The present experiment measured eye fixations in reading to determine whether word frequency affects the processing of the fixated word and the processing of the word to the right of the fixated word (the parafoveal word). In the experiment, subjects read sentences that contained either a critical high-or low-frequency target word. High-and low-frequency targets were matched on word length and a number of other variables. In one condition, parafoveal visual information to the right of the fixated word was denied or distorted; in other conditions, information about the parafoveal word to the right of the fixated word was available. The main results showed shorter fixations on high-frequency than on low-frequency target words. Furthermore, readers gained more effective previews from high-frequency parafoveal target words than from low-frequency parafoveal target words.There are two major ways in which parafoveal information can be used during eye fixations in reading. First, it can be used to help readers determine where to look next, and second, it can be used to aid word-recognition processes. A number of studies have indicated that parafoveally obtained information assists eye guidance; specifically, when parafoveal word length information is denied during a fixation in reading, reading is hindered (McConkie & Rayner, 1975;Rayner & Bertera, 1979;Rayner, Inhoff, Morrison, Slowiaczek, & Bertera, 1981). Some controversy exists, however, on the role of parafoveal information in word recognition. On some fixations, the word to the right of the fixated word is identified and skipped on the subsequent saccade (Ehrlich & Rayner, 1981; Rayner, Balota, & Pollatsek, in press). When word skipping occurs, the duration of the fixation that precedes skipping can be related to the characteristics of the skipped word (Hogaboam, 1983). Yet, for content words, word skipping occurs on a minority of saccades (Hogaboam, 1983;Just & Carpenter, 1980). How much useful information is obtained from a parafoveal word on the majority of fixations, when the parafoveal word is the target of the following fixation? Rayner, Well, Pollatsek, and Bertera (1982) and Lima and Inhoff (1985) found that less viewing time was necesThis research was supported by Grant IN 27f I-I of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to Albrecht Inhoff and by Grants HD 12727 and HD 17246 to Keith Rayner. We would like to thank Alexander Pollatsek, Charles Clifton, George McConkie, Susan Lima, and Ken Paap for their help on an earlier draft of the paper. Requests for reprints should be sent to Albrecht Inhoff, Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824. sary to process a word when the first three letters of a parafoveal word were available during each fixation than when such information was not available. Rayner et al. (1982) argued that the word's initial three-letter sequence is used during a fixation to speed the lexical processing of the parafoveal word during the following fixation of the word (see also Rayner, McConkie, & Zola, 1980)....
The purpose of the present study was to compare the oculomotor behavior of readers scanning meaningful and meaningless materials. Four conditions were used-a normal-text-reading control condition, and three experimental conditions in which the amount of linguistic processing was reduced, either by presenting the subjects with repeated letter strings or by asking the subjects to search for a target letter in texts or letter strings. The results show that global eye-movement characteristics (such as saccade size and fixation duration), as well as local characteristics (such as word-skipping rate, landing site, refixation probability, and refixation position), are very similar in the four conditions. The finding that the eyes are capable of generating an autonomous oculomotor scanning strategy in the absence of any linguistic information to process argues in favor of the idea that such predetermined oculomotor strategies might be an important determinant of eye movements in reading.During one century of research on eye movements in reading, several divergent theories have been proposed to account for the variability ofsaccade sizes and fixation durations classically observed when people read a text. From these theories, there have emerged two main hypotheses: an oculomotor hypothesis and a processing hypothesis.The oculomotor hypothesis was originally proposed at the beginning ofthe century by researchers who claimed that the main component of eye-movement guidance in reading is a preprogrammed oculomotor scanning strategy. According to this hypothesis, the eyes move forward in a rhythmic fashion by making saccades of constant length and fixations of constant duration; the known variability in saccade sizes and fixation durations results primarily from noise in the oculomotor system, and secondarily from gradual adjustments of the parameters of the rhythmic strategy to ongoing processing demands (Bouma
A window or visual mask as moved across text in synchrony with the reader's eye movements. The size of the window or mask was varied so that either information in foveal or parafoveal vision was masked on each fixation. In another experiment, the onset of the mask was delayed for a certain amount of time following the end of the saccade. The results of the experiments point out the relative importance of foveal and parafoveal vision for reading and further indicate that most of the visual information necessary for reading can be acquired during the first 50 msec that information is available during an eye fixation.
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