Parafoveal-on-foveal effects in normal reading.

A corpus of eye movement data derived from 10 English and 10 French participants, each reading about 50,000 words, was examined for evidence that properties of a word in parafoveal vision have an immediate effect on foveal inspection time. When inspecting a short word, there is evidence that the lexical frequency of an adjacent word affects processing time. When inspecting a long word, there are small effects of lexical frequency, but larger effects of initial-letter constraint and orthographic familiarity. Interactions of this kind are incompatible with models of reading which appeal to the operation of a serial attention switch.