Do Readers Integrate Phonological Codes Across Saccades? A Bayesian Meta-Analysis and a Survey of the Unpublished Literature

Abstract

It is commonly accepted that phonological codes can be activated parafoveally during reading and later used to aid foveal word recognition- a finding known as the phonological preview benefit. However, a closer look at the literature shows that this effect may be less consistent than what is sometimes believed. To determine the extent to which phonology is processed parafoveally, a Bayesian meta-analysis of 27 experiments and a survey of the unpublished literature were conducted. While the results were generally consistent with the phonological preview benefit (>90% probability of a true effect in gaze durations), the size of the effect was small. Readers of alphabetical orthographies obtained a modest benefit of only 4 ms in gaze durations. Interestingly, Chinese readers showed a larger effect (6–14 ms in size). There was no difference in the magnitude of the phonological preview benefit between homophone and pseudo-homophone previews, thus suggesting that the modest processing advantage is indeed related to the activation of phonological codes from the parafoveal word. Simulations revealed that the results are relatively robust to missing studies, although the effects may be 19–22% smaller if all missing studies found a null effect. The results suggest that while phonology can be processed parafoveally, this happens only to a limited extent. Because phonological priming effects in single-word recognition are small (10–13 ms; Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006) and there is a loss of visual acuity in the parafovea, it is argued that large phonological preview benefit effects may be unlikely.

Spelling ability influences early letter encoding during reading: Evidence from return-sweep eye movements

“…Furthermore, for the processing of non-predictable low-frequency words, poorer readers relied more on phonological activation than better readers, highlighting how reading skill influences word identification when words are particularly difficult to process. Although Jared et al reported that phonological activation influences foveal processing under certain conditions, this stands in contrast to research looking at parafoveal processing of phonology which reports that less-skilled readers do not extract phonological codes in parafoveal vision (e.g., Chace, Rayner, & Well, 2005;Vasilev, Yates, & Slattery, 2019). Ashby et al (2005) reported differences in the reading strategies employed by good and poor readers (again indexed by the Nelson-Denny scores), where better readers relied less on context to support word processing.…”

Orthographic and phonological contributions to flanker effects

“…Sentence reading experiments using the boundary technique (Rayner, 1975 ) have repeatedly shown that parafoveal previews that are phonologically related to the upcoming target word facilitate reading of that word compared with orthographic control previews. This is the case for both homophone previews (e.g., Bélanger, Mayberry, & Rayner, 2013 ; Chace, Rayner, & Well, 2005 ; Pollatsek, Lesch, Morris, & Rayner, 1992 ) and pseudohomophone previews (e.g., Miellet & Sparrow, 2004 ; see Vasilev, Yates, & Slattery, 2019 , for a review and meta-analysis). On the other hand, Tiffin-Richards and Schroeder ( 2015 ) failed to observe a preview effect with pseudohomophones in their adult participants, with the effects only being significant in children.…”

Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct

“…This is consistent with a recent meta-analysis showing that the phonological preview effect in English is relatively small (approx. 5 ms) and is mostly constrained to GDs (Vasilev, Yates, et al, 2019).…”

“…To evaluate the robustness of the key findings from Experiment 1, a high-power replication was conducted. Because recent evidence has suggested that the phonological preview effect in adult English readers may be smaller than originally thought (Vasilev, Yates, et al, 2019), the phonological preview condition was removed. 5 This does not affect the research aims of the original experiment as the phonological and orthographic previews are complementary in the research design (i.e., when target word degradation is "hidden" by degrading all words in the sentence, this degradation should reduce the amount of orthographic and phonological benefit that readers obtain parafoveally).…”

“…Therefore, the phonological preview effect requires the comparison with an orthographic control, which will inevitably share at least some phonemes with the phonologically similar preview. Because of this, phonological preview effects in English tend to be smaller than orthographic ones and have been estimated to be about 5 ms on average (Vasilev, Yates, & Slattery, 2019). Fitzsimmons and Drieghe (2011) also studied the parafoveal processing of phonology by manipulating the number of syllables of the parafoveal word.…”