Attentional Demands on the Processing of Neighbouring Words

In this chapter we describe two eye-tracking experiments that were conducted to investigate how foveal and parafoveal information is used in eye movement control. Characteristics of neighbouring words were manipulated and interference effects resulting from increases in processing difficulty were observed. Findings from these experiments suggest that neighbouring interference effects are bi-directional, with increases in processing difficulty leading to a disruption of both the currently fixated and the next-to-be fixated word. These findings are discussed with reference to current attention-based models of eye movement control and it is suggested that our data offer support to parallel attention-based but not to sequential attention-based models of eye guidance.