A co-registration investigation of inter-word spacing and parafoveal preview: Eye movements and fixation-related potentials

PLoS One. 2019 Dec 18;14(12):e0225819. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225819. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Participants' eye movements (EMs) and EEG signal were simultaneously recorded to examine foveal and parafoveal processing during sentence reading. All the words in the sentence were manipulated for inter-word spacing (intact spaces vs. spaces replaced by a random letter) and parafoveal preview (identical preview vs. random letter string preview). We observed disruption for unspaced text and invalid preview conditions in both EMs and fixation-related potentials (FRPs). Unspaced and invalid preview conditions received longer reading times than spaced and valid preview conditions. In addition, the FRP data showed that unspaced previews disrupted reading in earlier time windows of analysis, compared to string preview conditions. Moreover, the effect of parafoveal preview was greater for spaced relative to unspaced conditions, in both EMs and FRPs. These findings replicate well-established preview effects, provide novel insight into the neural correlates of reading with and without inter-word spacing and suggest that spatial selection precedes lexical processing.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Attention
  • Female
  • Fixation, Ocular / physiology*
  • Healthy Volunteers
  • Humans
  • Macula Lutea / physiology
  • Male
  • Pattern Recognition, Visual / physiology*
  • Reading*
  • Time Factors
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 31571122 awarded to CZ, grant number 31800920 awarded to MZ; http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/); the China Scholarship Council (CSC no. 201608120039 awarded to CZ; CSC no. 201608120033 awarded to MZ; https://www.csc.edu.cn/); the Special Program of Talents Development for Excellent Youth Scholars in Tianjin (https://www.tjrc.gov.cn/Index.aspx) awarded to CZ; the Creative Research Groups of Excellent Young Scholars in Tianjin Normal University (grant number 52WZ1702; http://kxjs.tjnu.edu.cn) awarded to CZ; the Science Council of University of Jyväskylä (665 I 13.00.0 4.01. I 201.6; https://www.jyu.fi/hallinto/neuvostot/tiedeneuvosto/liikkuvuusrahoitus) awarded to OL; the Economic and Social Research Council grant (ES/R003386/1; https://esrc.ukri.org/) awarded to SPL; and postgraduate student funding awarded to FD by the University of Southampton (https://www.southampton.ac.uk/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.