Lexical Processing Strongly Affects Reading Times But Not Skipping During Natural Reading.

In a typical text, readers look much longer at some words than at others, even skipping many altogether. Historically, researchers explained this variation via low-level visual or oculomotor factors, but today it is primarily explained via factors determining a word's lexical processing ease, such as how well word identity can be predicted from context or discerned from parafoveal preview. While the existence of these effects is well established in controlled experiments, the relative importance of prediction, preview and low-level factors in natural reading remains unclear.