Eye Movements During Reading

Η μέτρηση της οπτικής οξύτητας, της ικανότητας δηλαδή ν' αναγνωρίζουμε γράμματα, σύμβολα ή αριθμούς (που ονομάζουμε οπτότυπα), αποτελεί αναπόσπαστο και σημαντικό κομμάτι κάθε οπτομετρικής και οφθαλμολογικής εξέτασης. Χρησιμοποιείται για τον έλεγχο της ακεραιότητας της όρασης, του καθορισμού των διαθλαστικών σφαλμάτων και της αξιολόγησης της παθο-φυσιολογίας του οφθαλμού, ενώ ταυτόχρονα αποτελεί απαραίτητο κριτήριο για τον καθορισμό της οπτικής «ετοιμότητας» στην οδήγηση 1 και στην πλοήγηση αεροσκαφών 2 .

Praca doktorska napisana pod kierunkiem prof. dra hab. Adama Kulawika Kraków 201 5 W swoich pracach z rosnącym naciskiem dowodzę lub staram się do wieść, że wszelka postawa, jaką krytyk, uczony czy nauczyciel może zająć wobec wiersza, nieuchronnie i z konieczności sama musi mieć charakter poetycki.

Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to previous and next words. Results are based on fixation durations recorded from 222 persons, each reading 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes.

This paper argues for an arabesque vision as a way to perceive postmodern and contemporary dance in particular, as such I investigate newer theories of ornament (Jean-Claude Bonne) which conceptualize the ornamental as a modus operandi beyond ἐπίθετον and πάρεργον and with particular reference to a theory of the arabesque beyond orientalism. The arabesque unfolding and branching of an ornamental dance lineament thus demands a unique perception and gaze from the viewer who actively constructs a vision that continues and crosses the écriture corporelle of the dancers in a likewise arabesque way.

Brain-electric correlates of reading have traditionally been studied with word-by-word presentation, a condition that eliminates important aspects of the normal reading process and precludes direct comparisons between neural activity and oculomotor behavior. In the present study, we investigated effects of word predictability on eye movements (EM) and fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs) during natural sentence reading. Electroencephalogram (EEG) and EM (via video-based eye track- ing) were recorded simultaneously while subjects read heterogeneous German sentences, moving their eyes freely over the text. FRPs were time-locked to first-pass reading fixations and analyzed according to the cloze probability of the currently fixated word. We replicated robust effects of word predictability on EMs and the N400 component in FRPs. The data were then used to model the relation among fixation duration, gaze duration, and N400 amplitude, and to trace the time course of EEG effects relative to effects in EM behavior. In an extended Methodological Discussion section, we review 4 technical and data-analytical problems that need to be addressed when FRPs are recorded in free-viewing situations (such as reading, visual search, or scene perception) and propose solutions. Results suggest that EEG recordings during normal vision are feasible and useful to consolidate findings from EEG and eye-tracking studies.

Eye movement is key to helping us understand how the brain creates meaning with print.  As you read this page your eyes do not move from left to right, letter-to-letter, word-to-word in a straight, steady line. Your brain simply gives the impression that they do. Eye movement research shows that your eyes move unevenly across the page, going back occasionally, skipping some words, and fixating on others.

Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated, and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension.

Asymmetrical control areas in a continuous visual search were examined in two experiments.Two mechanisms for target detection were identified – one operating in the centre of the visual field engaged with processes requiring a high level of reso¬lution; the other operating in the periphery, performing detection processes requiring a low level of resolution. A functional model is outlined that interprets the findings in terms of hemispheric mechanisms.

Evidence for semantic preview benefit (PB) from parafoveal words has been elusive for reading alphabetic scripts such as English. Here we report semantic PB for noncompound characters in Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm. In addition, PBs for orthographic relatedness and, as a numeric trend, for phono- logical relatedness were obtained. Results are in agreement with other research suggesting that the Chinese writing system is based on a closer association between graphic form and meaning than is alphabetic script. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.

