Abstract
The present study examined how word-initial letters influence lexical access during reading. Eye movements were monitored as participants read sentences containing target words. Three factors were independently manipulated. First, target words had either high or low constraining word-initial letter sequences (e.g., dwarf or clown, respectively). Second, targets were either high or low in frequency of occurrence (e.g., train or stain, respectively). Third, targets were embedded in either biasing or neutral contexts (i.e., targets were high or low in their predictability). This 2 (constraint) × 2 (frequency) × 2 (context) design allowed us to examine the conditions under which a word’s initial letter sequence could facilitate processing. Analyses of fixation duration data revealed significant main effects of constraint, frequency, and context. Moreover, in measures taken to reflect “early” lexical processing (i.e., first and single fixation duration), there was a significant interaction between constraint and context. The overall pattern of findings suggests lexical access is facilitated by highly constraining word-initial letters. Results are discussed in comparison to recent studies of lexical features involved in word recognition during reading.
Highlights
The greatest advancements in understanding fluent reading over the past few decades have come from investigations that measure eye movement behavior
We examined the first-pass reading time on each region of the target sentence across Context conditions
Assuming that the presence of an orthographic uniqueness point (OUP) effect in naming and lexical decision is due to task effects and that the lack of one in fluent reading more accurately reflects processes associated with recognizing words in text, the question remains why we found a fixation time www.frontiersin.org advantage for words with HC trigrams while Miller et al found no such advantage for words with HC quadrigrams
Summary
The greatest advancements in understanding fluent reading over the past few decades have come from investigations that measure eye movement behavior (for reviews, see Rayner, 1998, 2009). Such studies have identified several oculomotor, perceptual, and cognitive factors that modulate the reader’s decisions of where and when to move the eyes while processing text. The importance of parafoveal vision in reading was substantiated in classic eye movement reading studies using the “moving window” (McConkie and Rayner, 1975) and “boundary” (Rayner, 1975) paradigms In these paradigms, changes are made in the text contingent on the reader’s eye position
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