Effects of Stimulus Quality and Word Frequency during Sentence Reading.

Consistent evidence both in the eye movement (EM) and event-related potential literatures has demonstrated that the quality of the stimulus in the fovea is essential for efficient reading. Much more limited is the evidence for an effect of quality while the stimulus is in the parafovea. In addition, while EM studies report robust foveal effects of word frequency, these effects are not observed when fixation-related potentials (FRPs) are recorded during sentence reading. In the present experiment, we simultaneously recorded participants' EMs and FRPs while they read sentences for comprehension. A target word was embedded in each sentence and manipulated for parafoveal stimulus quality (degraded vs. non-degraded preview) and foveal word frequency (high vs. low frequency target word). Initial analyses on first-pass reading times and amplitudes of FRP components showed effects of parafoveal and foveal stimulus quality in both the EM and FRP data, with foveal effects of word frequency in the EM data only. Deconvolution analyses of these data are currently underway and these analyses will disentangle FRP effects uniquely associated with specific, separate fixations on the pre-target and target words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]