Foveal processing difficulty does not modulate non-foveal orthographic influences on fixation positions

Abstract

Two experiments show that eye fixations land nearer to the beginning of misspelled than correctly spelled beginning words during sentence reading. The effect holds regardless of whether the previous word is easy (high frequency) or difficult (low frequency) to process. In Experiment 1, the misspelled words were directly fixated. In Experiment 2, a saccade contingent change technique was used such that the words were always correctly spelled once they were fixated. The results show that non-foveal orthography influences where words are first fixated regardless of foveal processing load.