BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Cognit.
Sec. Perception
This article is part of the Research TopicWomen in Perception 2024View all 3 articles
The role of top-down and bottom-up factors in parafoveal reading
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Human Sciences, Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta University, Rome, Italy
- 2Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca Dipartimento di Psicologia, Milan, Italy
- 3Universita degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza Dipartimento di Psicologia, Rome, Italy
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Recently we have shown that, while reading two words presented simultaneously, one in the fovea and one in the parafovea, participants are more accurate and faster when the two words are semantically related. The present study confirmed and supported the previous results by using the same Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Paradigm (RPVP) and by changing the relative proportions of unrelated versus semantically related word pairs. Indeed, differently from other studies where semantically unrelated and related word pairs were equally represented (50% each), in the present study only 30% of word pairs were semantically related. Results showed again an advantage when the two words were semantically related and we interpreted these findings in terms of automaticity between lexical / sublexical units processing and semantic access.
Keywords: parafoveal processing1, semantics2, rapid parallel visual presentation3, wordrecognition4, reading models5
Received: 29 Sep 2025; Accepted: 13 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bandiera, Primativo, Daini, Martelli and Arduino. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Silvia Primativo, s.primativo@lumsa.it
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