Transposed-letter effects in reading: evidence from eye movements and parafoveal preview.
Three eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the role of letter identity and letter position during reading. Before fixating on a target word within each sentence, readers were provided with a parafoveal preview that differed in the amount of useful letter identity and letter position information it provided. In Experiments 1 and 2, previews fell into 1 of 5 conditions: (a) identical to the target word, (b) a transposition of 2 internal letters, (c) a substitution of 2 internal letters, (d) a transposition of the 2 final letters, or (e) a substitution of the 2 final letters. In Experiment 3, the authors used a further set of conditions to explore the importance of external letter positions. The findings extend previous work and demonstrate that transposed-letter effects exist in silent reading. These experiments also indicate that letter identity information can be extracted from the parafovea outside of absolute letter position from the first 5 letters of the word to the right of fixation. Finally, the results support the notion that exterior letters play important roles in visual word recognition.
Johnson
Rebecca L
RL
Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. becca@psych.umass.edu
Perea
Manuel
M
Rayner
Keith
K
D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005133:Eye Movements; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D005584:Fovea Centralis; D006801:Humans; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014794:Visual Fields