Reading strategy modulates parafoveal-on-foveal effects in sentence reading.
Task demands and individual differences have been linked reliably to word skipping during reading. Such differences in fixation probability may imply a selection effect for multivariate analyses of eye-movement corpora if selection effects correlate with word properties of skipped words. For example, with fewer fixations on short and highly frequent words the power to detect parafoveal-on-foveal effects is reduced. We demonstrate that increasing the fixation probability on function words with a manipulation of the expected difficulty and frequency of questions reduces an age difference in skipping probability (i.e., old adults become comparable to young adults) and helps to uncover significant parafoveal-on-foveal effects in this group of old adults. We discuss implications for the comparison of results of eye-movement research based on multivariate analysis of corpus data with those from display-contingent manipulations of target words.
Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
Christiane
C
Wotschack
Reinhold
R
Kliegl
D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005584:Fovea Centralis / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult