Word ambiguity and the optimal viewing position in reading

The optimal viewing position phenomenon discovered by O'Regan et al. (1984) is characterized by a minimization of gaze duration on a word and maximization of word recognition rates when the eye xates a word near its center. Subsequent studies (Holmes and O'Regan (1987), O'Regan and Levy-Schoen (1987)) have shown that lexical structure can aect the location of the optimal viewing position. In this Preprint submitted to Elsevier Preprint 9 June 1998 paper we show that the optimal viewing position is near to the position which minimizes word ambiguity arising from incomplete recognition of the letters in the word. This conclusion is supported by a statistical analysis based on inter-letter correlations in English and French word corpuses