EyeLink Clinical and Oculomotor Eye-Tracking Publications
EyeLink clinical and oculomotor research publications up until 2023 (with some early 2024s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Saccadic Adaptation, Schizophrenia, Nystagmus, etc. You can also search for individual author names, and limit searches by year (choose the year then click the search button). If we missed any EyeLink clinical or oculomotor articles, please email us!
2019 |
Dave Kush; Brian Dillon; Ragnhild Eik; Adrian Staub Processing of Norwegian complex verbs: Evidence for early decomposition Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 335–350, 2019. @article{Kush2019, We examined the processing of Norwegian complex verbs—compounds consisting of a prepositional prefix and a verbal root—to investigate the lexical decomposition of such morphologically complex compounds. In an eyetracking-while-reading study, we tested whether reading time measures were significantly predicted by a compound verb's whole-word frequency, its root family frequency, or some combination thereof. The results suggest that whole-word and root family frequencies make independent contributions to first-fixation durations. Subsequent reading time measures were better predicted by either whole-word frequency, root family frequency, or both in tandem. We interpret these results as providing support for hybrid models of lexical representation, in which complex verbs are associated with an atomic (whole-word) representation linked to the lexical entries for the compound's constituent morphemes. |
Nayoung Kwon; Patrick Sturt Proximity and same case marking do not increase attraction effect in comprehension: Evidence from eye-tracking experiments in Korean Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 1320, 2019. @article{Kwon2019, Previous studies have suggested that during the on-line sentence processing, relevant memory representations are directly accessed based on cues at retrieval (McElree et al., 2003). Under this hypothesis, retrieval cues activate any memory representation with matching features, leading to the so-called attraction effect. This predicts that attraction effects would be modulated by memory representation of a distractor. Here, we investigated this possibility, focusing on two factors (i.e., proximity to the retrieval point and the number of matching features) that would affect representation of a distractor in three Korean eye-tracking experiments. We predicted that if memory representation of a distractor decays over time, a distractor close to a retrieval point would lead to stronger attraction effects. We also predicted that a distractor would be more likely to lead to interference when it shares a higher number of matching features with the retrieval cues of a dependency, relative to the target of the dependency, due to multiple direct accesses based on multiple matching cues. However, the results did not show evidence that proximity of a distractor to the retrieval point enhanced attraction effects. Likewise, there was no evidence that a greater number of matching cues of a distractor alone would trigger more mis-retrieval, in contrast to a previous finding that a greater number of mismatching cues of a licit antecedent in addition to a greater number of matching cues of a distractor did so (Parker and Phillips, 2017). On the other hand, the results suggested that a distractor marked with nominative case was more likely to be mis-retrieved as the subject of a verb, compared to a distractor marked with a dative case, suggesting that the subject grammatical role is a critical cue for a subject-verb agreement. These results are best compatible with the hypothesis that retrieval cues are weighted, possibly depending on the nature of the dependency that is currently processed. |
Anna K. Laurinavichyute; Irina A. Sekerina; Svetlana Alexeeva; Kristine Bagdasaryan; Reinhold Kliegl Russian Sentence Corpus: Benchmark measures of eye movements in reading in Russian Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 1161–1178, 2019. @article{Laurinavichyute2019, This article introduces a new corpus of eye movements in silent reading—the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC). Russian uses the Cyrillic script, which has not yet been investigated in cross-linguistic eye movement research. As in every language studied so far, we confirmed the expected effects of low-level parameters, such as word length, frequency, and predictability, on the eye movements of skilled Russian readers. These findings allow us to add Slavic languages using Cyrillic script (exemplified by Russian) to the growing number of languages with different orthographies, ranging from the Roman-based European languages to logographic Asian ones, whose basic eye movement benchmarks conform to the universal comparative science of reading (Share, 2008). We additionally report basic descriptive corpus statistics and three exploratory investigations of the effects of Russian morphology on the basic eye movement measures, which illustrate the kinds of questions that researchers can answer using the RSC. The annotated corpus is freely available from its project page at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/x5q2r/. |
Justin Lauro; Ana I. Schwartz Cognate effects on anaphor processing Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 381–396, 2019. @article{Lauro2019, There are numerous studies demonstrating facilitated processing of cognates relative to noncognates for bilinguals, providing evidence that bilingual lexical access is language nonselective. We tested whether cross-language activation affects comprehension of larger units of meaning, focusing specifically on comprehension of anaphoric references. Highly proficient, Spanish–English bilin- guals read sentences either in English (Experiment 1) or Spanish (Experiment 2) while their eye movements were recorded. Sentences consisted of an initial clause with 2 nouns that were either cognates or noncognates, and a later clause with an anaphor that either referred to the first or second noun. In the English experiment, cognate status facilitated selection of the sentence's foundational noun, reflected by shorter reading times for cognate nouns in the first position. Processing of pronouns was facilitated when they referred to cognates, reflected by higher skipping rates and shorter reading times. Final selection of cognate referents was also facilitated, reflected by total reading shorter total reading times, but only when the pronoun referred to the first noun. In the Spanish experiment, total reading times for cognate nouns were shorter, irrespective of their order of mention, reflecting a general cognate facilitation effect that was not affected by which noun was selected as the foundational structure. Spillover fixations from anaphors referring to cognates were shorter than noncognates, but only when they were the second-mentioned noun, suggesting that cognate status affected coreferencing for the more recently encountered noun. Implications for theories of cross-language activation and anaphoric reference are discussed. |
Miseon Lee Effects of case-marking on the anticipatory processing of Korean Sentences Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Science, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 339–364, 2019. @article{Lee2019b, The goal of this study was to explore the effect of the case-marking information from pre-verbal arguments on the anticipatory processing of Korean sentences. More specifically, it was examined whether the case-markers can be used to predict an upcoming argument even before it is introduced into the string. In our eye-tracking experiment using the visual-world paradigm, 24 adult native speakers of Korean showed significantly more anticipatory eye-movements to the potential referent of a Theme object as soon as hearing the sequence of a nominative-marked NP and a dative-marked NP, as compared to when the second NP is accusative-marked. These results confirm the predictive mechanism of the parsing system and the case effect on the prediction in Korean: that is, guided by the case-marking information which is available earlier in the input, the parser can predict a forthcoming argument and thus activate a structural representation of the currently processed sentence. In this way, a verb-final sentence can be interpreted incrementally and predictively as well at each moment of processing. |
Minna Lehtonen; Matti Varjokallio; Henna Kivikari; Annika Hultén; Sami Virpioja; Tero Hakala; Mikko Kurimo; Krista Lagus; Riitta Salmelin Statistical models of morphology predict eye-tracking measures during visual word recognition Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 1245–1269, 2019. @article{Lehtonen2019, We studied how statistical models of morphology that are built on different kinds of representational units, i.e., models emphasizing either holistic units or decomposition, perform in predicting human word recognition. More specifically, we studied the predictive power of such models at early vs. late stages of word recognition by using eye-tracking during two tasks. The tasks included a standard lexical decision task and a word recognition task that assumedly places less emphasis on postlexical reanalysis and decision processes. The lexical decision results showed good performance of Morfessor models based on the Minimum Description Length optimization principle. Models which segment words at some morpheme boundaries and keep other boundaries unsegmented performed well both at early and late stages of word recognition, supporting dual- or multiple-route cognitive models of morphological processing. Statistical models based on full forms fared better in late than early measures. The results of the second, multi-word recognition task showed that early and late stages of processing often involve accessing morphological constituents, with the exception of short complex words. Late stages of word recognition additionally involve predicting upcoming morphemes on the basis of previous ones in multimorphemic words. The statistical models based fully on whole words did not fare well in this task. Thus, we assume that the good performance of such models in global measures such as gaze durations or reaction times in lexical decision largely stems from postlexical reanalysis or decision processes. This finding highlights the importance of considering task demands in the study of morphological processing. |
Chi Yui Leung; Hitoshi Mikami; Lisa Yoshikawa Positive psychology broadens readers' attentional scope during L2 reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 2245, 2019. @article{Leung2019, While positive psychology has drawn increasing interests among researchers in the second language (L2) acquisition literature recently, little is known with respect to the relationship between positive psychology and mental processes during L2 reading. To bridge the gap, the present study investigated whether and how positive psychology (self-efficacy) influences word reading strategies during L2 sentence reading. Based on previous studies, eye-movement patterns with first-fixation locations closer to the beginning of a word can be characterized as an attempt to process the word with a local strategy, whereas first-fixation locations farther away from the beginning and closer to the center of a word can be considered as an attempt to use a global strategy. Eye movements of a group of Japanese learners of English (N = 59) were monitored, and L2 reading self-efficacy was used to assess the participants' positive belief toward their L2 reading skills. Based on Fredrickson's (1998) broaden-and-build theory, we predicted an effect of L2 reading self-efficacy on participants' first-fixation locations. Results from mixed-effects regression showed that while reading strategies depended in part on other factors such as L2 reading proficiency and word properties, L2 self-efficacy influenced reading strategy. The present data suggest that while more self-efficacious L2 readers prefer a more efficient global strategy, attempting to read the word as a whole word, less self-efficacious L2 readers tend to employ a local strategy, focusing more on sublexical information. These findings lend support to the broaden-and-build theory in the context of L2 processing. The present study has implications for how positive psychology works along with L2 proficiency in the development of strategic selection during reading. |
Lin Li; Sha Li; Fang Xie; Min Chang; Victoria A. McGowan; Jingxin Wang; Kevin B. Paterson In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 81, pp. 2626–2634, 2019. @article{Li2019c, Older adults experience greater difficulty compared to young adults during both alphabetic and nonalphabetic reading. However, while this age-related reading difficulty may be attributable to visual and cognitive declines in older adulthood, the underlying causes remain unclear. With the present research, we focused on effects related to the visual complexity of written language. Chinese is ideally suited to investigating such effects, as characters in this logographic writing system can vary substantially in complexity (in terms of their number of strokes, i.e., lines and dashes) while always occupying the same square area of space, so that this complexity is not confounded with word length. Nonreading studies suggests older adults have greater difficulty than young adults when recognizing characters with high compared to low numbers of strokes. The present research used measures of eye movements to investigate adult age differences in these effects during natural reading. Young adult (18–28 years) and older adult (65+ years) participants read sentences that included one of a pair of two-character target words matched for lexical frequency and contextual predictability, but composed of either high-complexity (>9 strokes) or low-complexity (≤7 strokes) characters. Typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty were observed. However, an effect of visual complexity in reading times for words was greater for the older than for the younger adults, due to the older readers experiencing greater difficulty identifying words containing many rather than few strokes. We interpret these findings in terms of the influence of subtle deficits in visual abilities on reading capabilities in older adulthood. |
Monica Y. C. Li; David Braze; Anuenue Kukona; Clinton L. Johns; Whitney Tabor; Julie A. Van Dyke; W. Einar Mencl; Donald P. Shankweiler; Kenneth R. Pugh; James S. Magnuson Individual differences in subphonemic sensitivity and phonological skills Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 107, pp. 195–215, 2019. @article{Li2019d, Many studies have established a link between phonological abilities (indexed by phonological awareness and phonological memory tasks) and typical and atypical reading development. Individuals who perform poorly on phonological assessments have been mostly assumed to have underspecified (or “fuzzy”) phonological representations, with typical phonemic categories, but with greater category overlap due to imprecise encoding. An alternative posits that poor readers have overspecified phonological representations, with speech sounds perceived allophonically (phonetically distinct variants of a single phonemic category). On both accounts, mismatch between phonological categories and orthography leads to reading difficulty. Here, we consider the implications of these accounts for online speech processing. We used eye tracking and an individual differences approach to assess sensitivity to subphonemic detail in a community sample of young adults with a wide range of reading-related skills. Subphonemic sensitivity inversely correlated with meta-phonological task performance, consistent with overspecification. |
Qianyu Li; Xuqian Chen; Qiaoning Su; Shun Liu; Jian Huang In: Language and Cognition, vol. 11, pp. 645–668, 2019. @article{Li2019e, We tested whether the proportion of typical sentences in a series of auditory sentences would lead people to adjust the strength of activation of world knowledge (i.e., retrieval rules adaptation) during comprehension. This issue is important because it could help clarify how people efficiently integrate different memory information in cognitive processes. In two experiments, all task materials were presented to participants as a whole package, in which proportions of typical sentences, with typical final locations, varied under different conditions. In Experiment 1, the proportion of typical sentences was equal to the atypical ones (i.e., 50% typical vs. 50% atypical), whereas in Experiment 2, the proportion of typical sentences was not equal to the atypical ones (i.e., 75% typical vs. 25% atypical, and 25% typical vs. 75% atypical). Visual fixation on the critical area in a visual display before/while hearing the critical words was compared across conditions, and across-condition differences were used as an index of the adaptation of the retrieval rule in the activation of world knowledge. The findings indicated that the adaptation of retrieval rules occurs throughout the whole test package of sentence comprehension, and the strength of activation of world knowledge in sentence comprehension can be adjusted. |
Sara T. K. Li; Susana T. L. Chung; Janet H. Hsiao Music-reading expertise modulates the visual span for English letters but not Chinese characters Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 1–16, 2019. @article{Li2019f, Recent research has suggested that the visual span in stimulus identification can be enlarged through perceptual learning. Since both English and music reading involve left-to-right sequential symbol processing, music-reading experience may enhance symbol identification through perceptual learning particularly in the right visual field (RVF). In contrast, as Chinese can be read in all directions, and components of Chinese characters do not consistently form a left-right structure, this hypothesized RVF enhancement effect may be limited in Chinese character identification. To test these hypotheses, here we recruited musicians and nonmusicians who read Chinese as their first language (L1) and English as their second language (L2) to identify music notes, English letters, Chinese characters, and novel symbols (Tibetan letters) presented at different eccentricities and visual field locations on the screen while maintaining central fixation. We found that in English letter identification, significantly more musicians achieved above-chance performance in the center-RVF locations than nonmusicians. This effect was not observed in Chinese character or novel symbol identification. We also found that in music note identification, musicians outperformed nonmusicians in accuracy in the center-RVF condition, consistent with the RVF enhancement effect in the visual span observed in English-letter identification. These results suggest that the modulation of music-reading experience on the visual span for stimulus identification depends on the similarities in the perceptual processes involved. |
Sha Li; Laurien Oliver-Mighten; Lin Li; Sarah J. White; Kevin B. Paterson; Jingxin Wang; Kayleigh L. Warrington; Victoria A. McGowan Adult age differences in effects of text spacing on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 2700, 2019. @article{Li2019, Large-scale changes in text spacing, such as removing the spaces between words, disrupt reading more for older (65+ years) than younger (18-30 years) adults. However, it is unknown whether older readers show greater sensitivity to simultaneous subtle changes in inter-letter and inter-word spacing encountered in everyday reading. To investigate this, we recorded young and older adults' eye movements while reading sentences in which inter-letter and inter-word spacing was normal, condensed (10 and 20% smaller than normal), or expanded (10 or 20% larger than normal). Each sentence included either a high or low frequency target word, matched for length and contextual predictability. Condensing but not expanding text spacing disrupted reading more for the older adults. Moreover, word frequency effects (the reading time cost for low compared to high frequency words) were larger for the older adults, consistent with aging effects on lexical processing in previous research. However, this age difference in the word frequency effect did not vary across spacing conditions, suggesting spacing did not further disrupt older readers' lexical processing. We conclude that visual rather than lexical processing is disrupted more for older readers when text spacing is condensed and discuss this finding in relation to common age-related visual deficits. |
