Interestingly, one of the differences between our (and Kaakinen & Hyönä’s, GDC-0068 concentration 2010) proofreading paradigm and the other proofreading studies described in Section 1.3.2 is that the other experiments often emphasized speed as opposed to accuracy (to avoid ceiling effects since their dependent measure was percent detection). It would be worth investigating in future studies whether and how the effects we have found here would change if speed were emphasized as opposed to accuracy. We must also address the fact that predictability
effects were modulated only for late measures, not for early measures, in Experiment 2. Once again, this result is not directly predicted by our framework, but is compatible with it. One possibility is that subjects in our study may have been hesitant to flag an unpredictable word as an error until they see the context words to the right (or reread context to the left). Because subjects received feedback
on every trial (a subjectively annoying 3 s timeout with the word “INCORRECT!” displayed on the screen), we assume they were highly motivated to avoid responding incorrectly. This happened not only see more after misses (i.e., failing to respond that there was an error when there was one) but also after false alarms (i.e., responding that there was an error when there was not). Thus, subjects may have been reluctant to prematurely (i.e., in first-pass reading) respond without seeing whether words after the target would make the word fit into context. For example, the error “The marathon runners trained on the trial…” could be salvaged with a continuation such as “… course behind the high school.” Obviously, subjects would not know this without reading the rest of the sentence and may, for all sentences, continue reading to become more confident
whether the sentence contained an error or not. Once subjects know both the left and right context of the word, they then evaluate the word’s fit into the sentence context, and it is this latter process that produces large effects of word predictability in total time. Finally, we note that several aspects of our data confirm that proofreading is Lck more difficult when spelling errors produce wrong words (e.g., trial for trail) compared to when they produce nonwords (e.g., trcak for track). First, d′ scores for proofreading accuracy when checking for wrong words (Experiment 2) were lower than d′ scores when checking for nonwords (Experiment 1; see Table 1). Furthermore, this difference was driven by poorer performance correctly identifying errors (81% in Experiment 2 compared to 89% in Experiment 1) rather than performance correctly identifying error-free sentences (98% vs. 97%).