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!
2017 |
Carolyn Quam; Sarah C. Creel Tone attrition in Mandarin speakers of varying English proficiency Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 60, pp. 293–305, 2017. @article{Quam2017, Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the degree of dominance of Mandarin–English bilinguals' languages affects phonetic processing of tone content in their native language, Mandarin. Method: We tested 72 Mandarin–English bilingual college students with a range of language-dominance profiles in the 2 languages and ages of acquisition of English. Participants viewed 2 photographs at a time while hearing a familiar Mandarin word referring to 1 photograph. The names of the 2 photographs diverged in tone, vowels, or both. Word recognition was evaluated using clicking accuracy, reaction times, and an online recognition measure (gaze) and was compared in the 3conditions. Results: Relative proficiency in English was correlated with reduced word recognition success in tone-disambiguated trials, but not in vowel-disambiguated trials, across all 3 dependent measures. This selective attrition for tone content emerged even though all bilinguals had learned Mandarin from birth. Lengthy experience with English thus weakened tone use. Conclusions: This finding has implications for the question of the extent to which bilinguals' 2 phonetic systems interact. It suggests that bilinguals may not process pitch information language-specifically and that processing strategies from the dominant language may affect phonetic processing in the nondominant language—even when the latter was learned natively. |
Carolyn Quam; Sarah C. Creel Mandarin-English bilinguals process lexical tones in newly learned words in accordance with the language context Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. e0169001, 2017. @article{Quam2017a, Previous research has mainly considered the impact of tone-language experience on ability to discriminate linguistic pitch, but proficient bilingual listening requires differential processing of sound variation in each language context. Here, we ask whether Mandarin-English bilinguals, for whom pitch indicates word distinctions in one language but not the other, can process pitch differently in a Mandarin context vs. an English context. Across three eye-tracked word-learning experiments, results indicated that tone-intonation bilinguals process tone in accordance with the language context. In Experiment 1, 51 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 26 English speakers without tone experience were taught Mandarin-compatible novel words with tones. Mandarin-English bilinguals out-performed English speakers, and, for bilinguals, overall accuracy was correlated with Mandarin dominance. Experiment 2 taught 24 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 25 English speakers novel words with Mandarin-like tones, but English-like phonemes and phonotactics. The Mandarin-dominance advantages observed in Experiment 1 disappeared when words were English-like. Experiment 3 contrasted Mandarin-like vs. English-like words in a within-subjects design, providing even stronger evidence that bilinguals can process tone language-specifically. Bilinguals (N = 58), regardless of language dominance, attended more to tone than English speakers without Mandarin experience (N = 28), but only when words were Mandarin-like—not when they were English-like. Mandarin-English bilinguals thus tailor tone processing to the within-word language context. |
Hugh Rabagliati; Alexander Robertson How do children learn to avoid referential ambiguity? Insights from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 94, pp. 15–27, 2017. @article{Rabagliati2017, Children have considerable difficulty producing informative and unambiguous referring expressions, a fact that still lacks a full explanation. Potential insight can come from psycholinguistic models of ambiguity avoidance in adults, which suggest that, before describing any scene, speakers pro-actively monitor for some — but not all — types of potential ambiguity, and then subsequently monitor whether their just-produced expression provides an ambiguous description. Our experiments used eye tracking to assess the developing roles of these skills in children's referential communication. Experiment 1 shows that adults' eye movements can index the processes of both pro-active and self-monitoring. Experiments 2 and 3 show that children (n = 110) typically do not pro-actively monitor for potential ambiguity, although they do show evidence of pro-active monitoring on the occasions when they produce informative expressions. However, we do find evidence that children consistently monitor their own descriptions for ambiguity, even though they rarely correct their utterances. We propose that the process of self-monitoring might act as a learning signal, that guides children as they acquire the ability to monitor pro-actively. |
Ileana Ratiu; Tamiko Azuma Language control in bilingual adults with and without history of mild traumatic brain injury Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 166, pp. 29–39, 2017. @article{Ratiu2017a, Adults with a history of traumatic brain injury often show deficits in executive functioning (EF), including the ability to inhibit, switch, and attend to tasks. These abilities are critical for language processing in bilinguals. This study examined the effect of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) on EF and language processing in bilinguals using behavioral and eye-tracking measures. Twenty-two bilinguals with a history of mTBI and twenty healthy control bilinguals were administered executive function and language processing tasks. Bilinguals with a history of mTBI showed deficits in specific EFs and had higher rates of language processing errors than healthy control bilinguals. Additionally, individuals with a history of mTBI have different patterns of eye movements during reading than healthy control bilinguals. These data suggest that language processing deficits are related to underlying EF abilities. The findings provide important information regarding specific EF and language control deficits in bilinguals with a history mTBI. |
Rachel A. Ryskin; Zhenghan Qi; Melissa C. Duff; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Verb biases are shaped through lifelong learning Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 781–794, 2017. @article{Ryskin2017, Verbs often participate in more than 1 syntactic structure, but individual verbs can be biased in terms of whether they are used more often with 1 structure or the other. For instance, in a sentence such as "Bop the bunny with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate an instrument with which to "bop," rather than which "bunny" to bop. Conversely, in a sentence such as "Choose the cow with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate which "cow" to choose. An open question is where these biases come from and whether they continue to be shaped in adulthood in a way that has lasting consequences for real-time processing of language. In Experiment 1 we replicated previous findings that these language-wide biases guide online syntactic processing in a computer-based visual-world paradigm. In Experiment 2, we tested the malleability of these biases by exposing adults to initially unbiased verbs situated in unambiguous contexts that led to either instrument or modifier interpretations. During test, participants interpreted sentences containing either modifier- or instrument-trained verbs in ambiguous contexts. Eye-movement and action data show that participants' considerations of the candidate interpretations of the ambiguous with-phrases were guided by the newly learned verb biases. These results suggest that co-occurrence information about specific verbs and syntactic structures embedded in language experiences plays a role in forming, and continuously shaping, the verb biases that constitute a part of the broader representation of the language. |
Alix Kowalski; Yi Ting Huang Predicting and priming thematic roles: Flexible use of verbal and nonverbal cues during relative clause comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 9, pp. 1341–1351, 2017. @article{Kowalski2017, Relative-clause sentences (RCs) have been a key test case for psycholinguistic models of comprehension. While object-relative clauses (e.g., ORCs: "The bear that 'the horse' . . .") are distinguished from subject-relative clauses (SRCs) after the second noun phrase (NP2; e.g., SRCs: "The bear that 'pushed' . . ."), role assignments are often delayed until the embedded verb (e.g., ". . . 'pushed' ate the sandwich"). This contrasts with overwhelming evidence of incremental role assignment in other garden-path sentences. The current study investigates how contextual factors modulate reliance on verbal and nonverbal cues. Using a visual-world paradigm, participants saw preceding discourse contexts that highlighted relevant roles within events (e.g., pusher, pushee). Nevertheless, role assignment for ORCs remained delayed until the embedded verb (Experiment 1). However, role assignment for ORCs occurred before the embedded verb when additional linguistic input was provided by an adverb (Experiment 2). Finally, when the likelihood of encountering RCs increased within the experimental context, role immediate assignment for ORCs was observed after NP2 (Experiment 3). Together, these findings suggest that real-time role assignment often prefers verbal cues, but can also flexibly adapt to the statistical properties of the local context. |
Edmundo Kronmüller; Ira Noveck; Natalia Rivera; Francisco Jaume-Guazzini; Dale Barr The positive side of a negative reference: The delay between linguistic processing and common ground Journal Article In: Royal Society Open Science, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1–14, 2017. @article{Kronmueller2017, Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a novel looking object as the jellyfish and, once identified, the listener will too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is a subject of debate. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, i.e. without needing to keep track of the speaker. To test predictions from each account, we used visual-world eyetracking, which allows observations in real time, during a standard referential communication task. Participants had to select objects based on instructions from two speakers. In the critical condition, listeners sought an object with a negative reference such as not the jellyfish. We aimed to determine the extent to which listeners rely on the linguistic input, common ground or both. We found that initial interpretations were based on linguistic processing only and that common ground considerations do emerge but only after 1000 ms. Our findings support the idea that-at least temporally-linguistic processing can be isolated from common ground. |
Sol Lago; Shayne Sloggett; Zoe Schlueter; Wing Yee Chow; Alexander Williams; Ellen Lau; Colin Phillips Coreference and antecedent representation across languages Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 795–817, 2017. @article{Lago2017, Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their antecedent noun. In contrast, in languages without syntactic gender such as English, lexical retrieval might be unnecessary. We used eye-tracking while reading to examine whether antecedent retrieval involves rapid semantic and phonological reactivation. We compared German and English. In German, we found early sensitivity to the semantic but not to the phonological features of the pronoun's antecedent. In English, readers did not immediately show either semantic or phonological effects specific to coreference. We propose that early semantic facilitation arises due to syntactic gender reactivation, and that antecedent retrieval varies cross-linguistically depending on the type of information relevant to the grammar of each language. |
Jiyeon Lee Time course of lexicalization during sentence production in Parkinson's Disease: Eye-tracking while speaking Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 60, no. 4, pp. 924–936, 2017. @article{Lee2017b, Purpose: Growing evidence suggests that sentence formulation is affected in Parkinson's disease (PD); however, how speakers with PD coordinate sentence planning and speaking remains unclear. Within 2 competing models of sentence production, this study examined whether speakers with PD show advanced buffering of words to minimize disfluencies and increased demands during speech or whether they plan one word at a time, compromising accuracy and fluency of speech. Method: Participants described 3 computer-displayed pictures using the sentence "the A and the B are above the C." Name agreement (codability) was varied to be high (clock) or low (sofa/couch) for each object position (A, B, C), affecting difficulty of lexical selection. Participants' gaze durations to each object were recorded. Results: Speakers with PD showed incremental word-by-word planning, retrieving only the first lexical item (A) before speech onset, similar to controls. However, they produced greater word-finding errors and disfluencies compared to controls for the low-codable pictures, but not for high-codable pictures. Conclusions: These findings suggest that by following word-by-word incremental production, speakers with PD compromise fluency and accuracy of speech to a greater extent than healthy older speakers and that PD is associated with impaired inhibitory control during lexical selection. |
Miseon Lee Incremental processing of negation: Evidence from Korean Journal Article In: Linguistic Research, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 205–224, 2017. @article{Lee2017c, The present study seeks to investigate whether negation is incrementally comprehended in Korean. Many of previous behavioral and neurological studies have found delays and errors in the comprehension of English negation. However, more recent studies have reported that negative sentences are incrementally processed as fast and accurately as affirmative sentences, given a pragmatically felicitous context. This discrepancy suggests that the poor comprehension of negation is mainly due to the absence of a felicitous context. In line with this, our hypothesis was that pragmatic felicity could help negation processing by establishing expectancies for using negation. In an eye-tracking task, we found that twenty-four Korean-speaking participants were equally fast and accurate in comprehending both affirmatives and negatives within a discourse context. Fixation analyses further showed that shortly after hearing the verb in a scrambled sentence, participants distinguished between negative and affirmative interpretations. These findings support the hypothesis that given a felicitous context, negation is incrementally processed by rapidly using the polarity information of the verb. |
