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In prevailing approaches to human sentence comprehension, the outcome of the word recognition process is assumed to be a categorical representation with no residual uncertainty. Yet perception is inevitably uncertain, and a system making optimal use of available information might retain this uncertainty and interactively recruit grammatical analysis and subsequent perceptual input to help resolve it. To test for the possibility of such an interaction, we tracked readers' eye movements as they read sentences constructed to vary in (i) whether an early word had near neighbors of a different grammatical category, and (ii) how strongly another word further downstream cohered grammatically with these potential near neighbors. Eye movements indicated that readers maintain uncertain beliefs about previously read word identities, revise these beliefs on the basis of relative grammatical consistency with subsequent input, and use these changing beliefs to guide saccadic behavior in ways consistent with principles of rational probabilistic inference.

Reading is a highly complex skill that is prerequisite to success in many societies in which a great deal of information is communicated in written form. Since the 1970s, much has been learned about the reading process from research by cognitive psychologists. This book summarizes that important work and puts it into a coherent framework. The book’s central theme is how readers go about extracting information from the printed page and comprehending the text. Like its predecessor, this thoroughly updated 2nd Edition encompasses all aspects of the psychology of reading with chapters on writing systems, word recognition, the work of the eyes during reading, inner speech, sentence processing, discourse processing, learning to read, dyslexia, individual differences and speed reading. Psychology of Reading, 2 nd Edition , is essential reading for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in cognitive psychology and could be used as a core textbook on courses on the psychology of reading and related topics. In addition, the clear writing style makes the book accessible to people without a background in psychology but who have a personal or professional interest in the process of reading. Keith Rayner is the Atkinson Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego and Emeritus Distinguished University Professor at the University of Massachusetts.　 He has published widely on topics related to reading, eye movements, and language processing. Alexander Pollatsek is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.　 His primary research interests are in reading, word recognition, scene perception, and driving behavior.　 He has published widely in each area. Jane Ashby is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Central Michigan University. Her primary interests are in skilled reading, phonological processing, dyslexia, and reading development. Charles Clifton, Jr is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.　 He is primarily interested in psycholinguistics and has published numerous papers dealing with linguistic processing, parsing, and syntactic ambiguity. Preface. Part 1. Background Information. 1. Introduction and Preliminary Information. 2. Writing Systems. 3. Word Perception I: Some Basic Issues and Methods. Part 2. Skilled Reading of Text. 4. The Work of the Eyes. 5. Word Perception II: Word Identification in Text. 6. A Model of Eye Movements in Reading. Part 3. Understanding Text. 7. Inner Speech. 8. Words and Sentences. 9. Comprehension of Discourse. Part 4. Beginning Reading, Reading Disability, Individual Differences. 10. Stages of Reading Development. 11. Learning to Read. 12. Reading Disorders. 13. Speed Reading, Proofreading, and Individual Differences. 14. Overview. \"I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of this book. It’s written by some of the very best-known and respected researchers in the field who, to a very large degree, have defined the field itself. In short, reading research would not have been the same without these authors, and to the present day they’re still amongst the most prominent scholars in the world.\" -Steven Frisson, Ph.D., University of Birmingham, UK \"I absolutely loved reading this book. The level of detail and analysis provided in several of the chapters was exceptional. In fact, given the attention to detail, and the continual use of presenting data followed by argument/criticism to build a position, results in a book that will be valuable at many levels.\" -Edward O’Brien, Ph.D., University of New Hampshire, US \"The original Psychology of Reading by Rayner and Pollatsek - of which this current book is a thoroughly revised and updated version - has often been described as a seminal book. Only too frequently this term is used to describe books which have received considerable attention in the field but in hindsight fail to meet the criterion for using that specific, powerful epithet . . . The current book is a rightful heir to the throne of the [first edition].\" -Denis Drieghe, Ph.D., University of Southampton, UK

The E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al. 1998; 1999) provides a theoretical framework for understanding how word identification, visual processing, attention, and oculomotor control jointly determine when and where the eyes move during reading. In this article, we first review what is known about eye movements during reading. Then we provide an updated version of the model (E-Z Reader 7) and describe how it accounts for basic findings about eye movement control in reading. We then review several alternative models of eye movement control in reading, discussing both their core assumptions and their theoretical scope. On the basis of this discussion, we conclude that E-Z Reader provides the most comprehensive account of eye movement control during reading. Finally, we provide a brief overview of what is known about the neural systems that support the various components of reading, and suggest how the cognitive constructs of our model might map onto this neural architecture.

