Exterior letters are not privileged in the early stage of visual word recognition during reading: Comment on Jordan, Thomas, Patching and Scott-Brown (2003).

Inhoff, Albrecht W.; Radach, Ralph; Eiter, Brianna M.; Skelly, Michael A.

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.29.5.894

Cited by 14 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Thus, this hypothesis relies on the importance of the beginning letters in word identification. There is, however, currently some debate in the literature over whether it is beginning letters (see Briihl & Inhoff, 1995; Inhoff, Radach, Eiter, & Skelly, 2003) or exterior letter pairs (Jordan, Thomas, Patching, & Scott-Brown, 2003; Jordan, Thomas, & Patching, 2003; see also White et al, in press) that are most important for word recognition. Previous studies have suggested that insertion of spaces increases perceptibility of letters for foveally presented letter strings in certain tasks (Campbell & Mewhort, 1980; Estes & Wolford, 1971; Mewhort, Marchetti, & Campbell, 1982; Shaw, 1969; Wolford & Holingshead, 1974).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movements and the use of parafoveal word length information in reading.

Juhasz

White

Liversedge

et al. 2008

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Eye movements were monitored in 4 experiments that explored the role of parafoveal word length in reading. The experiments employed a type of compound word where the deletion of a letter results in 2 short words (e.g., backhand, back and). The boundary technique (K. Rayner, 1975) was employed to manipulate word length information in the parafovea. Accuracy of the parafoveal word length preview significantly affected landing positions and fixation durations. This disruption was larger for 2-word targets, but the results demonstrated that this interaction was not due to the morphological status of the target words. Manipulation of sentence context also demonstrated that parafoveal word length information can be used in combination with sentence context to narrow down lexical candidates. The 4 experiments converge in demonstrating that an important role of parafoveal word length information is to direct the eyes to the center of the parafoveal word. Keywords eye movements; reading; parafoveal length informationIn modern alphabetic writing systems, blank spaces segment strings of letters into meaningful units (words) that contribute to the efficiency of reading. When spaces are deleted or masked, reading is significantly slowed (Epelboim, Booth, & Steinman, 1994;Fisher, 1976;Malt & Seamon, 1978;McConkie & Rayner, 1975;Morris, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1990;Rayner, Fischer, & Pollatsek, 1998;Spragins, Lefton, & Fisher, 1976). There are three reasons why interword spaces facilitate reading. First, blank spaces reduce lateral masking of the beginning and ending letters of words (Bouma, 1973) making them easier to see. Second, interword spaces specify the length of upcoming words and provide effective targets for eye movements (Rayner, 1979). Third, word length may be used to constrain the number of possible word candidates. The present article explores the relative importance of these different factors.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Barbara J. Juhasz, Department of Psychology, 207 High Street, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06424. E-mail: bjuhasz@wesleyan.edu. There are, of course, writing systems, such as Chinese and Thai, which do not contain interword spacing in which readers still read effectively. However, research on Thai (Kohsom & Gobet, 1997) indicated that inserting spaces between words actually increases the reading rate in that language, and research on Chinese (Bai, Yan, Liversedge, Zang, & Rayner, in press) indicated that inserting spaces between characters interfered with reading, whereas inserting spaces between words did not (see also Sainio, Hyönä, Bingushi, & Bertram, 2007, for research on spacing in Japanese). Also, work with German three-lexeme compound words has shown that inserting spaces between the lexemes actually reduces overall reading time on the compounds (Inhoff, Radach, & Heller, 2000), even though it is orthographically illegal to do so. NIH Public AccessTo better understand why interword spaces are beneficial to reading, it is important to consider...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movements and the use of parafoveal word length information in reading.

Juhasz

White

Liversedge

et al. 2008

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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“…For example, fixations land further into words with regular as compared with irregular beginnings (Hyönä, 1995; Radach, Inhoff, & Heller, 2004). Different spatial formats of the identical compound word lead to different saccade targeting strategies, each of which is designed to land near the centers of spatially distinct letter groupings (Inhoff, Radach, Eiter, & Skelly, 2003).…”

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confidence: 99%

CarPrice versus CarpRice: Word boundary ambiguity influences saccade target selection during the reading of Chinese sentences.

Yan¹,

Kliegl²

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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As a contribution to a theoretical debate about the degree of high-level influences on saccade targeting during sentence reading, we investigated eye movements during the reading of structurally ambiguous Chinese character strings and examined whether parafoveal word segmentation could influence saccade-target selection. As expected, ambiguous strings took longer to process. More critically there were theoretically relevant interactions between ambiguity and launch site when first-fixation location and saccade amplitude served as dependent variables: Ambiguous strings in the parafovea triggered longer saccades and more rightward fixations for close launch sites than unambiguous ones; the reverse result was obtained for far launch sites. These crossover interactions indicate that parafoveal word segmentation influences saccade generation in Chinese and provide support of the hypothesis that high-level information can be involved in the decision about where to fixate next. (PsycINFO Database Record

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“…Based on these and similar findings Schotter et al (2012, p. 14) concluded in their recent review on parafoveal processing that “having the first two or three letters preserved in the preview facilitates processing of the target word” (see also Rayner, Well, Pollatsek, & Bertera, 1982). The Briihl and Inhoff study triggered an interesting debate with Jordan and colleagues, who found evidence for a particular role of the exterior letters (i.e., the initial and the final letters) for word recognition (Inhoff, Radach, Eiter, & Skelly, 2003; Jordan, Thomas, & Patching, 2003; Jordan, Thomas, Patching, & Scott-Brown, 2003). An issue of the dispute was the application of parafoveal masks—essentially that one should not apply parafoveal masks without explicitly ensuring that the masks do not lead to uncalled-for side effects (Jordan, Thomas, et al, 2003).…”

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confidence: 99%

Parafoveal preprocessing in reading revisited: Evidence from a novel preview manipulation.

Gagl¹,

Hawelka²,

Richlan³

et al. 2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The study investigated parafoveal preprocessing by the means of the classical invisible boundary paradigm and a novel manipulation of the parafoveal previews (i.e., visual degradation). Eye movements were investigated on 5-letter target words with constraining (i.e., highly informative) initial letters or similarly constraining final letters. Visual degradation was administered to all, no, the initial, or the final 2 letters of the parafoveal preview of the target words. Critically, the manipulation of the parafoveal previews did not interfere with foveal processing. Thus, we had a proper baseline to which we could relate our main findings, which were as follows: First, the valid (i.e., nondegraded) preview of the target words’ final letters led to shorter fixation times compared to the baseline condition (i.e., the degradation of all letters). Second, this preview benefit for the final letters was comparable to the benefit of previewing the initial letters. Third, the preview of a constraining initial letter sequence, however, yielded a larger preview benefit than the preview of an unconstraining initial letter sequence. The latter finding indicates that preprocessing constraining initial letters is particularly conducive to foveal word recognition.

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Exterior letters are not privileged in the early stage of visual word recognition during reading: Comment on Jordan, Thomas, Patching and Scott-Brown (2003).

Cited by 14 publications

References 26 publications

Eye movements and the use of parafoveal word length information in reading.

Eye movements and the use of parafoveal word length information in reading.

CarPrice versus CarpRice: Word boundary ambiguity influences saccade target selection during the reading of Chinese sentences.

Parafoveal preprocessing in reading revisited: Evidence from a novel preview manipulation.

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