Mallorie Leinenger; Mark Myslín; Keith Rayner; Roger P. Levy Do resource constraints affect lexical processing? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 93, pp. 82–103, 2017. @article{Leinenger2017, Human language is massively ambiguous, yet we are generally able to identify the intended meanings of the sentences we hear and read quickly and accurately. How we manage and resolve ambiguity incrementally during real-time language comprehension given our cognitive resources and constraints is a major question in human cognition. Previous research investigating resource constraints on lexical ambiguity resolution has yielded conflicting results. Here we present results from two experiments in which we recorded eye movements to test for evidence of resource constraints during lexical ambiguity resolution. We embedded moderately biased homographs in sentences with neutral prior context and either long or short regions of text before disambiguation to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. The length of intervening material had no effect on ease of disambiguation. Instead, we found only a main effect of meaning at disambiguation, such that disambiguating to the subordinate meaning of the homograph was more difficult—results consistent with the reordered access model and contemporary probabilistic models, but inconsistent with the capacity-constrained model. |
Alexander Leube; Katharina Rifai; Siegfried Wahl Sampling rate influences saccade detection in mobile eye tracking of a reading task Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 3, 2017. @article{Leube2017, The purpose of this study was to compare saccade detection characteristics in two mobile eye trackers with different sampling rates in a natural task. Gaze data of 11 participants were recorded in one 60 Hz and one 120 Hz mobile eye tracker and compared directly to the saccades detected by a 1000 HZ stationary tracker while a reading task was performed. Saccades and fixations were detected using a velocity based algorithm and their properties analyzed. Results showed that there was no significant difference in the number of detect- ed fixations but mean fixation durations differed between the 60 Hz mobile and the sta- tionary eye tracker. The 120 Hz mobile eye tracker showed a significant increase in the detection rate of saccades and an improved estimation of the mean saccade duration, com- pared to the 60 Hz eye tracker. To conclude, for the detection and analysis of fast eye movements, such as saccades, it is better to use a 120 Hz mobile eye tracker. |
Fang Li; Willem M. Mak; Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul; Ted J. M. Sanders On the online effects of subjectivity encoded in causal connectives Journal Article In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 34–57, 2017. @article{Li2017d, Causal relations between sentences differ in terms of subjectivity: They can be objective (based on facts) or subjective (based on reasoning). Subjective relations lead to longer reading times than objective relations. Causal connectives differ in the degree to which they encode this subjectivity. The Chinese connectives kejian 'so' and yin'er 'so' specify a high and low degree of subjectivity, respectively, whereas suoyi 'so' is underspecified for subjectivity. In an eye-tracking experiment we compare the effect of the specificity of these connectives in subjective and objective relations. In objective relations, the specificity of the connective has no effect on reading times. In subjective relations, reading times are shorter in sentences with the specified connective kejian than in sentences with the underspecified connective suoyi. These results suggest that readers prefer to interpret a relation as objective. Computing subjective relations requires extra processing time, which is diminished when the connective encodes the subjectivity. |
Lin Li; Sha Li; Jingxin Wang; Victoria A. McGowan; Pingping Liu; Timothy R. Jordan; Kevin B. Paterson Aging and the optimal viewing position effect in visual word recognition: Evidence from English Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 367–376, 2017. @article{Li2017c, Words are recognized most efficiently by young adults when fixated at an optimal viewing position (OVP), which for English is between a word's beginning and middle letters. How this OVP effect changes with age is unknown but may differ for older adults due to visual declines in later life. Accordingly, a lexical decision experiment was conducted in which short (5-letter) and long (9-letter) words were fixated at various letter positions. The older adults produced slower responses. But, crucially, effects of fixation location for each word-length did not differ substantially across age groups, indicating that OVP effects are preserved in older age. |
Feifei Liang; Hazel I. Blythe; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Xin Li; Chuanli Zang; Simon P. Liversedge The role of character positional frequency on Chinese word learning during natural reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 11, pp. e0187656, 2017. @article{Liang2017a, Readers' eye movements were recorded to examine the role of character positional frequency on Chinese lexical acquisition during reading and its possible modulation by word spacing. In Experiment 1, three types of pseudowords were constructed based on each character's positional frequency, providing congruent, incongruent, and no positional word segmentation information. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences, for the learning and the test phases. In the learning phase, half the participants read sentences in word-spaced format, and half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read sentences in unspaced format. The results showed an inhibitory effect of character positional frequency upon the efficiency of word learning when processing incongruent pseudowords both in the learning and test phase, and also showed facilitatory effect of word spacing in the learning phase, but not at test. Most importantly, these two characteristics exerted independent influences on word segmentation. In Experiment 2, three analogous types of pseudowords were created whilst controlling for orthographic neighborhood size. The results of the two experiments were consistent, except that the effect of character positional frequency was absent in the test phase in Experiment 2. We argue that the positional frequency of a word's constituent characters may influence the character-to-word assignment in a process that likely incorporates both lexical segmentation and identification. |
Renske S. Hoedemaker; Jessica Ernst; Antje S. Meyer; Eva Belke Language production in a shared task: Cumulative Semantic Interference from self- and other-produced context words Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 172, pp. 55–63, 2017. @article{Hoedemaker2017, This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this paradigm, naming latencies have been found to increase for successive presentations of exemplars from the same category, a phenomenon known as Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI). As expected, the joint-naming task showed a within-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies increased as a function of the number of category exemplars named previously by the participant (self-produced items). Crucially, we also observed an across-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies slowed as a function of the number of category members named by the participant's task partner (other-produced items). The magnitude of the across-speaker CSI effect did not vary as a function of whether or not the listening participant could see the pictures their partner was naming. The observation of across-speaker CSI suggests that the effect originates at the conceptual level of the language system, as proposed by Belke's (2013) Conceptual Accumulation account. Whereas self-produced and other-produced words both resulted in a CSI effect on naming latencies, post-experiment free recall rates were higher for self-produced than other-produced items. Together, these results suggest that both speaking and listening result in implicit learning at the conceptual level of the language system but that these effects are independent of explicit learning as indicated by item recall. |
Renske S. Hoedemaker; Peter C. Gordon The onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid recognition of visual words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 881–902, 2017. @article{Hoedemaker2017a, In 2 experiments, we assessed the effects of response latency and task-induced goals on the onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid processing of visual words as revealed by ocular response tasks. In Experiment 1 (ocular lexical decision task), participants performed a lexical decision task using eye movement responses on a sequence of 4 words. In Experiment 2, the same words were encoded for an episodic recognition memory task that did not require a metalinguistic judgment. For both tasks, survival analyses showed that the earliest observable effect (divergence point [DP]) of semantic priming on target-word reading times occurred at approximately 260 ms, and ex-Gaussian distribution fits revealed that the magnitude of the priming effect increased as a function of response time. Together, these distributional effects of semantic priming suggest that the influence of the prime increases when target processing is more effortful. This effect does not require that the task include a metalinguistic judgment; manipulation of the task goals across experiments affected the overall response speed but not the location of the DP or the overall distributional pattern of the priming effect. These results are more readily explained as the result of a retrospective, rather than a prospective, priming mechanism and are consistent with compound-cue models of semantic priming. |
Sven Hohenstein; Hannes Matuschek; Reinhold Kliegl Linked linear mixed models: A joint analysis of fixation locations and fixation durations in natural reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 637–651, 2017. @article{Hohenstein2017, The complexity of eye-movement control during reading allows measurement of many dependent variables, the most prominent ones being fixation durations and their locations in words. In current practice, either variable may serve as dependent variable or covariate for the other in linear mixed models (LMMs) featuring also psycholinguistic covariates of word recognition and sentence comprehension. Rather than analyzing fixation location and duration with separate LMMs, we propose linking the two according to their sequential dependency. Specifically, we include predicted fixation location (estimated in the first LMM from psycholinguistic covariates) and its associated residual fixation location as covariates in the second, fixation-duration LMM. This linked LMM affords a distinction between direct and indirect effects (mediated through fixation location) of psycholinguistic covariates on fixation durations. Results confirm the robustness of distributed processing in the perceptual span. They also offer a resolution of the paradox of the inverted optimal viewing position (IOVP) effect (i.e., longer fixation durations in the center than at the beginning and end of words) although the opposite (i.e., an OVP effect) is predicted from default assumptions of psycholinguistic processing efficiency: The IOVP effect in fixation durations is due to the residual fixation-location covariate, presumably driven primarily by saccadic error, and the OVP effect (at least the left part of it) is uncovered with the predicted fixation-location covariate, capturing the indirect effects of psycholinguistic covariates. We expect that linked LMMs will be useful for the analysis of other dynamically related multiple outcomes, a conundrum of most psychonomic research. |
Philippa L. Howard; Simon P. Liversedge; Valerie Benson Processing of co-reference in autism spectrum disorder Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 1968–1980, 2017. @article{Howard2017, Accuracy for reading comprehension and inferencing tasks has previously been reported as reduced for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), relative to typically developing (TD) controls. In this study, we used an eye movements and reading paradigm to examine whether this difference in performance accuracy is underpinned by differences in the inferential work required to compute a co-referential link. Participants read two sentences that contained a category noun (e.g., bird) that was preceded by and co-referred to an exemplar that was either typical (e.g., pigeon) or atypical (e.g., penguin). Both TD and ASD participants showed an effect of typicality for gaze durations upon the category noun, with longer times being observed when the exemplar was atypical, in comparison to typical. No group differences or interactions were detected for target processing, and verbal language proficiency was found to predict general reading and inferential skill. The only difference between groups was that individuals with ASD engaged in more re-reading than TD participants. These data suggest that readers with ASD do not differ in the efficiency with which they compute anaphoric links on-line during reading. |
