Spelling-sound regularity effects on eye fixations in reading

An interaction of word frequency and word regularity has typically been obs erved in naming and lexical decision experiments in which, in addition to a n overall effect of word frequency, responses to low-frequency exception wo rds are slower than those to low-frequency regular words, while no such dif ference occurs with high-frequency words. The only eye movement study to ex amine this effect in reading (Inhoff & Topolski, 1994) reported only transi ent effects of regularity. In the present experiment, we examined the frequ ency x regularity interaction using different stimuli than these of Inhoff and Topolski and also varied the parafoveal preview of the target word prio r to fixation. When the preview was valid, the frequency x regularity inter action appeared. However, with an invalid preview, the effect of regularity disappeared. The results suggest that the activation of phonological codes is a very early component of reading.