Focus takes time: structural effects on reading

Abstract

Previous eye-tracking work has yielded inconsistent evidence regarding whether readers spend more or less time encoding focused information compared with information that is not focused. We report the results of an eye-tracking experiment that used syntactic structure to manipulate whether a target word was linguistically defocused, neutral, or focused, while controlling for possible oculomotor differences across conditions. As the structure of the sentence made the target word increasingly more focused, reading times systematically increased. We propose that the longer reading times for linguistically focused words reflect deeper encoding, which explains previous findings showing that readers have better subsequent memory for focused versus defocused information.