Parafoveal-foveal overlap can facilitate ongoing word identification during reading: evidence from eye movements.

Readers continuously receive parafoveal information about the upcoming word in addition to the foveal information about the currently fixated word. Previous research (Inhoff, Radach, Starr, & Greenberg, 2000) showed that the presence of a parafoveal word that was similar to the foveal word facilitated processing of the foveal word. We used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to manipulate the parafoveal information that subjects received before or while fixating a target word (e.g., news) within a sentence. Specifically, a reader's parafovea could contain a repetition of the target (news), a correct preview of the posttarget word (once), an unrelated word (warm), random letters (cxmr), a nonword neighbor of the target (niws), a semantically related word (tale), or a nonword neighbor of that word (tule). Target fixation times were significantly lower in the parafoveal repetition condition than in all other conditions, suggesting that foveal processing can be facilitated by parafoveal repetition. We present a simple model framework that can account for these effects

The effect of high- and low-frequency previews and sentential fit on word skipping during reading

In a previous gaze-contingent boundary experiment, Angele and Rayner (2013) found that readers are likely to skip a word that appears to be the definite article the even when syntactic constraints do not allow for articles to occur in that position. In the present study, we investigated whether the word frequency of the preview of a 3-letter target word influences a reader’s decision to fixate or skip that word. We found that the word frequency rather than the felicitousness (syntactic fit) of the preview affected how often the upcoming word was skipped. These results indicate that visual information about the upcoming word trumps information from the sentence context when it comes to making a skipping decision. Skipping parafoveal instances of the therefore may simply be an extreme case of skipping high-frequency words

False positive rates in standard analyses of eye movements in reading arXiv:1504.06896 [stat.AP]

In research on eye movements in reading, it is common to analyze a number of canonical dependent measures in order to study how the effects of a manipulation unfold over time. Although this gives rise to the well-known multiple comparisons problem, i.e. an inflated probability that the null hypothesis is incorrectly rejected (Type I error), it is accepted standard practice not to apply any correction procedures. Instead, there is a widespread belief that corrections are not necessary because the increase in false positives is too small to matter. To our knowledge, no formal argument has ever been made to justify this assumption. Here, we report an investigation of this issue using Monte Carlo simulations. Our results show that false positives are in fact increased to unacceptable levels when no correction is applied, which casts doubt on the assumptions that Type I error rate increases are too small to matter in practice. We also tested two stricter alternative criteria for determining the reliability of an effect and found that the Bonferroni correction controls false positives effectively while only moderately reducing power. Thus, there is little reason why the Bonferroni correction should not be made a standard requirement for analyses of eye movement data in reading

Inter-word and Inter-letter spacing effects during reading revisited: Interactions with word and font characteristics

Despite the large number of eye movement studies conducted over the past 30+ years, relatively few have examined the influence that font characteristics have on reading. However, there has been renewed interest in one particular font characteristic, letter spacing, which has both theoretical (visual word recognition) and applied (font design) importance. Recently published results that letter spacing has a bigger impact on the reading performance of dyslexic children have perhaps garnered the most attention (Zorzi et al. 2012). Unfortunately, the effects of increased inter-letter spacing have been mixed with some authors reporting facilitation and others reporting inhibition (van den Boer & Hakvoort, 2015). We present findings from three experiments designed to resolve the seemingly inconsistent letter-spacing effects and provide clarity to researchers and font designers and researchers. The results indicate that the direction of spacing effects depend on the size of the ‘default’ spacing chosen by font developers. Experiment 3, found that inter-letter spacing interacts with inter-word spacing, as the required space between words depends on the amount of space used between letters. Inter-word spacing also interacted with word type as the inhibition seen with smaller inter-word spacing was evident with nouns and verbs but not with function words

Predicting the unpredicted: No relationship between ‘the’-skipping and response inhibition

Skilled readers are likely to skip short, high-frequency words such as “the” in English. When deciding to skip such words, readers fail to take into account the preceding sentence context and will frequently skip an upcoming word that looks like “the” even if it is incompatible with the context, i.e. infelicitous (Angele & Rayner, 2013). It is not clear if (1) this failure to identify a potential problem with a sentence stems from an inability to access the information about the sentence context at the point of making the skipping decision or (2) a problem in selecting the appropriate information in order to make the decision. The latter case resembles response inhibition tests where participants need to make a decision in the presence of incongruent stimuli. If skipping and response inhibition depend on the same cognitive processes, we should find a relationship between a participant’s performance on response inhibition tests and the rate at which they skip words with an infelicitous gaze-contingent preview. We report an experiment testing this hypothesis in which there was no evidence for a relationship between the congruency effect in response inhibition tests and the rate of skipping infelicitous previews in a sentence reading task

Skipping syntactically illegal the previews: the role of predictability.