Philippa L. Howard; Simon P. Liversedge; Valerie Benson Investigating the use of world knowledge during on-line comprehension in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 2039–2053, 2017. @article{Howard2017a, The on-line use of world knowledge during reading was examined in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Both ASD and typically developed adults read sentences that included plausible, implausible and anomalous thematic relations, as their eye movements were monitored. No group differences in the speed of detection of the anomalous violations were found, but the ASD group showed a delay in detection of implausible thematic relations. These findings suggest that there are subtle differences in the speed of world knowledge processing during reading in ASD. |
Philippa L. Howard; Simon P. Liversedge; Valerie Benson Benchmark eye movement effects during natural reading in autism spectrum disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 109–127, 2017. @article{Howard2017b, In 2 experiments, eye tracking methodology was used to assess on-line lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In Experiment 1, lexical identification was examined by manipulating the frequency of target words. Both typically developed (TD) and ASD readers showed normal frequency effects, suggesting that the processes TD and ASD readers engage in to identify words are comparable. In Experiment 2, syntactic parsing and semantic interpretation requiring the on-line use of world knowledge were examined, by having participants read garden path sentences containing an ambiguous prepositional phrase. Both groups showed normal garden path effects when reading low-attached sentences and the time course of reading disruption was comparable between groups. This suggests that not only do ASD readers hold similar syntactic preferences to TD readers, but also that they use world knowledge on-line during reading. Together, these experiments demonstrate that the initial construction of sentence interpretation appears to be intact in ASD. However, the finding that ASD readers skip target words less often in Experiment 2, and take longer to read sentences during second pass for both experiments, suggests that they adopt a more cautious reading strategy and take longer to evaluate their sentence interpretation prior to making a manual response. |
Anneline Huck; Robin L. Thompson; Madeline Cruice; Jane Marshall The influence of sense-contingent argument structure frequencies on ambiguity resolution in aphasia Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 100, pp. 171–194, 2017. @article{Huck2017a, Verbs with multiple senses can show varying argument structure frequencies, depending on the underlying sense. When acknowledge is used to mean ‘recognise', it takes a direct object (DO), but when it is used to mean ‘admit' it prefers a sentence complement (SC). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether people with aphasia (PWA) can exploit such meaning-structure probabilities during the reading of temporarily ambiguous sentences, as demonstrated for neurologically healthy individuals (NHI) in a self-paced reading study (Hare et al., 2003). Eleven people with mild or moderate aphasia and eleven neurologically healthy control participants read sentences while their eyes were tracked. Using adapted materials from the study by Hare et al. target sentences containing an SC structure (e.g. He acknowledged (that) his friends would probably help him a lot) were presented following a context prime that biased either a direct object (DO-bias) or sentence complement (SC-bias) reading of the verbs. Half of the stimuli sentences did not contain that so made the post verbal noun phrase (his friends) structurally ambiguous. Both groups of participants were influenced by structural ambiguity as well as by the context bias, indicating that PWA can, like NHI, use their knowledge of a verb's sense-based argument structure frequency during online sentence reading. However, the individuals with aphasia showed delayed reading patterns and some individual differences in their sensitivity to context and ambiguity cues. These differences compared to the NHI may contribute to difficulties in sentence comprehension in aphasia. |
Anneline Huck; Robin L. Thompson; Madeline Cruice; Jane Marshall Effects of word frequency and contextual predictability on sentence reading in aphasia: An eye movement analysis Journal Article In: Aphasiology, vol. 31, no. 11, pp. 1307–1332, 2017. @article{Huck2017, Background: Mild reading difficulties are a pervasive symptom of aphasia. While much research in aphasia has been devoted to the study of single word reading, little is known about the process of (silent) sentence reading. Reading research in the non-brain-damaged population has benefited from the use of eye-tracking methodology, allowing inferences on cognitive processing without participants making an articulatory response. This body of research identified two factors, which strongly influence reading at the sentence level: word frequency and contextual predictability (influence of context).Aims: The main aim of this study was to investigate whether word frequency and contextual predictability influence sentence reading by people with aphasia (PWA), in parallel to that of neurologically healthy individuals (NHI). A second aim was to examine whether readers with aphasia show individual differences in the effects, and whether these are related to their underlying language profile. Methods & Procedures: Seventeen PWA and associated mild reading difficulties and 20 NHI took part in this study. Individuals with aphasia completed a range of language assessments. For the eye-tracking experiment, participants silently read sentences that included target words varying in word frequency and predictability while their eye movements were recorded. Comprehension accuracy, fixation durations, and the probability of first-pass fixations and first-pass regressions were measured. Outcomes & Results: Eye movements by both groups were significantly influenced by word frequency and predictability, but the predictability effect was stronger for the PWA than the neurologically healthy participants. Additionally, effects of word frequency and predictability were independent for the NHI, but the individuals with aphasia showed a more interactive pattern. Correlational analyses revealed (i) a significant relationship between lexical-semantic impairments and the word frequency effect score and (ii) a marginally significant association between the sentence comprehension skills and the predictability effect score. Conclusions: Consistent with compensatory processing theories, these findings indicate that decreased reading efficiency may trigger a more interactive reading strategy that aims to compensate for poorer reading by putting more emphasis on a sentence context, particularly for low-frequency words. For those individuals who have difficulties applying the strategy automatically, using a sentence context could be a beneficial strategy to focus on in reading intervention. |
Sara Iacozza; Albert Costa; Jon Andoni Duñabeitia What do your eyes reveal about your foreign language? Reading emotional sentences in a native and foreign language Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 10, pp. e0186027, 2017. @article{Iacozza2017, Foreign languages are often learned in emotionally neutral academic environments which differ greatly from the familiar context where native languages are acquired. This difference in learning contexts has been argued to lead to reduced emotional resonance when confronted with a foreign language. In the current study, we investigated whether the reactivity of the sympathetic nervous system in response to emotionally-charged stimuli is reduced in a foreign language. To this end, pupil sizes were recorded while reading aloud emotional sentences in the native or foreign language. Additionally, subjective ratings of emotional impact were provided after reading each sentence, allowing us to further investigate foreign language effects on explicit emotional understanding. Pupillary responses showed a larger effect of emotion in the native than in the foreign language. However, such a difference was not present for explicit ratings of emotionality. These results reveal that the sympathetic nervous system reacts differently depending on the language context, which in turns suggests a deeper emotional processing when reading in a native compared to a foreign language. |
Stephanie Jainta; Mirela Nikolova; Simon P. Liversedge Does text contrast mediate binocular advantages in reading? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 55–68, 2017. @article{Jainta2017, Humans typically make use of both of their eyes in reading and efficient processes of binocular vision provide a stable, single percept of the text. Binocular reading also comes with an advantage: reading speed is high and word frequency effects (i.e., faster lexical processing of words that are more often encountered in a language) emerge during fixations, which is not the case for monocular reading (Jainta, Blythe, & Liversedge, 2014). A potential contributor to this benefit is the reduced contrast in monocular reading: reduced text contrasts in binocular reading are known to slow down reading and word identification (Reingold & Rayner, 2006). To investigate whether contrast reduction mediates the binocular advantage, we first replicated increased reading time and nullified frequency effects for monocular reading (Experiment 1). Next, we reduced the contrast for binocular but whole sentences to 70% (Weber-contrast); this reading condition resembled monocular reading, but found no effect on reading speed and word identification (Experiment 2). A reasonable conclusion, therefore, was that a reduction in contrast is not the (primary) factor that mediates less efficient lexical processing under monocular reading. In a third experiment (Experiment 3) we reduced the sentence contrast to 40% and the pattern of results showed that, globally, reading was slowed down but clear word frequency effects were present in the data. Thus, word identification processes during reading (i.e., the word frequency effect) were qualitatively different in monocular reading compared with effects observed when text was read with substantially reduced contrast. |
Debra Jared; Sarah Bainbridge Reading homophone puns: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 2–13, 2017. @article{Jared2017, We investigated how readers make sense of homophone puns (e.g., The butcher was very glad we could meat up) by tracking their eye movements as they read. Comparison sentences included homophone-error sentences in which the presented homophone was also not correct (e.g., The lawyer was very glad we could meat up) and sentences in which the homophone was correct for the context (e.g., The butcher was very glad to chop meat up for the stew). An effect of the frequency of the unpresented homophone mate (e.g., meet) was found on first-pass reading times for homophones, indicating that participants activated the meaning of the homophone mate through shared phonology. First-fixation and gaze durations on the homophones were longer in puns than in correct-context sentences, indicating that participants imme- diately noticed that the homophone was incongruous with the adjacent context (e.g., glad we could meat) in puns, but total reading times did not differ, suggesting that the incongruity was quickly resolved. Immediate reading times on homophone in puns and homophone-error sentences did not differ, but total reading times did, suggesting that the impact of the critical context word (e.g., butcher) is delayed. Further analyses examined the resolution process in more detail. Ratings of the funniness of the puns were most strongly related to the strength of the association between the homophone and the critical context word (e.g., butcher). |
Debra Jared; Katrina O'Donnell Skilled adult readers activate the meanings of high-frequency words using phonology: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 334–346, 2017. @article{Jared2017a, We examined whether highly skilled adult readers activate the meanings of high-frequency words using phonology when reading sentences for meaning. A homophone-error paradigm was used. Sentences were written to fit 1 member of a homophone pair, and then 2 other versions were created in which the homophone was replaced by its mate or a spelling-control word. The error words were all high-frequency words, and the correct homophones were either higher-frequency words or low-frequency words—that is, the homophone errors were either the subordinate or dominant member of the pair. Participants read sentences as their eye movements were tracked. When the high-frequency homophone error words were the subordinate member of the homophone pair, participants had shorter immediate eye-fixation latencies on these words than on matched spelling-control words. In contrast, when the high-frequency homophone error words were the dominant member of the homophone pair, a difference between these words and spelling controls was delayed. These findings provide clear evidence that the meanings of high-frequency words are activated by phonological representations when skilled readers read sentences for meaning. Explanations of the differing patterns of results depending on homophone dominance are discussed. |
Juhani Järvikivi; Roger P. G. Gompel; Jukka Hyönä The interplay of implicit causality, structural heuristics, and anaphor type in ambiguous pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 525–550, 2017. @article{Jaervikivi2017, Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we counterbalanced the semantic roles of the verbs, we found no effect of grammatical role, suggesting the standard observed subject preference has a large semantic component. Experiment 2 showed that both the personal pronoun "hän" and the demonstrative "tämä" preferred the antecedent consistent with the implicit causality bias; "tämä" was not interpreted as referring to the semantically non-prominent entity. In contrast, structural prominence affected "hän" and "tämä" differently: we found a first-mention preference for "hän," but a second-mention preference for "tämä." The results suggest that semantic implicit causality information has an immediate effect on pronoun resolution and its use is not delayed relative to order-of-mention information. Furthermore, they show that order-of-mention differentially affects different types of anaphoric expressions, but semantic information has the same effect. |
