Lexical and sublexical influences on eye movements during reading

Abstract

In this paper, we briefly review some recent studies that have clearly demonstrated in importance of lexical factors on eye movements during reading. We introduce the reader to eye-movement recording and explain its importance within the field of experimental psychology as a tool with which we can examine the psychological processes underlying reading. We then provide a summary of (mainly) eye-movement experiments in three areas: reading disappearing text, reading text with transposed letters, and morphological processing of compound words. Throughout the paper our central claim is that processes associated with lexical identification exert a strong and quite immediate effect on eye-movement behaviour during reading.