Abstract
There is a growing understanding that the parafoveal preview effect during reading may represent a combination of preview benefits and preview costs due to interference from parafoveal masks. It has been suggested that visually degrading the parafoveal masks may reduce their costs, but adult readers were later shown to be highly sensitive to degraded display changes. Four experiments examined how preview benefits and preview costs are influenced by the perception of distinct parafoveal degradation at the target word location. Participants read sentences with four preview types (identity, orthographic, phonological, and letter-mask preview) and two levels of visual degradation (0% vs. 20%). The distinctiveness of the target word degradation was either eliminated by degrading all words in the sentence (Experiments 1a–2a) or remained present, as in previous research (Experiments 1b–2b). Degrading the letter masks resulted in a reduction in preview costs, but only when all words in the sentence were degraded. When degradation at the target word location was perceptually distinct, it induced costs of its own, even for orthographically and phonologically related previews. These results confirm previous reports that traditional parafoveal masks introduce preview costs that overestimate the size of the true benefit. However, they also show that parafoveal degradation has the unintended consequence of introducing additional costs when participants are aware of distinct degradation on the target word. Parafoveal degradation appears to be easily perceived and may temporarily orient attention away from the reading task, thus delaying word processing.
Highlights
Skilled readers acquire information from the currently fixated word and from the upcoming word in parafoveal vision
We investigated how preview benefits and preview costs are influenced by the awareness of distinct degradation changes occurring at the target word location
The results showed that the preview costs associated with invalid masks can be reduced when participants do not perceive distinct parafoveal degradation at the target word location (Experiments 1a and 2a), but that no such reduction in preview costs occurs when such distinct degradation is present (Experiments 1b and 2b)
Summary
Skilled readers acquire information from the currently fixated word and from the upcoming word in parafoveal vision. Using AlTeRnAtInG text, Rayner et al (1980) demonstrated that preview effects are not based on purely visual information They found that fixation durations did not differ between trials where the case of all letters changed and trials where the case of no letters changed (see Slattery, Angele, & Rayner, 2011). They found that the pattern of preview effects depended on whether the abbreviations were visually distinct (i.e., in lowercase sentences) or visually indistinct (i.e., in uppercase sentences) This demonstrates that readers can alter their parafoveal processing based on the awareness of visually distinct areas of text, which has important implications for the incremental boundary paradigm (Marx et al, 2015) and the specific way in which it is experimentally implemented
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