Predicting the unpredicted: No relationship between ‘the’-skipping and response inhibition.

Abstract

Skilled readers are likely to skip short, high-frequency words such as “the” in English. When deciding to skip such words, readers fail to take into account the preceding sentence context and will frequently skip an upcoming word that looks like “the” even if it is incompatible with the context, i.e. infelicitous (Angele & Rayner, 2013). It is not clear if (1) this failure to identify a potential problem with a sentence stems from an inability to access the information about the sentence context at the point of making the skipping decision or (2) a problem in selecting the appropriate information in order to make the decision. The latter case resembles response inhibition tests where participants need to make a decision in the presence of incongruent stimuli. If skipping and response inhibition depend on the same cognitive processes, we should find a relationship between a participant’s performance on response inhibition tests and the rate at which they skip words with an infelicitous gaze-contingent preview. We report an experiment testing this hypothesis in which there was no evidence for a relationship between the congruency effect in response inhibition tests and the rate of skipping infelicitous previews in a sentence reading task.