Why does English have spaces between words but not Chinese or Japanese? What did we invent punctuations? I argue in this paper that spaces and punctuations were created -- at least in part -- to guide eye movements. I call them paraorthographics.

Semantic processing from parafoveal words is an elusive phenomenon in alphabetic languages, but it has been demonstrated only for a restricted set of noncompound Chinese characters. Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, this experiment examined whether parafoveal lexical and sublexical semantic information was extracted from compound preview characters. Results generalized parafoveal semantic processing to this representative set of Chinese characters and extended the parafoveal processing to radical (sublexical) level semantic information extraction. Implications for notions of parafoveal information extraction during Chinese reading are discussed.

Research on eye movements in reading has made significant advances during the past few years, due to both experimental and computational research. Age effects have not been extensively studied, but the overall pattern suggests more quantitative than qualitative differences in fixation durations and fixation probabilities. Here we focus on age-differential effects of word frequency on reading time and on probabilities of skipping a word or regressing to previous ones. We present an overview of SWIFT [Engbert, R., Nuthmann, A., Richter, E.M., Kliegl, R., 2005. SWIFT: a dynamical model of saccade generation during reading. Psychological Review 112, 777–813], a fully implemented computational model of saccade generation and lexical processing during reading, based on spatially distributed processing over several words. Preliminary simulations of age differences recovered most, but not all experimental effects. Age differences in parameter estimates point towards an important role of visual acuity for oculomotor as well as lexical processing.

Tested the effects of word length, frequency, and predictability on inspection durations (first fixation, single fixation, gaze duration, and reading time) and inspection probabilities during first-pass reading (skipped, once, twice) for a corpus of 144 German sentences (1138 words) and a subset of 144 target words uncorrelated in length and frequency, read by 33 young and 32 older adults. For corpus words, length and frequency were reliably related to inspection durations and probabilities, predictability only to inspection probabilities. For first-pass reading of target words all three effects were reliable for inspection durations and probabilities. Low predictability was strongly related to second-pass reading. Older adults read slower than young adults and had a higher frequency of regressive movements. The data are to serve as a benchmark for computational models of eye movement control in reading.

Humans typically make use of both eyes during reading, which necessitates precise binocular coordination in order to achieve a unified perceptual representation of written text. A number of studies have explored the magnitude and effects of naturally occurring and induced horizontal fixation disparity during reading and non-reading tasks. However, the literature concerning the processing of disparities in different dimensions, particularly in the context of reading, is considerably limited. We therefore investigated vertical vergence in response to stereoscopically presented linguistic stimuli with varying levels of vertical offset. A lexical decision task was used to explore the ability of participants to fuse binocular image disparity in the vertical direction during word identification. Additionally, a lexical frequency manipulation explored the potential interplay between visual fusion processes and linguistic processes. Results indicated that no significant motor fusional responses were made in the vertical dimension (all p-values > .11), though that did not hinder successful lexical identification. In contrast, horizontal vergence movements were consistently observed on all fixations in the absence of a horizontal disparity manipulation. These findings add to the growing understanding of binocularity and its role in written language processing, and fit neatly with previous literature regarding binocular coordination in non-reading tasks.

Reading is often cited as a demanding task for patients with glaucomatous visual field (VF) loss, yet reading speed varies widely between patients and does not appear to be predicted by standard visual function measures. This within-person study aimed to investigate reading duration and eye movements when reading short passages of text in a patient's worse eye (most VF damage) when compared to their better eye (least VF damage). Reading duration and saccade rate were significantly different on average in the worse eye when compared to the better eye ( < 0.001) in 14 patients with glaucoma that had median (interquartile range) between-eye difference in mean deviation (MD; a standard clinical measure for VF loss) of 9.8 (8.3 to 14.8) dB; differences were not related to the size of the difference in MD between eyes. Patients with a more pronounced effect of longer reading duration on their worse eye made a larger proportion of "regressions" (backward saccades) and "unknown" EMs (not adhering to expected reading patterns) when reading with the worse eye when compared to the better eye. A between-eye study in patients with asymmetric disease, coupled with eye tracking, provides a useful experimental design for exploring reading performance in glaucoma.

