also involves a paradox. This can be illustrated by considering a sentence such as: While Mary was mending the old grandfather clock struck twelve The words old grandfather clock may initially be attached as the direct object of the verb mending. The missing comma encourages this error. The fact that the attachment is incorrect becomes apparent when the word struck is encountered. The reader needs to re-analyse the sentence and there is ample experimental evidence that this process of re-analysis may be associated with re-inspecting eye movements (sometimes called "regressions"). For example, an eye movement may be made from the word struck back to the word mending. Consideration of how eye movements in reading are controlled exposes a problem with this account. Visual acuity is restricted, so the question of how the eyes can be selectively and accurately directed to particular words arises. When the target is so visually degraded as to be virtually invisible, how is this achieved? Furthermore, if the target of such reinspections is the point where a faulty attachment was made, does this not imply that the reader was, in some sense, already aware of the potential problem? Kennedy suggested a possible solution to this paradox: the proposal that readers retain information on the spatial disposition of elements of text. This Spatial Coding Theory has proved controversial with researchers claiming either that no spatial information is maintained or that only very primitive non-specific information is retained. Parafoveal-on-Foveal Effects In 1995 in a poster presentation at the AmLap Conference in Edinburgh, Kennedy presented evidence that the duration of an eye fixation on a given word could be directly affected by properties (in this case, its frequency of occurrence in the language) of an adjacent word that had not yet been inspected. Up until that time it had been widely accepted that un-fixated words could be pre-processed (the so-called "preview effect"), but any advantage gained from this preview only became evident when the reader actually fixated the next word. The issue was important because of the developing consensus at that time that reading was best characterised as a serial activity in which only one word at a time was attended and all the processing needed to identify that word was completed before the eyes moved on. A preview effect is not inconsistent with this position because the reader’s eyes lag behind the reader’s attention. Attention shifts to the