Lexical and Post-Lexical Complexity Effects on Eye Movements in Reading

The current study investigated how a post-lexical complexity manipulation followed by a lexical complexity manipulation affects eye movements during reading. Both manipulations caused disruption in all measures on the manipulated words, but the patterns of spill-over differed. Critically, the effects of the two kinds of manipulations did not interact, and there was no evidence that post-lexical processing difficulty delayed lexical processing on the next word (c.f. Henderson & Ferreira, 1990). This suggests that post-lexical processing of one word and lexical processing of the next can proceed independently and likely in parallel. This finding is consistent with the assumptions of the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009).