Alexandra Jesse; Katja Poellmann; Ying-Yee Kong English listeners use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress early during spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 60, pp. 190–198, 2017. @article{Jesse2017, Purpose: We used an eye-tracking technique to investigate whether English listeners use suprasegmental information about lexical stress to speed up the recognition of spoken words in English. Method: In a visual world paradigm, 24 young English listeners followed spoken instructions to choose 1 of 4 printed referents on a computer screen (e.g., “Click on the word admiral”). Displays contained a critical pair of words (e.g., ˈadmiral–ˌadmiˈration) that were segmentally identical for their first 2 syllables but differed suprasegmentally in their 1st syllable: One word began with primary lexical stress, and the other began with secondary lexical stress. All words had phrase-level prominence. Listeners' relative proportion of eye fixations on these words indicated their ability to differentiate them over time. Results: Before critical word pairs became segmentally distinguishable in their 3rd syllables, participants fixated target words more than their stress competitors, but only if targets had initial primary lexical stress. The degree to which stress competitors were fixated was independent of their stress pattern. Conclusions: Suprasegmental information about lexical stress modulates the time course of spoken-word recognition. Specifically, suprasegmental information on the primary- stressed syllable of words with phrase-level prominence helps in distinguishing the word from phonological competitors with secondary lexical stress. |
Yu-Cin Jian Eye-movement patterns and reader characteristics of students with good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 1447–1472, 2017. @article{Jian2017a, This study investigated the cognitive processes and reader characteristics of sixth graders who had good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams. We first measured the reading ability and reading self-efficacy of sixth-grade participants, and then recorded their eye movements while they were reading an illustrated scientific text and scored their answers to content-related questions. Finally, the participants evaluated the difficulty of the article, the attractiveness of the content and diagram, and their learning performance. The participants were then classified into groups based on how many correct responses they gave to questions related to reading. The results showed that readers with good performance had better character recognition ability and reading self-efficacy, were more attracted to the diagrams, and had higher self-evaluated learning levels than the readers with poor performance did. Eye-movement data indicated that readers with good performance spent significantly more reading time on the whole article, the text section, and the diagram section than the readers with poor performance did. Interestingly, readers with good performance had significantly longer mean fixation duration on the diagrams than readers with poor performance did; further, readers with good performance made more saccades between the text and the diagrams. Additionally, sequential analysis of eye movements showed that readers with good performance preferred to observe the diagram rather than the text after reading the title, but this tendency was not present in readers with poor performance. In sum, using eye-tracking technology and several reading tests and questionnaires, we found that various cognitive aspects (reading strategy, diagram utilization) and affective aspects (reading self-efficacy, article likeness, diagram attraction, and self-evaluation of learning) affected sixth graders' reading performance in this study. |
Yu-Cin Jian; Hwa-Wei Ko Influences of text difficulty and reading ability on learning illustrated science texts for children: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Computers and Education, vol. 113, pp. 263–279, 2017. @article{Jian2017, In this study, eye movement recordings and comprehension tests were used to investigate children's cognitive processes and comprehension when reading illustrated science texts. Ten-year-old children (N = 42) who were beginning to read to learn, with high and low reading ability read two illustrated science texts in Chinese (one medium-difficult article, one difficult article), and then answered questions that measured comprehension of textual and pictorial information as well as text-and-picture integration. The high-ability group outperformed the low-ability group on all questions. Eye movement analyses showed that both group of students spent roughly the same amount of time reading both articles, but had different methods of reading them. The low-ability group was inclined to read what seemed easier to them and read the text more. The high-ability group attended more to the difficult article and made an effort to integrate the textual and pictorial information. During a first-pass reading of the difficult article, high- but not low-ability readers returned to the previous paragraph. The low-ability readers spent more time reading the less difficult article and not the difficult one that required teachers' attention. Suggestions for classroom instruction are proposed accordingly. |
Yanping Liu; Ren Huang; Dingguo Gao; Erik D. Reichle Further tests of a dynamic-adjustment account of saccade targeting during the reading of Chinese Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 41, pp. 1264–1287, 2017. @article{Liu2017a, There are two accounts of how readers of unspaced writing systems (e.g., Chinese) know where to move their eyes: (a) saccades are directed toward default targets (e.g., centers of words that have been segmented in the parafovea); or (b) saccade lengths are adjusted dynamically, as a function of ongoing parafoveal processing. This article reports an eye-movement experiment supporting the latter hypothesis by demonstrating that the slope of the relationship between the saccade launch site on word "N" and the subsequent fixation landing site on word "N" + 1 is > 1, suggesting that saccades are lengthened from launch sites that afford more parafoveal processing. This conclusion is then evaluated and confirmed via simulations using implementations of both hypotheses (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016), with a discussion of these results for our understanding of saccadic targeting during reading and existing models of eye-movement control. |
Yanping Liu; Ren Huang; Yugang Li; Dingguo Gao The word frequency effect on saccade targeting during Chinese reading: Evidence from a survival analysis of saccade length Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 116, 2017. @article{Liu2017b, Our study employs distributional analysis (i.e., survival analysis) to examine how the frequency of target words influences saccade lengths into and out of these target words in Chinese reading. The results of survival analysis indicate the survival curves in the high- and low-frequency conditions diverge for a short saccade length, with more than 80% of the lengths of incoming and outgoing saccades being larger than the divergence points. These results as well as simulations using the novel Dynamic-adjustment Model of saccadic targeting (Liu et al., 2016) are consistent with previous mean-based results and provide more precise information to support this novel model. The implications for saccade target selection during the reading of Chinese are discussed. |
Zhifang Liu; Yun Pan; Wen Tong; Nina Liu Effects of adults aging on word encoding in reading Chinese: Evidence from disappearing text Journal Article In: peerJ, pp. 1–22, 2017. @article{Liu2017e, The effect of aging on the process of word encoding for fixated words and words presented to the right of the fixation point during the reading of sentences in Chinese was investigated with two disappearing text experiments. The results of Experiment 1 showed that only the 40-ms onset disappearance of word n disrupted young adults' reading performance. However, for old readers, the disappearance of word n caused disruptions until the onset time was 120 ms. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the disappearance of word n+1 did not cause disruptions to young adults, but these conditions made old readers spend more time reading a sentence compared to the normal display condition. These results indicated a reliable aging effect on the process of word encoding when reading Chinese, and that the encoding process in the preview frame was more susceptible to normal aging compared to that in the fixation frame. We propose that sensory, cognitive, and specific factors related to the Chinese language are important contributors to these age-related differences. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon Print exposure modulates the effects of repetition priming during sentence reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1935–1942, 2017. @article{Lowder2017, Individual readers vary greatly in the quality of their lexical representations, and consequently in how quickly and efficiently they can access orthographic and lexical knowledge. This variability may be explained, at least in part, by individual differences in exposure to printed language, because practice at reading promotes the development of stronger reading skills. In the present eyetracking experiment, we tested the hypothesis that the efficiency of word recognition during reading improves with increases in print exposure, by determining whether the magnitude of the repetition-priming effect is modulated by individual differences in scores on the author recognition test (ART). Lexical repetition of target words was manipulated across pairs of unrelated sentences that were presented on consecutive trials. The magnitude of the repetition effect was modulated by print exposure in early measures of processing, such that the magnitude of the effect was inversely related to scores on the ART. The results showed that low levels of print exposure, and thus lower-quality lexical representations, are associated with high levels of difficulty recognizing words, and thus with the greatest room to benefit from repetition. Furthermore, the interaction between scores on the ART and repetition suggests that print exposure is not simply an index of general reading speed, but rather that higher levels of print exposure are associated with an enhanced ability to access lexical knowledge and recognize words during reading. |
Jia E. Loy; Hannah Rohde; Martin Corley Effects of disfluency in online interpretation of deception Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 41, pp. 1434–1456, 2017. @article{Loy2017, A speaker's manner of delivery of an utterance can affect a listener's pragmatic interpretation of the message. Disfluencies (such as filled pauses) influence a listener's off-line assessment of whether the speaker is truthful or deceptive. Do listeners also form this assessment during the moment-by-moment processing of the linguistic message? Here we present two experiments that examined listeners' judgments of whether a speaker was indicating the true location of the prize in a game during fluent and disfluent utterances. Participants' eye and mouse movements were biased toward the location named by the speaker during fluent utterances, whereas the opposite bias was observed during disfluent utterances. This difference emerged rapidly after the onset of the critical noun. Participants were similarly sensitive to disfluencies at the start of the utterance (Experiment 1) and in the middle (Experiment 2). Our findings support recent research showing that listeners integrate pragmatic information alongside semantic content during the earliest moments of language processing. Unlike prior work which has focused on pragmatic effects in the interpretation of the literal message, here we highlight disfluency's role in guiding a listener to an alternative non-literal message. |
Guojie Ma Does interword spacing influence lexical processing in Chinese reading? Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 25, no. 7-8, pp. 815–824, 2017. @article{Ma2017c, This study investigated how inserting spaces between Chinese words affected word recognition in Chinese reading. Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded in a sentence reading task where high- and low-frequency target words were presented in both the spaced and normally unspaced texts. We found that fixation durations on target words were shorter in the high- than low-frequency conditions, and shorter in the spaced than unspaced conditions. The survival analysis revealed that interword spacing advanced the temporal onset of word frequency effects relative to the normally unspaced condition. However, inconsistent with the findings in English reading, there was no interaction between word frequency and interword spacing on all fixation duration measures, and the Bayes factor analyses also favoured the hypothesis of null interaction. These data suggest that interword spacing facilitates visual rather than lexical processing in Chinese reading, and thus improves our understanding on the roles of interword spacing across different writing systems. |
Guojie Ma; Alexander Pollatsek; Yugang Li; Xingshan Li Chinese readers can perceive a word even when it's composed of noncontiguous characters Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 158–166, 2017. @article{Ma2017a, This study explored whether readers could recognize a word composed of noncontiguous characters (a "cross-character word") in Chinese reading. All 3 experiments employed Chinese 4-character strings ABCD, where both AB and CD were 2-character words. In the cross-character word condition, AC was a word but in the control condition, AC was not a word. A character identification task was employed in Experiment 1 and sentence reading tasks were employed in Experiments 2 and 3. In all 3 experiments, an AC word produced inhibition effects. In Experiment 1, an AC word decreased the accuracy of character B identification, but increased the accuracy of character C identification. In Experiments 2 and 3, an AC word slowed reading on CD, indicating that the cross-character words were activated. These results imply that Chinese character encoding leading to word recognition does not proceed in a strictly serial way from left to right, or is strictly constrained by invisible word boundaries. |
