Word skipping during sentence reading: effects of lexicality on parafoveal processing

Two experiments examined how lexical status affects the targeting of saccades during reading by using the boundary technique to vary independently the content of a letter string when seen in parafoveal preview and when directly fixated. Experiment 1 measured the skipping rate for a target word embedded in a sentence under three parafoveal preview conditions: full preview (e.g., brain–brain), pseudohomophone preview (e.g., brane–brain), and orthographic nonword control preview (e.g., brant–brain); in the first condition, the preview string was always an English word, while in the second and third conditions, it was always a nonword. Experiment 2 investigated three conditions where the preview string was always a word: full preview (e.g., beach–beach), homophone preview (e.g., beech–beach), and orthographic control preview (e.g., bench–beach). None of the letter string manipulations used to create the preview conditions in the experiments disrupted sublexical orthographic or phonological patterns. In Experiment 1, higher skipping rates were observed for the full (lexical) preview condition, which consisted of a word, than for the nonword preview conditions (pseudohomophone and orthographic control). In contrast, Experiment 2 showed no difference in skipping rates across the three types of lexical preview conditions (full, homophone, and orthographic control), although preview type did influence reading times. This pattern indicates that skipping not only depends on the presence of disrupted sublexical patterns of orthography or phonology, but also is critically dependent on processes that are sensitive to the lexical status of letter strings in the parafovea.