Assessing the Importance of Letter Pairs in Reading—Parafoveal Processing Is Not the Only View: Reply to Inhoff, Radach, Eiter, and Skelly (2003)

In English D. Briihl and A. W. Inhoff (1995) found that exterior letter pairs showed no privileged status in reading when letter pairs were presented as parafoveal primes. However, T. R. Jordan, S. M. Thomas, G. R. Patching, and K. C. Scott-Brown (2003) used a paradigm that (a) allowed letter pairs to exert influence at any point in the reading process, (b) overcame problems with the stimulus manipulations used by Briihl and Inhoff (1995), and (c) revealed a privileged status for exterior letter pairs in reading. A. W. Inhoff, R. Radach, B. M. Eiter, and M. Skelly (2003) made a number of claims about the Jordan, Thomas, et al. study, most of which focus on parafoveal processing. This article addresses these claims and points out that although studies that use parafoveal previews provide an important contribution, other techniques and paradigms are required to reveal the full role of letter pairs in reading.