SWIFT is a computational model of eye guidance in reading. It assumes (1) spatially distributed lexical processing, (2) a separation of saccade timing from saccade target selection, and (3) autonomous and parallel generation of saccades with inhibition by foveal targets. The model accounts for fixation probabilities as well as various measures of inspection time in their relation to lexical processing difficulty. We illustrate the dynamics associated with saccade generation and inhibition by foveal targets. In addition, we generate predictions for an experiment involving gaze-contingent display change.

Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N ϩ 2) and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N ϩ 2-word preview with low-and high-frequency words N ϩ 1. The main findings were (a) an identity PB for word N ϩ 2 that was (b) primarily observed when word N ϩ 1 was of high frequency (i.e., an interaction between frequency of word N ϩ 1 and PB for word N ϩ 2), and (c) a parafoveal-on-foveal frequency effect of word N ϩ 1 for fixation durations on word N. We discuss implications for theories of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.

We present a replication of Levy, Bicknell, Slattery, and Rayner (2009). In this prior study participants read sentences in which a perceptually confusable preposition (at; confusable with as) or non-confusable preposition (toward) was followed by a verb more likely to appear in the syntactic structure formed by replacing at with as (e. g. tossed) or a verb that was not more likely to appear in this structure (e.g. thrown). Readers experienced processing difficulty upon fixating verbs like tossed following at, but not toward. Levy et al. argued that this suggests readers maintained uncertainty about previously fixated words' identities. We argue that this finding has wideranging implications for language processing theories, and that a replication is required. On the basis of a Bayes Factor Design Analysis we conducted a replication study with 56 items and 72 participants in order to determine whether Levy et al.'s effects are replicable. Using Bayesian statistical techniques we show that in our dataset there is evidence against the existence of the interaction Levy et al. found, and thus conclude that this study is non-replicable.

As Chinese is written without orthographical word boundaries (i.e., spaces), it is unclear whether saccade targets are selected on the basis of characters or words and whether saccades are aimed at the beginning or the centre of words. Here, we report an experiment where 30 Chinese readers read 150 sentences while their eye movements were monitored. They exhibited a strong tendency to fixate at the word centre in single-fixation cases and at the word beginning in multiple-fixation cases. Different from spaced alphabetic script, initial fixations falling at the end of words were no more likely to be followed by a refixation than initial fixations at word centre. Further, single fixations were shorter than first fixations in two-fixation cases, which is opposite to what is found in Roman script. We propose that Chinese readers dynamically select the beginning or centre of words as saccade targets depending on failure or success with segmentation of parafoveal word boundaries.

The inclusion of information that is interesting, but irrelevant to the lesson, has been found to distract learners and diminish comprehension in a phenomenon referred to as the seductive details effect (Lehman, Schraw, McCrudden, & Hartley, 2007). Math textbooks often contain images, either decorative (i.e., for aesthetic purposes only) or contextual (i.e., related to the background of the lesson) that are irrelevant to the mathematical concepts being taught.
There is empirical evidence that decorative images have a negative influence on learning (Levin, Anglin, & Carney, 1987), likely because of the seductive details effect. In contrast, contextual images have been shown to help with aspects of reading comprehension for some populations (cf. Pike, Barnes, & Barron, 2010), although the effects of contextual images on learning from math lessons have not been explored. It is unknown whether contextual images would distract from mathematics learning or if they would benefit mathematics learning through assistance with reading comprehension. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of contextual and decorative images on learning from a mathematics lesson. Eye-tracking methodology was used to determine if the inclusion of these images, which are mathematically irrelevant, caused diminished visual attention to the lesson text and graphs, which are mathematically relevant.
Forty-one undergraduate students participated by reading four mathematics lessons on functions. The data indicated that there was little visual attention to either decorative or contextual images. Including decorative or contextual images did not influence visual attention towards math relevant information in the lesson (i.e., the graph and lesson text). Therefore, it can be inferred that the students tended to ignore the images in the lessons. There were no differences in written recalls of lessons or answers to questions across image conditions. Compared to the lesson text, little visual attention was directed towards the graphs, which were mathematically relevant visual representations. This is unfortunate because graphs can assist in mathematics learning (Shah, Mayer, & Hegarty, 1999). An important direction for future research may be to develop methods to direct learner attention towards graphs.

