Parafoveal processing of linguistic information in Russian skilled readers.

What is it about?

The time course of such higher-level linguistic information as who did what to whom was investigated in a language that marks such relations through letters at the end of the words (case markings). The informational depth of the letters at the end of the words was manipulated as follows: while readers eye fixated on preceding region of interest the final letter of a five letter region was either identical (no change), a different letter that changed the role the word played in the sentence (related) or a consonant that violated phonotactic rules of Russian and resulted in a nonce word (nonword). The cost of the manipulation at the end of the five-letter word n+1 (Experiment 1) was compared to the cost of the manipulation at the end of the five-letter region at the end of a longer word n (Experiment 2). The five letter regions at the end of the currently fixated words were read faster than five-letter words but the letter manipulations slowed readers equally in both word n+1 and word n. The nonce word manipulation was costly in both early and late measures but the related preview manipulation slowed readers only in second-pass measures when compared to the no change identical preview.

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Photo by salvatore ventura on Unsplash

Photo by salvatore ventura on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The project shows that, while low-level orthographic processing can be processed in parallel by skilled readers, it is the language-related, message-level interpretative processing that proceeds serially.

Perspectives