Recent eye-movement evidence suggests readers are more likely to skip a high-frequency word than a low-frequency word independently of the semantic or syntactic acceptability of the word in the sentence. This has been interpreted as strong support for a serial processing mechanism in which the decision to skip a word is based on the completion of a preliminary stage of lexical processing prior to any assessment of contextual fit. The present large-scale study was designed to reconcile these findings with the plausibility preview effect: higher skipping and reduced firstpass reading times for words that are previewed by contextually plausible, compared to implausible, sentence continuations that are unrelated to the target word. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a short (3-4 letters) or long ( 6letters) target word. The boundary paradigm was used to present parafoveal previews which were either higher or lower frequency than the target, and either plausible or implausible in the sentence context. The results revealed strong, independent effects of all three factors on target skipping and early measures of target fixation duration, while frequency and plausibility interacted on later measures of target fixation duration. Simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading demonstrated that plausibility effects on skipping are potentially consistent with the assumption that higher-level contextual information only affects post-lexical integration processes. However, no current model of eye movements in reading provides an explicit account of the information or processes that allow readers to rapidly detect an integration failure.

Despite advances in digital technology that have resulted in more people accessing information via mobile devices, little is known about reading comprehension on mobile phones. This research investigated the impact of reading format by comparing sensitivity to misinformation presented either in printed texts or in digital format on mobile phones to readers of English versus Chinese. Participants read pairs of short newspaper-style articles containing a critical piece of information that was either retracted or not retracted, and were later assessed on their memory for critical and general details, as well as inferential judgements related to the retracted information. The average results replicated previous evidence that repeating the original misinformation at the time of retraction enhanced memory updating. However, reading on a mobile phone reduced the likelihood that readers noticed the retraction and updated their memory with alternative information in both language groups and reduced the extent to which inferences were modified by the alternative information in readers of Chinese but not English. Chinese readers showed significantly better general memory, but were more affected by the continued influence of the misinformation. These differences between Chinese and English-speaking participants may reflect cultural influences on the tendency to apply a dialectical rather than an analytic reasoning strategy and incorporate contradictory information into the memory representation of a discourse or event.

Normative aging is accompanied by visual and cognitive changes that impact the systems that are critical for fluent reading. The patterns of eye movements during reading displayed by older adults have been characterized as demonstrating a trade-off between longer forward saccades and more word skipping versus higher rates of regressions back to previously read text. This pattern is assumed to reflect older readers' reliance on top-down contextual information to compensate for reduced uptake of parafoveal information from yet-to-be fixated words. However, the empirical evidence for these assumptions is equivocal. This study investigated the depth of older readers' parafoveal processing as indexed by sensitivity to the contextual plausibility of parafoveal words in both neutral and highly constraining sentence contexts. The eye movements of 65 cognitively intact older adults (61-87 years) were compared with data previously collected from young adults in two sentence reading experiments in which critical target words were replaced by valid, plausible, related, or implausible previews until the reader fixated on the target word location. Older and younger adults showed equivalent plausibility preview benefits on first-pass reading measures of both predictable and unpredictable words. However, older readers did not show the benefit of preview orthographic relatedness that was observed in young adults, and showed significantly attenuated preview validity effects. Taken together, the data suggest that older readers are specifically impaired in the integration of parafoveal and foveal information but do not show deficits in the depth of parafoveal processing. The implications for understanding the effects of aging on reading are discussed.

Given that increased word skipping is a key index of age-related changes in reading (Paterson et al., 2020), we conducted a supplementary analysis of the total number of words skipped during older adults' first-pass reading of the sentences. This analysis showed a significant effect of sentence difficulty because older readers skipped more words in easy versus hard sentences (b =-0.07, SE = 0.03, t =-2.73). There were also significant effects of both right window contrasts (3-vs. 9-letter: b = 0.41, SE = 0.03, t = 12.32; 9-vs.

Evidence of processing costs for unexpected words presented in place of a more expected completion remains elusive in the eye-movement literature. The current study investigated whether such prediction error costs depend on the source of constraint violation provided by the prior context. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read predictable words and unpredictable alternatives that were either semantically related or unrelated in three-sentence passages. The passages differed in whether the source of constraint originated solely from the global context provided by the first two semantically rich sentences of the passage; from the local context provided by the final sentence of the passage; from both the global and local context; or from none of the three sentences of the passage. The results revealed the expected processing advantage for predictable completions in any constraining context, although the relative contributions of the different sources of constraint varied across the time course of word processing. Unpredictable completions, however, did not yield any processing costs when the context constrained towards a different word, instead producing immediate processing benefits in the presence of any constraining context. Moreover, the initial processing of related unpredictable completions was enhanced further by the provision of a supportive global context. Predictability effects therefore do not appear to be determined by cloze probability alone but also by the nature of the prior contextual constraint especially when they encourage the construction of higher-level discourse representations. The implications of these findings for understanding existing theoretical models of predictive processing are discussed.