On the processing of canonical word order during eye fixations in reading: Do readers process transposed word previews?

Abstract

Whether readers always identify words in the order they are printed is subject to considerable debate. In the present study, we used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to manipulate the preview for a two-word target region (e.g., white walls in My neighbor painted the white walls black). Readers received an identical (white walls), transposed (walls white), or unrelated preview (vodka clubs). We found that there was a clear cost of having a transposed preview compared to an identical preview, indicating that readers cannot or do not identify words out of order. However, on some measures, the transposed preview condition did lead to faster processing than the unrelated preview condition, suggesting that readers may be able to obtain some useful information from a transposed preview. Implications of the results for models of eye movement control in reading are discussed.

Keywords:

• Eye movements
• Parafoveal processing
• Preview benefit
• Reading
• Word order

Acknowledgments

We thank Annie Jia for help with stimulus creation and subject running. This research was supported by Grant No. HD065829 from the National Institute of Health. ERS was supported by a Predoctoral Fellowship on Training Grant No. DC000041 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Portions of these data were presented at the CUNY Conference, New York City, March 2012 and at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, November 2012. We thank Simon Liversedge, Ralph Radach, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version.

Notes

¹As a result, many of the transposed words also had some type of semantic relationship. However, semantic preview benefit has generally not been observed for readers of English (Rayner, Balota, & Pollatsek, 1986; see Schotter et al., 2012, for a review).

²Slattery et al. (2011) found that display changes which occurred more than 10 ms after the onset of a fixation can affect the duration of that fixation even when they are not consciously detected. In the present study, 19.64% of the display changes completed more than 10 ms after fixation onset. In this case, we discarded the corresponding trial from the analysis. In order to ensure that the effects in the discarded data did not differ systematically from those observed in the rest of the data, we performed an additional analysis using a more lenient cutoff of 18 ms (9.2% of data). The results of this analysis did not differ from the analysis with the 10 ms cutoff.

³The latter random effect had to be omitted from the model for TVT on the first target word, as this model did not converge if it was included. Furthermore, the models for regressions into the second target word and the combined target region as well as those for fixation probability of the combined target region and the posttarget word only converged when both random slopes for conditional trigram probability for subjects and random slopes for preview for items were removed from the model. It should be noted that the coefficients and t-values for the interaction terms are potentially anticonservative, since the models do not contain random slopes for the interaction. The more appropriate models including the random interaction slopes failed to converge for any of the dependent variables.

⁴The null-hypothesis significance testing methods used in our analysis do not allow us to conclude that our results show that there was no difference between transposed and unrelated previews, as this would amount to arguing for the null hypothesis in the absence of statistical support against it.