Sunny S. J. Lin; Ming-Yi Hsieh In: International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 35, no. 4-5, pp. 299–312, 2019. @article{Lin2019, Compared to reading text alone, pictures are regarded as easier for readers to comprehend the context. For EFL readers, their reading behavior on text with pictures needs to be carefully inspected. The study aims to examine how different are the viewing behaviors of EFL beginners versus intermediate readers on reading narrative paragraphs and accompanying pictures. Seventeen junior high and twenty-one senior high students represented as EFL beginners and intermediate readers, respectively. Both of them read consecu- tively three screens with narrative texts and pictures illustrating the texts. The results showed that both beginners and intermediate readers paidmore attention to the texts than the pictures. The beginners almost solely fixated on the texts and few fixations fell on to the pictures while the intermediates hadmore fixations on both texts and pictures. The eye-movement data in the specific AOIs showed that the intermediates made more references between text and pictures when they encountered difficult words or processed semantic meaning making. The beginners were less efficient in reading, having less fixated time on each screen, and encountered greater difficulties in comprehension than the intermediates. Based on eye- movement data, a personalized strategy to alter display sequence could be provided to support EFL beginners: Before going into narrative reading, a remindingmessage could be dispatched onscreen guiding them to view standalone pictures and to inspect pictorial components carefully to serve as the macro- reading strategy. The personalization could also be realized by posting cognitive and meta-cognitive level questions during the inspection of picture. |
Michael A. Johns; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff; Paola E. Dussias Mixing things up: How blocking and mixing affect the processing of codemixed sentences Journal Article In: International Journal of Bilingualism, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 584–611, 2019. @article{Johns2019, Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The goal of this study is to determine if the way in which codemixed sentences are presented during experimental lab sessions affects the way they are processed, and how experimental design approximates (or not) patterns of language use in bilingual populations. Design/methodology/approach: An eye-tracking study was conducted comparing reading times on codemixed and unilingual Spanish sentences across two modes of presentation: (a) a blocked mode, where one block contained unilingual Spanish sentences and another one contained codemixed sentences; and (b) a mixed mode, where both unilingual and codemixed sentences were mixed together in a randomized fashion. Data and analysis: 20 heritage speakers of Spanish were tested. Four reading measures extracted from the eye-tracking data were subjected to linear mixed-effects regression, with significance determined via backwards likelihood ratio tests, to examine differences across modes of presentation. Findings/conclusions: Codemixes took significantly longer to process in the blocked mode than in the mixed mode. This is in line with corpus data suggesting that intra-sentential codemixing does not occur for long stretches of time and is broken up by unilingual discourse. Originality: While a few studies have hinted at the potential confounds related to the presentation of codemixed or language-switching stimuli, the direct effects of experimental manipulation coupled with insights from sociolinguistic or corpus-based studies have not been tested. Significance/implications: To better understand bilingual codemixing, as well as the cost (or lack thereof) associated with it, lab-based studies of codemixing should take insights from sociolinguistic and corpus-based research. The results of this study suggest that the experience that participants bring into the lab can interact with experimental design and result in unexpected results. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Sarah Rose Slate; Allison R. Teevan; Barbara J. Juhasz The processing of blend words in naming and sentence reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 847–857, 2019. @article{Johnson2019, Research exploring the processing of morphologically complex words, such as compound words, has found that they are decomposed into their constituent parts during processing. Although much is known about the processing of compound words, very little is known about the processing of lexicalised blend words, which are created from parts of two words, often with phoneme overlap (e.g., brunch). In the current study, blends were matched with non-blend words on a variety of lexical characteristics, and blend processing was examined using two tasks: a naming task and an eye-tracking task that recorded eye movements during reading. Results showed that blend words were processed more slowly than non-blend control words in both tasks. Blend words led to longer reaction times in naming and longer processing times on several eye movement measures compared to non-blend words. This was especially true for blends that were long, rated low in word familiarity, but were easily recognisable as blends. |
Barbara J. Juhasz; Heather Sheridan In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 83–95, 2019. @article{Juhasz2019, Adults process words that are rated as being learned earlier in life faster than words that are rated as being acquired later in life. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been observed in a variety of word-recognition tasks when word frequency is controlled. AoA has also previously been found to influence fixation durations when words are embedded into sentences and eye movements are recorded. However, the time course of AoA effects during reading has been inconsistent across studies. The current study further explored the time course of AoA effects on distributions of first-fixation durations during reading. Early and late acquired words were embedded into matched neutral sentence frames. Participants read the sentences while their eye movements were recorded. AoA effects were observed in both early and late fixation duration measures, suggesting that AoA has an early and long-lasting effect on word-recognition processes during reading. Survival analysis revealed that the earliest discernable effect of AoA on distributions of first-fixation durations emerged beginning at 158 ms. This rapid influence of AoA was confirmed through the use of Vincentile plots, which demonstrated that the effect of AoA occurred early and was relatively consistent across the distribution of fixations. This pattern of results provides support for the direct lexical-control hypothesis, as well as the viewpoint that AoA may exert an influence at multiple loci within the mental lexicon. |
Efthymia C. Kapnoula; Arthur G. Samuel Voices in the mental lexicon: Words carry indexical information that can affect access to their meaning Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 107, pp. 111–127, 2019. @article{Kapnoula2019, The speech signal carries both linguistic and non-linguistic information (e.g., a talker's voice qualities; referred to as indexical information). There is evidence that indexical information can affect some aspects of spoken word recognition, but we still do not know whether and how it can affect access to a word's meaning. A few studies support a dual-route model, in which inferences about the talker can guide access to meaning via a route external to the mental lexicon. It remains unclear whether indexical information is also encoded within the mental lexicon. The present study tests for indexical effects on spoken word recognition and referent selection within the mental lexicon. In two experiments, we manipulated voice-to-referent co-occurrence, while preventing participants from using indexical information in an explicit way. Participants learned novel words (e.g., bifa) and their meanings (e.g., kite), with each talker's voice linked (via systematic co-occurrence) to a specific referent (e.g., bifa spoken by speaker 1 referred to a specific picture of a kite). In testing, voice-to-referent mapping either matched that of training (congruent), or not (incongruent). Participants' looks to the target's referent were used as an index of lexical activation. Listeners looked faster at a target's referent on congruent than incongruent trials. The same pattern of results was observed in a third experiment, when testing was 24 hrs later. These results show that indexical information can be encoded in lexical representations and affect spoken word recognition and referent selection. Our findings are consistent with episodic and distributed views of the mental lexicon that assume multi-dimensional lexical representations. |
Hossein Karimi; Trevor Brothers; Fernanda Ferreira Phonological versus semantic prediction in focus and repair constructions: No evidence for differential predictions Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 112, pp. 25–47, 2019. @article{Karimi2019, Evidence suggests that the language processing system is predictive. Although past research has established prediction as a general tendency, it is not yet clear whether comprehenders can modulate their anticipatory strategies in response to cues based on sentence constructions. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we investigated whether focus constructions (not the hammer but rather the …)and repair disfluencies (the hammer uh I mean the …)would lead listeners to generate different patterns of predictions. In three offline tasks, we observed that participants preferred semantically related continuations (hammer – nail)following focus constructions and phonologically related continuations (hammer – hammock)following disfluencies. However, these offline preferences were not evident in participants' predictive eye-movements during online language processing: Semantically related (nail)and phonologically related words (hammock)received additional predictive looks regardless of whether the target word appeared in a disfluency or in a focus construction. However, significantly less semantic and phonological activation was observed in two “control” linguistic contexts in which predictive processing was discouraged. These findings suggest that although the prediction system is sensitive to sentence construction, is it not flexible enough to alter the type of prediction generated based on preceding context. |
Young-Suk Grace Kim; Yaacov Petscher; Christian Vorstius Unpacking eye movements during oral and silent reading and their relations to reading proficiency in beginning readers Journal Article In: Contemporary Educational Psychology, vol. 58, pp. 102–120, 2019. @article{Kim2019, Our understanding about the developmental similarities and differences between oral and silent reading and their relations to reading proficiency (word reading and reading comprehension) in beginning readers is limited. To fill this gap, we investigated 368 first graders' oral and silent reading using eye-tracking technology at the beginning and end of the school year. Oral reading took a longer time (greater rereading times and refixations) than silent reading, but showed greater development (greater reduction in rereading times and fixations) from the beginning to the end of the year. The relation of eye-movement behaviors to reading proficiency was such that, for example, less rereading time was positively related to reading proficiency, and the relation was stronger in oral reading than in silent reading. Moreover, the nature of relations between eye movements and reading skill varied as a function of the child's reading proficiency such that the relations were weaker for poor readers, particularly at the beginning of the year. The relations between eye movements and reading proficiency stabilized in the spring for children whose reading skill was 0.30 quantile and above, but weaker relations remained for readers below 0.30 quantile. These findings suggest the importance of examining eye-movement behaviors in both oral and silent reading modes and their developmental relations to reading proficiency. |
Thomas Kluth; Michele Burigo; Holger Schultheis; Pia Knoeferle Does direction matter? Linguistic asymmetries reflected in visual attention Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 185, pp. 91–120, 2019. @article{Kluth2019, Language and vision interact in non-trivial ways. Linguistically, spatial utterances are often asymmetrical as they relate more stable objects (reference objects) to less stable objects (located objects). Researchers have claimed that such linguistic asymmetry should also be reflected in the allocation of visual attention when people process a depicted spatial relation described by spatial language. More specifically, it was assumed that people move their attention from the reference object to the located object. However, recent theoretical and empirical findings challenge the directionality of this attentional shift. In this article, we present the results of an empirical study based on predictions generated by computational cognitive models implementing different directionalities of attention. Moreover, we thoroughly analyze the computational models. While our results do not favor any of the implemented directionalities of attention, we found that two unknown sources of geometric information affect spatial language understanding. We provide modifications to the computational models that substantially improve their performance on empirical data. |
Faye Knickerbocker; Rebecca L. Johnson; Emma L. Starr; Anna M. Hall; Daphne M. Preti; Sarah Rose Slate; Jeanette Altarriba The time course of processing emotion-laden words during sentence reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 192, pp. 1–10, 2019. @article{Knickerbocker2019, While recent research has explored the effect that positive and negative emotion words (e.g., happy or sad) have on the eye-movement record during reading, the current study examined the effect of positive and negative emotion-laden words (e.g., birthday or funeral) on eye movements. Emotion-laden words do not express a state of mind but have emotional associations and connotations. The current results indicated that both positive and negative emotion-laden words have a processing advantage over neutral words, although the relative time-course of processing differs between words of positive and negative valence. Specifically, positive emotion-laden words showed advantages in early, late, and post-target measures, while negative emotion-laden words showed effects only in late and post-target measures. |
Tammy Sue-Wynne Liu; Yeu-Ting Liu; Chun-Yin Doris Chen Meaningfulness is in the eye of the reader: Eye-tracking insights of L2 learners reading e-books and their pedagogical implications Journal Article In: Interactive Learning Environments, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 181–199, 2019. @article{Liu2019a, This study employed eye-tracking technology to probe the online reading behavior of 52 advanced L2 English learners. These participants read an e-book containing six types of multimedia supports for either vocabulary acquisition or comprehension. The six supports consisted of three micro-level supports that provided information about specific words (glosses, vocabulary focus, and footnotes), and three macro-level supports that provided global or background information (illustrations, infographics, and photos). The participants read the ebook under two presentation modes: (1) simultaneous mode: where digital input and supports were presented at the same time; and (2) sequential mode: where the digital content and supports were incrementally presented. Analyses showed that when reading for vocabulary acquisition, vocabulary focus and glosses were significantly fixated on, and when reading for comprehension, illustrations were more intensely fixated on. Additionally, when the digital content was incrementally presented, vocabulary focus received significantly higher total fixation duration. This suggests that reading under the sequential mode has the potency to guide L2 learners' focal attention toward micro-level supports. In contrast, under the simultaneous presentation mode, L2 learners seemed to divide their focal attention among both micro-level and macro-level supports. Pedagogical implications are discussed based on the findings of this study. |
Yanping Liu; Lei Yu; Erik D. Reichle The dynamic adjustment of saccades during Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements and simulations Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 535–543, 2019. @article{Liu2019d, This article reports an eye-movement experiment in which participants scanned continuous sequences of Landolt-Cs for target circles to examine the visual and oculomotor constraints that might jointly determine where the eyes move in a task that engages many of the perceptual and motor processes involved in Chinese reading but without lexical or linguistic processing. The lengths of the saccades entering the Landolt-C clusters were modulated by the processing difficulty (i.e., gap sizes) of those clusters. Simulations using implemented versions of default-targeting (Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu, 2010) versus dynamic-adjustment (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016) models of saccadic targeting indicated that the latter provided a better account of our participants' eye movements, further supporting the hypothesis that Chinese readers "decide" where to move their eyes by adjusting saccade length in response to processing difficulty rather than by selecting default saccade targets. We discuss this hypothesis in relation to both what is known about saccadic targeting during the reading of English versus Chinese and current models of eye-movement control in reading. |
Yanping Liu; Lei Yu; Erik D. Reichle The influence of parafoveal preview, character transposition, and word frequency on saccadic targeting in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 537–552, 2019. @article{Liu2019, This article reports the results of an eye-movement experiment which manipulated the frequency and parafoveal preview (i.e., nonword, transposed-character, or identical) of 2-character Chinese target words using a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). The key findings were that progressive saccades were longer into high-than low-frequency target words, and that this word-frequency effect was more pronounced for identical than transposed previews. These findings suggest that Chinese readers adjust their saccade lengths in response to variables that influence the rate of parafoveal lexical processing. To examine the feasibility of this hypothesis, 2 computer simulations were completed that pitted this dynamic-adjustment account (Liu, Huang, Gao, & Reichle, 2017) against an account in which readers simply move their eyes to a small number of default saccade targets (e.g., the beginning or center of the upcoming word; Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu, 2010). The simulation results show that the dynamic-adjustment hypothesis more accurately describes our experimental findings using fewer parameters. The theoretical implications of the dynamic-adjustment account of saccadic targeting are discussed relevant to both models of eye-movement control in reading and modes of Chinese word identification. |
Yanping Liu; Lili Yu; Le Fu; Wenwen Li; Ziyi Duan; Erik D. Reichle The effects of parafoveal word frequency and segmentation on saccade targeting during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 1367–1376, 2019. @article{Liu2019e, Two eye-movement experiments are reported in which a boundary paradigm was used to manipulate the presence versus absence of boundaries for high-frequency and low-frequency target words in the parafovea. In Experiment 1, this was done by introducing a blank space after the target words, whereas in Experiment 2 this was done by rendering the target words in red. In both experiments, higher frequency targets engendered longer saccades, whereas the presence of parafoveal word boundaries engendered shorter saccades. This pattern suggests the operation of two countermanding saccade-targeting mechanisms: one that uses parafoveal processing difficulty to adjust saccade lengths and a second that uses word boundaries to direct the eyes toward specific saccade targets. The implications of these findings for models of eye-movement control during reading are discussed, as are suggestions for integrating dynamic-adjustment and default-targeting accounts. |
