The availability of useful information to the right of fixation in reading

Rayner, Keith; Well, Arnold D.; Pollatsek, Alexander; Bertera, James H.

doi:10.3758/bf03204186

Cited by 310 publications

(292 citation statements)

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“…Rayner et al's (1982) finding that individual letters to the right of fixation are more critical than word integrity and that the acquisition of letters is not tied to words being intact suggests that readers acquire partial word information from the parafovea. Further evidence for this conclusion comes from another experiment reported by Rayner et al (1982), in which readers read text when (a) only the fixated word was available and all other letters to the right of fixation were replaced by another letter (a one-word window), (b) the fixated word and the word to the right of fixation were available and all other letters were replaced by another letter (a two-word window), or (c) the fixated word as well as partial information about the word to the right of fixation were available. In the third condition, 1, 2, or 3 letters of the word to the right of fixation were available on each fixation.…”

Section: Acquiring Information To the Right Of Fixationmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Studies using these techniques (DenBuurman, Boersma, & Gerrissen, 1981;Ikeda & Saida, 1978;McConkie & Hogaboam, 1985;McConkie & Rayner, 1975;O'Regan, 1979O'Regan, , 1980Pollatsek et al, 1986;Rayner, 1975bRayner, , 1986Rayner & Bertera, 1979;Raynet;Well, Pollatsek, & Bertera, 1982; N. R. Underwood & McConkie, 1985; N. R. Underwood & This situation creates an artificial foveal scotoma and eye movement behavior if the situation is quite similar to the eye movement behavior of patients with real scotomas (Whittak~, Cummings, & Swieson, 1991;Zihl, 1995). Zola, 1986) have been very consistent in indicating that the size of the perceptual span is relatively small; for readers of alphabetical orthographies (e.g., English, French, and Dutch) the span extends from the beginning of the currently fixated word but no more than 3-4 letters to the left of fixation 6 (McConkie & Rayner, 1976a;Rayner, Well, & Pollatsek, 1980; N. R. Underwood & McConkie, 1985) to about 14-15 letter spaces to the right of fixation (DenBuurman et al, 1981;McConkie & Rayner, 1975;Rayner, 1986;Rayner & Bertera, 1979;.…”

Section: The Moving Mask Techniquementioning

confidence: 99%

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Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Rayner

1998

Psychological Bulletin

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Recent studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing tasks, such as music reading, typing, visual search, and scene perception, are reviewed. The major emphasis of the review is on reading as a specific example of cognitive processing. Basic topics discussed with respect to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined. Theoretical and practical considerations concerning the use of eye movement data are also discussed.Many studies using eye movements to investigate cognitive processes have appeared over the past 20 years. In an earlier review, I (Rayner, 1978b) argued that since the mid-1970s we have been in a third era of eye movement research and that the success of research in the current era would depend on the ingenuity of researchers in designing interesting and informative studies. It would appear from the vast number of studies using eye movement data over the past 20 years that research in this third era is fulfilling the promise inherent in using eye movement behavior to infer cognitive processes. The first era of eye movement research extended from Javal's initial observations concerning the role of eye movements in reading in 1879 (see Huey, 1908) up until about 1920. During this era, many basic facts about eye movements were discovered. Issues such as saccadic suppression (the fact that we do not perceive information during an eye movement), saccade latency (the time that it takes to initiate an eye movement), and the size of the perceptual span (the region of effective vision) were of concern in this era. The second era, which coincided with the behaviorist movement in experimental psychology, tended to have a more applied focus, and little research was undertaken with eye movements to infer cognitive processes. Although classic work by Tinker (1946) on reading and by Buswell (1935) on scene perception was carried out during this era, in retrospect, most of the work seems to have focused on the eye movements per se (or on surface aspects of the task being investigated). Tinker's (1958) final review ended on the rather pessimistic note that almost every-

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Section: Acquiring Information To the Right Of Fixationmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: The Moving Mask Techniquementioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Rayner

1998

Psychological Bulletin

Self Cite

6,141

231

5,590

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“…If letter identity information is not extracted by the reader any further than three letter positions of the word to the right of fixation, as Rayner et al (1982) claimed, there should be no difference among these three conditions. In each case, the first three letters of the parafoveal preview are correct and in their correct letter position.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…4 Another interesting finding is that the identity condition led to shorter viewing durations than the mean of the two final manipulation conditions (TL final and SL final). According to Rayner et al (1982), readers do not extract useful letter identity information from more than the first three letters of the word to the right of fixation. On the basis of this conclusion, one would predict that the identity condition, the TL-final condition, and the SL-final condition would be equally facilitative as a parafoveal preview of the base word.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transposed-letter effects in reading: Evidence from eye movements and parafoveal preview.

