SCANNING PATTERNS ON INDIVIDUAL WORDS DURING THE COMPREHENSION OF SENTENCES

What determines the guidance of the eye during word recognition? The experiments reported here investigate the possibility that the informativeness of a specific region within a word can determine the duration of fixation and can also attract an eye fixation. In Experiment 1 words containing identifying information either towards the beginning or towards the end were displayed asymmetrically around the point of fixation, so that the reader was initially presented with either the informative or non-informative zone. Fixations upon the informative zones of words were longer only when those zones were at the beginnings of words; saccades away from the ends of words were longer than those away from the beginnings, and this trend was emphasised when the informative zone was at the beginning. In Experiment 2 the battery of words was presented in sentences which were to be comprehended, and fixation patterns around the informative regions were recorded. More attention was again given to the informative zones of words, and the locations of the fixations within words tended to be upon the informative zones. The results of these experiments lend good support to the hypothesis of immediate lexical control over fixation behaviour, and some support to the view that parafoveal information can be useful in guiding the reader's eyes to important parts of text.