Otto Loberg; Jarkko Hautala; Jarmo A. Hämäläinen; Paavo H. T. Leppänen Influence of reading skill and word length on fixation-related brain activity in school-aged children during natural reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 165, pp. 109–122, 2019. @article{Loberg2019, Word length is one of the main determinants of eye movements during reading and has been shown to influence slow readers more strongly than typical readers. The influence of word length on reading in individuals with different reading skill levels has been shown in separate eye-tracking and electroencephalography studies. However, the influence of reading difficulty on cortical correlates of word length effect during natural reading is unknown. To investigate how reading skill is related to brain activity during natural reading, we performed an exploratory analysis on our data set from a previous study, where slow reading (N = 27) and typically reading (N = 65) 12-to-13.5-year-old children read sentences while co-registered ET-EEG was recorded. We extracted fixation-related potentials (FRPs) from the sentences using the linear deconvolution approach. We examined standard eye-movement variables and deconvoluted FRP estimates: intercept of the response, categorical effect of first fixation versus additional fixation and continuous effect of word length. We replicated the pattern of stronger word length effect in eye movements for slow readers. We found a difference between typical readers and slow readers in the FRP intercept, which contains activity that is common to all fixations, within a fixation time-window of 50–300 ms. For both groups, the word length effect was present in brain activity during additional fixations; however, this effect was not different between groups. This suggests that stronger word length effect in the eye movements of slow readers might be mainly due re-fixations, which are more probable due to the lower efficiency of visual processing. |
Ya Lou; Huajian Cai; Xuewei Liu; Xingshan Li Effects of self-enhancement on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 343, 2019. @article{Lou2019, Previous studies show that readers' eye movements are influenced by text properties and readers' personal cognitive characteristics. In the current study, we further show that readers' eye movements are influenced by a social motivation of self-enhancement. We asked participants to silently read sentences that describe self or others with positive or negative traits while their eyes were monitored. First-fixation duration and gaze duration were longer when positive words were used to describe self than to describe others, but there was no such effect for negative words. These results suggest that eye movements can be influenced by the motivation of self-enhancement in addition to various stimuli features and cognitive factors. This finding indicates that the eye movement methodology can potentially be used to study implicit social cognition. |
Jana Lüdtke; Eva Fröhlich; Arthur M. Jacobs; Florian Hutzler The SLS-Berlin: Validation of a German computer-based screening test to measure reading proficiency in early and late adulthood Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 1682, 2019. @article{Luedtke2019, Reading proficiency, i.e., successfully integrating early word-based information and utilizing this information in later processes of sentence and text comprehension, and its assessment is subject to extensive research. However, screening tests for German adults across the life span are basically non-existent. Therefore, the present article introduces a standardized computerized sentence-based screening measure for German adult readers to assess reading proficiency including norm data from 2,148 participants covering an age range from 16-88 years. The test was developed in accordance with the children's version of the Salzburger LeseScreening (SLS, Wimmer & Mayringer, 2014). The SLS-Berlin has a high reliability and can easily be implemented in any research setting using German language. We present a detailed description of the test and report the distribution of SLS-Berlin scores for the norm sample as well as for two subsamples of younger (below 60 years) and older adults (60 and older). For all three samples, we conducted regression analyses to investigate the relationship between sentence characteristics and SLS-Berlin scores. In a second validation study, SLS-Berlin scores were compared with two (pseudo)word reading tests, a test measuring attention and processing speed and eye-movements recorded during expository text reading. Our results confirm the SLS-Berlin's sensitivity to capture early word decoding and later text related comprehension processes. The test distinguished very well between skilled and less skilled readers and also within less skilled readers and is therefore a powerful and efficient screening test for German adults to assess interindividual levels of reading proficiency. |
Sahil Luthra; Sara Guediche; Sheila E. Blumstein; Emily B. Myers Neural substrates of subphonemic variation and lexical competition in spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 151–169, 2019. @article{Luthra2019, In spoken word recognition, subphonemic variation influences lexical activation, with sounds near a category boundary increasing phonetic competition as well as lexical competition. The current study investigated the interplay of these factors using a visual world task in which participants were instructed to look at a picture of an auditory target (e.g. peacock). Eyetracking data indicated that participants were slowed when a voiced onset competitor (e.g. beaker) was also displayed, and this effect was amplified when acoustic-phonetic competition was increased. Simultaneously-collected fMRI data showed that several brain regions were sensitive to the presence of the onset competitor, including the supramarginal, middle temporal, and inferior frontal gyri, and functional connectivity analyses revealed that the coordinated activity of left frontal regions depends on both acoustic-phonetic and lexical factors. Taken together, results suggest a role for frontal brain structures in resolving lexical competition, particularly as atypical acoustic-phonetic information maps on to the lexicon. |
Guojie Ma; Danxin Li; Xiangling Zhuang Do visual word segmentation cues improve reading performance in Chinese reading? Journal Article In: Ergonomics, vol. 62, no. 8, pp. 1086–1097, 2019. @article{Ma2019, It is controversial whether providing visual word segmentation cues can improve Chinese reading performance. This study investigated this topic by examining how visual word segmentation cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influence global sentence reading and local word recognition during reading Chinese text in three experiments. The results showed that interword spacing could facilitate local word recognition but could not increase reading speed. In contrast, grey highlighting and red colour could improve neither local word recognition nor global sentence reading performance. Instead, these cues increased the number of fixations and saccades, resulting in slower reading speed. These results suggest that even red colour is not a practically visual cue for Chinese word segmentation and the corresponding mechanisms were discussed. Practitioner Summary: We studied how visual cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influenced Chinese reading performance. Our data showed that even the red colour was not an efficient cue for Chinese word segmentation. The corresponding mechanisms and future direction were discussed regarding how to improve Chinese reading performance. |
Guojie Ma; Ziang Li; Fengfeng Xu; Xingshan Li The modulation of eye movement control by word length in reading Chinese Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 72, no. 7, pp. 1620–1631, 2019. @article{Ma2019a, Given there are no interword spaces marking word boundaries in Chinese text, it remains unclear how information about word length influences eye movement control during the reading of Chinese text. In this research, we set up strict controls for word frequency and other word properties, to study this knowledge gap. In Experiment 1A and Experiment 1B, a between-subjects design was used. Forty-eight pairs of one- and two-character words were selected as target words in Experiment 1A, while the same amount of two- and three-character words were selected in Experiment 1B. Conversely, a within-subjects design was used in Experiment 2. Sixty sets of one-, two- and three-character words were selected as target words. The results showed that long words were skipped less often and fixated on more often than short words. Total time was shorter for shorter than for longer words but first fixation durations were longer for one- than for two-character words. Most importantly, we did not find reliable evidence to support the view that word length could modulate initial landing position and incoming saccade length in the length-matched region analyses. These findings suggest that word length influences eye movement control during reading Chinese in a way that is slightly different from that in the process of reading English. |
Marloes Mak; Roel M. Willems Mental simulation during literary reading: Individual differences revealed with eye-tracking Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 511–535, 2019. @article{Mak2019, People engage in simulation when reading literary narratives. In this study, we tried to pinpoint how different kinds of simulation (perceptual and motor simulation, mentalising) affect reading behaviour. Eye-tracking (gaze durations, regression probability) and questionnaire data were collected from 102 participants, who read three literary short stories. In a pre-test, 90 additional participants indicated which parts of the stories were high in one of the three kinds of simulation-eliciting content. The results show that motor simulation reduces gaze duration (faster reading), whereas perceptual simulation and mentalising increase gaze duration (slower reading). Individual differences in the effect of simulation on gaze duration were found, which were related to individual differences in aspects of story world absorption and story appreciation. These findings suggest fundamental differences between different kinds of simulation and confirm the role of simulation in absorption and appreciation. |
Michael P. Mansbridge; Katsuo Tamaoka Ambiguity in Japanese relative clause processing Journal Article In: Journal of Japanese Linguistics, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 75–136, 2019. @article{Mansbridge2019, In Japanese, relative clauses have initial clause-type ambiguity. Because there are no overt RC markers, the structure is realized at a locus of disambiguation, typically the head noun. While previous studies have attenuated this ambiguity, these studies have not effectively investigated the processing asymmetry between subject/object-relatives during reading. The current study investigated RC processing within different ambiguity contexts using eye-tracking on native Japanese speakers. For ambiguous RCs, ORC difficulties were primarily observed during late-processing measures after disambiguation at the head noun and RC verb. This was possibly due to the inherent difficulty of assigning thematic roles when the object appears outside the clause as the object-before-subject-bias predicts or due to factors such as expectation, structural-integration and similarity interference. Because all predict ORC difficulties in ambiguous RCs, the exact nature of the processing remains uncertain. For unambiguous RCs, ORC difficulties were instead observed during early-processing measures at the head noun. We attribute this to expectation-based processing because the clause no longer requires a structural reconfiguration. Specifically, with increased cues for the RC interpretation, expectation-based processing effects became more observable at the head. In conclusion, clause type ambiguity is an integral factor for Japanese relative clause processing. |
María Teresa Martínez-García Using eye-movements to track bilingual activation Journal Article In: Languages, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 59, 2019. @article{MartinezGarcia2019, Recent research found that the languages of bilingual listeners are active and interact, such that both lexical representations are activated by the spoken input with which they are compatible. However, the time course of bilingual activation and whether suprasegmental information further modulates this cross-language competition are still not well understood. This study investigates the effect of stress placement on the processing of English–Spanish cognates by beginner-to-intermediate Spanish-speaking second-language (L2) learners of English and intermediate-to-advanced English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish using the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm. In each trial, participants saw a target (asado, ‘roast'), one of two competitors (stress match: asados, ‘roast (pl)'; stress mismatch: asador, ‘rotisserie'), and two unrelated distracters, while hearing the target word. The experiment included a non-cognate condition (asado-asados-asador) and a cognate condition, where the stress pattern of the English word corresponding to the Spanish competitor in the stress-mismatch condition (inventor) instead matched that of the Spanish target (invento, ‘invent'). Growth-curve analyses revealed cognate-status and stress-mismatch effects for Spanish-speaking L2 learners of English, and cognate-status and stress-mismatch effects, and an interaction for English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish. This suggests that both groups use stress for word recognition, but the English stress pattern only affects the processing of Spanish words in the English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish. |
Eliana Mastrantuono; Michele Burigo; Isabel R. Rodríguez-Ortiz; David Saldaña The role of multiple articulatory channels of sign-supported speech revealed by visual processing Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 62, pp. 1625–1656, 2019. @article{Mastrantuono2019, Purpose: The use of sign-supported speech (SSS) in the education of deaf students has been recently discussed inrelation to its usefulness with deaf children using cochlear implants. To clarify the benefits of SSS for comprehension, 2 eye-tracking experiments aimed to detect the extent to which signs are actively processed in this mode of communication. Method: Participants were 36 deaf adolescents, including cochlear implant users and native deaf signers. Experiment 1 attempted to shift observers' foveal attention to the linguistic source in SSS from which most information is extracted, lip movements or signs, by magnifying the face area, thus modifying lip movements perceptual accessibility (magnified condition), and by constraining the visual field to either theface or the sign through a moving window paradigm (gaze contingent condition). Experiment 2 aimed to explore the reliance on signs in SSS by occasionally producing a mismatch between sign and speech. Participants were required to concentrate upon the orally transmitted message. Results: In Experiment 1, analyses revealed a greater number of fixations toward the signs and a reduction in accuracy in the gaze contingent condition across all participants. Fixations toward signs were also increased inthe magnified condition. In Experiment 2, results indicatedless accuracy in the mismatching condition across all participants. Participants looked more at the sign when it was inconsistent with speech. Conclusions: All participants, even those with residualhearing, rely on signs when attending SSS, either peripherally or through overt attention, depending on the perceptual conditions. |
Bob McMurray; Tyler P. Ellis; Keith S. Apfelbaum How do you deal with uncertainty? Cochlear implant users differ in the dynamics of lexical processing of noncanonical inputs Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 961–980, 2019. @article{McMurray2019, Objectives: Work in normal-hearing (NH) adults suggests that spoken language processing involves coping with ambiguity. Even a clearly spoken word contains brief periods of ambiguity as it unfolds over time, and early portions will not be sufficient to uniquely identify the word. However, beyond this temporary ambiguity, NH listeners must also cope with the loss of information due to reduced forms, dialect, and other factors. A recent study suggests that NH listeners may adapt to increased ambiguity by changing the dynamics of how they commit to candidates at a lexical level. Cochlear implant (CI) users must also frequently deal with highly degraded input, in which there is less information available in the input to recover a target word. The authors asked here whether their frequent experience with this leads to lexical dynamics that are better suited for coping with uncertainty. Design: Listeners heard words either correctly pronounced (dog) or mispronounced at onset (gog) or offset (dob). Listeners selected the corresponding picture from a screen containing pictures of the target and three unrelated items. While they did this, fixations to each object were tracked as a measure of the time course of identifying the target. The authors tested 44 postlingually deafened adult CI users in 2 groups (23 used standard electric only configurations, and 21 supplemented the CI with a hearing aid), along with 28 age-matched age-typical hearing (ATH) controls. Results: All three groups recognized the target word accurately, though each showed a small decrement for mispronounced forms (larger in both types of CI users). Analysis of fixations showed a close time locking to the timing of the mispronunciation. Onset mispronunciations delayed initial fixations to the target, but fixations to the target showed partial recovery by the end of the trial. Offset mispronunciations showed no effect early, but suppressed looking later. This pattern was attested in all three groups, though both types of CI users were slower and did not commit fully to the target. When the authors quantified the degree of disruption (by the mispronounced forms), they found that both groups of CI users showed less disruption than ATH listeners during the first 900 msec of processing. Finally, an individual differences analysis showed that within the CI users, the dynamics of fixations predicted speech perception outcomes over and above accuracy in this task and that CI users with the more rapid fixation patterns of ATH listeners showed better outcomes. Conclusions: Postlingually deafened CI users process speech incrementally (as do ATH listeners), though they commit more slowly and less strongly to a single item than do ATH listeners. This may allow them to cope more flexible with mispronunciations. |
Ascensión Pagán; Kate Nation Learning words via reading: Contextual diversity, spacing, and retrieval effects in adults Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 1–24, 2019. @article{Pagan2019a, We examined whether variations in contextual diversity, spacing, and retrieval practice influenced how well adults learned new words from reading experience. Eye movements were recorded as adults read novel words embedded in sentences. In the learning phase, unfamiliar words were presented either in the same sentence repeated four times (same context) or in four different sentences (diverse context). Spacing was manipulated by presenting the sentences under distributed or non-distributed practice. After learning, half of the participants were asked to retrieve the new words, and half had an extra exposure to the new words. Although words experienced in diverse contexts were acquired more slowly during learning, they enjoyed a greater benefit of learning at immediate posttest. Distributed practice also slowed learning, but no benefit was observed at posttest. Although participants who had an extra exposure showed the greatest learning benefit overall, learning also benefited from retrieval opportunity, when words were experienced in diverse contexts. These findings demonstrate that variation in the content and structure of the learning environment impacts on word learning via reading. |
