In reply to White spaces:
Hrant, what you call 'parafoveal boumas' seem to me so unresolvable in terms of word-recognition, due to crowding, as to not really constitute boumas at all. What we can perceive in the parafovea, thanks to the existence of word spaces that break up the crowded string, is the presence and length of words, and that is sufficient information to provide the processing benefits that Peter describes. From the content of the text and from experience we can reliably anticipate many shorter words and hence skip them, which accounts for longer saccades. In order for the existence of long saccades to be as important as you claim it to be, such saccades would need to regularly include longer words, uncommon words, and not be frequently followed by reversions. If these are not the case, then long saccades are accounted for by skipping and guessing, without requiring any parafoveal bouma recognition.