Processing Information During Regressions: An Application of the Reverse Boundary-Change Paradigm.

2018

Although 10-15% of eye-movements during reading are regressions, we still know little about the information that is processed during regressive episodes. Here, we report an eye-movement study that uses what we call the "reverse boundary change technique" to examine the processing of lexical-semantic information during regressions, and to establish the role of this information during recovery from processing difficulty. In the critical condition of the experiment, an initially implausible sentence (e.g. "There was an old house that John had ridden when he was a boy.") was rendered plausible by changing a context word ("house") to a lexical neighbour ("horse") using a gaze-contingent display …