Is emotional content obtained from parafoveal words during reading? An eye movement analysis.

An eye-movement-contingent display change technique was employed to study whether adult readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words during reading. Three types of parafoveal preview conditions were contrasted: an emotional word, a neutral word, and an identical word condition. To have a maximally effective parafoveal manipulation, high-arousal emotional words (sex- and threat-related and curse words) were used as parafoveal previews. Readers' eye fixation patterns around the target word revealed no evidence for parafoveal semantic processing. Furthermore, the pupil size showed no signs for an emotional response triggered by an emotional word previewed parafoveally. These results are consistent with the view that, as a rule, only the fixated word is processed to a semantic level during reading.