Abstract
Participants’ eye movements (EMs) and EEG signal were simultaneously recorded to examine foveal and parafoveal processing during sentence reading. All the words in the sentence were manipulated for inter-word spacing (intact spaces vs. spaces replaced by a random letter) and parafoveal preview (identical preview vs. random letter string preview). We observed disruption for unspaced text and invalid preview conditions in both EMs and fixation-related potentials (FRPs). Unspaced and invalid preview conditions received longer reading times than spaced and valid preview conditions. In addition, the FRP data showed that unspaced previews disrupted reading in earlier time windows of analysis, compared to string preview conditions. Moreover, the effect of parafoveal preview was greater for spaced relative to unspaced conditions, in both EMs and FRPs. These findings replicate well-established preview effects, provide novel insight into the neural correlates of reading with and without inter-word spacing and suggest that spatial selection precedes lexical processing.
Highlights
New insights on the time course of the processes underlying reading come from studies conducted with co-registration methodology
We observed a significant effect of inter-word spacing, such that reading times were significantly shorter when the parafoveal preview preserved the spaces between words compared to when the spaces were replaced by letters
We explored for the first time the neural correlates of inter-word spacing, and we examined the neural correlates of parafoveal preview during natural reading, when all the words in the sentence are manipulated
Summary
New insights on the time course of the processes underlying reading come from studies conducted with co-registration methodology. This approach involves the simultaneous recording of participants’ eye movements (EMs) and EEG signal, and provides a record of continuous brain activity over time while participants read sentences or paragraphs normally, whilst making saccadic EMs [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. I 201.6; https://www.jyu.fi/hallinto/neuvostot/ tiedeneuvosto/liikkuvuusrahoitus) awarded to OL; the Economic and Social Research Council grant (ES/R003386/1; https://esrc.ukri.org/) awarded to SPL; and postgraduate student funding awarded to FD by the University of Southampton The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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