The effect of high- and low-frequency previews and sentential fit on word skipping during reading.

Abstract

In a previous gaze-contingent boundary experiment, Angele and Rayner (2012) found that readers are likely to skip a word that appears to be the definite article the even when syntactic constraints do not allow for articles to occur in that position. In the present study, we investigated whether the word frequency of the preview of a three-letter target word influences a reader’s decision to fixate or skip that word. We found that the word frequency rather than the felicitousness (syntactic fit) of the preview affected how often the upcoming word was skipped. These results indicate that visual information about the upcoming word trumps information from the sentence context when it comes to making a skipping decision. Skipping parafoveal instances of the therefore may simply be an extreme case of skipping high-frequency words.

Beyond cloze probability: Parafoveal processing of semantic and syntactic information during reading

“…However, this criticism does not apply to research using the boundary paradigm to show that readers are more likely to skip high frequency words regardless of semantic or syntactic acceptability. For instance, readers are more likely to skip parafoveal previews of the article the than contextually valid but lower frequency content word previews Angele et al, 2014;. The discrepancy between these data and the present results may reflect the previous studies' use of three-letter target words, which have a much higher base rate of skipping than the 4-7 letter words used in the present study.…”

“…The very early effects of plausibility appear to conflict with previous evidence that plausibility does not influence skipping rates (e.g., Abbott & Staub, 2015;Abbott, Angele, Ahn, & Rayner, 2015;Angele, Laishley, Rayner, & Liversedge, 2014; and are difficult to reconcile with E-Z Reader's post-lexical account of the impact of contextual integration. The current research was designed to clarify whether, and under what circumstances, the plausibility of the upcoming word affects skipping.…”

Skipping of the very-high-frequency structural particle de (的) in Chinese reading

“…Furthermore, these effects spilled over into the post-target region such that the reading times were longest for pseudocharacter previews, shorter for de previews, and shortest for identity preview (again, though, in the post-target character analyses, the differences for the early reading time measures, FFD, SFD, and GD, were not significant between the identity and de preview conditions, and the de and pseudocharacter preview conditions). The spillover effects were comparable with previous findings in Chinese reading (e.g., Li, Bicknell, Liu, Wei, & Rayner, 2014) and alphabetic reading (e.g., Angele et al, 2014;Angele & Rayner, 2013). However, it should be noted that there were longer go-past reading times and more regressions out of the post-target region for the de previews than for the identical previews, presumably reflecting difficulty associated with sentence integration processes (Angele & Rayner, 2013).…”

“…The constraints of the preceding sentence context do not seem to be taken into account. In a subsequent experiment, Angele, Laishley, Rayner, and Liversedge (2014) extended this work using a similar paradigm but used three-letter content words of either high or low frequency as the syntactically illegal previews. They replicated the findings of Angele and Rayner, and further demonstrated that readers made their skipping decision based on the parafoveal information only: High-frequency previews were frequently skipped even when they did not fit the sentence context.…”

Parafoveal lexical activation depends on skilled reading proficiency.

“…This interaction demonstrates that the facilitation from an HFN preview reported by Williams et al was evident very early for highly skilled readers in the present study, suggesting that they were able to efficiently extract lexical information from a highfrequency word in the parafovea before it was fixated and rapidly program a skipping saccade. The fact that highly proficient readers were more likely to skip the target after HFN preview, even though preview words rarely fitted the sentence context, is consistent with the claim that skipping decisions are based on preview lexicality rather than contextual fit (Angele, Laishley, Rayner, & Liversedge, 2014;Angele & Rayner, 2013;Gordon, Plummer, & Choi, 2013). This finding suggests that even the highest proficiency readers initiate a skip prior to the integration of parafoveal information with the sentence context.…”