DETERMINANTS OF PARAFOVEAL PREVIEW BENEFIT IN HIGH AND LOW WORKING-MEMORY CAPACITY READERS - IMPLICATIONS FOR EYE-MOVEMENT CONTROL

The experiment in this article extended studies by A. W. Inhoff and K. Rayner (1986) and J. M. Henderson and F. Ferreira (1990) to determine how the printed frequency of two adjacent words influenced the benefi t of having parafoveal preview of the 2nd word. High- and low-span par ticipants (assessed by M. Daneman and P. A. Carpenter's, 1980, Reading Span Test) were tested to determine whether working memory capacity i nfluenced parafoveal preview benefit. Parafoveal preview benefit was d etermined by an interaction of both words' frequencies in first fixati on and by the 2nd word's frequency in gaze duration. However, readers were generally fixated closer to the beginning of the 2nd word when th e 1st word was low frequency. When the viewing distance confound was m inimized, the prior word's frequency did affect parafoveal preview ben efit. Parafoveal preview benefit did not vary between reading groups. Group distributions of fixation duration provided no evidence for J. M . Henderson and F. Ferreira's fixation cutoff model.