Parafoveal pre-processing in children reading English: The importance of external letters
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BRIEF REPORT
Parafoveal pre-processing in children reading English: The importance of external letters Sara V. Milledge 1
&
Hazel I. Blythe 2 & Simon P. Liversedge 3
Accepted: 29 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Although previous research has demonstrated that for adults external letters of words are more important than internal letters for lexical processing during reading, no comparable research has been conducted with children. This experiment explored, using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, whether parafoveal pre-processing in English is more affected by the manipulation of external letters or internal letters, and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Six previews were generated: identity (e.g., monkey); external letter manipulations where either the beginning three letters of the word were substituted (e.g., rackey) or the last three letters of the word were substituted (e.g., monhig); internal letter manipulations; e.g., machey, mochiy); and an unrelated control condition (e.g., rachig). Results indicate that both adults and children undertook pre-processing of words in their entirety in the parafovea, and that the manipulation of external letters in preview was more harmful to participants’ parafoveal pre-processing than internal letters. The data also suggest developmental change in the time course of pre-processing, with children’s pre-processing delayed compared to that of adults. These results not only provide further evidence for the importance of external letters to parafoveal processing and lexical identification for adults, but also demonstrate that such findings can be extended to children. Keywords Reading . Parafoveal pre-processing . Children . English . Internal letters . External letters
Introduction In recent years a number of studies have been reported that examine eye-movement behaviour during silent sentence reading in children compared to adults (see Blythe & Joseph, 2011, and Blythe, 2014, for reviews); however, this research has predominantly focused on foveal reading processes. That is, examining word-identification processes for the directly fixated word (n). In contrast, there is a paucity of research that directly compares parafoveal reading processes in adults and children, examining how identification of the upcoming word (n+1) occurs and which factors can affect such processing.
* Sara V. Milledge [email protected] 1
University of Southampton, Building 44, Highfield Campus SO17 1BJ, UK
2
Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
3
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
The use of eye-movement recordings in order to study reading is a dominant research method for skilled adults, providing a moment-to-moment index of the reader’s cognitive processing of text (e.g., Rayner, 2009). Critically, such research has shown that, during a fixation on n, adults both process n and also begin to pre-process n+1. Subsequently, when n+1 is directly fixated, reading times are faster due to the pre-proces
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