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Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct

There is a growing understanding that the parafoveal preview effect during reading may represent a combination of preview benefits and preview costs due to interference from parafoveal masks. It has been suggested that visually degrading the parafoveal masks may reduce their costs, but adult readers...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Vasilev, Martin R, Yates, Mark, Prueitt, Ethan, Slattery, Timothy J
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8044602/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32988313
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820959661
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author Vasilev, Martin R
Yates, Mark
Prueitt, Ethan
Slattery, Timothy J
author_facet Vasilev, Martin R
Yates, Mark
Prueitt, Ethan
Slattery, Timothy J
author_sort Vasilev, Martin R
collection PubMed
description There is a growing understanding that the parafoveal preview effect during reading may represent a combination of preview benefits and preview costs due to interference from parafoveal masks. It has been suggested that visually degrading the parafoveal masks may reduce their costs, but adult readers were later shown to be highly sensitive to degraded display changes. Four experiments examined how preview benefits and preview costs are influenced by the perception of distinct parafoveal degradation at the target word location. Participants read sentences with four preview types (identity, orthographic, phonological, and letter-mask preview) and two levels of visual degradation (0% vs. 20%). The distinctiveness of the target word degradation was either eliminated by degrading all words in the sentence (Experiments 1a–2a) or remained present, as in previous research (Experiments 1b–2b). Degrading the letter masks resulted in a reduction in preview costs, but only when all words in the sentence were degraded. When degradation at the target word location was perceptually distinct, it induced costs of its own, even for orthographically and phonologically related previews. These results confirm previous reports that traditional parafoveal masks introduce preview costs that overestimate the size of the true benefit. However, they also show that parafoveal degradation has the unintended consequence of introducing additional costs when participants are aware of distinct degradation on the target word. Parafoveal degradation appears to be easily perceived and may temporarily orient attention away from the reading task, thus delaying word processing.
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spelling pubmed-80446022021-04-22 Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct Vasilev, Martin R Yates, Mark Prueitt, Ethan Slattery, Timothy J Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) Original Articles There is a growing understanding that the parafoveal preview effect during reading may represent a combination of preview benefits and preview costs due to interference from parafoveal masks. It has been suggested that visually degrading the parafoveal masks may reduce their costs, but adult readers were later shown to be highly sensitive to degraded display changes. Four experiments examined how preview benefits and preview costs are influenced by the perception of distinct parafoveal degradation at the target word location. Participants read sentences with four preview types (identity, orthographic, phonological, and letter-mask preview) and two levels of visual degradation (0% vs. 20%). The distinctiveness of the target word degradation was either eliminated by degrading all words in the sentence (Experiments 1a–2a) or remained present, as in previous research (Experiments 1b–2b). Degrading the letter masks resulted in a reduction in preview costs, but only when all words in the sentence were degraded. When degradation at the target word location was perceptually distinct, it induced costs of its own, even for orthographically and phonologically related previews. These results confirm previous reports that traditional parafoveal masks introduce preview costs that overestimate the size of the true benefit. However, they also show that parafoveal degradation has the unintended consequence of introducing additional costs when participants are aware of distinct degradation on the target word. Parafoveal degradation appears to be easily perceived and may temporarily orient attention away from the reading task, thus delaying word processing. SAGE Publications 2020-09-28 2021-02 /pmc/articles/PMC8044602/ /pubmed/32988313 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820959661 Text en © Experimental Psychology Society 2020 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Articles
Vasilev, Martin R
Yates, Mark
Prueitt, Ethan
Slattery, Timothy J
Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct
title Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct
title_full Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct
title_fullStr Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct
title_full_unstemmed Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct
title_short Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct
title_sort parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8044602/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32988313
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820959661
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