Michael P. Mansbridge; Sunju Park; Katsuo Tamaoka Disambiguation and integration in Korean relative clause processing Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 827–845, 2017. @article{Mansbridge2017a, Previous studies on Korean relative clauses (RC) show that, with respect to processing, object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) are more difficult to process at the head noun than subject-extracted relative clauses within temporarily ambiguous contexts. ORCs, however, are predicted by experience-based processing models to incur a greater processing cost during early processing stages at the RC verb, since it is a likely locus of disambiguation for RCs in Korean, and because ORCs are a less frequent structure. Consequently, the current study investigates whether processing difficulty for ORCs manifests itself at the RC verb using eye-tracking methods, a simple sentence structure and a sentential-decision task. The results revealed significantly increased go-past reading times for ORCs at the RC verb. We believe this is a result of a less frequent structure being more difficult to parse during disambiguation. Accordingly, experience-based models of processing can accurately predict difficulty for ORCs in Korean. |
Michael P. Mansbridge; Katsuo Tamaoka; Kexin Xiong; Rinus G. Verdonschot Ambiguity in the processing of Mandarin Chinese relative clauses: One factor cannot explain it all Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. e0178369, 2017. @article{Mansbridge2017, This study addresses the question of whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers process and comprehend subject-extracted relative clauses (SRC) more readily than object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) in Mandarin Chinese. Presently, this has been a hotly debated issue, with various studies producing contrasting results. Using two eye-tracking experiments with ambiguous and unambiguous RCs, this study shows that both ORCs and SRCs have different processing requirements depending on the locus and time course during reading. The results reveal that ORC reading was possibly facilitated by linear/temporal integration and canonicity. On the other hand, similarity-based interference made ORCs more difficult, and expectation-based processing was more prominent for unambiguous ORCs. Overall, RC processing in Mandarin should not be broken down to a single ORC (dis)advantage, but understood as multiple interdependent factors influencing whether ORCs are either more difficult or easier to parse depending on the task and context at hand. |
Christina Marx; Stefan Hawelka; Sarah Schuster; Florian Hutzler Foveal processing difficulty does not affect parafoveal preprocessing in young readers Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 7, pp. 41602, 2017. @article{Marx2017, Recent evidence suggested that parafoveal preprocessing develops early during reading acquisition, that is, young readers profit from valid parafoveal information and exhibit a resultant preview benefit. For young readers, however, it is unknown whether the processing demands of the currently fixated word modulate the extent to which the upcoming word is parafoveally preprocessed - as it has been postulated (for adult readers) by the foveal load hypothesis. The present study used the novel incremental boundary technique to assess whether 4 th and 6 th Graders exhibit an effect of foveal load. Furthermore, we attempted to distinguish the foveal load effect from the spillover effect. These effects are hard to differentiate with respect to the expected pattern of results, but are conceptually different. The foveal load effect is supposed to reflect modulations of the extent of parafoveal preprocessing, whereas the spillover effect reflects the ongoing processing of the previous word whilst the reader's fixation is already on the next word. The findings revealed that the young readers did not exhibit an effect of foveal load, but a substantial spillover effect. The implications for previous studies with adult readers and for models of eye movement control in reading are discussed. |
Eliana Mastrantuono; David Saldaña; Isabel R. Rodríguez-Ortiz An eye tracking study on the perception and comprehension of unimodal and bimodal linguistic inputs by deaf adolescents Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 1044, 2017. @article{Mastrantuono2017, An eye tracking experiment explored the gaze behaviour of deaf individuals when perceiving language in spoken and sign language only, and in sign-supported speech. Participants were deaf (n = 25) and hearing (n = 25) Spanish adolescents. Deaf students were prelingually profoundly deaf individuals with cochlear implants used by age 5 or earlier, or prelingually profoundly deaf native signers with deaf parents. The effectiveness of sign-supported speech has rarely been tested within the same group of children at discourse-level comprehension. Here, video-recorded texts, including spatial descriptions, were alternately transmitted in spoken language, sign language and sign-supported speech. The capacity of these communicative systems to equalise comprehension in deaf participants with that of spoken language in hearing participants was tested. Within-group analyses of deaf participants tested if the bimodal linguistic input of sign-supported speech favoured discourse comprehension compared to unimodal languages. Deaf participants with cochlear implants achieved equal comprehension to hearing controls in all communicative systems while deaf native signers with no cochlear implants achieved equal comprehension to hearing participants if tested in their native sign language. Comprehension of sign-supported speech was not increased compared to spoken language, even when spatial information was communicated. Eye movements of deaf and hearing participants were tracked and data of dwell times spent looking at the face or body area of the sign model were analysed. Within-group analyses focused on differences between native and non-native signers. Dwell times of hearing participants were equally distributed across upper and lower areas of the face while deaf participants mainly looked at the mouth area; this could enable information to be obtained from mouthings in sign language and from lipreading in sign-supported speech and spoken language. Few fixations were directed towards the signs, although these were more frequent when spatial language was transmitted. Both native and non-native signers looked mainly at the face when perceiving sign language, although non-native signers looked significantly more at the body than native signers. This distribution of gaze fixations suggested that deaf individuals – particularly native signers – mainly perceived signs through peripheral vision. |
Sebastiaan Mathôt; Jonathan Grainger; Kristof Strijkers Pupillary responses to words that convey a sense of brightness or darkness Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1116–1124, 2017. @article{Mathot2017, Theories about embodiment of language hold that when you process a word's meaning, you automatically simulate associated sensory input (e.g., perception of brightness when you process lamp) and prepare associated actions (e.g., finger movements when you process typing). To test this latter prediction, we measured pupillary responses to single words that conveyed a sense of brightness (e.g., day) or darkness (e.g., night) or were neutral (e.g., house). We found that pupils were largest for words conveying darkness, of intermediate size for neutral words, and smallest for words conveying brightness. This pattern was found for both visually presented and spoken words, which suggests that it was due to the words' meanings, rather than to visual or auditory properties of the stimuli. Our findings suggest that word meaning is sufficient to trigger a pupillary response, even when this response is not imposed by the experimental task, and even when this response is beyond voluntary control. |
Daniel R. McCloy; Bonnie K. Lau; Eric D. Larson; Katherine A. I. Pratt; Adrian K. C. Lee Pupillometry shows the effort of auditory attention switching Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 141, no. 4, pp. 2440–2451, 2017. @article{McCloy2017, © 2017 Acoustical Society of America. Successful speech communication often requires selective attention to a target stream amidst competing sounds, as well as the ability to switch attention among multiple interlocutors. However, auditory attention switching negatively affects both target detection accuracy and reaction time, suggesting that attention switches carry a cognitive cost. Pupillometry is one method of assessing mental effort or cognitive load. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the effort associated with attention switches is detectable in the pupillary response. In both experiments, pupil dilation, target detection sensitivity, and reaction time were measured; the task required listeners to either maintain or switch attention between two concurrent speech streams. Secondary manipulations explored whether switch-related effort would increase when auditory streaming was harder. In experiment 1, spatially distinct stimuli were degraded by simulating reverberation (compromising across-time streaming cues), and target-masker talker gender match was also varied. In experiment 2, diotic streams separable by talker voice quality and pitch were degraded by noise vocoding, and the time alloted for mid-trial attention switching was varied. All trial manipulations had some effect on target detection sensitivity and/or reaction time; however, only the attention-switching manipulation affected the pupillary response: greater dilation was observed in trials requiring switching attention between talkers. |
Ronan McGarrigle; Piers Dawes; Andrew J. Stewart; Stefanie E. Kuchinsky; Kevin J. Munro Measuring listening-related effort and fatigue in school-aged children using pupillometry Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 161, pp. 95–112, 2017. @article{McGarrigle2017, Stress and fatigue from effortful listening may compromise well-being, learning, and academic achievement in school-aged children. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) typical of those in school classrooms on listening effort (behavioral and pupillometric) and listening-related fatigue (self-report and pupillometric) in a group of school-aged children. A sample of 41 normal-hearing children aged 8–11 years performed a narrative speech–picture verification task in a condition with recommended levels of background noise (“ideal”: +15 dB SNR) and a condition with typical classroom background noise levels (“typical”: −2 dB SNR). Participants showed increased task-evoked pupil dilation in the typical listening condition compared with the ideal listening condition, consistent with an increase in listening effort. No differences were found between listening conditions in terms of performance accuracy and response time on the behavioral task. Similarly, no differences were found between listening conditions in self-report and pupillometric markers of listening-related fatigue. This is the first study to (a) examine listening-related fatigue in children using pupillometry and (b) demonstrate physiological evidence consistent with increased listening effort while listening to spoken narratives despite ceiling-level task performance accuracy. Understanding the physiological mechanisms that underpin listening-related effort and fatigue could inform intervention strategies and ultimately mitigate listening difficulties in children. |
Ronan McGarrigle; Piers Dawes; Andrew J. Stewart; Stefanie E. Kuchinsky; Kevin J. Munro Pupillometry reveals changes in physiological arousal during a sustained listening task Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 193–203, 2017. @article{McGarrigle2017a, Hearing loss is associated with anecdotal reports of fatigue during periods of sustained listening. However, few studies have attempted to measure changes in arousal, as a potential marker of fatigue, over the course of a sustained listening task. The present study aimed to examine subjective, behavioral, and physiological indices of listening-related fatigue. Twenty-four normal-hearing young adults performed a speech-picture verification task in different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) while their pupil size was monitored and response times recorded. Growth curve analysis revealed a significantly steeper linear decrease in pupil size in the more challenging SNR, but only in the second half of the trial block. Changes in pupil dynamics over the course of the more challenging listening condition block suggest a reduction in physiological arousal. Behavioral and self-report measures did not reveal any differences between listening conditions. This is the first study to show reduced physiological arousal during a sustained listening task, with changes over time consistent with the onset of fatigue. |
Gareth Carrol; Kathy Conklin Cross language lexical priming extends to formulaic units: Evidence from eye-tracking suggests that this idea 'has legs' Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 299–317, 2017. @article{Carrol2017, Idiom priming effects (faster processing compared to novel phrases) are generally robust in native speakers but not non-native speakers. This leads to the question of how idioms and other multiword units are represented and accessed in a first (L1) and second language (L2). We address this by investigating the processing of translated Chinese idioms to determine whether known L1 combinations show idiom priming effects in non-native speakers when encountered in the L2. In two eye-tracking experiments we compared reading times for idioms vs. control phrases (Experiment 1) and for figurative vs. literal uses of idioms (Experiment 2). Native speakers of Chinese showed recognition of the L1 form in the L2, but figurative meanings were read more slowly than literal meanings, suggesting that the non-compositional nature of idioms makes them problematic in a non-native language. We discuss the results as they relate to crosslinguistic priming at the multiword level. |
