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Processing the in the parafovea: are articles skipped automatically?

Bernhard Angele¹, Keith Rayner

¹Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0109, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA.bangele@ucsd.edu

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition

|July 18, 2012

Summary

Readers often skip the definite article "the." This study suggests skipping the word "the" may be an automatic process, driven by its visual appearance rather than its meaning.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Linguistics
Reading Science

Background:

The definite article 'the' is frequently skipped by English readers.
Existing theories suggest word skipping requires lexical processing.
Regular skipping of 'the' raises questions about automatic processing.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether skipping the definite article 'the' is context-dependent or a truly automatic process.
To determine if the orthographic properties of 'the' trigger automatic skipping.
To examine if readers detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal previews of 'the'.

Main Methods:

Utilized the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975).
Presented readers with false parafoveal previews of the definite article 'the'.
Manipulated previews to be correct, nonwords, or infelicitous articles.

Main Results:

Readers frequently skipped infelicitous 'the' previews, indicating reliance on orthographic properties.
Readers often failed to detect syntactic anomalies in the 'the' preview.
Some evidence suggests readers detected anomalies, leading to increased skipping of the preceding word.

Conclusions:

Skipping of the definite article 'the' appears to be largely automatic, driven by its visual form.
Orthographic characteristics of 'the' can override syntactic anomaly detection.
Reading processes for function words like 'the' may differ significantly from content words.