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Skipping syntactically illegal the previews: The role of predictability
Matthew J Abbott1, Bernhard Angele2, Y Danbi Ahn1
1Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego.
Summary
Readers often skip predictable words, even when context suggests they should not. This word skipping behavior persists even with parafoveal preview, impacting reading comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Reading Science
Background:
- Readers frequently skip short, predictable words during reading.
- Parafoveal vision plays a role in processing upcoming words, but its influence on skipping predictable words is not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether contextual constraint influences word skipping behavior.
- To determine if readers skip predictable words even when they are syntactically anomalous and presented as parafoveal previews.
Main Methods:
- Manipulated target word predictability in reading experiments.
- Assessed word skipping behavior based on contextual constraint and parafoveal information.
- Simulated experimental results using the E-Z Reader 10 model.
Main Results:
- Readers skipped predictable words more often than unpredictable words.
- The article 'the' was frequently skipped when contextually inappropriate.
- Word skipping occurred even when parafoveal previews conflicted visually and syntactically with predictions.
Conclusions:
- Contextual predictability significantly influences word skipping behavior.
- Readers may skip predictable words even when parafoveal information suggests otherwise.
- The E-Z Reader 10 model can simulate these findings by dissociating cloze probability from parafoveal input.
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