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…

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…

Recent research using word recognition paradigms, such as lexical decision and speeded pronunciation, has investigated how a range of variables affect the location and shape of response time distributions, using both parametric and non-parametric techniques. In this article, we explore the distributional effects of a word frequency manipulation on…

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…

There are numerous reports in the visual word recognition literature that the joint effects of various factors are additive on reaction time. A central claim by D. C. Plaut and J. R. Booth (2000, 2006) is that their parallel distributed processing model simulates additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency in the context of lexical…

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,…

Recent debates on lexical ambiguity resolution have centered on the subordinate-bias effect, in which reading time is longer on a biased ambiguous word in a subordinate-biasing context than on a control word. The nature of the control word--namely, whether it matched the frequency of the ambiguous word's overall word form or its contextually…

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…

What form is the lexical phonology that gives rise to phonological effects in visual lexical decision? The authors explored the hypothesis that beyond phonological contrasts the physical phonetic details of words are included. Three experiments using lexical decision and 1 using naming compared processing times for printed words (e.g., plead and…

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…

Rayner and Slowiaczek have a different conception of the issues our experiments address than we do. These differences are discussed. Our main point, is that the extent to which the preview produces a benefit depends on the subject's expectations. (Author/RD)