Underwood G, Clews S, Everatt J
Department of Psychology, University of Nottingham, U.K.
Q J Exp Psychol A. 1990 Feb;42(1):39-65. doi: 10.1080/14640749008401207.
Skilled readers' eye movements were recorded as they inspected sentences in preparation for comprehension questions. The sentences were written around target words that had uneven distributions of information, in that the words were predictable, given either the first few letters or the last few letters. Some parts of these words can be described as being more important than others for successful word recognition, and the experiments asked whether inspection patterns reflect the uneven distributions. Four types of ten-letter word were used: words with highly redundant endings (e.g. engagement), with moderately redundant endings (e.g. repatriate), with moderately redundant beginnings (e.g. superstore), and words with informative beginnings and endings (e.g. amalgamate). Redundancy was defined operationally in terms of the number of possible completions of a word given the first few or last few letters. A highly redundant ending is therefore one that occurs frequently and cannot be used to identify the word. Words gaining just one fixation received this fixation nearer to the word's centre than in the case of the first fixation upon words gaining two fixations. The single fixation also had a longer duration, giving support to the notion of a convenient viewing location, which, when achieved, can lead to a net saving in inspection time. In the case of words with redundant endings gaining just one fixation, the fixation was nearer to the beginning of the word than in the case of words with informative endings, and this influence of word type upon the location of the first fixation was interpreted in favour of the parafoveal processing hypothesis of eye guidance during reading.
当熟练的读者为理解问题而检查句子时，他们的眼动被记录下来。这些句子围绕着信息分布不均衡的目标词编写，也就是说，这些词根据开头的几个字母或结尾的几个字母是可预测的。对于成功识别单词而言，这些单词的某些部分可被描述为比其他部分更重要，实验探究了检查模式是否反映了这种不均衡分布。使用了四种类型的十个字母的单词：结尾高度冗余的单词（如engagement）、结尾适度冗余的单词（如repatriate）、开头适度冗余的单词（如superstore）以及开头和结尾都有信息性的单词（如amalgamate）。冗余是根据给定开头或结尾几个字母时单词可能的完成形式数量来操作性定义的。因此，高度冗余的结尾是指频繁出现且不能用于识别单词的结尾。与获得两次注视的单词相比，只获得一次注视的单词，其首次注视点更靠近单词中心。单次注视的持续时间也更长，这支持了存在一个便利注视位置的观点，一旦找到这个位置，就能在检查时间上实现净节省。对于结尾冗余且只获得一次注视的单词，其注视点比结尾有信息性的单词更靠近单词开头，单词类型对首次注视位置的这种影响被解释为支持阅读过程中眼动引导的副中央凹加工假说。
