Both everyday experience and laboratory research demonstrate that readers often fail to notice errors such as an omitted or repeated function word. This phenomenon challenges central tenets of reading and sentence processing models, according to which each word is lexically processed and incrementally integrated into a syntactic representation. One solution would propose that apparent failure to notice such errors reflects post-perceptual inference; the reader does initially perceive the error, but then unconsciously ’corrects’ the perceived string. Such a post-perceptual account predicts that when readers fail to explicitly notice an error, the error will nevertheless disrupt reading, at least fleetingly. We present a large-scale eyetracking experiment investigating whether disruption is detectable in the eye movement record when readers fail to notice an omitted or repeated two-letter function word in naturalistic sentences. Readers failed to notice both omission and repetition errors over 36% of the time. In an analysis that included all trials, both omission and repetition resulted in pronounced eye movement disruption, compared to reading of grammatical control sentences. But in an analysis including only trials on which readers failed to notice the errors, neither type of error disrupted eye movements on any measure. Indeed, there was evidence in some measures that reading was relatively fast on the trials on which errors were missed. It does not appear that when an error is not consciously noticed, it is initially perceived, and then later corrected; rather, linguistic knowledge influences what the reader perceives.
The direct-lexical-control hypothesis stipulates that some aspect of a word’s processing determines the duration of the fixation on that word and/or the next. Although the direct lexical control is incorporated into most current models of eye-movement control in reading, the precise implementation varies and the assumptions of the hypothesis may not be feasible given that lexical processing must occur rapidly enough to influence fixation durations. Conclusive empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis is therefore lacking. In this article, we report the results of an eye-tracking experiment using the boundary paradigm in which native speakers of Chinese read sentences in which target words were either high- or low-frequency and preceded by a valid or invalid preview. Eye movements were co-registered with electroencephalography, allowing standard analyses of eye-movement measures, divergence point analyses of fixation-duration distributions, and fixated-related potentials on the target words. These analyses collectively provide strong behavioral and neural evidence of early lexical processing and thus strong support for the direct-lexical-control hypothesis. We discuss the implications of the findings for our understanding of how the hypothesis might be implemented, the neural systems that support skilled reading, and the nature of eye-movement control in the reading of Chinese versus alphabetic scripts.