Pauline Palma; Veronica Whitford; Debra Titone Cross-language activation and executive control modulate within-language ambiguity resolution: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 507–528, 2019. @article{Palma2019, An important question within psycholinguistics is how knowledge of multiple languages impacts the coactivation of word forms and meanings during language comprehension. To the extent that a bilingual's known languages are always partially active, as predicted by models such as the bilingual interactive activation plus model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002), cross-language activation should influence which meanings are accessed and in which order. Here, we monitored the eye movements of 48 French-English and 40 English-French bilingual adults as they read within-language homonyms embedded in more or less semantically constraining English sentences. The within-language homonyms were either cognate homonyms, whose subordinate meanings were also French cognates (e.g., sage, "herb" or, less frequently, "wise man" in English and, also, "wise man" in French), or uniquely English (e.g., chest). French-English bilinguals processed cognate homonyms with subordinate meanings more quickly than uniquely English homonyms with subordinate meanings, and individual differences in executive control capacity modulated their processing of uniquely English homonyms only. In contrast, English-French bilinguals processed all within-language homonyms similarly, regardless of cognate status and executive control capacity. Our findings suggest that cross-language activation impacts within-language ambiguity resolution by changing the relative dominance of the meanings associated with a word form, and that cross-language activation varies as a function of the language tested (first or second language). |
Jinger Pan; Ming Yan; Jochen Laubrock; Hua Shu Lexical and sublexical phonological effects in Chinese silent and oral reading Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 403–418, 2019. @article{Pan2019, What is the time course of activation of phonological information in logographic writing systems like Chinese, in which meaning is prioritized over sound? We used a manipulation of phonological regularity to examine foveal and parafoveal phonological processing of Chinese phonograms at lexical and sublexical levels during Chinese sentence reading in 2 eye-tracking experiments. In Experiment 1, using an error disruption task during silent reading, we observed foveal lexical phonological activation in second-pass reading. In Experiment 2, using the boundary paradigm, both parafoveal lexical and sublexical phonological preview benefits were found in first-fixation duration in oral reading, whereas only lexical phonological benefits were found in gaze duration during silent reading. Thus, phonological information had earlier and more pronounced parafoveal effects in oral reading, and these extended to sublexical processing. These results are compatible with the view that oral reading prioritizes parafoveal phonological processing in Chinese. |
Adam J. Parker; Timothy J. Slattery Word frequency, predictability, and return-sweep saccades: Towards the modeling of eye movements during paragraph reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 45, no. 12, pp. 1614–1633, 2019. @article{Parker2019a, Models of eye movement control during reading focus on the reading of single lines of text. Within these models, word frequency and predictability are important input variables which influence fixation probabilities and durations. However, a comprehensive model of eye movement control will have to account for readers' eye movements across multiline texts. Line-initial words are unlike those presented midline; they are routinely unavailable for parafoveal preprocessing. Therefore, it is unclear whether and how word frequency and predictability influence reading times on line-initial words. To address this, we present an analysis of the Provo Corpus (Luke & Christianson, 2018) followed by a novel eye-movement experiment. We conclude that word frequency and predictability impact single-fixation and gaze durations on line-initial words. We also observed that return-sweep error (undersweep-fixations) may, among several other possibilities, allow for parafoveal processing of line-initial words prior to their direct fixation. Implications for models of eye movement control during reading are discussed. |
Adam J. Parker; Timothy J. Slattery; Julie A. Kirkby Return-sweep saccades during reading in adults and children Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 155, pp. 35–43, 2019. @article{Parker2019, During reading, eye movement patterns differ between children and adults. Children make more fixations that are longer in duration and make shorter saccades. Return-sweeps are saccadic eye movements that move a reader's fixation to a new line of text. Return-sweeps move fixation further than intra-line saccades and often undershoot their target. This necessitates a corrective saccade to bring fixation closer to the start of the line. There have been few empirical investigations of return-sweep saccades in adults, and even fewer in children. In the present study, we examined return-sweeps of 47 adults and 48 children who read identical multiline texts. We found that children launch their return-sweeps closer to the end of the line and target a position closer to the left margin. Therefore, children fixate more extreme positions on the screen when reading for comprehension. Furthermore, children required a corrective saccade following a return-sweep more often than adults. Analysis of the duration of the fixation preceding the corrective saccade indicated that children are as efficient as adults at responding to retinal feedback following a saccade. Rather than consider differences in adult's and children's return-sweep behaviour an artefact of oculomotor control, we believe that these differences represent adult's ability to utilise parafoveal processing to encode text at extreme positions. |
Giovanni Parodi; Cristóbal Julio; Laura Nadal; Adriana Cruz; Gina Burdiles Stepping back to look ahead: Neuter encapsulation and referent extension in counter-argumentative and causal relations in Spanish Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 11, pp. 431–454, 2019. @article{Parodi2019, In discourse comprehension, if all goes well, people tend to create a rich and coherent mental representation of the events described in the text. To do so, referential and relational coherence must be established in order to construct a connected discourse. The objective of this follow-up eye-tracking study (N = 72) is to explore the existence of an interaction effect between two factors: (a) the extension of the referent (short and long antecedent), and (b) the semantic relation (counter-argumentative a pesar de, and causal por), when processing the neuter pronoun ello in texts written in Spanish. No previous study has systematically compared the on-line processing of texts in which different extensions of the encapsulated anaphoric antecedent by the neuter pronoun ello ('this' or 'it' in English) are presented in diverse marked semantic relations (causal and counter-argumentative). Based on three eye-tracking measures, we found distinctive patterns of reading behavior when anaphoric neuter reference and semantic relations must be processed conjointly in order to construct a coherent mental representation. The main findings show that reading longer and more complex antecedents encapsulated by the neutral pronouns ello exerts more cognitive effort in late processing (Look Back measure), particularly when simultaneously and in the same discourse construction there is an explicitly marked counter-argumentative semantic relation. Implications for theories of referential and relational coherence are discussed. |
Clare Patterson; Claudia Felser Delayed application of binding condition C during cataphoric pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 453–475, 2019. @article{Patterson2019, Previous research has shown that during cataphoric pronoun resolution, the predictive search for an antecedent is restricted by a structure-sensitive constraint known as ‘Condition C', such that an antecedent is only considered when the constraint does not apply. Evidence has mainly come from self-paced reading (SPR), a method which may not be able to pick up on short-lived effects over the timecourse of processing. This study investigates whether or not the active search mechanism is constrained by Condition C at all points in time during cataphoric processing. We carried out one eye-tracking during reading and a parallel SPR experiment, accompanied by offline coreference judgment tasks. Although offline judgments about coreference were constrained by Condition C, the eye-tracking experiment revealed temporary consideration of antecedents that should be ruled out by Condition C. The SPR experiment using exactly the same materials indicated, conversely, that only structurally appropriate antecedents were considered. Taken together, our results suggest that the application of Condition C may be delayed during naturalistic reading. |
Jovana Pejovic; Eiling Yee; Monika Molnar Speaker matters: Natural inter-speaker variation affects 4-month-olds' perception of audio-visual speech Journal Article In: First Language, pp. 1–15, 2019. @article{Pejovic2019, In the language development literature, studies often make inferences about infants' speech perception abilities based on their responses to a single speaker. However, there can be significant natural variability across speakers in how speech is produced (i.e., inter-speaker differences). The current study examined whether inter-speaker differences can affect infants' ability to detect a mismatch between the auditory and visual components of vowels. Using an eye-tracker, 4.5-month-old infants were tested on auditory-visual (AV) matching for two vowels (/i/ and /u/). Critically, infants were tested with two speakers who naturally differed in how distinctively they articulated the two vowels within and across the categories. Only infants who watched and listened to the speaker whose visual articulations of the two vowels were most distinct from one another were sensitive to AV mismatch. This speaker also produced a visually more distinct /i/ as compared to the other speaker. This finding suggests that infants are sensitive to the distinctiveness of AV information across speakers, and that when making inferences about infants' perceptual abilities, characteristics of the speaker should be taken into account. |
Michelle S. Peter; Samantha Durrant; Andrew Jessop; Amy Bidgood; Julian M. Pine; Caroline F. Rowland Does speed of processing or vocabulary size predict later language growth in toddlers? Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 115, pp. 1–25, 2019. @article{Peter2019a, It is becoming increasingly clear that the way that children acquire cognitive representations depends critically on how their processing system is developing. In particular, recent studies suggest that individual differences in language processing speed play an important role in explaining the speed with which children acquire language. Inconsistencies across studies, however, mean that it is not clear whether this relationship is causal or correlational, whether it is present right across development, or whether it extends beyond word learning to affect other aspects of language learning, like syntax acquisition. To address these issues, the current study used the looking-while-listening paradigm devised by Fernald, Swingley, and Pinto (2001) to test the speed with which a large longitudinal cohort of children (the Language 0–5 Project) processed language at 19, 25, and 31 months of age, and took multiple measures of vocabulary (UK-CDI, Lincoln CDI, CDI-III) and syntax (Lincoln CDI) between 8 and 37 months of age. Processing speed correlated with vocabulary size - though this relationship changed over time, and was observed only when there was variation in how well the items used in the looking-while-listening task were known. Fast processing speed was a positive predictor of subsequent vocabulary growth, but only for children with smaller vocabularies. Faster processing speed did, however, predict faster syntactic growth across the whole sample, even when controlling for concurrent vocabulary. The results indicate a relatively direct relationship between processing speed and syntactic development, but point to a more complex interaction between processing speed, vocabulary size and subsequent vocabulary growth. |
Mikhail Y. Pokhoday; Yury Y. Shtyrov; Andriy Myachykov Effects of visual priming and event orientation on word order choice in Russian sentence production Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 1661, 2019. @article{Pokhoday2019, Existing research shows that distribution of the speaker's attention among event's protagonists affects syntactic choice during sentence production. One of the debated issues concerns the extent of the attentional contribution to syntactic choice in languages that put stronger emphasis on word order arrangement rather than the choice of the overall syntactic frame. To address this, the current study used a sentence production task, in which Russian native speakers were asked to verbally describe visually perceived transitive events. Prior to describing the target event, a visual cue directed the participants' attention to the location of either the agent or the patient of the subsequently presented visual event. In addition, we also manipulated event orientation (agent-left vs agent-right) as another potential contributor to syntactic choice. The number of patient-initial sentences was the dependent variable compared between conditions. First, the obtained results replicated the effect of visual cueing on the word order in Russian language: more patient-initial sentences in patient cued condition. Second, we registered a novel effect of event orientation: Russian native speakers produced more patient-initial sentences after seeing events developing from right to left as opposed to left-to-right events. Our study provides new evidence about the role of the speaker's attention and event orientation in syntactic choice in language with flexible word order. |
Vincent Porretta; Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen Influencing the time and space of lexical competition: The effect of gradient foreign accentedness Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 45, no. 10, pp. 1832–1851, 2019. @article{Porretta2019, This article examines the influence of gradient foreign accentedness on lexical competition during spoken word recognition. Using native and Mandarin-accented English words ranging in degree of foreign accentedness, we investigate the effect of increased accentedness on (a) the size of the competitor space and (b) the strength and duration of competitor activation. Here, we analyze the number of misperceptions in a transcription task, as well as the time course of competitor activation in a Visual World Paradigm eye-tracking task. The transcription data show that as accentedness increases, the number of unique misperceptions increases. This indicates that greater accent strength induces the activation of many additional competitors within the competition space relative to native speech. The eye-tracking data further show that, as accentedness increases, looks to competitors (not produced in the transcription task) increase both in likelihood and duration. This indicates that greater accentedness boosts the strength of competitor activation as well as the duration of the competition process, even when comprehension is ultimately successful, suggesting strong and diffuse competition within the lexicon. The results provide evidence of changes in the underlying dynamics, which lead to the pervasive processing costs associated with foreign-accented speech that are commonly observed in behavioral data. |
Céline Pozniak; Barbara Hemforth; Yair Haendler; Andrea Santi; Nino Grillo Seeing events vs. entities: The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 107, pp. 128–151, 2019. @article{Pozniak2019, We present the results of three offline questionnaires (one attachment preference study and two acceptability judgments) and two eye-tracking studies in French and English, investigating the resolution of the ambiguity between pseudo relative and relative clause interpretations. This structural and interpretive ambiguity has recently been shown to play a central role in the explanation of apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries in relative clause attachment (Grillo and Costa, 2014; Grillo et al., 2015). This literature has argued that pseudo relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their structural and interpretive simplicity. This paper adds to this growing body of literature in two ways. First we show that, in contrast to previous findings, French speakers prefer to attach relative clauses to the most local antecedent once pseudo relative availability is controlled for. We then provide direct support for the pseudo relative preference: grammatically forced disambiguation to a relative clause interpretation leads to degraded acceptability and greater processing cost in a pseudo relative environment than maintaining compatibility with a pseudo relative. |
Esha Prakash; Rebecca J. McLean; Sarah J. White; Kevin B. Paterson; Irene Gottlob; Frank A. Proudlock Reading individual words within sentences in infantile nystagmus Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 60, no. 6, pp. 2226–2236, 2019. @article{Prakash2019, PURPOSE. Normal readers make immediate and precise adjustments in eye movements during sentence reading in response to individual word features, such as lexical difficulty (e.g., common or uncommon words) or word length. Our purpose was to assess the effect of infantile nystagmus (IN) on these adaptive mechanisms. METHODS. Eye movements were recorded from 29 participants with IN (14 albinism, 12 idiopathic, and 3 congenital stationary night blindness) and 15 controls when reading sentences containing either common/uncommon words or long/short target words. Parameters assessed included: duration of first foveation/fixation, number of first-pass and percentage second-pass foveations/fixations, percentage words skipped, gaze duration, acquisition time (gaze þ nongaze duration), landing site locations, clinical and experimental reading speeds. RESULTS. Participants with IN could not modify first foveation durations in contrast to controls who made longer first fixations on uncommon words (P < 0.001). Participants with IN made more first-pass foveations on uncommon and long words (P < 0.001) to increase gaze durations. However, this also increased nongaze durations (P < 0.001) delaying acquisition times. Participants with IN reread shorter words more often (P < 0.005). Similar to controls, participants with IN landed more first foveations between the start and center of long words. Reading speeds during experiments were lower in IN participants compared to controls (P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS. People with IN make more first-pass foveations on uncommon and long words influencing reading speeds. This demonstrates that the ‘‘slow to see'' phenomenon occurs during word reading in IN. These deficits are not captured by clinical reading charts. |
Stéphanie Bellocchi; Delphine Massendari; Jonathan Grainger; Stéphanie Ducrot Effects of inter-character spacing on saccade programming in beginning readers and dyslexics Journal Article In: Child Neuropsychology, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 482–506, 2019. @article{Bellocchi2019, The present study investigated the impact of inter-character spacing on saccade programming in beginning readers and dyslexic children. In two experiments, eye movements were recorded while dyslexic children, reading-age, and chronological-age controls, performed an oculomotor lateralized bisection task on words and strings of hashes presented either with default inter-character spacing or with extra spacing between the characters. The results of Experiment 1 showed that (1) only proficient readers had already developed highly automatized procedures for programming both left- and rightward saccades, depending on the discreteness of the stimuli and (2) children of all groups were disrupted (i.e., had trouble to land close to the beginning of the stimuli) by extra spacing between the characters of the stimuli, and particularly for stimuli presented in the left visual field. Experiment 2 was designed to disentangle the role of inter-character spacing and spatial width. Stimuli were made the same physical length in the default and extra-spacing conditions by having more characters in the default spacing condition. Our results showed that inter-letter spacing still influenced saccade programming when controlling for spatial width, thus confirming the detrimental effect of extra spacing for saccade programming. We conclude that the beneficial effect of increased inter-letter spacing on reading can be better explained in terms of decreased visual crowding than improved saccade targeting. |
Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Eric Castet The optimal use of non-optimal letter information in foveal and parafoveal word recognition Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 155, pp. 44–61, 2019. @article{Bernard2019, Letters and words across the visual field can be difficult to identify due to limiting visual factors such as acuity, crowding and position uncertainty. Here, we show that when human readers identify words presented at foveal and para-foveal locations, they act like theoretical observers making optimal use of letter identity and letter position information independently extracted from each letter after an unavoidable and non-optimal letter recognition guess. The novelty of our approach is that we carefully considered foveal and parafoveal letter identity and position uncertainties by measuring crowded letter recognition performance in five subjects without any word context influence. Based on these behavioral measures, lexical access was simulated for each subject by an observer making optimal use of each subject's uncertainties. This free-parameter model was able to predict individual behavioral recognition rates of words presented at different positions across the visual field. Importantly, the model was also able to predict individual mislocation and identity letter errors made during behavioral word recognition. These results reinforce the view that human readers recognize foveal and parafoveal words by parts (the word letters) in a first stage, independently of word context. They also suggest a second step where letter identity and position uncertainties are generated based on letter first guesses and positions. During the third lexical access stage, identity and position uncertainties from each letter look remarkably combined together through an optimal word recognition decision process. |
Nicoletta Biondo; Francesco Vespignani; Brian W. Dillon Attachment and concord of temporal adverbs: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 983, 2019. @article{Biondo2019, The present study examined the processing of temporal adverbial phrases such as "last week," which must agree in temporal features with the verb they modify. We investigated readers' sensitivity to this feature match or mismatch in two eye-tracking studies. The main aim of this study was to expand the range of concord phenomena which have been investigated in real-time processing in order to understand how linguistic dependencies are formed during sentence comprehension (Felser et al., 2017). Under a cue-based perspective, linguistic dependency formation relies on an associative cue-based retrieval mechanism (Lewis et al., 2006; McElree, 2006), but how such a mechanism is deployed over diverse linguistic dependencies remains a matter of debate. Are all linguistic features candidate cues that guide retrieval? Are all cues given similar weight? Are different cues differently weighted based on the dependency being processed? To address these questions, we implemented a mismatch paradigm (Sturt, 2003) adapted for temporal concord dependencies. This paradigm tested whether readers were sensitive to a temporal agreement between a temporal adverb like last week and a linearly distant, but structurally accessible verb, as well as a linearly proximate but structurally inaccessible verb. We found clear evidence that readers were sensitive to feature match between the adverb and the linearly distant, structurally accessible verb. We found no clear evidence on whether feature match with the inaccessible verb impacted the processing of a temporal adverb. Our results suggest syntactic positional information plays an important role during the processing of the temporal concord relation. |
Jo Black; Mahsa Barzy; David Williams; Heather Ferguson Intact counterfactual emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 422–444, 2019. @article{Black2019, Counterfactual emotions, such as regret and relief, require an awareness of how things could have been different. We report a preregistered experiment that examines how adults with and without ASD process counterfactual emotions in real-time, based on research showing that the developmental trajectory of counterfactual thinking may be disrupted in people with ASD. Participants were eye-tracked as they read narratives in which a character made an explicit decision then subsequently experienced either a mildly negative or positive outcome. The final sentence in each story included an explicit remark about the character's mood that was either consistent or inconsistent with the character's expected feelings of regret or relief (e.g., “… she feels happy/annoyed about her decision.”). Results showed that adults with ASD are unimpaired in processing emotions based on counterfactual reasoning, and in fact showed earlier sensitivity to inconsistencies within relief contexts compared to TD participants. This finding highlights a previously unknown strength in empathy and emotion processing in adults with ASD, which may have been masked in previous research that has typically relied on explicit, response-based measures to record emotional inferences, which are likely to be susceptible to demand characteristics and response biases. Therefore, this study highlights the value of employing implicit measures that provide insights on peoples' immediate responses to emotional content without disrupting ongoing processing. Autism Res 2019, 12: 422–444 © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary: Despite known difficulties with empathy and perspective-taking, we found that adults with autism are unimpaired at inferring complex emotions (regret and relief) in others. This finding extends existing evidence showing dysfunctional counterfactual thinking in children with autism. We highlight the value of using implicit measures to identify strengths and abilities in ASD that may be masked by explicit tasks that require participants to interact socially or report their own thoughts. |
Frances Blanchette; Cynthia Lukyanenko Unacceptable grammars? An eye-tracking study of English negative concord Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–40, 2019. @article{Blanchette2019, This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers' processing of sentences with two syntactic negations: a negative auxiliary and either a negative subject (e.g., Nothing didn't fall from the shelf) or a negative object (e.g., She didn't answer nothing in that interview). Sentences were read in Double Negation (DN; the 'she answered something' reading of she didn't answer nothing) and Negative Concord (NC; the 'she answered nothing' reading of she didn't answer nothing) biasing contexts. Despite the social stigma associated with NC, and linguistic assumptions that Standard English has a DN grammar, in which each syntactic negation necessarily contributes a semantic negation, our results show that Standard English speakers generate both NC and DN interpretations, and that their interpretation is affected by the syntactic structure of the negative sentence. Participants spent more time reading the critical sentence and rereading the context sentence when negative object sentences were paired with DN-biasing contexts and when negative subject sentences were paired with NC-biasing contexts. This suggests that, despite not producing NC, they find NC interpretations of negative object sentences easier to generate than DN interpretations. The results illustrate the utility of online measures when investigating socially stigmatized construction types. |
Hazel I. Blythe; Barbara J. Juhasz; Lee W. Tbaily; Keith Rayner; Simon P. Liversedge Reading sentences of words with rotated letters: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 72, no. 7, pp. 1790–1804, 2019. @article{Blythe2019, Participants' eye movements were measured as they read sentences in which individual letters within words were rotated. Both the consistency of direction and the magnitude of rotation were manipulated (letters rotated all in the same direction, or alternately clockwise and anti-clockwise, by 30° or 60°). Each sentence included a target word that was manipulated for frequency of occurrence. Our objectives were threefold: To quantify how change in the visual presentation of individual letters disrupted word identification, and whether disruption was consistent with systematic change in visual presentation; to determine whether inconsistent letter transformation caused more disruption than consistent letter transformation; and to determine whether such effects were comparable for words that were high and low frequency to explore the extent to which they were visually or linguistically mediated. We found that disruption to reading was greater as the magnitude of letter rotation increased, although even small rotations affected processing. The data also showed that alternating letter rotations were significantly more disruptive than consistent rotations; this result is consistent with models of lexical identification in which encoding occurs over units of more than one adjacent letter. These rotation manipulations also showed significant interactions with word frequency on the target word: Gaze durations and total fixation duration times increased disproportionately for low-frequency words when they were presented at more extreme rotations. These data provide a first step towards quantifying the relative contribution of the spatial relationships between individual letters to word recognition and eye movement control in reading. |
Hans Rutger Bosker; Marjolein Os; Rik Does; Geertje Bergen Counting ‘uhm's: How tracking the distribution of native and non-native disfluencies influences online language comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 106, pp. 189–202, 2019. @article{Bosker2019, Disfluencies, like uh, have been shown to help listeners anticipate reference to low-frequency words. The associative account of this ‘disfluency bias' proposes that listeners learn to associate disfluency with low-frequency referents based on prior exposure to non-arbitrary disfluency distributions (i.e., greater probability of low-frequency words after disfluencies). However, there is limited evidence for listeners actually tracking disfluency distributions online. The present experiments are the first to show that adult listeners, exposed to a typical or more atypical disfluency distribution (i.e., hearing a talker unexpectedly say uh before high-frequency words), flexibly adjust their predictive strategies to the disfluency distribution at hand (e.g., learn to predict high-frequency referents after disfluency). However, when listeners were presented with the same atypical disfluency distribution but produced by a non-native speaker, no adjustment was observed. This suggests pragmatic inferences can modulate distributional learning, revealing the flexibility of, and constraints on, distributional learning in incremental language comprehension. |
Bettina Braun; Yuki Asano; Nicole Dehé When (not) to look for contrastive alternatives: The role of pitch accent type and additive particles Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 751–778, 2019. @article{Braun2019, This study investigates how pitch accent type and additive particles affect the activation of contrastive alternatives. In Experiment 1, German listeners heard declarative utterances (e.g., The swimmer wanted to put on flippers) and saw four printed words displayed on screen: one that was a contrastive alternative to the subject noun (e.g., diver), one that was non-contrastively related (e.g., pool), the object (e.g., flippers), and an unrelated distractor. Experiment 1 manipulated pitch accent type, comparing a broad focus control condition to two narrow focus conditions: with a contrastive or non-contrastive accent on the subject noun (nuclear L+H* vs. H+L*, respectively, followed by deaccentuation). In Experiment 2, the utterances in the narrow focus conditions were preceded by the unstressed additive particle auch (“also”), which may trigger alternatives itself. It associated with the accented subject. Results showed that, compared to the control condition, participants directed more fixations to the contrastive alternative when the subject was realized with a contrastive accent (nuclear L+H*) than when it was realized with non-contrastive H+L*, while additive particles had no effect. Hence, accent type is the primary trigger for signaling the presence of alternatives (i.e., contrast). Implications for theories of information structure and the processing of additive particles are discussed. |
Laurel Brehm; Linda Taschenberger; Antje S. Meyer Mental representations of partner task cause interference in picture naming Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 199, pp. 1–13, 2019. @article{Brehm2019, Interference in picture naming occurs from representing a partner's preparations to speak (Gambi, van de Cavey, & Pickering, 2015). We tested the origins of this interference using a simple non-communicative joint naming task based on Gambi et al. (2015), where response latencies indexed interference from partner task and partner speech content, and eye fixations to partner objects indexed overt attention. Experiment 1 contrasted a partner- present condition with a control partner-absent condition to establish the role of the partner in eliciting interference. For latencies, we observed interference from the partner's task and speech content, with interference increasing due to partner task in the partner-present condition. Eye-tracking measures showed that interference in naming was not due to overt attention to partner stimuli but to broad expectations about likely utterances. Experiment 2 examined whether an equivalent non-verbal task also elicited interference, as predicted from a language as joint action framework. We replicated the finding of interference due to partner task and again found no relationship between overt attention and interference. These results support Gambi et al. (2015). Individuals co-represent a partner's task while speaking, and doing so does not require overt attention to partner stimuli. |
Emma Bridgwater; Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen; Victor Kuperman The influence of syntactic expectations on reading comprehension is malleable and strategic: An eye-tracking study of English dative alternation Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 179–192, 2019. @article{Bridgwater2019, Language processing is incremental and inherently predictive. Against this theoretic backdrop, we investigated the role of upcoming structural information in the comprehension of the English dative alternation. The use of eye-tracking enabled us to examine both the time course and locus of the effect associated with (a) structural expectations based on a lifetime of experience with language, and (b) rapid adaptation of the reader to the local statistics of the experiment. We quantified (a) as a verb subcategorization bias toward dative alternatives, and (b) as distributional biases in the syntactic input during the experiment. A reliable facilitatory effect of the verb bias was only observed in the double-object datives and only in the disambiguation region of the second object. Furthermore, structural priming led to an earlier locus of the verb bias effect, suggesting an interaction between (a) and (b). Our results offer a new outlook on the utilization of syntactic expectations during reading, in conjunction with rapid adaptation to the immediate linguistic environment. We demonstrate that this utilization is both malleable and strategic. |
Julie Gregg; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Cynthia M. Connine Re-reconsidering the role of temporal order in spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 72, no. 11, pp. 2574–2583, 2019. @article{Gregg2019, Spoken word recognition models incorporate the temporal unfolding of word information by assuming that positional match constrains lexical activation. Recent findings challenge the linearity constraint. In the visual world paradigm, Toscano, Anderson, and McMurray observed that listeners preferentially viewed a picture of a target word's anadrome competitor (e.g., competitor bus for target sub) compared with phonologically unrelated distractors (e.g., well) or competitors sharing an overlapping vowel (e.g., sun). Toscano et al. concluded that spoken word recognition relies on coarse grain spectral similarity for mapping spoken input to a lexical representation. Our experiments aimed to replicate the anadrome effect and to test the coarse grain similarity account using competitors without vowel position overlap (e.g., competitor leaf for target flea). The results confirmed the original effect: anadrome competitor fixation curves diverged from unrelated distractors approximately 275 ms after the onset of the target word. In contrast, the no vowel position overlap competitor did not show an increase in fixations compared with the unrelated distractors. The contrasting results for the anadrome and no vowel position overlap items are discussed in terms of theoretical implications of sequential match versus coarse grain similarity accounts of spoken word recognition. We also discuss design issues (repetition of stimulus materials and display parameters) concerning the use of the visual world paradigm in making inferences about online spoken word recognition. |
Jason W. Gullifer; Debra Titone The impact of a momentary language switch on bilingual reading: Intense at the switch but merciful downstream for L2 but not L1 Readers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 45, no. 11, pp. 2036–2050, 2019. @article{Gullifer2019, We investigated whether cross-language activation is sensitive to shifting language demands and language experience during first and second language (i.e., L1, L2) reading. Experiment 1 consisted of L1 French-L2 English bilinguals reading in the L2, and Experiment 2 consisted of L1 English-L2 French bilinguals reading in the L1. Both groups read English sentences with target words serving as indices of cross-language activation: cross-language homographs, cognates, and matched language-unique control words. Critically, we manipulated whether English sentences contained a momentary language switch into French before downstream target words. This allowed us to assess the consequences of shifting language demands, both in the moment, and residually following a switch as a function of language experience. Switches into French were associated with a reading cost at the switch site for both L2 and L1 readers. However, downstream cross-language activation was larger following a switch only for L1 readers. These results suggest that cross-language activation is jointly sensitive to momentary shifts in language demands and language experience, likely reflecting different control demands faced by L2 versus L1 readers, consistent with models of bilingual processing that ascribe a primary role for language control. |
Arella E. Gussow; Efthymia C. Kapnoula; Nicola Molinaro Any leftovers from a discarded prediction? Evidence from eye-movements during sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 34, no. 8, pp. 1041–1058, 2019. @article{Gussow2019, We investigated how listeners use gender-marked adjectives to adjust lexical predictions during sentence comprehension. Participants listened to sentence fragments in Spanish (e.g. “The witch flew to the village on her … ”) that created expectation for a specific noun (broomstickfem), and were completed by an adjective and a noun. The adjective either agreed (newfem), disagreed (newmasc), or was neutral (bigfem/masc) with respect to the expected noun's gender. Using the visual-world paradigm, we monitored looks toward images of the expected noun versus an alternative of the opposite gender (helicoptermasc). While listening to the initial fragment, participants looked more towards the expected noun. Once the adjective was heard, looks shifted toward the noun that matched the adjective's gender. Finally, upon hearing the noun, looks were affected by both previous context and adjective gender. We conclude that predictions are updated online based on gender cues, but sentence context still affects integration of the expected noun. |
