Skipping Syntactically Illegal "The" Previews-The Role of Predictability

Abstract

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates the-skipping behavior. The results provide further evidence that readers frequently skip the article the when infelicitous in context. Readers skipped predictable words more often than unpredictable words, even when the, which was syntactically illegal and unpredictable from the prior context, was presented as a parafoveal preview. The results of the experiment were simulated using E-Z Reader 10 by assuming that cloze probability can be dissociated from parafoveal visual input. It appears that when a short word is predictable in context, a decision to skip it can be made even if the information available parafoveally conflicts both visually and syntactically with those predictions.

What is the most plausible account of the role of parafoveal processing in reading?

“…Skipping effects imply that plausibility impacts the earliest stages of lexical processing. However, these findings appear to contradict previous evidence showing that high‐frequency words are skipped more than low‐frequency words, even when they are contextually unacceptable in the context (Abbott, Angele, Ahn, & Rayner, ; Abbott & Staub, ; Angele, Laishley, Rayner, & Liversedge, ; Angele & Rayner, ). Further research is therefore required to determine whether, and under what conditions, parafoveal plausibility can affect skipping.…”

Is semantic preview benefit due to relatedness or plausibility?

“…Essentially, the reading system makes a "hedged bet" (Schotter et al, 2015) that the correct meaning will be successfully retrieved, and initiates planning of the next saccade, before the information required to judge the word's semantic and/or syntactic acceptability in the sentence is available. This is supported by evidence that word skipping is determined by the ease of lexical processing and is independent of semantic and/or syntactic fit (e.g., Abbott, Angele, Ahn, & Rayner, 2015;Angele, Laishley, Rayner, & Liversedge, 2014;Angele & Rayner, 2013). The skipping rates in the present study are also consistent with this claim because readers were equally likely to skip implausible words as they were plausible words.…”

Failure to detect function word repetitions and omissions in reading: Are eye movements to blame?

“…This assumption is based on the previous evidence that saccade targeting is based mostly on low-level orthographic features (e.g., Reichle, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 2003), such as the length of the parafoveal word, and is much less sensitive than durational measures to lexical and higherlevel factors. More specifically, there is evidence that the word the tends to be fixated at about the same rate, regardless of whether it is a grammatical continuation of the sentence (Abbott, Angele, Ahn, & Rayner, 2015;Angele & Rayner, 2013). Below we provide evidence that first-pass fixations on the critical words were not much (if at all) more likely to occur in the ungrammatical conditions than in the grammatical control condition.…”