Four eye movement experiments investigated whether readers use parafoveal input to gain information about the phonological or orthographic forms of consonants, vowels, and tones in word recognition when reading Thai silently. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which consonant, vowel, or tone information was manipulated. Previews of homophonous consonants (Experiment 1) and concordant vowels (Experiment 2) did not substantially facilitate processing of the target word, whereas the identical previews did. Hence, orthography appears to be playing the prominent role in early word recognition for consonants and vowels. Incorrect tone marker previews (Experiment 3) substantially retarded the subsequent processing of the target word, indicating that lexical tone plays an important role in early word recognition. Vowels in VOP (Experiment 4) did not facilitate processing, which points to vowel position being a significant factor. Primarily, orthographic codes of consonants and vowels (HOP) in conjunction with tone information are assembled from parafoveal input and used for early lexical access.

Proposes a method based on the symbolic sequence dynamics of eye movements to reconstruct the horizontal position of the eyes while a reader blinks during reading. In eye movement research in reading, the amount of data plays a crucial role for the validation of results; however, eye blinks (when readers close their eyes) are a methodological problem for the analysis of the eye movement. Blinking rate increases with increasing reading time, resulting in high data loss, especially for older adults or reading impaired subjects. This new method makes use of an observed fact that the movements of the eyes before closing or after opening contain information about the eyes movements during blinks. Test results from the data of 4 younger (mean age 18.5 years) and 3 older (mean age 72.3 years) participants indicate that this reconstruction method is superior to methods that use simpler interpolation approaches. In addition, analyses of the reconstructed data show no significant deviation from the usual behavior observed in readers.

The development of theories and computational models of reading requires an understanding of processing constraints, in particular of timelines related to word recognition and oculomotor control. Timelines of word recognition are usually determined with event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded under conditions of serial visual presentation (SVP) of words; timelines of oculomotor control are derived from parameters of eye movements (EMs) during natural reading. We describe two strategies to integrate these approaches. One is to collect ERPs and EMs in separate SVP and natural reading experiments for the same experimental material (but different subjects). The other strategy is to co-register EMs and ERPs during natural reading from the same subjects. Both strategies yield data that allow us to determine how lexical properties influence ERPs (e.g., the N400 component) and EMs (e.g., fixation durations) across neighboring words. We review our recent research on the effects of frequency and predictability of words on both EM and ERP measures with reference to current models of eye-movement control during reading. Results are in support of the proposition that lexical access is distributed across several fixations and across brain- electric potentials measured on neighboring words.

As Chinese is written without orthographical word boundaries (i.e., spaces), it is unclear whether saccade targets are selected on the basis of characters or words and whether saccades are aimed at the beginning or the center of words. Here, we report an experiment where 30 Chinese readers read 150 sentences while their eye movements were monitored. They exhibited a strong tendency to fixate at the word center in single-fixation cases and at the word beginning in multiple-fixation cases. Different from spaced alphabetic script, initial fixations falling at the end of words were no more likely to be followed by a refixation than initial fixations at word center. Further, single fixations were shorter than first fixations in two-fixation cases, which is opposite to what is found in Roman script. We propose that Chinese readers dynamically select the beginning or center of words as saccade targets depending on failure or success with segmentation of parafoveal word boundaries.