Julia Habicht; Oliver Behler; Birger Kollmeier; Tobias Neher In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 13, pp. 420, 2019. @article{Habicht2019, Recently, evidence has been accumulating that untreated hearing loss can lead to neurophysiological changes that affect speech processing abilities in noise. To shed more light on how aiding may impact these effects, this study explored the influence of hearing aid (HA) experience on the cognitive processes underlying speech comprehension. Eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurements were carried out with acoustic sentence-in-noise (SiN) stimuli complemented by pairs of pictures that either correctly (target picture) or incorrectly (competitor picture) depicted the sentence meanings. For the eye-tracking measurements, the time taken by the participants to start fixating the target picture (the ‘processing time') was measured. For the fMRI measurements, brain activation inferred from blood-oxygen-level dependent responses following sentence comprehension was measured. A noise-only condition was also included. Groups of older hearing-impaired individuals matched in terms of age, hearing loss, and working memory capacity with (eHA; N = 13) or without (iHA; N = 14) HA experience participated. All acoustic stimuli were presented via earphones with individual linear amplification to ensure audibility. Consistent with previous findings, the iHA group had significantly longer (poorer) processing times than the eHA group, despite no differences in speech recognition performance. Concerning the fMRI measurements, there were indications of less brain activation in some right frontal areas for SiN relative to noise-only stimuli in the eHA group compared to the iHA group. Together, these results suggest that HA experience leads to faster speech-in-noise processing, possibly related to less recruitment of brain regions outside the core sentence-comprehension network. Follow-up research is needed to substantiate the findings related to changes in cortical speech processing with HA use. |
Lei Han; Rui Sun; Fengqiang Gao; Yuci Zhou; Min Jou The effect of negative energy news on social trust and helping behavior Journal Article In: Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 92, pp. 128–138, 2019. @article{Han2019, Due to the fast development of science and technology, people increasingly like to get information from the Internet rather than newspapers and magazines. However, recently, this accessible online information has been filled with enormous negative news or neutral news with negative headlines. Therefore, the current study conducted three experiments to examine how negative online news affects social trust and helping behavior. The results of experiment 1 showed that individuals were inclined to demonstrate an attentional bias on and perform a preference for the negative news during the eye-movement task and indicated that individuals were easily affected by negative online news compared with positive online news. Based on experiment 1, experiment 2 used the guiding effect of online news and found that relative to some readers who were presented with positive news, others who read negative news showed less helping behavior, and this relationship was completely mediated by social trust. In experiment 3, we changed the headline of every neutral news story into two versions, one with a neutral headline and another with a negative headline, and found more negative cognition, lower social trust, and less helping behavior when individuals read negative headlines. Results of the current study supported the general learning model and the social cognitive theory, which showed that negative news had an impact on individuals' cognition, such as social trust, and then influenced their helping behavior. In particular, negative headlines led to a severely negative effect on social trust and helping behavior. |
Hannah Harvey; Stephen J. Anderson; Robin Walker Increased word spacing improves performance for reading scrolling text with central vision loss Journal Article In: Optometry and Vision Science, vol. 96, no. 8, pp. 609–616, 2019. @article{Harvey2019, SIGNIFICANCE: Scrolling text can be an effective reading aid for those with central vision loss. Our results suggest that increased interword spacing with scrolling text may further improve the reading experience of this population. This conclusion may be of particular interest to low-vision aid developers and visual rehabilitation practitioners. PURPOSE: The dynamic, horizontally scrolling text format has been shown to improve reading performance in individuals with central visual loss. Here, we sought to determine whether reading performance with scrolling text can be further improved by modulating interword spacing to reduce the effects of visual crowding, a factor known to impact negatively on reading with peripheral vision. METHODS: The effects of interword spacing on reading performance (accuracy, memory recall, and speed) were assessed for eccentrically viewed single sentences of scrolling text. Separate experiments were used to determine whether performance measures were affected by any confound between interword spacing and text presentation rate in words per minute. Normally sighted participants were included, with a central vision loss implemented using a gaze-contingent scotoma of 8° diameter. In both experiments, participants read sentences that were presented with an interword spacing of one, two, or three characters. RESULTS: Reading accuracy and memory recall were significantly enhanced with triple-character interword spacing (both measures, P ≤.01). These basic findings were independent of the text presentation rate (in words per minute). CONCLUSIONS: We attribute the improvements in reading performance with increased interword spacing to a reduction in the deleterious effects of visual crowding. We conclude that increased interword spacing may enhance reading experience and ability when using horizontally scrolling text with a central vision loss. |
Hannah Harvey; Simon P. Liversedge; Robin Walker Evidence for a reduction of the rightward extent of the perceptual span when reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 45, no. 7, pp. 951–965, 2019. @article{Harvey2019a, The dynamic horizontally scrolling text format produces a directional conflict in the allocation of attention for reading, with a necessity to track each word leftward (in the direction of movement) concurrently with normal rightward shifts made to progress through the text (in left-to-right orthographies such as English). The gaze-contingent window paradigm was used to compare the extent of the perceptual span in reading of scrolling and static sentences. Across two experiments, this investigation confirmed that the allocation of attentional resources to the right of fixation was compressed with scrolling text. There was no evidence for a reversal of the direction of asymmetry or a confounding shift of landing position. |
Naomi Havron; Alex Carvalho; Anne-Caroline Fiévét; Anne Christophe Three- to four-year-old children rapidly adapt their predictions and use them to learn novel word meanings Journal Article In: Child Development, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 82–90, 2019. @article{Havron2019, Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predicted verbs were more likely to infer that a novel word appearing in this context referred to an action, than children for whom it predicted nouns. This suggests that children make rapid changes to their predictions, and use this information to learn novel information, supporting the role of prediction in language acquisition. |
Michael G. Cutter; Andrea E. Martin; Patrick Sturt Capitalization interacts with syntactic complexity Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–19, 2019. @article{Cutter2019, We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative clause's overt argument was a proper noun (e.g., The tall lanky guard who alerted Charlie/Charlie alerted to the danger was young) across three experiments. In Experiment 1 these sentences were presented in normal sentence casing or entirely in upper case. In Experiment 2 participants received either valid or invalid parafoveal previews of the relative clause. In Experiment 3 participants viewed relative clauses in only normal conditions. We hypothesized that we would observe relative clause effects (i.e., inflated fixation times for object relative clauses) while readers were still fixated on the word who, if readers use capitalization to infer a parafoveal word's syntactic class. This would constitute a syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Furthermore, we hypothesized that this effect should be influenced by sentence casing in Experiment 1 (with no cue for syntactic category being available in upper case sentences) but not by parafoveal preview validity of the target words. We observed syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Experiment 1 and 3, and a Bayesian analysis of the combined data from all three experiments. These effects seemed to be influenced more by noun capitalization than lexical processing. We discuss our findings in relation to models of eye movement control and sentence processing theories. |
Julien Dampuré; Pedro Javier López-Pérez; Horacio A. Barber Meaning-based attentional guidance as a function of foveal and task-related cognitive loads Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2019. @article{Dampure2019, The depth of parafoveal word processing depends on the amount of cognitive resources available. Whether this principle applies to the parafoveal semantic processing of multiple words remains, however, controversial. This study therefore aimed at testing the impact of the amount of cognitive resources available on the parafoveal semantic processing of words, by manipulating the foveal and task-related cognitive loads. Participants searched for words in displays of three semantically related or unrelated words, one of which was presented in the centre of the screen and two within the parafovea. The nature of the task and the characteristics of the centred word were manipulated to vary respectively the load associated to the task and to the foveal load. Analyses revealed more first saccades toward the parafoveal semantic distractors when both loads were low. These results indicate that fast parafoveal semantic word processing is constrained by the availability of cognitive resources. |
Federica Degno; Otto Loberg; Chuanli Zang; Manman Zhang; Nick Donnelly; Simon P. Liversedge A co-registration investigation of inter-word spacing and parafoveal preview: Eye movements and fixation-related potentials Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 14, no. 12, pp. e0225819, 2019. @article{Degno2019, Participants' eye movements (EMs) and EEG signal were simultaneously recorded to examine foveal and parafoveal processing during sentence reading. All the words in the sentence were manipulated for inter-word spacing (intact spaces vs. spaces replaced by a random letter) and parafoveal preview (identical preview vs. random letter string preview). We observed disruption for unspaced text and invalid preview conditions in both EMs and fixation- related potentials (FRPs). Unspaced and invalid preview conditions received longer reading times than spaced and valid preview conditions. In addition, the FRP data showed that unspaced previews disrupted reading in earlier time windows of analysis, compared to string preview conditions. Moreover, the effect of parafoveal preview was greater for spaced relative to unspaced conditions, in both EMs and FRPs. These findings replicate well-established preview effects, provide novel insight into the neural correlates of reading with and without inter-word spacing and suggest that spatial selection precedes lexical processing. |
Federica Degno; Otto Loberg; Chuanli Zang; Manman Zhang; Nick Donnelly; Simon P. Liversedge Parafoveal previews and lexical frequency in natural reading: Evidence from eye movements and fixation-related potentials. Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 148, no. 3, pp. 453–474, 2019. @article{Degno2019a, Participants' eye movements and electroencephalogram (EEG) signal were recorded as they read sentences displayed according to the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. Two target words in each sentence were manipulated for lexical frequency (high vs. low frequency) and parafoveal preview of each target word (identical vs. string of random letters vs. string of Xs). Eye movement data revealed visual parafoveal-on-foveal (PoF) effects, as well as foveal visual and orthographic preview effects and word frequency effects. Fixation-related potentials (FRPs) showed visual and orthographic PoF effects as well as foveal visual and orthographic preview effects. Our results replicated the early preview positivity effect (Dimigen, Kliegl, & Sommer, 2012) in the X-string preview condition, and revealed different neural correlates associated with a preview comprised of a string of random letters relative to a string of Xs. The former effects seem likely to reflect difficulty associated with the integration of parafoveal and foveal information, as well as feature overlap, while the latter reflect inhibition, and potentially disruption, to processing underlying reading. Interestingly, and consistent with Kretzschmar, Schlesewsky, and Staub (2015), no frequency effect was reflected in the FRP measures. The findings provide insight into the neural correlates of parafoveal processing and written word recognition in reading and demonstrate the value of utilizing ecologically valid paradigms to study well established phenomena that occur as text is read naturally. |
Félix Desmeules-Trudel; Tania S. Zamuner Gradient and categorical patterns of spoken-word recognition and processing of phonetic details Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 81, pp. 1673–1674, 2019. @article{DesmeulesTrudel2019, The speech signal is inherently rich, and this reflects complexities of speech articulation. During spoken-word recognition, listeners must process time-dependent perceptual cues, and the role that these cues play varies depending on the phonological status of the sounds across languages. For example, Canadian French has both phonologically nasal vowels (i.e., contrastive) and coarticulatorily nasalized vowels, as opposed to English, which only has coarticulatorily nasalized vowels. We investigated how vowel nasalization duration, a time-dependent phonetic cue to the French nasal contrast, affects spoken-word recognition. Using eye tracking in two visual world paradigm experiments, the results show that fine-grained phonetic information is important for lexical recognition, and that lexical access is dependent on small variations in the signal. The results also show gradient interpretation of ambiguous vowel nasalization despite the phonemic distinction between phonological nasal vowels and coarticulatorily nasalized vowels in Canadian French. Gradience was found when words were ambiguous, and interpretation was more categorical when words were unambiguous. These results support the hypothesis of gradient interpretation of phonetic cues for ambiguously produced stimuli and the storage of coarticulatory information in phono-lexical representations for a language that has a phonological contrast for nasality (i.e., French). |
Heather R. Dial; Bob McMurray; Randi C. Martin Lexical processing depends on sublexical processing: Evidence from the visual world paradigm and aphasia Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 81, no. 4, pp. 1047–1064, 2019. @article{Dial2019, Some early studies of people with aphasia reported strikingly better performance on lexical than on sublexical speech perception tasks. These findings challenged the claim that lexical processing depends on sublexical processing and suggested that acoustic information could be mapped directly to lexical representations. However, Dial and Martin (Neuropsychologia 96: 192-212, 2017) argued that these studies failed to match the discriminability of targets and distractors for the sublexical and lexical stimuli and showed that when using closely matched tasks with natural speech tokens, no patient performed substantially better at the lexical than at the sublexical processing task. In the current study, we sought to provide converging evidence for the dependence of lexical on sublexical processing by examining the perception of synthetic speech stimuli varied on a voice-onset time continuum using eye-tracking methodology, which is sensitive to online speech perception processes. Eight individuals with aphasia and ten age-matched controls completed two visual world paradigm tasks: phoneme (sublexical) and word (lexical) identification. For both identification and eye-movement data, strong correlations were observed between the sublexical and lexical tasks. Critically, no patient within the control range on the lexical task was impaired on the sublexical task. Overall, the current study supports the claim that lexical processing depends on sublexical processing. Implications for inferring deficits in people with aphasia and the use of sublexical tasks to assess sublexical processing are also discussed. |
Monica L. Do; Elsi Kaiser Subjecthood and linear order in linguistic encoding: Evidence from the real-time production of wh-questions in English and Mandarin Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 105, pp. 60–75, 2019. @article{Do2019, We use visual world eye-tracking to provide a first look into the real-time production of an under-researched but communicatively crucial construction – wh-questions. We investigate whether the transition from abstract message to highly-structured utterances (linguistic encoding) is driven by linear order (positional processing) or subjecthood assignment (functional processing). Experiment 1 decouples positional and functional processes by comparing production of English declaratives versus object wh-questions (‘Which nurses did the maids tickle?'). Experiment 2 compares the production of declaratives versus object wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese to investigate potential information-focus effects on linguistic encoding and tests whether Experiment 1's findings could be due to focus. Experiment 1 found that even though the articulation of a sentence is necessarily linear, speakers do not necessarily encode sentences in accordance with the linear order in which the words are uttered. Experiment 2 suggests that information-focus does not guide speakers' eye-movements during linguistic encoding. |
Denis Drieghe; Aaron Veldre; Gemma Fitzsimmons; Jane Ashby; Sally Andrews The influence of number of syllables on word skipping during reading revisited Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 616–621, 2019. @article{Drieghe2019, Fitzsimmons and Drieghe (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 736–741, 2011) showed that a monosyllabic word was skipped more often than a disyllabic word during reading. This finding was interpreted as evidence that syllabic information was extracted from the parafovea early enough to influence word skipping. In the present, large-scale replication of this study, in which we additionally measured the reading, vocabulary, and spelling abilities of the participants, the effect of number of syllables on word skipping was not significant. Moreover, a Bayesian analysis indicated strong evidence for the absence of the effect. The individual differences analyses replicate previous observations showing that spelling ability uniquely predicts word skipping (but not fixation times) because better spellers skip more often. The results indicate that high-quality lexical representations allow the system to reach an advanced stage in the word-recognition process of the parafoveal word early enough to influence the decision of whether or not to skip the word, but this decision is not influenced by number of syllables. |
