Readers tend to skip words,particularly when they are short and frequent (ORegan,1979;Drieghe,Pollatsek,Staub,& Rayner,2008),or predictable from the prior context (Balota,Pollatsek,& Rayner,1985).We report a series of experiments during whichwe manipulated the parafoveal input available to readers while they were deciding on whether to skip an upcoming word or to fixate it.In the first experiment,readers were presented with either a preview of a frequent 3-letter word (e.g.,fix),a nonword(e.g.,fde),or "the",in sentences where the was syntactically infelicitous (e.g.,You should not fix it unless it is broken).Readers skipped the illegal "the" when presented parafoveally more often than the target words (first-pass skipping probability,.51 vs..29).In the second experiment,we showed that this effect is not restricted to illegal instances of "the",but occurs whenever the parafoveally presented word is of higher frequency than the actual target word.The results indicated that readersare often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision.In the third experiment,we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates the-skipping behavior.We found that readers were prone to skipping infelicitous instances of the even in situations with high contextual constraint.In addition,there was a significant predictability effect on skipping across preview conditions,indicating that contextual constraint and parafoveal preview have additive--but not interactive--effects,with the parafoveal preview effect being much stronger than the context effect.