Chapter 17 - The interplay between parafoveal preview and morphological Processing in reading

Abstract

This chapter investigates whether a morphological preview benefit can be obtained in Finnish with the eye contingent display change paradigm. The use of compound words is a good way to study morphological preview effects in Finnish. It seems that depending on the language, morphological preprocessing may or may not take place. For that purpose, compound words with long or short 1st constituents are embedded in sentences, while manipulating the amount of information available of the 1st constituent before the compound word was fixated. In the change conditions, the first 3–4 letters were made available parafoveally that constituted the whole 1st constituent in the case of the short, but only part of the 1st constituent in the case of the long 1st constituents. The results showed that the change manipulation was equally effective for long and short 1st constituent compounds, indicating that in reading Finnish there is no morphological preview benefit. On the other hand, 1st constituent length affected several eye movement measures, indicating that the role of morphology in lexical processing is constrained by visual acuity principles. The chapter discusses two compound word studies that have touched upon the issue of parafoveal processing in Finnish, and summarizes those Finnish compound studies in which the focus is on foveal processing, but in which the investigated variables are at the intersection of morphology and visual acuity.