Abstract
Recent evidence suggested that parafoveal preprocessing develops early during reading acquisition, that is, young readers profit from valid parafoveal information and exhibit a resultant preview benefit. For young readers, however, it is unknown whether the processing demands of the currently fixated word modulate the extent to which the upcoming word is parafoveally preprocessed – as it has been postulated (for adult readers) by the foveal load hypothesis. The present study used the novel incremental boundary technique to assess whether 4th and 6th Graders exhibit an effect of foveal load. Furthermore, we attempted to distinguish the foveal load effect from the spillover effect. These effects are hard to differentiate with respect to the expected pattern of results, but are conceptually different. The foveal load effect is supposed to reflect modulations of the extent of parafoveal preprocessing, whereas the spillover effect reflects the ongoing processing of the previous word whilst the reader’s fixation is already on the next word. The findings revealed that the young readers did not exhibit an effect of foveal load, but a substantial spillover effect. The implications for previous studies with adult readers and for models of eye movement control in reading are discussed.
Highlights
Recent evidence suggested that parafoveal preprocessing develops early during reading acquisition, that is, young readers profit from valid parafoveal information and exhibit a resultant preview benefit
Recent studies revealed that beginning readers soon begin to utilize information from parafoveal words for subsequent foveal word recognition, that is, they engage in parafoveal preprocessing and exhibit the resultant preview benefit
A study from our workgroup – using the novel incremental boundary paradigm – confirmed that 2nd Graders benefit from valid parafoveal previews[8]
Summary
It is further evident from the Figure, that the children of both Grades exhibited substantially shorter FFD and GD with an increasing salience of the parafoveal preview of wordn, that is, they exhibited a preview benefit (reflected by the main effects of salience; see Table 1) This finding replicates previous findings of our group[8,16] and shows that visual degradation is an effective method for manipulating the extent to which information can be extracted from the parafoveal word. No effect of foveal load was found for readers who were aware of the display change For these readers, the size of the preview benefit on wordn was unaffected by the frequency of the wordn−1 – as was the case for the young readers of the present study. White and colleagues[20] purposefully chose dissimilar letter strings
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