Initial fixation location effects in reading Hebrew words

Three experiments examined initial fixation position effects for Hebrew rea ders. In English, the preferred viewing location (where readers' eyes initi ally land in a word) is to the left of the centre of words, and words prese nted in isolation are identified more easily when the initial fixation poin t is near the optimal viewing location (close to the centre of the word). I n Experiment I, we found that the preferred viewing location for Hebrew rea ders was to the right of the centre of words and that it was not modulated by inflectional morphological constraints. However, the results from the wo rd identification task in Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that derivational m orphological constraints do modulate the optimal viewing location.