Semantic codes are not used in integrating information across eye fixations in reading: Evidence from fluent Spanish-English bilinguals

The question of whether meaning can be extracted from unidentified parafove al words was examined using fluent Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experimen t 1, subjects fixated on a central cross, and a preview word was presented to the right of fixation in parafoveal vision. During the saccade to the pa rafoveal preview word, the preview was replaced by the target word, which t he subject was required to name. In Experiment 2, subjects read sentences c ontaining the target word, and, as in the naming task, a preview word was r eplaced by the target word when the subject's saccade crossed a boundary lo cation. In both experiments, preview words were identical to the target wor d, translations, orthographic controls for the translations, or unrelated w ords in the opposite language. In both experiments, the preview benefit fro m the translation conditions was no greater than would be predicted by the orthographic similarity of the preview to the target. Hence, the data indic ated that subjects obtained no useful semantic information from words seen parafoveally that enabled them to identify them more quickly on the subsequ ent fixation.