Processing of parafoveally presented words: An fMRI study

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Abstract

The present fMRI study investigated neural correlates of parafoveal preprocessing during reading and the type of information that is accessible from the upcoming - not yet fixated - word. Participants performed a lexical decision flanker task while the constraints imposed by the first three letters (the initial trigram) of parafoveally presented words were controlled. Behavioral results evidenced that the amount of information extracted from parafoveal stimuli, was affected by the difficulty of the foveal stimulus. Easy to process foveal stimuli (i.e., high frequency nouns) allowed parafoveal information to be extracted up to the lexical level. Conversely, when foveal stimuli were difficult to process (orthographically legal nonwords) only constraining trigrams modulated the task performance. Neuroimaging findings showed no effects of lexicality (i.e., difference between words and pseudowords) in the parafovea independently from the difficulty of the foveal stimulus. The constraints imposed by the initial trigrams, however, modulated the hemodynamic response in the left supramarginal gyrus. We interpreted the supramarginal activation as reflecting sublexical (phonological) processes. The missing parafoveal lexicality effect was discussed in relation to findings of experiments which observed effects of parafoveal semantic congruency on electrophysiological correlates.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-9
Number of pages9
JournalNeuroImage
Volume184
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2019

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • Adult
  • Brain/physiology
  • Brain Mapping
  • Female
  • Fixation, Ocular
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Male
  • Pattern Recognition, Visual/physiology
  • Reaction Time
  • Reading
  • Young Adult

Fields of Science and Technology Classification 2012

  • 501 Psychology
  • 107 Other Natural Sciences

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