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…

In most current models of word recognition, the word recognition process is assumed to be driven by the activation of letter units (i.e., that letters are the perceptual units in reading). An alternative possibility is that the word recognition process is driven by the activation of grapheme units, that is, that graphemes, rather than letters, are…

A recent cross-cultural comparison (Shaki, Fischer, & Petrusic, 2009) suggested that spatially consistent processing habits for words and numbers are a necessary condition for the spatial representation of numbers (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes; SNARC effect). Here we reexamine the SNARC in Israelis who read text from right…

Two experiments examined parafoveal preview for words located in the middle of sentences and at sentence boundaries. Parafoveal processing was shown to occur for words at sentence-initial, mid-sentence, and sentence-final positions. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed reduced effects of preview on regressions out for sentence-initial words. In…

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…

This article reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2,500 polymorphemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision while readers' eye movements were registered. The authors found evidence that both full forms of compounds ("dishwasher") and their constituent morphemes (e.g., "dish," "washer," "er") and morphological…

Over the last decade, there has been increasing evidence for syllabic processing during visual word recognition. If syllabic effects prove to be independent from orthographic redundancy, this would seriously challenge the ability of current computational models to account for the processing of polysyllabic words. Three experiments are presented to…

Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The…

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words…

This article presents data and theory concerning the fundamental question of how the brain achieves a balance between integrating and separating perceptual information over time. This theory was tested in the domain of word reading by examining brain responses to briefly presented words that were either new or immediate repetitions. Critically,…

Sequential attention shift models of reading predict that an attended (typically fixated) word must be recognized before useful linguistic information can be obtained from the following (parafoveal) word. These models also predict that linguistic information is obtained from a parafoveal word immediately prior to a saccade toward it. To test these…

Dividing attention across multiple words occasionally results in misidentifications whereby letters apparently migrate between words. Previous studies have found that letter migrations preserve within-word letter position, which has been interpreted as support for position-specific letter coding. To investigate this issue, the authors used word…

In three experiments, subjects read passages and circled misspelling in them. Results support the unitization hypothesis that common words are normally read in units larger than letters but are read in letter units when misspelled. (Author/CP)

The authors examined word skipping in reading in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, skipping rates were higher for a preview of a predictable word than for a visually similar nonword, indicating there is full recognition in parafoveal vision. In Experiment 2, foveal load was manipulated by varying the frequency of the word preceding either a 3-letter…

The functions of spaces between words in adult reading of text were investigated in three experiments. Results were consistent with a two-process theory in which filling parafoveal spaces disrupts guidance of the next eye movement and filling foveal spaces disrupts processing of the fixated word as well. (Author/RD)