Eric Castet; Marine Descamps; Ambre Denis-Noël; Pascale Colé Letter and symbol identification: No evidence for letter-specific crowding mechanisms Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 17, no. 11, pp. 1–19, 2017. @article{Castet2017, It has been proposed that letters, as opposed to symbols, trigger specialized crowding processes, boosting identification of the first and last letters of words. This hypothesis is based on evidence that single-letter accuracy as a function of within-string position has a W shape (the classic serial position function [SPF] in psycholinguistics) whereas an inverted V shape is obtained when measured with symbols. Our main goal was to test the robustness of the latter result. Our hypothesis was that any letter/symbol difference might result from short-term visual memory processes (due to the partial report [PR] procedures used in SPF studies) rather than from crowding. We therefore removed the involvement of short-term memory by precueing target- item position and compared SPFs with precueing and postcueing. Perimetric complexity was stringently matched between letters and symbols. In postcueing conditions similar to previous studies, we did not reproduce the inverted V shape for symbols: Clear-cut W shapes were observed with an overall smaller accuracy for symbols compared to letters. This letter/symbol difference was dramatically reduced in precueing conditions in keeping with our prediction. Our results are not consistent with the claim that letter strings trigger specialized crowding processes. We argue that PR procedures are not fit to isolate crowding processes. |
Fuguo Chen; Jie Liu; Shuanghong Chen; Hong Chen; Xiao Gao Eye movement study on attention bias to body height stimuli in height dissatisfied males Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 2209, 2017. @article{Chen2017, The present study investigated attention bias in response to height-related words among young men in China. 47 [26 high height dissatisfied (HHD) and 21 low height dissatisfied (LHD)] men performed a dot-probe task. Eye movement (EM) recordings showed that compared to LHD men, HHD men had an avoidance bias in response to height-related words, which was revealed by less frequent first fixations on both tall-related and short-related words, and showed significantly shorter first fixations on short-related words. There was no other significant difference in EM indices (i.e., first fixation latency and gaze duration) between two groups. In addition, HHD participants were significantly slower than LHD participants when responding to probes preceded by short-related words, while there was no difference when probes were preceded by tall-related or neutral words. In sum, the present results indicate that HHD men selectively avoid cues related to short height. |
Qingrong Chen; Xin Huang; Le Bai; Xiaodong Xu; Yiming Yang; Michael K. Tanenhaus The effect of contextual diversity on eye movements in Chinese sentence reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 510–518, 2017. @article{Chen2017f, Recent studies have demonstrated that when contextual diversity is controlled token word frequency has minimal effects on visual word recognition. With the exception of a single experiment by Plummer, Perea, & Rayner (2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 275-283), those studies have examined words in isolation. The current studies address two potential limitations of the Plummer et al. experiment. First, because Plummer et al. used different sentence frames for words in different conditions, the effects might be due to uncontrolled differences on the sentences. Second, the absence of a frequency effect might be attributed to comparing higher and lower frequency words within a limited range. Three eye-tracking experiments examined effects of contextual diversity and frequency on Mandarin Chinese, a logographic language, for words embedded in the normal sentences. In Experiment 1, yoked words were rotated through the same sentence frame. Experiments 2a and 2b used a design similar to Plummer et al., which allows use of a larger sample of words to compare results between experiments with a smaller and larger difference in log frequency (0.41 and 1.06, respectively). In all three experiments, first-pass and later eye movement measures were significantly shorter for targets with higher contextual diversity than for targets with lower contextual diversity, with no effects of frequency. |
Wonil Choi; Matthew W. Lowder; Fernanda Ferreira; Tamara Y. Swaab; John M. Henderson Effects of word predictability and preview lexicality on eye movements during reading: A comparison between young and older adults Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 232–242, 2017. @article{Choi2017, Previous eye-tracking research has characterized older adults' reading patterns as "risky," arguing that compared to young adults, older adults skip more words, have longer saccades, and are more likely to regress to previous portions of the text. In the present eye-tracking study, we reexamined the claim that older adults adopt a risky reading strategy, utilizing the boundary paradigm to manipulate parafoveal preview and contextual predictability of a target word. Results showed that older adults had longer fixation durations compared to young adults; however, there were no age differences in skipping rates, saccade length, or proportion of regressions. In addition, readers showed higher skipping rates of the target word if the preview string was a word than if it was a nonword, regardless of age. Finally, the effect of predictability in reading times on the target word was larger for older adults than for young adults. These results suggest that older adults' reading strategies are not as risky as was previously claimed. Instead, we propose that older adults can effectively combine top-down information from the sentence context with bottom-up information from the parafovea to optimize their reading strategies. |
Michael Christen; Mathias Abegg The effect of magnification and contrast on reading performance in different types of simulated low vision Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 1–9, 2017. @article{Christen2017, Low vision therapy, such as magnifiers or contrast enhancement, is widely used. Scientific evidence proving its efficacy is scarce however. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the benefits of magnification and contrast enhancement depended on the origin of low vision. For this purpose we measured reading speed with artificially induced low vision in 12 healthy subjects in conditions of a simulated central scotoma, blurred vision and oscillopsia. Texts were either blurred, set in motion or blanked at the gaze position by using eye tracking and gaze contingent display. The simulated visual impairment was calibrated such that all types of low vision caused equal reading impairment. We then tested the effect of magnification and contrast enhancement among the different types of low vision. We found that reading speed improved with increasing magnification and with higher contrast in all conditions. The effect of magnification was significantly different in the three low vision conditions: The gain from magnification was highest in simulated blur and least in central scotoma. Magnification eventually led to near normal reading speed in all conditions. High contrast was less effective than high magnification and the effect of contrast enhancement was similar in all low vision conditions. From these results we conclude that the type of low vision determines the benefit that can be expected from magnification. Contrast enhancement leads to similar improved reading speed in all low vision types. We provide evidence that supports the use of low vision aids. |
Kiel Christianson; Steven G. Luke; Erika K. Hussey; Kacey L. Wochna Why reread? Evidence from garden-path and local coherence structures Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 70, no. 7, pp. 1380–1405, 2017. @article{Christianson2017a, Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to compare the online reading and offline comprehension of main verb/reduced relative garden-path sentences and local coherence sentences. Rereading of early material in garden-path reduced relatives should be revisionary, aimed at reanalysing an earlier misparse; however, rereading of early material in a local coherence reduced relative need only be confirmatory, as the original parse of the earlier portion of these sentences is ultimately correct. Results of online and offline measures showed that local coherence structures elicited signals of reading disruption that arose earlier and lasted longer, and local coherence comprehension was also better than garden path comprehension. Few rereading measures in either sentence type were predicted by structural features of these sentences, nor was rereading related to comprehension accuracy, which was extremely low overall. Results are discussed with respect to selective reanalysis and good-enough processing. |
Kiel Christianson; Peiyun Zhou; Cassie Palmer; Adina Raizen Effects of context and individual differences on the processing of taboo words Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 178, pp. 73–86, 2017. @article{Christianson2017, Previous studies suggest that taboo words are special in regards to language processing. Findings from the studies have led to the formation of two theories, global resource theory and binding theory, of taboo word processing. The current study investigates how readers process taboo words embedded in sentences during silent reading. In two experiments, measures collected include eye movement data, accuracy and reaction time measures for recalling probe words within the sentences, and individual differences in likelihood of being offended by taboo words. Although certain aspects of the results support both theories, as the likelihood of a person being offended by a taboo word influenced some measures, neither theory sufficiently predicts or describes the effects observed. The results are interpreted as evidence that processing effects ascribed to taboo words are largely, but not completely, attributable to the context in which they are used and the individual attitudes of the people who hear/read them. The results also demonstrate the importance of investigating taboo words in naturalistic language processing paradigms. A revised theory of taboo word processing is proposed that incorporates both global resource theory and binding theory along with the sociolinguistic factors and individual differences that largely drive the effects observed here. |
Tim Chuk; Antoni B. Chan; Janet H. Hsiao In: Vision Research, vol. 141, pp. 204–216, 2017. @article{Chuk2017a, The hidden Markov model (HMM)-based approach for eye movement analysis is able to reflect individual differences in both spatial and temporal aspects of eye movements. Here we used this approach to understand the relationship between eye movements during face learning and recognition, and its association with recognition performance. We discovered holistic (i.e., mainly looking at the face center) and analytic (i.e., specifically looking at the two eyes in addition to the face center) patterns during both learning and recognition. Although for both learning and recognition, participants who adopted analytic patterns had better recognition performance than those with holistic patterns, a significant positive correlation between the likelihood of participants' patterns being classified as analytic and their recognition performance was only observed during recognition. Significantly more participants adopted holistic patterns during learning than recognition. Interestingly, about 40% of the participants used different patterns between learning and recognition, and among them 90% switched their patterns from holistic at learning to analytic at recognition. In contrast to the scan path theory, which posits that eye movements during learning have to be recapitulated during recognition for the recognition to be successful, participants who used the same or different patterns during learning and recognition did not differ in recognition performance. The similarity between their learning and recognition eye movement patterns also did not correlate with their recognition performance. These findings suggested that perceptuomotor memory elicited by eye movement patterns during learning does not play an important role in recognition. In contrast, the retrieval of diagnostic information for recognition, such as the eyes for face recognition, is a better predictor for recognition performance. |
Anna B. Cieślicka; Roberto R. Heredia How to "save your skin" when processing L2 idioms: An eye movement analysis of idiom transparency and cross-language similarity among bilinguals Journal Article In: Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 81–107, 2017. @article{Cieslicka2017, The current study looks at whether bilinguals varying in language dominance show a processing advantage for idiomatic over non-idiomatic phrases and to what extent this effect is modulated by idiom transparency (i.e., the degree to which the idiom's figurative meaning can be inferred from its literal analysis) and cross-language similarity (i.e., the extent to which an idiom has an identical translation equivalent in another language). An eye tracking experiment was conducted in which Spanish-English bilinguals were presented with literally plausible (i.e., idioms that can be interpreted both figuratively and literally) transparent (e.g., break the ice, where the figurative meaning can be deduced from analyzing the idiom literally) and opaque idioms (e.g., hit the sack, where the meaning cannot be inferred from idiom constituents). Idioms varied along the dimension of cross-language similarity, with half the idioms having word for word translation equivalents in English and Spanish and another half being different, that is, having no similar counterpart in another language. Each idiom was used either in its literal (e.g., get cold feet: become cold) or figurative meaning (e.g., get cold feet: become afraid). In control phrases the last word of the idiom was replaced by a carefully matched control (e.g., get cold hands). Reading measures (fixation count, first pass/gaze reading time and total reading time) revealed that cross-language similarity interacts in an important way with idiom transparency, such that opaque idioms were more difficult to process than transparent ones, and different transparent idioms took faster to process than similar transparent idioms. Results are discussed with regard to the holistic vs. compositional views of idiom storage and the role of activated L1 (first language) knowledge in the course of L2 (second language) figurative processing. |
