Are the final letters of a parafoveal word used by developing readers? Evidence from a single word reading task

Abstract

A recent study in isolated word reading (Khelifi et al., 2015) reported that word identification was facilitated in developing readers when a target was preceded parafoveally by a full preview (a preview containing all the target letters) but not by a partial preview (a preview containing only the first three letters of the target). While this result leads to wonder about contribution of the final letters in the preview benefit, two reasons could explain why partial preview does not provide any facilitation effect. First, lexical competition could arise between the partial preview and the target word. Second, an incompatibility between the partial preview and the target word at the visual level might disrupt the activation. The present study aimed to examine which of these reasons is the most likely. Third graders, fifth graders and expert readers performed a lexical decision task. Before being foveally displayed, a target was parafoveally previewed for a short time. It could be fully previewed or partially previewed. A facilitation effect was observed in fifth graders and expert readers when the target was fully previewed but not when it was partially previewed. The more probable explanation for the lack of an effect in the partial preview lies in a disruption at the visual processing level rather than a lexical competition between the target and the preview. In third graders, no facilitation effect was observed whatever the preview condition. In contrast to fifth graders and expert readers, the results in third graders evidenced a limit in the processing of the more eccentric letters of a parafoveal word.