The effect of stimulus processing time on eye fixation duration was examined during visual search. Ten Japanese students searched word lists for a target word under two task conditions. In the physical matching task, the target word was the same word as a probe word presented previously. In the phonological matching task, the target word was a homophone to the probe word. The number of syllables of the stimulus words were 2 or 4. The fixation durations to each word in the phonological matching task were longer than those in the physical matching task. The number of syllables of the stimulus words had no effect on fixation duration. Results showed that the processing time required to perform the task affected fixation duration.