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Karine Doré, Cécile Beauvillain
An experiment is reported examining the way in which 5- and 7 -letter words, identifiable by information at their beginning or end, are inspected. Eye movements were recorded when reading isolated words displayed first in the parafovea. In order to test the weight of initial and ending letters, the relative intensity of beginning letters was manipulated by keeping their sum constant. Three relative-intensity conditions were used; the luminance of the initial letters relative to that of the whole-word configuration was either 80 %, 20% or 50 % (isoluminance) . Two findings are reported : 1 1 the informativeness of initial letters influences the landing position in word, 2 1 the gaze duration is affected by the position of pertinent information within words. For long words, redundant beginning and informative ending words received a longer gaze (and the probability of refixating the word was higher) than informative-beginning and redundant-ending words. We conclude that the distribution of information within words influences the way in which words are read.
