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. 2013 Apr;39(2):526-38.
doi: 10.1037/a0029492. Epub 2012 Aug 6.

Parafoveal-foveal overlap can facilitate ongoing word identification during reading: evidence from eye movements

Bernhard Angele  1 , Randy Tran, Keith Rayner
Affiliations

Parafoveal-foveal overlap can facilitate ongoing word identification during reading: evidence from eye movements

Bernhard Angele et al. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2013 Apr.

Abstract

Readers continuously receive parafoveal information about the upcoming word in addition to the foveal information about the currently fixated word. Previous research (Inhoff, Radach, Starr, & Greenberg, 2000) showed that the presence of a parafoveal word that was similar to the foveal word facilitated processing of the foveal word. We used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to manipulate the parafoveal information that subjects received before or while fixating a target word (e.g., news) within a sentence. Specifically, a reader's parafovea could contain a repetition of the target (news), a correct preview of the posttarget word (once), an unrelated word (warm), random letters (cxmr), a nonword neighbor of the target (niws), a semantically related word (tale), or a nonword neighbor of that word (tule). Target fixation times were significantly lower in the parafoveal repetition condition than in all other conditions, suggesting that foveal processing can be facilitated by parafoveal repetition. We present a simple model framework that can account for these effects.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Condition examples and display change procedure in Experiment 1
Figure 2
Figure 2
Condition examples and display change procedure in Experiment 2
Figure 3
Figure 3
A simple model framework capable of explaining parafoveal repetition effects and orthographic parafoveal-on-foveal effects
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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