Morpho-syntactico-semantic parafoveal processing: Eye-tracking evidence from word n + 1 and word n in Russian

Two experiments compared morpho-syntactico-semantic parafoveal processing of five-letter words n + 1 (Experiment 1) with five-letter regions at the end of longer words n (Experiment 2), understudied cross-linguistically. Earlier boundary-change studies showed that subject/object case assignment in Russian can be extracted from a parafoveally presented but never directly fixated letter when the related preview is the most expected continuation (Stoops & Christianson, 2017, 2019). This study reversed the syntactic expectations for the identical and related previews (Cloze ratings: 94% grammatical identical object vs. 0% ungrammatical related subject). The related preview was read more slowly than the no-change preview in the later measures: go-past for the words n + 1 and n, according to both frequentist and Bayesian analyses. Additionally, the study clarifies the augmented allocation of attention hypothesis-skilled readers process parafoveally visible parts of a longer word faster than length-controlled upcoming word n + 1, yet the message-level contextual linguistic information affected the target words n and n + 1 similarly. The most intriguing finding is the delayed morpho-syntactico-semantic effect: even though the morphologically ungrammatical marking was parafoveally available, the syntactic fit only affected delayed processing, manifested as increased reading of previous text. More cross-linguistic work is needed to understand the role of higher level linguistic information beyond the predictability of individual lexical items on parafoveal processing during reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).