In this dissertation I address how we coordinate perceptual (visual) and linguistic processing to perform common tasks like speak about our environment or read a text. This is important because perception provides the input the linguistic system requires to activate relevant internal representations. Using eye tracking and gaze- contingent display change paradigms I assessed preview benefit--facilitated processing of a target when an item previously in its location (the preview) was related compared to unrelated. Preview benefit indexes the success of visual-linguistic coordination, indicating that one had (1) obtained information from an item before fixating it and (2) used that information to speed processing, upon fixation. In Studies 1 (Schotter, Jia, Ferreira & Rayner, under review) and 2 (Schotter, Ferreira & Rayner, 2013), a target object was revealed when the speaker fixated it; before, it was masked and then a preview object (representing the same or a different concept as the target) appeared briefly in its location. Processing of the target was unaffected by the timing of the preview or subjects' awareness of it (Study 1), suggesting that speakers access information from upcoming objects opportunistically (i.e., whenever the preview is available). Furthermore, preview benefit was provided by previews in to-be-named locations but not by previews in to-be-ignored locations (Study 2), suggesting that speakers do not access information from non-fixated objects indiscriminately. In Study 3 (Schotter, under revision), I investigated how the linguistic system uses this information to address a debate over whether semantic information is obtained from upcoming words. Research in German and Chinese has found semantic preview benefit but research in English has not. This may be due to the deep orthography of English delaying semantic access due to more effortful phonological decoding. Supporting this idea, semantic preview benefit occurred in English when the preview and target were synonyms but not when they were associatively related, possibly because associated words have looser connections in semantic networks than synonyms. Together, these studies imply that we achieve efficient reading and speaking via sophisticated (opportunistic but not indiscriminate) access of visual information in service of the linguistic system to activate appropriate mental representations

Readers rely on sentence context to generate predictions about the upcoming words so that processing of their visual forms is less necessary. Consequently, processing of an orthographic neighbor of a strongly predicted word is facilitated by that context (as indicated by a reduced N400 ERP amplitude), regardless of the perceived item’s lexicality (i.e., whether it is a real word or a pseudoword). The current study investigated whether lexicality becomes important when the sentence context is less helpful in generating predictions. Our findings indicate that in weakly constraining sentences, the lexical status of a word impacts word recognition processes as indicated by a left anterior negativity, suggesting that readers rely on sublexical properties of words in the absence of strong expectations.

The debate about how attention is allocated during readinghas been framed in as: Either attention is allocated in a strictlyserial manner, to support the identification of one word at atime, or it is allocated as a gradient, to support the concurrentprocessing of multiple words. The first part of this article re-views reading models to examine the feasibility of both posi-tions. Although word-identification and sentence-processingmodels assume that words are identified serially to incremen-tally build larger units of representation, discourse-processingmodel allow several propositions to be co-active in workingmemory. The remainder of this article then describes an in-stance-based model of word identification, Über-Reader, andsimulations comparing the identification of single words andword pairs. These simulations indicate that, although wordpairs can be identified, accurate identification is restricted toshort high-frequency words due to the computational de-mands of both memory retrieval and limited visual acuity.

Readers use predictions about upcoming words to facilitate word recognition, particularly when the visual input is degraded(e.g., viewed in parafoveal vision; Staub & Goddard, 2019) or when the reader has poor lexical quality (Hersch & Andrews,2012). To test how these factors interact participants, who were assessed for spelling ability, made a two-alternative forced-choice regarding one letter, which differentiated the target from an orthographic neighbor (e.g., worm was followed byW or D?). The target was presented either in foveal or parafoveal vision and was preceded by a sentence contextthat made (1) the target predictable, (2) the neighbor predictable, or (3) neither predictable. We found that worse spellersrelied on sentence context in both foveal and parafoveal vision whereas better spellers only relied on context in parafovealvision, suggesting that both visual quality and lexical quality affect reliance on sentence context to identify words.

Electrical brain potentials in response to violation of expectations in language processing have revealed that people usesentence context to facilitate word recognition and integration. Less is known about the interaction between the qualityof visual information in reading and the use of contextual information. In the current study we manipulated the visualfield (foveal vs. parafoveal) in which a sentence-final expected word, orthographic neighbor of an expected word, orunexpected word is presented and recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the role of visual clarity. We findevidence that earlier stages of semantic retrieval indexed by the N400 are resilient to visual information presented at greatereccentricity, but that later, integration-related processes indexed by a posterior late positive complex (LPC) may depend onunambiguous, foveally presented visual information. These findings have implications for parafoveal processing duringnatural reading.