Linda Drijvers; Julija Vaitonytė; Asli Özyürek Degree of language experience modulates visual attention to visible speech and iconic gestures during clear and degraded speech comprehension Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 43, pp. 1–25, 2019. @article{Drijvers2019, Visual information conveyed by iconic hand gestures and visible speech can enhance speech comprehension under adverse listening conditions for both native and non-native listeners. However, how a listener allocates visual attention to these articulators during speech comprehension is unknown. We used eye-tracking to investigate whether and how native and highly proficient non-native listeners of Dutch allocated overt eye gaze to visible speech and gestures during clear and degraded speech comprehension. Participants watched video clips of an actress uttering a clear or degraded (6-band noise-vocoded) action verb while performing a gesture or not, and were asked to indicate the word they heard in a cued-recall task. Gestural enhancement was the largest (i.e., a relative reduction in reaction time cost) when speech was degraded for all listeners, but it was stronger for native listeners. Both native and non-native listeners mostly gazed at the face during comprehension, but non-native listeners gazed more often at gestures than native listeners. However, only native but not non-native listeners' gaze allocation to gestures predicted gestural benefit during degraded speech comprehension. We conclude that non-native listeners might gaze at gesture more as it might be more challenging for non-native listeners to resolve the degraded auditory cues and couple those cues to phonological information that is conveyed by visible speech. This diminished phonological knowledge might hinder the use of semantic information that is conveyed by gestures for non-native compared to native listeners. Our results demonstrate that the degree of language experience impacts overt visual attention to visual articulators, resulting in different visual benefits for native versus non-native listeners. |
Linda Drijvers; Mircea Plas; Asli Özyürek; Ole Jensen Native and non-native listeners show similar yet distinct oscillatory dynamics when using gestures to access speech in noise Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 194, pp. 55–67, 2019. @article{Drijvers2019a, Listeners are often challenged by adverse listening conditions during language comprehension induced by external factors, such as noise, but also internal factors, such as being a non-native listener. Visible cues, such as semantic information conveyed by iconic gestures, can enhance language comprehension in such situations. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) we investigated whether spatiotemporal oscillatory dynamics can predict a listener's benefit of iconic gestures during language comprehension in both internally (non-native versus native listeners) and externally (clear/degraded speech) induced adverse listening conditions. Proficient non-native speakers of Dutch were presented with videos in which an actress uttered a degraded or clear verb, accompanied by a gesture or not, and completed a cued-recall task after every video. The behavioral and oscillatory results obtained from non-native listeners were compared to an MEG study where we presented the same stimuli to native listeners (Drijvers et al., 2018a). Non-native listeners demonstrated a similar gestural enhancement effect as native listeners, but overall scored significantly slower on the cued-recall task. In both native and non-native listeners, an alpha/beta power suppression revealed engagement of the extended language network, motor and visual regions during gestural enhancement of degraded speech comprehension, suggesting similar core processes that support unification and lexical access processes. An individual's alpha/beta power modulation predicted the gestural benefit a listener experienced during degraded speech comprehension. Importantly, however, non-native listeners showed less engagement of the mouth area of the primary somatosensory cortex, left insula (beta), LIFG and ATL (alpha) than native listeners, which suggests that non-native listeners might be hindered in processing the degraded phonological cues and coupling them to the semantic information conveyed by the gesture. Native and non-native listeners thus demonstrated similar yet distinct spatiotemporal oscillatory dynamics when recruiting visual cues to disambiguate degraded speech. |
Grant Eckstein; Wesley Schramm; Madeline Noxon; Jenna Snyder Reading L1 and L2 writing: An eye-tracking study of TESOL rater behavior Journal Article In: The Electronic Journal for English as a Second Language, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 1–24, 2019. @article{Eckstein2019, Researchers have found numerous differences in the approaches raters take to the complex task of essay rating including differences when rating native (L1) and non-native (L2) English writing. Yet less is known about raters' reading practices while scoring those essays. This small-scale study uses eye-tracking technology and reflective protocols to examine the reading behavior of TESOL teachers who evaluated university-level L1 and L2 writing. Results from the eye-tracking component indicate that the teachers read the rhetorical, organizational, and grammatical features of an L1 text more deliberately while skimming through and then returning to rhetorical features of an L2 text and initially skipping over many L2 grammatical structures. In reflective interviews, the teachers also reported more consensus on their approach to evaluating grammar and organization than word choice and rhetoric. While these findings corroborate prior research comparing the rating of L1 and L2 writing, they promise to expand our understanding of rating processes by reflecting the teachers' reading practices and attentional focus while rating. Moreover, the study demonstrates the potential for using eye-tracking research to unobtrusively investigate the reading behaviors involved in assessing L1 and L2 writing. |
C. Egan; Gary M. Oppenheim; Christopher Saville; Kristina Moll; Manon Wyn Jones Bilinguals apply language-specific grain sizes during sentence reading Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 193, pp. 104018, 2019. @article{Egan2019, Languages differ in the consistency with which they map orthography to phonology, and a large body of work now shows that orthographic consistency determines the style of word decoding in monolinguals. Here, we characterise word decoding in bilinguals whose two languages differ in orthographic consistency, assessing whether they maintain two distinct reading styles or settle on a single ‘compromise' reading style. In Experiment 1, Welsh-English bilinguals read cognates and pseudowords embedded in Welsh and English sentences. Eye-movements revealed that bilinguals dynamically alter their decoding strategy according to the language context, including more fixations during lexical access for cognates in the more consistent orthography (Welsh) than in the less consistent orthography (English), and these effects were specific to word (as opposed to pseudoword) processing. In Experiment 2, we compared the same bilinguals' eye movements in the English sentence reading context to those of monolinguals'. Bilinguals' eye-movement behaviour was very similar to monolinguals' when reading English, suggesting that their knowledge of the more consistent orthography (Welsh) did not alter their decoding style when reading in English. This study presents the first characterisation of bilingual decoding style in sentence reading. We discuss our findings in relation to connectionist reading models and models of bilingual visual word recognition. |
Nikola Anna Eger; Holger Mitterer; Eva Reinisch Learning a new sound pair in a second language: Italian learners and German glottal consonants Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 77, pp. 1–24, 2019. @article{Eger2019, The present study investigated Italian learners' production and perception of German /h/ and /Ɂ/ – two sounds that lack obvious linguistic counterparts in Italian. Critically, of these sounds only /h/ is explicitly known to learners from instruction and orthography. We therefore asked whether this awareness would lead to better acquisition of /h/ than /Ɂ/, and whether any differences would depend on the explicitness of the task. In production, learners of a medium proficiency level performed accurately in about 70% of the cases, with errors including sound deletions and substitutions. In spoken word recognition, two other learner groups of the same proficiency were hindered by sound deletions, but not by substitutions, although they were able to differentiate the sounds in an explicit goodness rating task. Overall, acquisition of /Ɂ/ was similar to /h/, despite lack of awareness for this sound. The results suggest that learners have established one combined “glottal category” to which both sounds map in speech processing, while they may be better implemented in production. |
Sarah Eilers; Simon P. Tiffin-Richards; Sascha Schroeder The repeated name penalty effect in children's natural reading: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 72, no. 3, pp. 403–412, 2019. @article{Eilers2019a, We report data from an eye tracking experiment on the repeated name penalty effect in 9-year-old children and young adults. The repeated name penalty effect is informative for the study of children's reading because it allows conclusions about children's ability to direct attention to discourse-level processing cues during reading. We presented children and adults simple three-sentence stories with a single referent, which was referred to by an anaphor—either a pronoun or a repeated name—downstream in the text. The anaphor was either near or far from the antecedent. We found a repeated name penalty effect in early processing for children as well as adults, suggesting that beginning readers are already susceptible to discourse-level expectations of anaphora during reading. Furthermore, children's reading was more influenced by the distance of anaphor and antecedent than adults', which we attribute to differences in reading fluency and the resulting cognitive load during reading. |
Sarah Eilers; Simon P. Tiffin-Richards; Sascha Schroeder Gender cue effects in children's pronoun processing: A longitudinal eye tracking study Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 509–522, 2019. @article{Eilers2019, Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative resolution cue for the pronoun or not. We were interested in children's processing of the pronoun and their resolution preferences, as well as the effects of individual differences of Grade level and reading skill. Children's resolution ability improved with age, and good readers were more accurate than poor readers. In the eye-tracking measures, we found strong individual differences related to reading skill: Children with good reading skill took more time to read the pronoun region when pronoun gender was informative, suggesting that good readers make better use of the available information at the pronoun than poor readers. |
Susanne Eisenhauer; Christian J. Fiebach; Benjamin Gagl Context-based facilitation in visual word recognition: Evidence for visual and lexical but not pre-lexical contributions Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 1–25, 2019. @article{Eisenhauer2019, Word familiarity and predictive context facilitate visual word processing, leading to faster recognition times and reduced neuronal responses. Previously, models with and without top-down connections, including lexical-semantic, pre-lexical (e.g., orthographic/phonological), and visual processing levels were successful in accounting for these facilitation effects. Here we systematically assessed context-based facilitation with a repetition priming task and explicitly dissociated pre-lexical and lexical processing levels using a pseudoword (PW) familiarization procedure. Experiment 1 investigated the temporal dynamics of neuronal facilitation effects with magnetoencephalography (MEG; N = 38 human participants), while experiment 2 assessed behavioral facilitation effects (N = 24 human participants). Across all stimulus conditions, MEG demonstrated context-based facilitation across multiple time windows starting at 100 ms, in occipital brain areas. This finding indicates context-based facilitation at an early visual processing level. In both experiments, we furthermore found an interaction of context and lexical familiarity, such that stimuli with associated meaning showed the strongest context-dependent facilitation in brain activation and behavior. Using MEG, this facilitation effect could be localized to the left anterior temporal lobe at around 400 ms, indicating within-level (i.e., exclusively lexical-semantic) facilitation but no top-down effects on earlier processing stages. Increased pre-lexical familiarity (in PWs familiarized utilizing training) did not enhance or reduce context effects significantly. We conclude that context-based facilitation is achieved within visual and lexical processing levels. Finally, by testing alternative hypotheses derived from mechanistic accounts of repetition suppression, we suggest that the facilitatory context effects found here are implemented using a predictive coding mechanism. |
Isabel Orenes; Juan A. García-Madruga; Isabel Gómez-Veiga; Orlando Espino; Ruth M. J. Byrne The comprehension of counterfactual conditionals: Evidence from eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 1172, 2019. @article{Orenes2019, Three experiments tracked participants' eye-movements to examine the time course of comprehension of the dual meaning of counterfactuals, such as "if there had been oranges then there would have been pears." Participants listened to conditionals while looking at images in the visual world paradigm, including an image of oranges and pears that corresponds to the counterfactual's conjecture, and one of no oranges and no pears that corresponds to its presumed facts, to establish at what point in time they consider each one. The results revealed striking individual differences: some participants looked at the negative image and the affirmative one, and some only at the affirmative image. The first experiment showed that participants who looked at the negative image increased their fixation on it within half a second. The second experiment showed they do so even without explicit instructions, and the third showed they do so even for printed words. |
Aisling E. O'Sullivan; Chantelle Y. Lim; Edmund C. Lalor In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 50, no. 8, pp. 3282–3295, 2019. @article{OSullivan2019, Recent work using electroencephalography has applied stimulus reconstruction techniques to identify the attended speaker in a cocktail party environment. The success of these approaches has been primarily based on the ability to detect cortical tracking of the acoustic envelope at the scalp level. However, most studies have ignored the effects of visual input, which is almost always present in naturalistic scenarios. In this study, we investigated the effects of visual input on envelope-based cocktail party decoding in two multisensory cocktail party situations: (a) Congruent AV—facing the attended speaker while ignoring another speaker represented by the audio-only stream and (b) Incongruent AV (eavesdropping)—attending the audio-only speaker while looking at the unattended speaker. We trained and tested decoders for each condition separately and found that we can successfully decode attention to congruent audiovisual speech and can also decode attention when listeners were eavesdropping, i.e., looking at the face of the unattended talker. In addition to this, we found alpha power to be a reliable measure of attention to the visual speech. Using parieto-occipital alpha power, we found that we can distinguish whether subjects are attending or ignoring the speaker's face. Considering the practical applications of these methods, we demonstrate that with only six near-ear electrodes we can successfully determine the attended speech. This work extends the current framework for decoding attention to speech to more naturalistic scenarios, and in doing so provides additional neural measures which may be incorporated to improve decoding accuracy. |
Irene Ablinger; Anne Friede; Ralph Radach A combined lexical and segmental therapy approach in a participant with pure alexia Journal Article In: Aphasiology, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 579–605, 2019. @article{Ablinger2019, Background: Pure alexia is characterized by effortful left-to-right word processing, leading to a pathological length effect during reading aloud. Results of previous therapy outcome research suggest that patients with pure alexia tend to develop and maintain an adaptive sequential reading strategy in an effort to cope with their severe deficit and at least master a slow and laborious reading mode. Aim: We applied a theory-based, strategy-driven and eye-movement-supported therapy approach on HC, a participant with pure alexia. Our intention was to help optimizing his very persistent sequential reading strategy, while concurrently facilitating fast parallel word processing. Methods & Procedures: Therapy included a systematic combination of segmental and holistic reading as well as text reading components. Exposure duration and font size were gradually reduced. Following a single case experimental reading design with follow-up testing, we assessed reading performance at four testing points focusing on analyses of linguistic errors and word viewing patterns. Outcomes & Results: With respect to reading accuracy and oculomotor measures, the combined therapy approach resulted in sustained training effects evident in significant improvements for trained and untrained word materials. Text reading intervention only led to therapy specific improvements. Spatio-temporal analyses of eye fixation positions revealed a more and more efficient adaptive strategy to compensate for reading difficulties. However, spatial changes in fixation position were less pronounced at T4, suggesting some diminishing of success at follow-up. Conclusions: Our results underscore the need for a continuous systematic training of underlying reading strategies in pure alexia to develop and sustain more economic reading procedures. |
Luis Aguado; Karisa B. Parkington; Teresa Dieguez-Risco; José A. Hinojosa; Roxane J. Itier Joint modulation of facial expression processing by contextual congruency and task demands Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 9, pp. 1–20, 2019. @article{Aguado2019, Faces showing expressions of happiness or anger were presented together with sentences that described happiness-inducing or anger-inducing situations. Two main variables were manipulated: (i) congruency between contexts and expressions (congruent/incongruent) and (ii) the task assigned to the participant, discriminating the emotion shown by the target face (emotion task) or judging whether the expression shown by the face was congruent or not with the context (congruency task). Behavioral and electrophysiological results (event-related potentials (ERP)) showed that processing facial expressions was jointly influenced by congruency and task demands. ERP results revealed task effects at frontal sites, with larger positive amplitudes between 250–450 ms in the congruency task, reflecting the higher cognitive effort required by this task. Effects of congruency appeared at latencies and locations corresponding to the early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP) components that have previously been found to be sensitive to emotion and affective congruency. The magnitude and spatial distribution of the congruency effects varied depending on the task and the target expression. These results are discussed in terms of the modulatory role of context on facial expression processing and the different mechanisms underlying the processing of expressions of positive and negative emotions. |
Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder; Andrea M. Zawoyski; Eloise Nimocks; Tori E. Foster Measuring the behavior of reading comprehension test takers: What do they do, and should they do it? Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 507–529, 2019. @article{Ardoin2019, The authors sought to further the understanding of reading processes and their links to comprehension using two reading tasks for elementary-grade students. One hundred sixty-six students in grades 2–5 were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: reading with questions presented concurrently with text or reading with questions presented after reading the text (with the text unavailable when answering questions). Eye movement data suggested different processes for each task: Rereading occurred and more time was spent on higher level processing measures in the with-text condition, and in particular, those who did not reread had more accurate answers than those who engaged in rereading. Measurement of students' precision in returning directly to the portion of the passage with information corresponding to a question also predicted students' response accuracy. |