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates the-skipping behavior. The results provide further evidence that readers frequently skip the article the when infelicitous in context. Readers skipped predictable words more often than unpredictable words, even when the, which was syntactically illegal and unpredictable from the prior context, was presented as a parafoveal preview. The results of the experiment were simulated using E-Z Reader 10 by assuming that cloze probability can be dissociated from parafoveal visual input. It appears that when a short word is predictable in context, a decision to skip it can be made even if the information available parafoveally conflicts both visually and syntactically with those predictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved

Repetition causes confusion: Insights to word segmentation during Chinese reading.

Since there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries in Chinese, it is common to see 2 identical neighboring characters in natural text. Usually, this occurs when there are 2 adjacent words containing the same character (we will call such a coincidental sequence of 2 identical characters repeated characters). In the present study, we examined how Chinese readers process words when there are repeated characters. In 3 experiments, we compared how Chinese readers process 4-character strings including 2 repeated characters (e.g. , pinyin: xíngdòng dòngjī, meaning behavioral motivation) with a control condition where none of the characters repeat (e.g. , pinyin: xíngdòng yùwàng, meaning behavioral desire). In Experiment 1, the 4-character strings were presented for 40 ms and participants were asked to report as many characters as possible. Participants reported the second and third characters less accurately in the repeated condition than the control condition. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we embedded 2 different types of 4-character strings, compound Chinese characters and simple Chinese characters, into the same sentence frames, and asked participants to read these sentences normally. Gaze duration and total time on the second word were significantly longer in the repeated condition. These results suggest that the repeated characters increased the difficulty of word processing. Moreover, the results are consistent with the predictions of serial models, which assumes that words are processed serially in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Processing the in the parafovea: Are articles skipped automatically?

One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article the. Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string t-h-e automatically. We tested whether skipping of articles in English is sensitive to context information or whether it is truly automatic in the sense that any occurrence of the letter string the will trigger a skip. This was done using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to provide readers with false parafoveal previews of the article the. All experimental sentences contained a short target verb, the preview of which could be correct (i.e., identical to the actual subsequent word in the sentence; e.g., ace), a nonword (tda), or an infelicitous article preview (the). Our results indicated that readers tended to skip the infelicitous the previews frequently, suggesting that, in many cases, they seemed to be unable to detect the syntactic anomaly in the preview and based their skipping decision solely on the orthographic properties of the article. However, there was some evidence that readers sometimes detected the anomaly, as they also showed increased skipping of the pretarget word in the the preview condition. © 2012 American Psychological Association

Parafoveal Processing of Word n + 2 During Reading: Do the Preceding Words Matter?

We used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to test two hypotheses that might explain why no conclusive evidence has been found for the existence of n + 2 preprocessing effects. In Experiment 1, we tested whether parafoveal processing of the second word to the right of fixation (n + 2) takes place only when the preceding word (n + 1) is very short (Angele, Slattery, Yang, Kliegl, & Rayner, 2008); word n + 1 was always a three-letter word. Before crossing the boundary, preview for both words n + 1 and n + 2 was either incorrect or correct. In a third condition, only the preview for word n + 1 was incorrect. In Experiment 2, we tested whether word frequency of the preboundary word (n) had an influence on the presence of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effects. Additionally, Experiment 2 contained a condition in which only preview of n + 2 was incorrect. Our findings suggest that effects of parafoveal n + 2 preprocessing are not modulated by either n + 1 word length or n frequency. Furthermore, we did not observe any evidence of parafoveal lexical preprocessing of word n + 2 in either experiment. © 2011 American Psychological Association

What are the costs of degraded parafoveal previews during silent reading?

It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner,1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline. We report two experiments of skilled adults reading silently. In Experiment 1, we found no compelling evidence that degraded previews reduced processing costs associated with traditional letter masks. Moreover, participants were highly sensitive to detecting degraded display changes. Experiment 2 utilized the boundary detection paradigm (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner, 2011) to explore whether participants were capable of detecting actual letter changes or if they were responding purely to changes in degradation. Half of the participants were instructed to respond to any noticed display changes; the other half were instructed to respond only to changes in letter identities. Participants were highly sensitive to degraded changes. In fact, these changes were so apparent that they reduced the sensitivity to letter masks. In the context of the model proposed by Angele, Slattery, and Rayner (2016), we suggest that degraded previews interfere with the attentional stage, as evidenced by the general lack of foveal load effects. In summary, we found that increasingly degrading parafoveal letter masks does not reduce their processing costs in adults, but that both degraded valid and invalid previews introduce additional costs in terms of greater display change awareness