Lack of semantic parafoveal preview benefit in reading revisited

In contrast to earlier research, evidence for semantic preview benefit in reading has been reported by Hohenstein and Kliegl (Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 166–190, 2013) in an alphabetic writing system; they also implied that prior demonstrations of lack of a semantic preview benefit needed to be reexamined. In the present article, we report a rather direct replication of an experiment reported by Rayner, Balota, and Pollatsek (Canadian Journal of Psychology, 40, 473–483, 1986). Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, subjects read sentences that contained a target word (razor), but different preview words were initially presented in the sentence. The preview was identical to the target word (i.e., razor), semantically related to the target word (i.e., blade), semantically unrelated to the target word (i.e., sweet), or a visually similar nonword (i.e., razar). When the reader’s eyes crossed an invisible boundary location just to the left of the target word location, the preview changed to the target word. Like Rayner et al. (Canadian Journal of Psychology, 40, 473–483, 1986), we found that fixations on the target word were significantly shorter in the identical condition than in the unrelated condition, which did not differ from the semantically related condition; when an orthographically similar preview had been initially present in the sentence, fixations were shorter than when a semantically unrelated preview had been present. Thus, the present experiment replicates the earlier data reported by Rayner et al. (Canadian Journal of Psychology, 40, 473–483, 1986), indicating evidence for an orthographic preview benefit but a lack of semantic preview benefit in reading English.