UNCORRECTED PROOF ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 12 September 2015 Received in revised form 8 March 2016 Accepted 8 May 2016 Available online xxx Keywords: Eye movements Reading Schizophrenia Fixation duration Semantic-context effect ABSTRACT In the present work we analyzed fixation duration in 40 healthy individuals and 18 patients with chronic, stable SZ during reading of regular sentences and proverbs. While they read, their eye movements were recorded. We used lineal mixed models to analyze fixation durations. The predictability of words N−1, N, and N+1 exerted a strong influence on controls and SZ patients. The influence of the predictabilities of preceding, current, and upcoming words on SZ was clearly re- duced for proverbs in comparison to regular sentences. Both controls and SZ readers were able to use highly predictable fixated words for an easier reading. Our results suggest that SZ readers might compensate attentional and working mem- ory deficiencies by using stored information of familiar texts for enhancing their reading performance. The predictabili- ties of words in proverbs serve as task-appropriate cues that are used by SZ readers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using eyetracking for measuring how patients with SZ process well-defined words embedded in regular sentences and proverbs. Evaluation of the resulting changes in fixation durations might provide a useful tool for under- standing how SZ patients could enhance their reading performance. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Psychiatry Research xxx (2016) xxx-xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Psychiatry Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com Contextual predictability enhances reading performance in patients with schizophrenia Gerardo Fernández, a, ⁎ Salvador Guinjoan, c Marcelo Sapognikoff, b David Orozco, b Osvaldo Agamennoni a a Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS), Bahía Blanca, Argentina, Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Eléctrica (IIIE) (UNS-CONICET), Bahía Blanca, Buenos Aires, Argentina b Clínica Privada Bahiense, Bahía Blanca, Buenos Aires, Argentina c FLENI, Department of Psychiatry, Buenos Aires, Argentina 1. Introduction During reading, eye movements (saccades) alternate with phases of relative stability (fixations). The sequence of fixations and saccades during visual exploration is crucial for perception (Rayner and Pol- lastek, 1992). Fixation behavior is the result of a complex interaction of features of the explored picture (“bottom up” processing) and the instruction or question to be solved by the explorer (“top down” pro- cessing) (Yarbus, 1967; Awh et al., 2006; Cowan and Morey, 2006; Gilbert and Sigman, 2007; Khayat et al., 2006; Palmer, 1990; Sig- man and Gilbert, 2000). In the last several decades, different inves- tigators analyzed the ocular behavior of healthy persons during flu- ent reading, with the goal of understanding the influence of syntac- tic, semantic, and morphologic properties of the previous words, the currently fixated word, and the not-yet fixated upcoming word on fixation duration and on saccade generation (Rayner, 1998; Kennedy and Pynte, 2005; Kennedy et al., 2012; Kliegl, 2007; Kliegl et al., 2006; Vitu et al., 2004; Fernández et al., 2013, 2015b). There is agreement that fixation durations on high frequency and high pre- dictability words are shorter than those on low frequency and low predictability words, suggesting an easier word processing of fre- quent and predictable words (Kliegl et al., 2006; Rayner et al., 2004; Inhoff and Rayner, 1986, Fernández et al., 2013, 2014, Yan et al., 2010; Wei et al., 2013). These works, among others, did a great deal for explaining the characteristics of eye movements in healthy read ⁎ Corresponding author. Email address: gerardo.fernandez@uns.edu.ar (G. Fernández) ers. Nevertheless, little is known about the effect of schizophrenia on eye movement behavior during reading sentences with different con- textual predictability (e.g., proverbs vs. regular sentences). Previous studies proposed that schizophrenia-related reading diffi- culties might be associated with impairments in inhibitory processes during lexical-semantic access (e.g., Hayes and O’Grady, 2003; Revheim et al., 2006; Kuperberg, 2010a, 2010b; Levy et al., 2010; Li et al., 2009; Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 2003; Spitzer, 1997; Titone et al., 2002, 2000; Clementz et al., 1994; Gooding and Basso, 2008; O’Driscoll and Callahan, 2008; Sereno and Holzman, 1995; Arnott et al., 2011; Whitford et al., 2013). Researchers analyzed SZ proverbs’ comprehension and showed that SZ’ performance was lower than their matched controls. They related such low performance to working memory impairments (Thoma et al., 2009). At a neural level, proverbs comprehension and executive functions were related to fronto-sub- cortical circuitry, which seems to be disrupted both structurally and functionally in SZ (Kian et al., 2007; Thoma et al., 2009). Thus, re- searchers proposed that SZ’ comprehending-difficulties were related to frontal dysfunction and to associated deficits in executive functions (Kircher et al., 2007). However, fewer studies have examined the capacities through which linguistic material is processed online (i.e., simultaneously) when reading proverbs. Most previous studies examined reading in schizophrenia using single-word reading tests. Such tests are not sen- sitive to problems in reading fluency and neighboring word process- ing, where word processing might be affected by the context in which words appear, as well as eye movements that shift attention from one word to the next. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2016.05.010 0165-1781/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.