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eye movements were recorded. Word frequency influenced fixation durations and the probability of word skipping when orthographic familiarity was controlled. These results indicate that lexical processing of words can influence saccade programming (as shown by fixation durations and which words are fixated). Orthographic familiarity, but not word frequency, influenced the duration of prior fixations. These results provide evidence for orthographic, but not lexical, parafoveal-on-foveal effects. Overall, the findings have a crucial implication for models of eye movement control in reading: there must be sufficient time for lexical factors to influence saccade programming before saccade metrics and timing are finalised. The conclusions are critical for the fundamental architecture of models of eye movement control in reading, namely, how to reconcile long saccade programming times and complex linguistic influences on saccades during reading.Key words / phrases: Reading. Eye movements. Word frequency. Orthography. Models of eye movement control in reading.Word frequency and orthographic familiarity 1 As we read, the linguistic characteristics of words influence the duration of fixations and which words are fixated (Rayner, 1998). The present study provides a detailed examination of the influences of orthographic familiarity and word frequency on eye movements during reading. It thus provides a critical assessment of the relationship between linguistic text processing and the systems that control when and where the eyes move. Specifically, whether lexical processing can have an immediate influence on saccade programming is examined. The issues addressed here have crucial implications for the architecture of models of eye movement control in reading. The article adds to a growing number of recent studies which specifically aim to test and develop such accounts (Inhoff, Eiter, & Radach, 2005; Kliegl, Nuthmann, & Engbert, 2006; Rayner, Ashby, Pollatsek, & Reichle, 2004; Rayner, Juhasz, & Brown, 2007; Rayner, Liversedge, White, & Vergilino-Perez, 2003;Reingold & Rayner, 2006). Previous studies of the effects of word frequency and orthography will first be discussed. Models of eye movements in reading will be summarised which may account for such effects. Finally, the issue of whether processing of parafoveal information can influence prior fixations (parafoveal-onfoveal effects) and where words are fixated (saccade specification) will be considered. Word frequency effectsThe influence of word frequency on word processing is an established finding both for isolated word response time tasks (Monsell, 1991) and sentence reading (Rayner, 1998). Inhoff and Rayner (1986) (also Rayner & Duffy, 1986) first demonstrated, that for words in sentences with word length controlled, first fixation durations and gaze durations (the sum of fixations before leaving a word) are longer on infrequent than frequent words.Word frequency effects during sentence reading are usually spatially localised to the word Word frequency and orthog...

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words with transposed letters compared to the normal baseline condition, and the greatest disruption was observed for word-initial transpositions. In Experiment 1, transpositions within low frequency words led to longer reading times than when letters were transposed within high frequency words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the position of word-initial letters is most critical even when parafoveal preview of words to the right of fixation is unavailable. The findings have important implications for the roles of different letter positions in word recognition and the effects of parafoveal preview on word recognition processes. Keywordsreading; eye movements; word recognition; transposed letters; parafoveal processing To establish a comprehensive account of word recognition, it is necessary to investigate the flexibility of letter encoding and in particular whether letters at certain positions within words are more easily encoded relative to letters at other positions. Much recent research has investigated these issues by employing experimental manipulations involving the systematic transposition of letters (TL) at different positions within words. In particular, there has been considerable interest in how text with TL nonwords is read (e.g., see Grainger & Whitney, 2004; Rayner, White, Johnson, & Liversedge, 2006 1 ). In the present experiments, we recorded eye movements to precisely determine how disruptive TL nonwords are during reading. Specifically, we examined whether the position of transposed letters within a word influences how easily those words are processed. This was achieved by comparing the relative disruption Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sarah J. White, School of Psychology, University of Leicester, Lancaster Road, Leicester LE1 9HN, United Kingdom. E-mail: s.j.white@le.ac.uk or s.j.white@dunelm.org.uk. 1 The short report by includes some preliminary analyses of the global data presented in much more detail in Experiment 1. A number of studies using standard isolated word recognition tasks have shown that the coding of letter position is, in fact, quite flexible. For example, it has been clearly shown that nonwords involving a transposition of two letters (e.g., jugde for the base word judge) are more similar to their base words than substituted-letter nonwords in which two letters are replaced (e.g., jupte). This result has been found in a number of tasks including naming (Christianson, Johnson, & Rayner, 2005) and lexical decision (Chambers, 1979;Forster, Davis, Schoknecht, & Carter, 1987;O'Connor & Forster, 1981;Perea & Lupker, 2003a, 2003b. Thus, on the basis of these studies, it appears that TL nonwords can activat...

Recent research using word recognition paradigms such as lexical decision and speeded pronunciation has investigated how a range of variables affect the location and shape of response time distributions, using both parametric and non-parametric techniques. In this article, we explore the distributional effects of a word frequency manipulation on fixation durations in normal reading, making use of data from two recent eye movement experiments (Drieghe, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 2008;White, 2008). The ex-Gaussian distribution provided a good fit to the shape of individual subjects' distributions in both experiments. The frequency manipulation affected both the shift and skew of the distributions, in both experiments, and this conclusion was supported by the nonparametric vincentizing technique. Finally, a new experiment demonstrated that White's (2008) frequency manipulation also affects both shift and skew in RT distributions in the lexical decision task. These results argue against models of eye movement control in reading that propose that word frequency influences only a subset of fixations, and support models in which there is a tight connection between eye movement control and the progress of lexical processing.It is well known that the time the eyes spend on a word in reading is a function of a range of linguistic factors (see Staub & Rayner, 2007;Rayner, 1998Rayner, , 2009, for reviews). For example, a word's printed frequency (Inhoff & Rayner, 1986;Rayner & Duffy, 1986) and its predictability in context (Ehrlich & Rayner, 1981;Rayner, Ashby, Pollatsek, & Reichle, 2004) each have substantial effects on measures such as the duration of the reader's first eye fixation on the word (first fixation duration), and the summed duration of all fixations before the eyes leave the word (gaze duration); as frequency and predictability each decrease, the mean durations increase.These empirical findings are among the benchmark phenomena that models of eye movement control in reading such as E-Z Reader (Pollatsek, Reichle, & Rayner, 2006;Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998;Reichle, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 2003) and SWIFT (Engbert, Nuthmann, Richter, & Kliegl, 2005) attempt to account for. In E-Z Reader, for example, it is the progress of lexical processing that determines when a saccade program will be initiated. Specifically, the model proposes that a saccade is initiated when the word processing system has completed an initial stage of processing, referred to as L1 (originally termed a familiarity check), on the Address correspondence to: Adrian Staub, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, 430 Tobin Hall, Amherst, MA 01003; astaub@psych.umass.edu; phone: (413) 545-5925; fax: (413) NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript fixated word, and that word frequency and predictability additively influence how long this stage takes to complete (Rayner et al., 2004).There remains, however, a family of theories of eye movement control in reading which, while not denyi...

Henderson and Ferreira (1990) found that foveal load (manipulated via word frequency) modulates parafoveal processing, thereby affecting the amount of preview benefit obtained from the word to the right of fixation. The present experiment used the eye-contingent boundary paradigm and, consistent with Henderson and Ferreira, showed that foveal load modulated preview benefit for participants who were not aware of the display changes during reading. Also, for these participants, foveal load modulated preview benefit regardless of fixation durations on the foveal word. For participants who were aware of the display change, preview benefits occurred regardless of foveal processing difficulty. These results have important implications for understanding the way in which foveal load influences parafoveal processing during reading.