Readers Use Word Length Information to Determine Word Order

Abstract

It is assumed by the OB1-reader model that activated words are flexibly associated with spatial locations. Supporting this notion, recent studies show that readers can confuse the order of words. As word position coding is assumed to rely, among other things, on low-level visual cues, OB1 predicts that it must be harder to determine the order of words when these are of equal length, and consequently, that it is more difficult to read uniform word length sentences. Here we review recent evidence, obtained by our peers, in line with this prediction.We additionally report an analysis of eye-movement data from the GECO corpus, replicating the phenomenon in a natural reading setting, and an experiment revealing a negative impact of length uniformity in a grammatical decision task. By virtue of the spatiotopic sentence-level representation, OB1-reader is currently the only model of reading to account for these behaviors.