Fixation-related potentials (FRPs), neural responses aligned to the end of saccades, are a promising tool for studying the dynamics of attention and cognition under natural viewing conditions. In the past, four methodological problems have complicated the analysis of such combined eye-tracking/electroencephalogram experiments: (1) the synchronization of data streams, (2) the removal of ocular artifacts, (3) the condition-specific temporal overlap between the brain responses evoked by consecutive fixations, and (4) the fact that numerous low-level stimulus and saccade properties also influence the postsaccadic neural responses. Although effective solutions exist for the first two problems, the latter two are only beginning to be addressed. In the current paper, we present and review a unified regression-based framework for FRP analysis that allows us to deconvolve overlapping potentials while also controlling for both linear and nonlinear confounds on the FRP waveform. An open software implementation is provided for all procedures. We then demonstrate the advantages of this proposed (non)linear deconvolution modeling approach for data from three commonly studied paradigms: face perception, scene viewing, and reading. First, for a traditional event-related potential (ERP) face recognition experiment, we show how this technique can separate stimulus ERPs from overlapping muscle and brain potentials produced by small (micro)saccades on the face. Second, in natural scene viewing, we model and isolate multiple nonlinear effects of saccade parameters on the FRP. Finally, for a natural sentence reading experiment using the boundary paradigm, we show how it is possible to study the neural correlates of parafoveal preview after removing spurious overlap effects caused by the associated difference in average fixation time. Our results suggest a principal way of measuring reliable eye movement-related brain activity during natural vision.

The perceptual span, which is the visual area providing useful information to a reader during eye fixation, has been well investigated among native or first language (L1) readers, but not among second language (L2) readers. Our goal was to investigate the size of the perceptual span among Japanese university students who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) to investigate parafoveal processing during L2 reading. In an experiment using the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm, we compared perceptual span between Japanese EFL readers (N = 42) and native English L1 readers (N = 14). Our results showed that (1) the EFL readers had a smaller perceptual span than the L1 readers did, and (2) the facilitating effect of parafoveal information was greater for faster EFL readers than it was for slower EFL readers. These findings provide evidence that EFL readers can only utilize little parafoveal information during fixation when compared with L1 readers.

A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and Sartre) he draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework.

Keywords: imagination; mental imagery; mental image; perception; eye movements; active vision; enactive perception; seeing as; dreams; hallucination

To examine how readers of Chinese and English take advantage of orthographic and
phonological features in reading, the authors investigated the effects of spelling errors on
reading text in Chinese and English using the error disruption paradigm of M. Daneman and
E. Reingold (1993) . Skilled readers in China and the United States read passages in their
native language that contained occasional spelling errors. Results showed that under some
circumstances very early phonological activation can be identified in English, but no
evidence for early phonology was found in Chinese. In both languages, homophone errors
showed a benefit in measures of later processing, suggesting that phonology helps readers
recover from the disruptive effects of errors. These results suggest that skilled readers take
advantage of the special features of particular orthographies but that these orthographic
effects may be most pronounced in the early stages of lexical access.

As children become proficient readers, there are substantial changes in the eye movements that subserve reading. Some of these changes reflect universal developmental factors while others may be specific to a particular writing system. This study attempts to disentangle effects of universal and script-dependent factors by comparing the development of eye movements of English and Chinese speakers. Third-grade (English: mean age = 9.1 years, n = 23; Chinese: mean age = 9.4 years, n = 25), fifth-grade (English: mean age = 11.2 years, n = 30; Chinese: mean age = 11.4, n = 25), and undergraduate students (English: n = 26; Chinese: n = 30) read stories in their native language while their eye movements were recorded. Results show a mixture of orthography- dependent factors with others that are remarkably parallel across these two very different writing systems. Orthographic effects are also more pronounced for children than for skilled adult readers. Implications for theories of reading eye movements and reading development are discussed.

Investigated parafoveal processing of words to the right of fixation. 32 college students read sentences in which 3 critical words were found (n, n+1, n+2). Using the boundary paradigm together with a novel preview manipulation, words n+1 and n+2 had either correct or incorrect previews prior to fixation and n+1 was either a high- or low-frequency word. During reading, eye movements and fixation times were recorded. Clear evidence of an n+1 preview benefit was found in addition to an effect of n+1 frequency on n+1 fixation times replicating previously found standard preview benefits and frequency effects. However, no evidence of an n+2 preview benefit effect or a parafoveal-on-foveal effect for n+1words with at least 4 letters was found. In closing, implications of the findings for computational models of eye-movement control in reading are discussed.

Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N+2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N+2 or word N+2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N+1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N+2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N+2 preview both for young and for old adults with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N+1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults.

Semantic processing from parafoveal words is an elusive phenomenon in alphabetic languages, but it has been demonstrated only for a restricted set of non-compound Chinese characters. Using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm, this experiment examined whether parafoveal lexical and sub-lexical semantic information was extracted from compound preview characters. Results generalized parafoveal semantic processing to this representative set of Chinese characters and extended the parafoveal processing to radical (sub-lexical) level semantic information extraction.

MoviMenti oculari saccadici volontari controllati e autoMatici: la loro iMportanza nella lettura per dislessici e norMolettori This article underlines how the development of automatic and controlled voluntary saccadic eye movements is important for reading, both in normal readers and in subjects with specific learning disabilities (SLD). By describing current knowledge as regards the saccadic neural network and the eye-head coordination and by showing results referring to the application of the anti-saccade para-digm to dyslexic subjects and normal readers, we get to: 1) identify in the development of the ex-plicitly voluntary controlled element of attention an important factor for the acquisition of reading abilities; 2) underline the voluntary-reflex axis as a new reference dyad to handle the optometric patient with visual-spatial and/or oculomotor attention problems. ABSTRACT di Mario Lecce, optometrista FCOVD

Previous research supports the view that initial letter position has a privileged role in comparison to internal letters for visual-word recognition in Roman script. The current study examines if this is the case for Thai. Thai is an alphabetic script in which ordering of the letters does not necessarily correspond to the ordering of a word's phonemes. Furthermore, Thai does not normally have interword spaces. We examined whether the position of transposed letters (internal [e.g. porblem] vs. initial [e.g. rpoblem]) within a word influences how readily those words are processed when interword spacing and demarcation of word boundaries (using alternatingbold text) is manipulated. The eye movements of fifty-four participants were recorded while reading sentences silently. There was no apparent difference in degree of disruption caused when reading initial and internal transposed-letter nonwords.

Eye-movement control during reading depends on foveal and parafoveal information. If the parafoveal preview of the next word is suppressed, reading is less efficient. A linear mixed model (LMM) reanalysis of McDonald (2006) confirmed his observation that preview benefit may be limited to parafoveal words that have been selected as the saccade target. Going beyond the original analyses, in the same LMM, we examined how the preview effect (i.e., the difference in single-fixation duration, SFD, between random-letter and identical preview) depends on the gaze duration on the pretarget word and on the amplitude of the saccade moving the eye onto the target word. There were two key results: (a) The shorter the saccade amplitude (i.e., the larger preview space), the shorter a subsequent SFD with an identical preview; this association was not observed with a random-letter preview. (b) However, the longer the gaze duration on the pretarget word, the longer the subsequent SFD on the target, with the difference between random-letter string and identical previews increasing with preview time. A third pattern—increasing cost of a random-letter string in the parafovea associated with shorter saccade amplitudes—was observed for target gaze durations. Thus, LMMs revealed that preview effects, which are typically summarized under “preview benefit”, are a complex mixture of preview cost and preview benefit and vary with preview space and preview time. The consequence for reading is that parafoveal preview may not only facilitate, but also interfere with lexical access.

During reading information is acquired from word(s) beyond the word that is currently looked at. It is still an open question whether such parafoveal information can influence the current viewing of a word, and if so, whether such parafoveal-on-foveal effects are attributable to distributed processing or to mislocated fixations which occur when the eyes are directed at a parafoveal word but land on another word instead. In two display-change experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the preview and target difficulty of word n+2 to investigate the role of mislocated fixations on the previous word n+1. When the eyes left word n, an easy or difficult word n+2 preview was replaced by an easy or difficult n+2 target word. In Experiment 1, n+2 processing difficulty was manipulated by means of word frequency (i.e., easy high-frequency vs. difficult low-frequency word n+2). In Experiment 2, we varied the visual familiarity of word n+2 (i.e., easy lower-case vs. difficult alternating-case writing). Fixations on the short word n+1, which were likely to be mislocated, were nevertheless not influenced by the difficulty of the adjacent word n+2, the hypothesized target of the mislocated fixation. Instead word n+1 was influenced by the preview difficulty of word n+2, representing a delayed parafoveal-on-foveal effect. The results challenge the mislocated-fixation hypothesis as an explanation of parafoveal-on-foveal effects and provide new insight into the complex spatial and temporal effect structure of processing inside the perceptual span during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