Johnson¹,

Perea

Rayner³

2007

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Three eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the role of letter identity and letter position during reading. Before fixating on a target word within each sentence, readers were provided with a parafoveal preview that differed in the amount of useful letter identity and letter position information it provided. In Experiments 1 and 2, previews fell into 1 of 5 conditions: (a) identical to the target word, (b) a transposition of 2 internal letters, (c) a substitution of 2 internal letters, (d) a transposition of the 2 final letters, or (e) a substitution of the 2 final letters. In Experiment 3, the authors used a further set of conditions to explore the importance of external letter positions. The findings extend previous work and demonstrate that transposed-letter effects exist in silent reading. These experiments also indicate that letter identity information can be extracted from the parafovea outside of absolute letter position from the first 5 letters of the word to the right of fixation. Finally, the results support the notion that exterior letters play important roles in visual word recognition.Keywords: eye tracking, reading, transposed letters, parafoveal processing How are the letter identities and letter positions within a written word encoded? Letter identity and position must both play a role or people would be unable to distinguish between anagrams such as stop, pots, tops, opts, post, and spot. Although there is general agreement that a given letter string will activate not only the appropriate word from the lexicon but also a number of perceptually similar words, the specific way in which a model specifies the coding of letter position affects which words are considered similar.Many models, for example, assume a channel-specific (or position-specific) coding scheme. In such models, letter position is coded early in lexical processing and letters are immediately tagged to their position within the string of letters. Each letter is then processed within its specific channel independent of the other letters in the letter string. Examples of such models include the multiple read-out model (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996), the dual-route cascaded model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Ziegler, & Langdon, 2001), the interactive activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), and the activation-verification model (Paap, Newsome, McDonald, & Schvaneveldt, 1982). These models predict that the nonwords jugde, junpe, and juxxe are all equally similar to the word judge, because in each case, the nonword contains three letters in their correct letter positions. However, the nonword jugde shares all of the same letters as the word judge and differs only in a transposition of two internal, adjacent letters. So intuitively it seems that this transposed letter (TL) nonword jugde is much more similar to the base word judge than is the substituted letter (SL) nonword junpe. Indeed, research supports these intuitions; a number of experiments using a variety of tasks have found that TL nonwords are more similar to their...

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“…Second, changes in mean landing site with different launch sites could also be predicted from a "peripheral preview" hypothesis, in which partial information is assumed to be acquired from a word during the fixation prior to that on which it is directly fixated (Rayner, Well, Pollatsek, & Bertera, 1982). The closer the eyes are to a word, the more information might be obtained from the early parts of that word.…”

Section: The Basis For Launch Site Influences On Landing Sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movement control during reading: I. The location of initial eye fixations on words

et al. 1988

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Sixty-six college students read two chapters from a contemporary novel while their eye movements were monitored. The eye movement data were analyzed to identify factors that influence the location of a reader's initial eye fixation on a word. When the data were partitioned according to the location of the prior fixation (i.e., launch site), the distribution of fixation locations on the word (i.e., landing site distribution) was highly constrained, normal in shape, and not influenced by word length. The locations of initial fixations on words can be accounted for on the basis of five principles of oculomotor control: A word-object has a specific functional target location, a saccadic range error occurs that produces a systematic deviation of landing sites from the functional target location, the saccadic range error is reduced somewhat for saccades that follow longer eye fixations, there exists oculomotor variability that is a second, non-systematic source of error in landing sites, and the oculomotor variability increases with distance of the launch site from the target.

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The availability of useful information to the right of fixation in reading

Cited by 310 publications

References 21 publications

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Transposed-letter effects in reading: Evidence from eye movements and parafoveal preview.

Eye movement control during reading: I. The location of initial eye fixations on words

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