Previous research has demonstrated that readers use word length and word boundary information in targeting saccades into upcoming words while reading. Previous studies have also revealed that the initial landing positions for fixations on words are affected by parafoveal processing. In the present study, we examined the effects of word length and orthographic legality on targeting saccades into parafoveal words. Long (8–9 letters) and short (4–5 letters) target words, which were matched on lexical frequency and initial letter trigram, were paired and embedded into identical sentence frames. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975 ) was used to manipulate the parafoveal information available to the reader before direct fixation on the target word. The parafoveal preview was either identical to the target word or was a visually similar nonword. The nonword previews contained orthographically legal or orthographically illegal initial letters. The results showed that orthographic preprocessing of the word to the right of fixation affected eye movement targeting, regardless of word length. Additionally, the lexical status of an upcoming saccade target in the parafovea generally did not influence preprocessing.

The amount of time viewers could process a scene during eye fixations was varied by a mask that appeared at a certain point in each eye fixation. The scene did not reappear until the viewer made an eye movement. The main finding in the studies was that in order to normally process a scene, viewers needed to see the scene for at least 150 ms during each eye fixation. This result is surprising because viewers can extract the gist of a scene from a brief 40- to 100-ms exposure. It also stands in marked contrast to reading, as readers need only to view the words in the text for 50 to 60 ms to read normally. Thus, although the same neural mechanisms control eye movements in scene perception and reading, the cognitive processes associated with each task drive processing in different ways.

Recent evidence suggests that, compared with hearing people, deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli viewed in the parafovea and periphery. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to preprocess upcoming words and decide where to look next. In the study reported here, we investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading by comparing the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less-skilled readers with the perceptual span of skilled hearing readers. Compared with hearing readers, the two groups of deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected given their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during complex cognitive tasks, such as reading.

Previous research has examined parafoveal processing during silent reading, but little is known about the role of these processes in oral reading. Given that masking parafoveal information slows down silent reading, we asked whether a similar effect also occurs in oral reading. To investigate the role of parafoveal processing in silent and oral reading, we manipulated the parafoveal information available to readers by changing the size of a gaze-contingent moving window. Participants read silently and orally in a one-word window and a three-word window condition as we monitored their eye movements. The lack of parafoveal information slowed reading speed in both oral and silent reading. However, the effects of parafoveal information were larger in silent reading than in oral reading, because of different effects of preview information on both when the eyes move and how often. Parafoveal information benefitted silent reading for faster readers more than for slower readers.

Eye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing target words that varied in terms of word frequency and character frequency. There was an effect of word frequency on fixation times on a target word and it was comparable in size to that typically found with readers of English. Furthermore, character frequency also influenced fixation time on the target word. The effect of the initial character in two character words was more pronounced than that of the second character. However, word frequency modulated the effect of character frequency. The effect of character frequency was attenuated with high frequency target words while it was quite apparent with low frequency target words.

While our frequent saccades allow us to sample the complex visual environment in a highly efficient manner, they also raise certain challenges for interpreting and acting upon visual input. In the present, selective review, we discuss key findings from the domains of cognitive psychology, visual perception, and neuroscience concerning two such challenges: (1) maintaining the phenomenal experience of visual stability despite our rapidly shifting gaze, and (2) integrating visual information across discrete fixations. In the first two sections of the article, we focus primarily on behavioral findings. Next, we examine the possibility that a neural phenomenon known as predictive remapping may provide an explanation for aspects of transsaccadic processing. In this section of the article, we delineate and critically evaluate multiple proposals about the potential role of predictive remapping in light of both theoretical principles and empirical findings.