Reading sentences of uniform word length – II: Very rapid adaptation of the preferred saccade length

In the current study we investigated whether readers adjust their preferred saccade length (PSL) during reading on a trial-by-trial basis. The PSL refers to the distance between a saccade launch site and saccade target (i.e., the word center during reading) when participants neither undershoot nor overshoot this target (McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola in Vision Research, 28, 1107-1118, 1988). The tendency for saccades longer or shorter than the PSL to under or overshoot their target is referred to as the range error. Recent research by Cutter, Drieghe, and Liversedge (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2017) has shown that the PSL changes to be shorter when readers are presented with 30 consecutive sentences exclusively made of three-letter words, and longer when presented with 30 consecutive sentences exclusively made of five-letter words. We replicated and extended this work by this time presenting participants with these uniform sentences in an unblocked design. We found that adaptation still occurred across different sentence types despite participants only having one trial to adapt. Our analyses suggested that this effect was driven by the length of the words readers were making saccades away from, rather than the length of the words in the rest of the sentence. We propose an account of the range error in which readers use parafoveal word length information to estimate the length of a saccade between the center of two parafoveal words (termed the Centre-Based Saccade Length) prior to landing on the first of these words.