Uschi Cop; Nicolas Dirix; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck Presenting GECO: An eyetracking corpus of monolingual and bilingual sentence reading Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 602–615, 2017. @article{Cop2017, This article introduces GECO, the Ghent Eye-Tracking Corpus, a monolingual and bilingual corpus of the eyetracking data of participants reading a complete novel. English monolinguals and Dutch–English bilinguals read an entire novel, which was presented in paragraphs on the screen. The bilinguals read half of the novel in their first language, and the other half in their second language. In this article, we describe the distributions and descriptive statistics ofthe most important reading time measures for the two groups of participants. This large eyetracking corpus is perfectly suited for both exploratory purposes and more directed hypothesis test- ing, and it can guide the formulation of ideas and theories about naturalistic reading processes in a meaningful context. Most importantly, this corpus has the potential to evaluate the generalizability of monolingual and bilingual language theories and models to the reading oflong texts and narratives. The corpus is freely available at http://expsy.ugent.be/downloads/ geco. |
Uschi Cop; Nicolas Dirix; Eva Van Assche; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck Reading a book in one or two languages? An eye movement study of cognate facilitation in L1 and L2 reading Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 747–769, 2017. @article{Cop2017a, This study examined how noun reading by bilinguals is influenced by orthographic similarity with their translation equivalents in another language. Eye movements of Dutch-English bilinguals reading an entire novel in L1 and L2 were analyzed. In L2, we found a facilitatory effect of orthographic overlap. Additional facilitation for identical cognates was found for later eye movement measures. This shows that the complex, semantic context of a novel does not eliminate cross-lingual activation in natural reading. In L1 we detected non-identical cognate facilitation for first fixation durations of longer nouns. Identical cognate facilitation was found on total reading times for high frequent nouns. This study is the first to show cognate facilitation in L1 reading of narrative text. This shows that even when reading a novel in the mother tongue, lexical access is not restricted to the target language. |
Michael G. Cutter; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Reading sentences of uniform word length: Evidence for the adaptation of the preferred saccade length during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 11, pp. 1895–1911, 2017. @article{Cutter2017a, In the current study, the effect of removing word length variability within sentences on spatial aspects of eye movements during reading was investigated. Participants read sentences that were uniform in terms of word length, with each sentence consisting entirely of three-, four-, or five-letter words, or a combination of these word lengths. Several interesting findings emerged. Adaptation of the preferred saccade length occurred for sentences with different uniform word length; participants would be more accurate at making short saccades while reading uniform sentences of three-letter words, while they would be more accurate at making long saccades while reading uniform sentences of five-letter words. Furthermore, word skipping was affected such that three- and four-letter words were more likely, and five-letter words less likely, to be directly fixated in uniform compared to non-uniform sentences. It is argued that saccadic targeting during reading is highly adaptable and flexible toward the characteristics of the text currently being read, as opposed to the idea implemented in most current models of eye movement control during reading that readers develop a preference for making saccades of a certain length across a lifetime of experience with a given language. |
Michael G. Cutter; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Is orthographic information from multiple parafoveal words processed in parallel: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 8, pp. 1550–1567, 2017. @article{Cutter2017, In the current study we investigated whether orthographic information available from 1 upcoming parafoveal word influences the processing of another parafoveal word. Across 2 experiments we used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to present participants with an identity preview of the 2 words after the boundary (e.g.,hot pan), a preview in which 2 letters were transposed between these words ( e.g., hop tan), or a preview in which the same 2 letters were substituted (e.g., hob fan). We hypothesized that if these 2 words were processed in parallel in the parafovea then we may observe significant preview benefits for the condition in which the letters were transposed between words relative to the condition in which the letters were substituted. However, no such effect was observed, with participants fixating the words for the same amount of time in both conditions. This was the case both when the transposition was made between the final and first letter of the 2 words (e.g., hop tan as a preview of hot pan; Experiment 1) and when the transposition maintained within word letter position (e.g., pit hop as a preview of hit pop; Experiment 2). The implications of these findings are considered in relation to serial and parallel lexical processing during reading. |
Alex Carvalho; Isabelle Dautriche; Isabelle Lin; Anne Christophe Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 163, pp. 67–79, 2017. @article{Carvalho2017, This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébé souris] [a bien mangé] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourit à sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words. |
Christopher A. Dean; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff Cross-linguistic orthographic effects in late spanish/english bilinguals Journal Article In: Languages, vol. 2, pp. 24, 2017. @article{Dean2017, Through the use of the visual world paradigm and eye tracking, we investigate how orthographic–phonological mappings in bilinguals promote interference during spoken language comprehension. Eighteen English-dominant bilinguals and 13 Spanish-dominant bilinguals viewed 4-picture visual displays while listening to Spanish-only auditory sentences (e.g., El detective busca su banco ‘The detective is looking for his bench') in order to select a target image. Stimuli included two types of trials that represent potential conflict in bilinguals: b-v trials, e.g., banco-vaso ‘bench-glass', representing homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations in Spanish, and j-h trials, e.g., juego-huevo ‘game-egg', representing interlingual homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations. Data were collected on accuracy, reaction time (RT), and mean proportion of target fixation. Reaction Time results indicate that Spanish-dominant speakers were slower when the competitor was present in b-v trials, though no effects were observed for English-dominant speakers. Eye-tracking results indicate a lack of competition effects in either set of trials for English-dominant speakers, but lower proportional target fixations for Spanish-dominant speakers in both sets of trials when an orthographic/phonological distractor was present. These results suggest that Spanish-dominant bilinguals may be influenced by the orthographic mappings of their less-dominant L2 English, providing new insight into the nature of the interaction between the orthography and phonology in bilingual speakers. |
Gayle DeDe Effects of lexical variables on silent reading comprehension in individuals with aphasia: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 60, pp. 2589–2620, 2017. @article{DeDe2017, Purpose: Previous eye-tracking research has suggested that individuals with aphasia (IWA) do not assign syntactic structure on their first pass through a sentence during silent reading comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the time course with which lexical variables affect silent reading comprehension in IWA. Three lexical variables were investigated: word frequency, word class, and word length. Methods: IWA and control participants without brain damage participated in the experiment. Participants read sentences while a camera tracked their eye movements. Results: IWA showed effects of word class, word length, and word frequency that were similar to or greater than those observed in controls. Conclusions: IWA showed sensitivity to lexical variables on the first pass through the sentence. The results are consistent with the view that IWA focus on lexical access on their first pass through a sentence and then work to build syntactic structure on subsequent passes. In addition, IWA showed very long rereading times and low skipping rates overall, which may contribute to some of the group differences in reading comprehension. |
Francesca Delogu; Matthew W. Crocker; Heiner Drenhaus Teasing apart coercion and surprisal: Evidence from eye-movements and ERPs Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 161, pp. 46–59, 2017. @article{Delogu2017, Previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have presented evidence suggesting that coercion expressions (e.g., began the book) are more difficult to process than control expressions like read the book. While this processing cost has been attributed to a specific coercion operation for recovering an event-sense of the complement (e.g., began reading the book), an alternative view based on the Surprisal Theory of language processing would attribute the cost to the relative unpredictability of the complement noun in the coercion compared to the control condition, with no need to postulate coercion-specific mechanisms. In two experiments, monitoring eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs), respectively, we sought to determine whether there is any evidence for coercion-specific processing cost above-and-beyond the difficulty predicted by surprisal, by contrasting coercing and control expressions with a further control condition in which the predictability of the complement noun was similar to that in the coercion condition (e.g., bought the book). While the eye-tracking study showed significant effects of surprisal and a marginal effect of coercion on late reading measures, the ERP study clearly supported the surprisal account. Overall, our findings suggest that the coercion cost largely reflects the surprisal of the complement noun with coercion specific operations possibly influencing later processing stages. |
Aster Dijkgraaf; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Wouter Duyck Predicting upcoming information in native-language and non-native-language auditory word recognition Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 917–930, 2017. @article{Dijkgraaf2017, Monolingual listeners continuously predict upcoming information. Here, we tested whether predictive language processing occurs to the same extent when bilinguals listen to their native language vs. a non-native language. Additionally, we tested whether bilinguals use prediction to the same extent as monolinguals. Dutch-English bilinguals and English monolinguals listened to constraining and neutral sentences in Dutch (bilinguals only) and in English, and viewed target and distractor pictures on a display while their eye movements were measured. There was a bias of fixations towards the target object in the constraining condition, relative to the neutral condition, before information from the target word could affect fixations. This prediction effect occurred to the same extent in native processing by bilinguals and monolinguals, but also in non-native processing. This indicates that unbalanced, proficient bilinguals can quickly use semantic information during listening to predict upcoming referents to the same extent in both of their languages. |
Brian W. Dillon; Charles Clifton; Shayne Sloggett; Lyn Frazier Appositives and their aftermath: Interference depends on at-issue vs. not-at-issue status Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 96, pp. 93–109, 2017. @article{Dillon2017, Much research has explored the degree to which not-at-issue content is interpreted independently of at-issue content, or the main assertion of a sentence (AnderBois, Brasoveanu, & Henderson, 2011; Harris & Potts, 2009; Potts, 2005; Schlenker, 2010; Tonhauser, 2011; a.o.). Building on this work, psycholinguistic research has explored the hypothesis that not-at-issue content, such as appositive relative clauses, is treated distinctly from at-issue content in online processing (Dillon, Clifton, & Frazier, 2014; Syrett & Koev, 2015). In the present paper, we explore the way in which appositive relative clauses interact with their host sentences in the course of incremental sentence comprehension. In an offline acceptability judgment, we find that appositive relative clauses contribute significantly less processing difficulty when they intervene between a filler and its gap than do superficially similar restrictive relative clauses. Results from two eye-tracking-while-reading studies suggests that recently processed restrictive relative clauses interfere to a greater degree with processes of integrating the filler at its gap site than do appositive relative clauses. Our findings suggest that the degree of interference observed during sentence processing may depend on the discourse status of potentially interfering constituents. We propose that this arises because the syntactic form of not-at-issue content is rendered relatively unavailable once it has been processed. |
