Parafoveal-on-foveal effects in normal reading.
A corpus of eye movement data derived from 10 English and 10 French participants, each reading about 50,000 words, was examined for evidence that properties of a word in parafoveal vision have an immediate effect on foveal inspection time. When inspecting a short word, there is evidence that the lexical frequency of an adjacent word affects processing time. When inspecting a long word, there are small effects of lexical frequency, but larger effects of initial-letter constraint and orthographic familiarity. Interactions of this kind are incompatible with models of reading which appeal to the operation of a serial attention switch.
Kennedy
Alan
A
Department of Psychology, University of Dundee, Scrymgeour Building, Dundee, DD1 4HN Tayside, Scotland, UK. a.kennedy@dundee.ac.uk
Pynte
Joël
J
D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D005584:Fovea Centralis / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors