The Influence of Number of Syllables on Word Skipping during Reading Revisited

Denis Drieghe 1 , Aaron Veldre 2 , Gemma Fitzsimmons 1 , Jane Ashby 3 & Sally Andrews 2

1 University of Southampton, UK; 2 University of Sydney, Australia; 3 Central Michigan University, U.S.A.

During reading about one out of three words does not receive a direct fixation during first pass. An important research question concerns both the quantity and the nature of parafoveal processing the word has received when the system decides whether or not to skip the word. Fitzsimmons and Drieghe (2011) showed that a monosyllabic word was skipped more often than a disyllabic word during reading, indicating that syllabic structure was extracted from the parafovea early enough to influence word skipping. In a large-scale replication of this study in which we additionally measured the reading and spelling abilities of the participants, the effect of number of syllables on word skipping was not significant. Moreover, a Bayesian analysis indicates strong evidence for the absence of this effect. Our individual differences measures replicate previous observations showing that spelling ability uniquely predicts word skipping such that better spellers skip more often. These findings indicate that high quality lexical representations afford the system to reach an advanced stage in the word recognition process of the parafoveal word early enough to influence the decision whether or not to skip the word but that number of syllables does not feature in this decision.