What determines the eyes’ landing position in words?

The place at which the eyes first fixate in a word during continuous reading, called thepreferred landing position(PLP), is usually located halfway between the beginning and the middle of the word. To propose a mechanism that might account for the off-center location of the PLP, six eye movement experiments were conducted using a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and a stimulus bisection task (Experiments 2–6). The type of stimulus—linguistic (words and nonwords) versus nonlinguistic (strings of hashes, dotted lines, and solid lines)—and the stimulus presentation side (left vs. right) were manipulated. The results showed that (1) stimulus discreteness versus continuousness is an important factor in saccade computation and (2) PLP asymmetry can be explained in terms of attentional and/or oculomotor processes.

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