During natural reading, a parafoveal preview of the upcoming word facilitates its subsequent recognition (e.g., shorter fixation durations compared to masked preview) but nothing is known about the neural correlates of this so-called preview benefit. Furthermore, while the evidence is strong that readers preprocess orthographic features of upcoming words, it is controversial whether word meaning can also be accessed parafoveally. We investigated the timing, scope, and electrophysiological correlates of parafoveal information use in reading by simultaneously recording eye movements and fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs) while participants read word lists fluently from left to right. For one word – the target – (e.g.,“blade”) parafoveal information was manipulated by showing an identical (“blade”), semantically related (“knife”), or unrelated (“sugar”) word as preview. In boundary trials, the preview was shown parafoveally but changed to the correct target word during the incoming saccade. Replicating classic findings, target words were fixated shorter after identical previews. In the EEG, this benefit was reflected in an occipitotemporal preview positivity between 200-280 ms. In contrast, there was no facilitation from related previews. In parafoveal-on-foveal trials, preview and target were embedded at neighboring list positions without a display change. Consecutive fixation of two related words produced N400 priming effects, but only shortly (160 ms) after the second word was directly fixated. Results demonstrate that neural responses to words are substantially altered by parafoveal
preprocessing under normal reading conditions. We found no evidence that word meaning contributes to these effects. Saccade-contingent display manipulations can be combined with EEG recordings to study extrafoveal perception in vision.

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.

Semantic preview benefit from parafoveal words is critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. Semantic preview benefit has been demonstrated for Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm in which unrelated or semantically related previews of a target word N + 1 are replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N (Yan et al., 2009); for the target word in position N + 2, only identical compared to unrelated-word preview led to shorter fixation times on the target word (Yan et al., in press). A reanalysis of these data reveals that identical and semantic preview benefits depend on preview duration (i.e., the fixation duration on the preboundary word). Identical preview benefit from word N + 1 increased with preview duration. The identical preview benefit was also significant for N + 2, but did not significantly interact with preview duration. The previously reported semantic preview benefit from word N + 1 was mainly due to single- or first-fixation durations following short previews. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.

The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers’ eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram frequency and bigram frequency (transitional probability), word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the socalled “early” and “late” measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold.

Eye movements in reading are sensitive to foveal and parafoveal word features. Whereas the influence of orthographic or phonological parafoveal information on gaze control is undisputed, there has been no reliable evidence for early parafoveal extraction of semantic information in alphabetic script. Using a novel combination of the gaze-contingent fast-priming and boundary paradigms, we demonstrate seman- tic preview benefit when a semantically related parafoveal word was available during the initial 125 ms of a fixation on the pretarget word (Experiments 1 and 2). When the target location was made more salient, significant parafoveal semantic priming occurred only at 80 ms (Experiment 3). Finally, with short primes only (20, 40, 60 ms), effects were not significant but were numerically in the expected direction for 40 and 60 ms (Experiment 4). In all experiments, fixation durations on the target word increased with prime durations under all conditions. The evidence for extraction of semantic information from the parafoveal word favors an explanation in terms of parallel word processing in reading.

1. During reading information is acquired from word (s) beyond the word that is currently looked at. It is still an open question whether such parafoveal information can influence the current viewing of a word, and if so, whether such parafoveal-on-foveal effects are attributable to distributed processing or to mislocated fixations which occur when the eyes are directed at a parafoveal word but land on another word instead. In two display-change experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the preview and target difficulty of ...