese silent reading was different from that in Chinese oral reading. Chinese readers tended to placing more reliance on parafoveal previews in silent reading than in oral reading; however, whether it is the same or not about how parafoveal previews affecting foveal processing during the two reading modes is unclear. Thus, the present experiment compared the difference of foveal processing between silent and oral reading by recording eye movements of 40 undergraduates while reading normal sentence of which the parafoveal words varied from frequency (high, low) and stroke (less, more). The results showed that on single fixation duration, frequency and strokes of parafoveal words had different effects on foveal word processing in silent reading from that in oral reading, showing an interacted and positive parafoveal-foveal effect of word frequency and word strokes in silent reading rather than oral reading. That is, single fixation duration on foveal words was shorter when parafoveal words were high frequency and had less strokes than words of high frequency and more strokes. Meanwhile, on gaze duration, there was word frequency parafoveal-fovel effect both in silent and oral reading, with shorter gaze duration on foveal words when parafoveal words were high frequency than when those were low frequency. The results were in consistent with the issues of the parallel graded attention models of reading.