Parafoveal preview effects from word N + 1 and word N + 2 during reading: A critical review and Bayesian meta-analysis

Abstract

The use of gaze-contingent display techniques to study reading has shown that readers attend not only the currently fixated word, but also the word to the right of the current fixation. However, a critical look at the literature shows that a number of questions cannot be readily answered from the available literature reviews on the topic. First, there is no consensus as to whether readers also attend the second word to the right of fixation. Second, it is not clear whether parafoveal processing is more efficient in languages such as Chinese. Third, it is not well understood whether the measured effects are confounded by the properties of the parafoveal mask. In the present study, we addressed these issues by performing a Bayesian metaanalysis of 93 experiments that used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, Cognitive Psychology, 7, 65-81. doi:10.1016/0010-028590005-5, 1975. We describe three main findings: (1) The advantage of previewing the second word to the right is modest in size and likely is not centered on zero; (2) Chinese readers do seem to make more efficient use of parafoveal processing, but this is mostly evident in gaze durations; and (3) there are interference effects associated with using different parafoveal masks that roughly increase when the mask is less word-like.Keywords Parafoveal processing . Reading . Preview benefit . Perceptual span . Eye movementsThe advance of eye-tracking technology has allowed an unprecedented opportunity to understand how the reading process unfolds in space and time. One of the advantages of this method is the possibility to precisely manipulate what participants see in real time while they are reading sentences on the screen. The use of such techniques has shown that readers not only process the currently fixated word, but that they also benefit from previewing the upcoming word in parafoveal vision (Rayner, 1998). This so-called preview benefit effect is measured as shorter fixation durations on a word for which correct preview information was available during the preceding fixation.The preview benefit effect is arguably one of the most robust and least controversial findings in the literature, and it has inspired many subsequent experiments as well as models of reading (Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012). A particular issue highlighted by the preview benefit effect is the distinction between gaze location and the attentional focus during reading. Although the gaze location and attentional focus are usually identical in single-word recognition tasks, readers appear to routinely attend the upcoming word as well. Many experiments have been dedicated to determining exactly which properties of an upcoming word readers can process while they are still fixating on the preceding word. It has been shown that reader can preprocess the orthographic, phonological, morphological, and possibly semantic properties of the upcoming word (for a review, see Schotter et al., 2012).However, despite four decades of research on the topic, the size of this effect has not been system...

Predictability effects during reading in the absence of parafoveal preview

“…Still, it should be seen as yet another tool for investigating eye movements during reading. A recently published Bayesian meta-analysis of the preview benefit effect in reading (Vasilev & Angele, 2016) estimated the effect to be 45 ms which is smaller than the 79 ms benefit we obtained with our new method in the current study. As mentioned earlier, the absence of parafoveal preview is not the only explanation for increased fixation durations for accurate line initial fixations.…”

Event-related brain potentials reveal age-related changes in parafoveal-foveal integration during sentence processing

“…This work has converged on the finding that readers can extract and integrate parafoveal orthographic information as well as abstract phonological codes (see Vasilev & Angele, 2017 for a recent meta-analysis). However, early on, semantic information was thought to not be extracted from parafoveal vision.…”

Binocular coordination and return-sweep saccades among skilled adult readers

“…This parallels studies in which accurate preview of an upcoming word is prevented by masking the text. In a recent Bayesian meta-analysis, Vasilev and Angele (2017) estimated the preview-benefit effect to be 29 ms for the first-fixation duration. This is very similar to the 28-ms difference that we observed between intraline and accurate line-initial fixations in the current study.…”