EVIDENCE FOR THE USE OF PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS DURING TRANSSACCADIC WORD RECOGNITION

The authors explored the role of phonological representations in the integration of lexical information across saccadic eye movements. Study participants executed a saccade to a preview letter string that was presented extrafoveally. In Experiment 1, the preview string was replaced by a target string during the saccade, and the participants performed a lexical decision. Targets with phonologically regular initial trigrams benefited more from a preview than did targets with irregular initial trigrams. In Experiment 2, words with regularly pronounced initial trigrams were more likely to be correctly identified from the preview alone. In Experiment 3, participants were more likely to detect a change across a saccade from regular to irregular initial trigrams than from irregular to regular trigrams. The results suggest that phonological representations are activated from an extrafoveal preview and that this phonological information can be integrated with foveal information following a saccade.