Initial Fixation Location Effects in Reading Hebrew Words

Three experiments examined initial fixation position effects for Hebrew readers. In English, the preferred viewing location (where readers' eyes initially land in a word) is to the left of the centre of words, and words presented in isolation are identified more easily when the initial fixation point is near the optimal viewing location (close to the centre of the word). In Experiment 1, we found that the preferred viewing location for Hebrew readers was to the right of the centre of words and that it was not modulated by inflectional morphological constraints. However, the results from the word identification task in Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that derivational morphological constraints do modulate the optimal viewing location.