Morphosemantic/morphosyntactic parafoveal processing in skilled readers: evidence from English

Skilled reading is characterized by eye movements that allow the reader to gather the necessary word related information quickly and efficiently from the page by being able to better use information in the parafovea. The open question is what kind of visual and linguistic information skilled readers gather from the parafovea and use to plan their eye movements. In this talk I present results from several experiments with gaze-contingent boundary-change paradigm that manipulated the predictability of the semantic and syntactic context in English. The results reveal differentiated time-course and depth of processing for the semantic and morphosemantic/morphosyntactic information that was manipulated parafoveally prior to being directly fixated by the readers.

While target words were read faster in the predictable context regardless of the previews (main effect of predictability), semantically manipulated previews yielded consistent preview benefit over the nonword and preview cost over the identical (no-change) previews (main effect of the preview manipulation no interaction with the context predictability). The effect of morphosyntactic/morphosemantic information presented parafoveally depended on the context, specifically how predictable the previewed word would be given the prior context. Specifically, the effect of the previewed word, including whether it led to longer or shorter looks, varied based on how predictable or unpredictable that word would be given the previous context.

The present work contributes to growing evidence that points to the flexible, contextually sensitive capacity of the allocation of attention within the parafoveal portion of the visual field and proposes predictability of the syntactic context as an additional dimension that guides parafoveal perception in skilled readers.