Co-registration of eye movements and brain potentials to investigate processes underlying reading

Abstract

The present thesis reports three experiments conducted simultaneously recording eye movements (EMs) and fixation-related potentials (FRPs) to examine parafoveal and foveal processing during silent reading of sentences. Experiment 1 examined the influence of preview quality and target word frequency on reading. Experiment 2 investigated the influence that different types of parafoveal previews as well as target word frequency exert on processing. Experiment 3 explored the effects of parafoveal inter-word spacing and parafoveal preview when a word is currently fixated. Overall, all three experiments indicated that visual and orthographic properties of an upcoming word are pre-processed in the parafovea, and that this pre-processing influences processing during fixations on pretarget and target words. No evidence of lexical processing of a word in parafovea was obtained neither in Experiment 1 nor in Experiment 2. Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 also demonstrated the added value of the FRP data in showing qualitative differences in relation to effects that appear as quantitatively similar in EM measures. In addition, all three experiments indicated that neural correlates associated with processing during natural reading might be different to those associated with less natural reading conditions. The thesis also considers a number of methodological implementations and implications of coregistration methodology for future experiments aiming to investigate reading.

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