Understanding the Eye‐Brain Interface During Reading: Connecting Word Skipping and Comprehension Using Behavior‐Contingent Fixation‐Related Potentials

Readers frequently skip words, often when they are expected, but sometimes even when they are contextually incompatible (e.g., the high frequency article the). Therefore, some skipping behaviors may be automatic (e.g., based on familiarity or length) rather than based on thorough word identification, raising the question of how related word skipping behavior is to comprehension of the meaning of the text. To test this question, we coregistered eye tracking and EEG recordings and measured fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs). We time-locked FRPs to the pretarget word before a three-letter target word embedded in a high constraint sentence, and compared the neural activity between different preview conditions when the target word was subsequently either skipped or fixated (i.e., behavior-contingent analysis). We used a gaze-contingent display change to manipulate the parafoveal word to be (1) expected, (2) an anomalous orthographic neighbor of the expected word, or (3) an anomalous instance of the, which changed to the expected word during the skip or fixate saccade. We found a parafoveal N400 (pN400) effect to the anomalous neighbor compared to the expected preview that only occurred when the target was skipped, but not when it was fixated. There was also a pN400 effect for the anomalous the compared to the expected word that was not skipping-contingent. This pattern demonstrates that word skipping is associated with the depth of parafoveal linguistic processing, but these decisions are initiated prior to complete identification and contextual integration processes, which continue after the eyes have moved on.