Parafoveal access to phonemic representations: Identity but not the order thereof

The invisible boundary paradigm (gaze contingency) was used to investigate the availability and retrieval of phonological information when the letters of a word are retrieved by parafoveal vision. For this purpose, the target stimuli were masked by swapping or replacing the first two letters. The results show that fixation times (first fixation duration and dwell time) are shorter in the transposition condition than in the substitution condition, indicating that the identity of the phonemes is already retrieved parafoveally, regardless of their order in the word. Croatian was used for the experiment, a language with a transparent and fine-grained orthography with a grapheme-phoneme correspondence of almost 1:1, which allows the experimental exclusion of any confounding effects of orthography on phonology.