Vahid Aryadoust; Bee Hoon Ang Exploring the frontiers of eye tracking research in language studies: A novel co-citation scientometric review Journal Article In: Computer Assisted Language Learning, 2019. @article{Aryadoust2019, Eye tracking technology has become an increasingly popular methodology in language studies. Using data from 27 journals in language sciences indexed in the Social Science Citation Index and/or Scopus, we conducted an in-depth scientometric analysis of 341 research publications together with their 14,866 references between 1994 and 2018. We identified a number of countries, researchers, universities, and institutes with large numbers of publications in eye tracking research in language studies. We further discovered a mixed multitude of connected research trends that have shaped the nature and development of eye tracking research. Specifically, a document co-citation analysis revealed a number of major research clusters, their key topics, connections, and bursts (sudden citation surges). For example, the foci of clusters #0 through #5 were found to be perceptual learning, regressive eye movement(s), attributive adjective(s), stereotypical gender, discourse processing, and bilingual adult(s). The content of all the major clusters was closely examined and synthesized in the form of an in-depth review. Finally, we grounded the findings within a data-driven theory of scientific revolution and discussed how the observed patterns have contributed to the emergence of new trends. As the first scientometric investigation of eye tracking research in language studies, the present study offers several implications for future research that are discussed. |
Mahsa Barzy; Jo Black; David Williams; Heather J. Ferguson Autistic adults anticipate and integrate meaning based on the speaker's voice: Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 149, no. 6, pp. 1097–1115, 2019. @article{Barzy2019, Typically developing (TD) individuals rapidly integrate information about a speaker and their intended meaning while processing sentences online. We examined whether the same processes are activated in autistic adults and tested their timecourse in 2 preregistered experiments. Experiment 1 employed the visual world paradigm. Participants listened to sentences where the speaker's voice and message were either consistent or inconsistent (e.g., "When we go shopping, I usually look for my favorite wine," spoken by an adult or a child), and concurrently viewed visual scenes including consistent and inconsistent objects (e.g., wine and sweets). All participants were slower to select the mentioned object in the inconsistent condition. Importantly, eye movements showed a visual bias toward the voiceconsistent object, well before hearing the disambiguating word, showing that autistic adults rapidly use the speaker's voice to anticipate the intended meaning. However, this target bias emerged earlier in the TD group compared to the autism group (2240 ms vs. 1800 ms before disambiguation). Experiment 2 recorded ERPs to explore speaker-meaning integration processes. Participants listened to sentences as described above, and ERPs were time-locked to the onset of the target word. A control condition included a semantic anomaly. Results revealed an enhanced N400 for inconsistent speaker-meaning sentences that was comparable to that elicited by anomalous sentences, in both groups. Overall, contrary to research that has characterized autism in terms of a local processing bias and pragmatic dysfunction, autistic people were unimpaired at integrating multiple modalities of linguistic information and were comparably sensitive to speaker-meaning inconsistency effects. |
Benjamin T. Carter; Brent Foster; Nathan M. Muncy; Steven G. Luke Linguistic networks associated with lexical, semantic and syntactic predictability in reading: A fixation-related fMRI study Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 189, pp. 224–240, 2019. @article{Carter2019, The ability to make predictions is thought to facilitate language processing. During language comprehension such predictions appear to occur at multiple levels of linguistic representations (i.e. semantic, syntactic and lexical). The neural mechanisms that define the network sensitive to linguistic predictability have yet to be adequately defined. The purpose of the present study was to explore the neural network underlying predictability during the normal reading of connected text. Predictability values for different linguistic information were obtained from a pre-existing text corpus. Forty-one subjects underwent simultaneous eye-tracking and fMRI scans while reading these select paragraphs. Lexical, semantic, and syntactic predictability measures were then correlated with functional activation associated with fixation onset on the individual words. Activation patterns showed both positive and negative correlations to lexical, semantic, and syntactic predictabilities. Conjunction analysis revealed regions specific to or shared between each type of predictability. The regions associated with the different predictability measures were largely separate. Results suggest that most linguistic predictions are graded in nature, activating components of the existing language system. A number of regions were also found to be uniquely associated with full lexical predictability, most notably the anterior temporal lobe and the inferior posterior temporal cortex. |
Xianglan Chen; Fang Li The length of preceding context influences metonymy processing Journal Article In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 243–256, 2019. @article{Chen2019f, Earlier studies have shown that conceptually supportive context is an important factor in the comprehension of metaphors (Inhoff, Lima, & Carroll, 1984 ; Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, & Antos, 1978). However, little empirical evidence has been found so far regarding contextual effects on metonymy processing (Lowder & Gordon, 2013). Implementing an eye-tracking experiment with Chinese materials, this present paper investigated whether and how preceding contextual information affects the processing of metonymy. The results show that for unfamiliar metonymies, it takes readers longer time to interpret unfamiliar metonymies than to literally interpret them given a shorter context. However, the processing disparity between metonymic comprehension and literal comprehension disappears when longer supportive information is available in the preceding context. These results are analogous to those found for metaphors and familiar metonymies, supporting the parallel model of language processing. In addition, our results suggest that the presence of supportive preceding context facilitates the processing of unfamiliar metonymies more than it does to the literal controls. |
Cristiano Chesi; Paolo Canal Person features and lexical restrictions in Italian clefts Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 2105, 2019. @article{Chesi2019, In this paper, we discuss the results of two experiments, one off-line (acceptability judgment) and the other on-line (eye-tracking), targeting Object Cleft (OC) constructions. In both experiments, we used the same materials presenting a manipulation on person features: second person plural pronouns and plural definite determiners alternate in introducing a full NP (“it was [DP1 the/you [NP bankers]]i that [DP2 the/you [NP lawyers]] have avoided _i at the party”) in a language, Italian, with overt person (and number) subject-verb agreement. As results, we first observed that the advantage of the bare pronominal forms reported in previous experiments (Gordon et al., 2001; Warren and Gibson, 2005, a.o.) is lost when the full NP (the “lexical restriction” in Belletti and Rizzi, 2013) is present. Second, an advantage for the mismatch condition, Art1-Pro2, in which the focalized subject is introduced by the determiner and the OC subject by the pronoun, as opposed to the matching Pro1-Pro2 condition, is observed, both off-line (higher acceptability and accuracy in answering comprehension questions after eyetracking) and on-line (e.g., smaller number of regressions from the subject region); third, we found a relevant difference between acceptability and accuracy in comprehension questions: despite similar numerical patterns in both off-line measures, the difference across conditions in accuracy is mostly not significant, while it is significant in acceptability. Moreover, while the matching condition Pro1-Pro2 is perceived as nearly ungrammatical (far below the mean acceptability across-conditions), the accuracy in comprehension is still high (close to 80%). To account for these facts, we compare different formal competence and processing models that predict difficulties in OC constructions: similarity-based (Gordon et al., 2001, a.o.), memory load (Gibson, 1998), and intervention-based (Friedmann et al., 2009) accounts are compared to processing oriented ACT-R-based predictions (Lewis and Vasishth, 2005) and to top-down Minimalist derivations (Chesi, 2015). We conclude that most of these approaches fail in making predictions able to reconcile the competence and the performance perspective in a coherent way to the exception of the top-down model that is able to predict correctly both the on-line and the off-line main effects obtained. |
Agnieszka Chmiel; Agnieszka Lijewska Syntactic processing in sight translation by professional and trainee interpreters Journal Article In: Target, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 378–397, 2019. @article{Chmiel2019, The study examines how professional and trainee interpreters process syntax in sight translation. We asked 24 professionals and 15 trainees to sight translate sentences with subject-relative clauses and more difficult object-relative clauses while measuring translation accuracy, eye movements and translation durations. We found that trainees took longer to achieve similar translation accuracy as professionals and viewed the source text less than professionals to avoid interference, especially when reading more difficult object-relative sentences. Syntactic manipulation modulated translation and viewing times: participants took longer to translate object-relative sentences but viewed them less in order to avoid interference in target language reformulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that reading measures in sight translation should be analysed together with translation times to explain complex reading patterns. It also proposes a new measure, percentage of dwell time, as an index of interference avoidance. |
Jürgen Cholewa; Isabel Neitzel; Annika Bürsgens; Thomas Günther Online-processing of grammatical gender in noun-phrase decoding: An eye-tracking study with monolingual German 3rd and 4th graders Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 2586, 2019. @article{Cholewa2019, Like many other languages, German employs a linguistic category called “grammatical gender.” In gender-marking languages each noun is assigned to a particular gender-class (in German: masculine, feminine or neuter) and other words in a sentence which are grammatically controlled by the noun are marked by particular morphemes according to the noun's gender feature – so called gender agreement. Within psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension, it is often assumed that gender agreement might help to predict the continuation of a sentence on grammatical grounds and to reduce the lexical search space for the next words emerging within the speech signal. Thus, gender agreement relations may provide a means to make the comprehension process more effective and targeted. The aim of the current study was to assess whether monolingual German 3rd and 4th grade primary school children make use of gender agreement in online auditory comprehension and whether different gender cues interact with each other and with semantic information. A language-picture matching task was conducted in which 32 children looked at two pictures while listening to a noun phrase. Due to features of the German gender system, the target picture corresponding with the noun phrase could be predicted shortly after stimulus onset on account of gender agreement relations. The predictive impact of grammatical gender agreement on noun-phrase decoding was investigated by measuring the time course of eye-movements onto the target and distractor pictures. The results confirm and extend previous findings that gender plays a role in predictive online comprehension of gender-marking languages like German, and that even primary school children are able to make use of this grammatical device. |
Wing Yee Chow; Yangzi Zhou Eye-tracking evidence for active gap-filling regardless of dependency length Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 72, no. 6, pp. 1297–1307, 2019. @article{Chow2019, Previous work on real-time sentence processing has established that comprehenders build and interpret filler-gap dependencies without waiting for unambiguous evidence about the actual location of the gap ("active gap-filling") as long as such dependencies are grammatically licensed. However, this generalisation was called into question by recent findings in a self-paced reading experiment by Wagers and Phillips, which may be taken to show that comprehenders do not interpret the filler at the posited gap when the dependency spans a longer distance. In the present study, we aimed to replicate these findings in an eye-tracking experiment with better controlled materials and increased statistical power. Crucially, we found clear evidence for active gap-filling across all levels of dependency length. This diverges from Wagers and Phillips's findings but is in line with the long-standing generalisation that comprehenders build and interpret filler-gap dependencies predictively as long as they are grammatically licensed. We found that the effect became smaller in the long dependency conditions in the post-critical region, which suggests the weaker effect in the long dependency conditions may have been undetected in Wagers and Phillips's study due to insufficient statistical power and/or the use of a self-paced reading paradigm. |
Eunjin Chun; Edith Kaan L2 prediction during complex sentence processing Journal Article In: Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 203–216, 2019. @article{Chun2019, Recent studies have found that proficient second language (L2) listeners are able to predict upcoming linguistic information to the same extent as first language (L1) listeners during simple sentence processing, particularly when semantic cues are given and/or few cognitive resources are required for language processing. These findings may suggest that L2 listeners use the same mechanisms as L1 listeners for prediction. Yet, it has not been fully specified under which conditions L2 listeners can use predictive mechanisms. To address this issue, we investigated whether advanced L2 listeners make predictions while processing more complex constructions that are cognitively more taxing. Specifically, we investigated prediction in sentences containing a relative clause that can modify either of two noun phrases. In an eye-tracking study using a visual world paradigm, L2 learners listened to sentences containing a semantically biasing verb or a neutral one (e.g., ‘‘I know the friend of the dancer that will open/get the present''). We measured L2 listeners' prediction by comparing the fixations to target objects (e.g., present among non-openable objects) between the two experimental conditions. Results showed that L2 listeners, similar to L1 listeners, made significantly more anticipatory looks to the targets in the semantically biasing condition than in the neutral condition, though their prediction started a bit (180 ms) later than L1 listeners' prediction. These findings suggest that L2 speakers can use prediction mechanisms even during complex sentence processing and provide further evidence for the claim that there is no fundamental difference between L1 and L2 speakers, but that cognitive resources matter for prediction. |
Daniel R. Coates; Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Susana T. L. Chung Feature contingencies when reading letter strings Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 156, pp. 84–95, 2019. @article{Coates2019, Many models posit the use of distinctive spatial features to recognize letters of the alphabet, a fundamental component of reading. It has also been hypothesized that when letters are in close proximity, visual crowding may cause features to mislocalize between nearby letters, causing identification errors. Here, we took a data-driven approach to investigate these aspects of textual processing. Using data collected from subjects identifying each letter in thousands of lower-case letter trigrams presented in the peripheral visual field, we found characteristic error patterns in the results suggestive of the use of particular spatial features. Distinctive features were seldom entirely missed, and we found evidence for errors due to doubling, masking, and migration of features. Dependencies both amongst neighboring letters and in the responses revealed the contingent nature of processing letter strings, challenging the most basic models of reading that ignore either crowding or featural decomposition. |
Carla Contemori; Paola E. Dussias Prediction at the discourse level in Spanish-English bilinguals: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 956, 2019. @article{Contemori2019, In two experiments, we examine English monolinguals' and Spanish-English bilinguals' ability to predict an upcoming pronoun referent based on the Implicit Causality (IC) bias of the verb. In an eye-tracking experiment, the monolingual data show anticipation of the upcoming referent for NP1-bias verbs. For bilinguals, the same effect is found, showing that bilinguals are not slower than monolinguals at processing the information associated with the IC of the verb. In an off-line experiment, both groups showed knowledge of IC bias information for the verbs used in the eye-tracking experiment. Based on the findings of the two experiments, we show that highly proficient bilinguals have similar online and off-line predictions based on IC verb information than monolingual speakers. |
Ashley Farris-Trimble; Anne-Michelle Tessier The effect of allophonic processes on word recognition: Eye-tracking evidence from Canadian raising Journal Article In: Language, vol. 95, no. 1, pp. 136–160, 2019. @article{FarrisTrimble2019, Whether lexical representations are stored as abstract forms or exemplar tokens is the focus of much debate in both the phonological and word-recognition literature. This research report examines the recognition of words that have undergone Canadian raising and/or intervocalic flapping. Two eye-tracking experiments suggest that listeners are slower to fixate words that have undergone one or more phonological processes within their own raising dialect, supporting the idea that they must calculate a mapping from surface word forms to more abstract representations. Implications for representational and phonological theories are discussed.* 1. Introduction. The interaction between two mostly predictable segmental processes in Canadian English-Canadian raising, which causes some diphthong nuclei to be raised, and intervocalic flapping, which reduces some /t/s and /d/s to [ɾ]-has long been of interest to phonologists, in part because its analysis highlights a core question: How are words that are subject to phonological processes stored in the mind? One way to frame this question is to ask whether the 'distance' between a surface form of a word and its underlying representation, according to a particular phonological analysis, is reflected somewhere in lexical processing. This research report tries to address this version of the question, using new eye-tracking data, with results that support some degree of abstract representations in the minds of listeners. We discuss their implications for both phonological grammar and word recognition. |