<p>The types and priority of parafoveal information processing is relevant to theoretical debates on reading. Whether readers make use of high-level linguistic features such as semantics and morphology in the parafoveal vision during reading has been debated. Some recent studies on agglutinative languages such as Uighur and Finnish have demonstrated that saccades can be affected by morphological structure. However, the underlying mechanism of such morphological influences has not been determined completely. In the current study, participants read three-character Chinese compound words embedded in sentences. The target words differed in their morphological hierarchical structure and were preceded by parafoveally presented pseudo-word primes whose grouping patterns were either consistent or inconsistent with the morphological hierarchical structure of the target word. Our results showed an influence of preview on first-fixation location, indicating that Chinese readers use the grouping information for saccade generation. More importantly, the readers processed the target words more briefly following consistent than inconsistent previews. The results suggest that parafoveal information influences subsequent foveal lexical processing, providing support to the notion that the processing of morphological hierarchical structure during Chinese sentence reading may occur early.</p>