How Initial Fixation Position Influences Visual Word Recognition: a Comparison of French and Arabic

The position the eye initially fixates in a written word influences the ease with which this word is recognized. Prior research has shown that the function relating ease of word recognition and initial fixation position in the word is not symmetric. Word recognition is generally superior when the initial fixation is left rather than right of the center of the word. This asymmetry in the function relating initial fixation position to word identifiability could be due to (a) hemispheric specialization, (b) reading habits, or (c) variations in lexical constraint. The present experiments tested these alternative explanations by comparing the effects of initial fixation position in prefixed and suffixed words in French and Arabic. The results show that, contrary to both the hemispheric specialization and reading habit hypotheses, the average initial fixation curves for Arabic are asymmetric neither to the left nor to the right but depend on the morphological structure of the stimuli, thus lending support to the lexical constraint hypothesis.