next word while the relevant eye movement is being prepared. In contrast, evidence that properties of an un-fixated word feed back and directly affect processing time on a currently-fixated word would be seriously damaging to the serial position. Kennedy published the first study demonstrating such "parafoveal-on-foveal" effects in 1998. This was followed by a number of further laboratory studies (most in collaboration with Joël Pynte in Aix-en-Provence) revealing a large number of sources of mutual cross-talk involving adjacent words in text. Factors identified included frequency-of-occurrence, familiarity, the constraint of the initial letters (i.e. how many other words in the language share the same initial letters), and the plausibility of the target sentence-frame. The initial response from proponents of the strictly serial view of reading to these data was to acknowledge that some mutual interactions between adjacent words might occur, but to claim that the effects were small and fugitive – restricted to the unusual presentation conditions typically found in small-scale experiments (e.g. short sentences on a single line across a computer display). It was claimed that parafoveal-on-foveal interactions were not found in normal reading, and the bulk of evidence at that time supported this contention. This changed, however, with the publication of an analysis of the Dundee Corpus by Kennedy and Pynte published in 2005. This involved French and English readers working through extended passages of text taken from newspaper articles. Shortly afterwards, Kliegl and colleagues in the University of Potsdam published an even larger analysis of a huge corpus of eye movement data collected during the reading of lengthy passages of text in German. Both the Dundee and Potsdam analyses revealed clear evidence of parafoveal-on-foveal effects. An obvious conclusion is that, rather than characterise the reader’s attention as a "switch" operating in a strictly serial fashion, it seems more plausible that a degree of parallel processing takes place, involving the simultaneous processing of more than one word. Up to the present, this controversy has not been settled. Although the effects obtained are clearly not an artefact of small-scale laboratory procedures, it must be accepted they are small; it is still possible that artefacts may be involved. One such draws on the fact that eye movement control in normal reading is not particularly precise: sometimes fixations intended for the next word may miss their target. A sufficiently large number of systematic mislocations of this kind might mimic measured parafoveal-on-foveal effects,