# Spanish Readers Skip Articles Regardless of Gender and Number Agreement

## TL;DR

Spanish readers skip articles without checking if they match the noun's gender or number, but they take longer to process mismatches later.

## Contribution

This study shows that Spanish readers do not use grammatical agreement in articles during initial processing but need more time after mismatches.

## Key findings

- Article skipping probability is not affected by gender or number agreement in previews.
- Mismatched previews lead to increased viewing time on the subsequent noun.
- Initial article processing does not involve grammatical properties.

## Abstract

Articles are among the most frequently encountered words during reading; however, it is not clear how deeply they are usually processed. This study examines whether native Spanish speakers use parafoveal article–noun agreement information to guide eye movements during reading. Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated the parafoveal preview of articles across two experiments. In Experiment 1, we manipulated gender agreement between the previews readers received of definite articles and the subsequent nouns (e.g., la mesa vs. el* mesa). In Experiment 2, we manipulated grammatical gender and number agreement between parafoveal article previews and the subsequent nouns jointly (e.g., los* mesa vs. una mesa). We found no evidence that parafoveal article–noun gender or number agreement affected article skipping probability, suggesting that initial parafoveal processing of articles does not extend to their grammatical properties. However, we observed increased total viewing time on the noun following mismatching previews, suggesting that, while the decision of whether to skip an article is taken largely without considering the grammatical properties of the upcoming words, readers do need more time to recover from the grammatical mismatch afterwards. We discuss the results in the context of current models of eye-movement control during reading.