Abstract
A hotly debated issue in reading research concerns the extent to which readers process parafoveal words, and how parafoveal information might influence foveal word recognition. We investigated syntactic word processing both in sentence reading and in reading isolated foveal words when these were flanked by parafoveal words. In Experiment 1 we found a syntactic parafoveal preview benefit in sentence reading, meaning that fixation durations on target words were decreased when there was a syntactically congruent preview word at the target location (n) during the fixation on the pre-target (n-1). In Experiment 2 we used a flanker paradigm in which participants had to classify foveal target words as either noun or verb, when those targets were flanked by syntactically congruent or incongruent words (stimulus on-time 170 ms). Lower response times and error rates in the congruent condition suggested that higher-order (syntactic) information can be integrated across foveal and parafoveal words. Although higher-order parafoveal-on-foveal effects have been elusive in sentence reading, results from our flanker paradigm show that the reading system can extract higher-order information from multiple words in a single glance. We propose a model of reading to account for the present findings.
Highlights
Through decades of reading research, much insight has been gained into how properties of fixated words and upcoming words influence eye movement behavior as well as processes of word recognition and sentence comprehension
There is already considerable evidence that upcoming words are processed sub-lexically in alphabetic languages, and that orthographic information is integrated across foveal and parafoveal words such that words are recognized faster when they are orthographically related to adjacent words (e.g. [8,9,10,11,12,13,14])
FFD refers to the mean first fixation duration on a word, regardless of whether there were subsequent fixations
Summary
Through decades of reading research, much insight has been gained into how properties of fixated (i.e., foveal) words and upcoming (i.e., parafoveal) words influence eye movement behavior as well as processes of word recognition and sentence comprehension. The depth of processing of parafoveal words remains a hotly debated issue. Multiple lines of research have suggested that this is likely to depend on several factors, such as the language at hand There is already considerable evidence that upcoming words are processed sub-lexically in alphabetic languages, and that orthographic information is integrated across foveal and parafoveal words such that words are recognized faster when they are orthographically related to adjacent words Higher-order processing of upcoming words is more controversial
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