Alice Doherty; Kathy Conklin How gender-expectancy affects the processing of “them” Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 70, no. 4, pp. 718–735, 2017. @article{Doherty2017, How sensitive is pronoun processing to expectancies based on real-world knowledge and language usage? The current study links research on the integration of gender stereotypes and number-mismatch to explore this question. It focuses on the use of them to refer to antecedents of different levels of gender-expectancy (low-cyclist, high-mechanic, known-spokeswoman). In a rating task, them is considered increasingly unnatural with greater gender-expectancy. However, participants might not be able to differentiate high-expectancy and gender-known antecedents online because they initially search for plural antecedents (e.g., Sanford & Filik), and they make all-or-nothing gender inferences. An eye-tracking study reveals early differences in the processing of them with antecedents of high gender-expectancy compared with gender-known antecedents. This suggests that participants have rapid access to the expected gender of the antecedent and the level of that expectancy. |
Denis Drieghe; Lei Cui; Guoli Yan; Bai Xuejun; Chi Hui; Simon P. Liversedge The morphosyntactic structure of compound words influences parafoveal processing in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 190–197, 2017. @article{Drieghe2017a, In an eye movement experiment employing the boundary paradigm, we compared parafoveal preview benefit during the reading of Chinese sentences. The target word was a two-character compound that had either a noun–noun or an adjective–noun structure each sharing an identical noun as the second character. The boundary was located between the two characters of the compound word. Prior to the eyes crossing the boundary, the preview of the second character was presented either normally or was replaced by a pseudocharacter. Previously, Juhasz, Inhoff, and Rayner observed that inserting a space into a normally unspaced compound in English significantly disrupted processing and that this disruption was larger for adjective–noun compounds than for noun–noun compounds. This finding supports the hypothesis that, at least in English, for adjective–noun compounds, the noun is more important for lexical identification than the adjective, while for noun–noun compounds, both constituents are similar in importance for lexical identification. Our results indicate a similar division of the importance of compounds in reading in Chinese as the pseudocharacter preview was more disruptive for the adjective–noun compounds than for the noun–noun compounds. These findings also indicate that parafoveal processing can be influenced by the morphosyntactic structure of the currently fixated character. |
Denis Drieghe; Gemma Fitzsimmons; Simon P. Liversedge Parafoveal preview effects in reading unspaced text Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 10, pp. 1701–1716, 2017. @article{Drieghe2017, In English reading, eye guidance relies heavily on the spaces between words for demarcating word boundaries. In an eye tracking experiment, we examined the impact of removing spaces on parafoveal processing. Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), a high or low frequency preboundary word was followed by a postboundary preview presented either normally (i.e., identical to the postboundary word), or with letters replaced creating an orthographically illegal preview. The spaces between words were either retained or removed. Results replicate previous findings of increased reading times during unspaced reading (Rayner, Fischer, & Pollatsek, 1998) and indicate rather limited evidence for more distributed processing: Observations of processing of the previous word (spill-over effects) or processing of the next word (parafoveal-on-foveal effects) influencing fixation durations on the currently fixated word were limited. Spill-over effects were only observed in the unspaced layout when the postboundary preview was correct, presumably because the orthographically illegal, incorrect preview was visually salient enough to allow for relatively easy word segmentation and therefore more focused processing of the preboundary word. As such, results points toward a system that prefers narrowly focused processing of a single word, at least when means for easy word segmentation are available. |
Mareike Bayer; Katja Ruthmann; Annekathrin Schacht The impact of personal relevance on emotion processing: Evidence from event-related potentials and pupillary responses Journal Article In: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, vol. 12, no. 9, pp. 1470–1479, 2017. @article{Bayer2017, Emotional stimuli attract attention and lead to increased activity in the visual cortex. The present study investigated the impact of personal relevance on emotion processing by presenting emotional words within sentences that referred to participants' significant others or to unknown agents. In event-related potentials, personal relevance increased visual cortex activity within 100 ms after stimulus onset and the amplitudes of the Late Positive Complex (LPC). Moreover, personally relevant contexts gave rise to augmented pupillary responses and higher arousal ratings, suggesting a general boost of attention and arousal. Finally, personal relevance increased emotion-related ERP effects starting around 200 ms after word onset; effects for negative words compared to neutral words were prolonged in duration. Source localizations of these interactions revealed activations in prefrontal regions, in the visual cortex and in the fusiform gyrus. Taken together, these results demonstrate the high impact of personal relevance on reading in general and on emotion processing in particular. |
Elika Bergelson; Richard N. Aslin Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds Journal Article In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 114, no. 49, pp. 12916–12921, 2017. @article{Bergelson2017, Recent research reported the surprising finding that even 6-mo-olds understand common nouns [Bergelson E, Swingley D (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:3253-3258]. However, is their early lexicon structured and acquired like older learners? We test 6-mo-olds for a hallmark of the mature lexicon: cross-word relations. We also examine whether properties of the home environment that have been linked with lexical knowledge in older children are detectable in the initial stage of comprehension. We use a new dataset, which includes in-lab comprehension and home measures from the same infants. We find evidence for cross-word structure: On seeing two images of common nouns, infants looked significantly more at named target images when the competitor images were semantically unrelated (e.g., milk and foot) than when they were related (e.g., milk and juice), just as older learners do. We further find initial evidence for home-lab links: common noun "copresence" (i.e., whether words' referents were present and attended to in home recordings) correlated with in-lab comprehension. These findings suggest that, even in neophyte word learners, cross-word relations are formed early and the home learning environment measurably helps shape the lexicon from the outset. |
Frank Boers; Paul A. Warren; Gina M. Grimshaw; Anna Siyanova-Chanturia On the benefits of multimodal annotations for vocabulary uptake from reading Journal Article In: Computer Assisted Language Learning, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 709–725, 2017. @article{Boers2017, Several research articles published in the realm of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) have reported evidence of the benefits of multimodal annotations, i.e. the provision of pictorial as well as verbal clarifications, for vocabulary uptake from reading. Almost invariably, these publications account for the observed benefits with reference to Paivio's Dual Coding Theory, suggesting it is the visual illustration of word meaning that enhances the quality of processing and hence makes new words more memorable. In this discussion article, we explore the possibility that it is not necessarily the multimodality per se that accounts for the reported benefits. Instead, we argue that the provision of multimodal annotations is one of several possible means of inviting more and/or longer attention to the annotations – with amounts of attention given to words being a significant predictor of their retention in memory. After reviewing the available research on the subject and questioning whether invoking Paivio's Dual Coding Theory is an optimal account for reported findings, we report an eye-tracking study the results of which are consistent with the alternative thesis that the advantage of multimodal glosses for word learning lies with the greater quantity of attention these glosses attract in comparison with single-mode glosses. We conclude with a call for further research on combinations and sequences of annotation types, regardless of multimodality, as ways of promoting vocabulary uptake from reading. |
Arielle Borovsky The amount and structure of prior event experience affects anticipatory sentence interpretation Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 190–204, 2017. @article{Borovsky2017, Listeners easily interpret speech about novel events in everyday conversation; however, much of research on mechanisms of spoken language comprehension, by design, capitalises on event knowledge that is familiar to most listeners. This paper explores how listeners generalise from previous experience during incremental processing of novel spoken sentences. In two studies, participants initially heard stories that conveyed novel event mappings between agents, actions and objects, and their ability to interpret a novel, related event in real-time was measured via eye-tracking. A single exposure to a novel event was not sufficient to support generalisation in real-time sentence processing. When each story event was repeated with either the same agent or a different, related agent, listeners generalised in the repetition condition, but not in the multiple agent condition. These findings shed light on the conditions under which listeners leverage prior event experience while interpreting novel linguistic signals in everyday speech. |
Oliver Boxell; Claudia Felser Sensitivity to parasitic gaps inside subject islands in native and non-native sentence processing Journal Article In: Bilingualism, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 494–511, 2017. @article{Boxell2017, We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study that investigated late German-English bilinguals' sensitivity to parasitic gaps inside subject islands. The online reading experiment was complemented by an offline scalar judgement task. The results from the offline task confirmed that for both native and non-native speakers, subject island environments must normally be non-finite in order to host a parasitic gap. The analysis of the reading-time data showed that, while native speakers posited parasitic gaps in non-finite environments only, the non-native group initially overgenerated parasitic gaps, showing delayed sensitivity to island-inducing cues during online processing. Taken together, our findings show that non-native comprehenders are sensitive to exceptions to island constraints that are not attested in their native language and also rare in the L2 input. They need more time than native comprehenders to compute the linguistic representations over which the relevant restrictions are defined, however. |
Oliver Boxell; Claudia Felser; Ian Cunnings Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 554–582, 2017. @article{Boxell2017a, We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers' real-time processing of antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), a type of verb phrase ellipsis in which the ellipsis gap forms part of its own antecedent. The resulting interpretation problem is traditionally thought to be solved by quantifier raising, a covert scope-shifting operation that serves to remove the gap from within its antecedent. Our L2 group comprised advanced, native German-speaking L2 learners of English. The analysis of the eye-movement data showed that both L1 and L2 English speakers tried to recover the missing verb phrase after encountering the gap. Only the native speakers showed evidence of ellipsis resolution being affected by quantification, however. No effects of quantification following gap detection were found in the L2 group, by contrast, indicating that recovery of the elided material was accomplished independently from the object's quantificational status in this group. |
Trevor Brothers; Liv J. Hoversten; Matthew J. Traxler Looking back on reading ahead: No evidence for lexical parafoveal-on-foveal effects Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 96, pp. 9–22, 2017. @article{Brothers2017, Current models of eye movement control during reading make different predictions regarding the possibility of parafoveal-on-foveal effects – i.e. whether the lexical properties of upcoming, parafoveal words can affect reading time. To date, there have been contradictory findings from correlational corpus analyses and carefully controlled experimental studies regarding the existence of these effects. To address this controversy, we conducted four experimental studies (total N = 244) investigating the effects of parafoveal word frequency during natural reading. These experiments showed no evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects in an environment that should have been highly conducive to parallel lexical processing. In addition, a Bayes Factor meta-analysis of the prior experimental literature also provided clear support for the null hypothesis. These findings confirm the predictions of serial attention models such as E-Z Reader, and call into question the findings of previous correlational corpus studies. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Joseph C. Toscano Gradient acoustic information induces long-lasting referential uncertainty in short discourses Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 32, no. 10, pp. 1211–1228, 2017. @article{BrownSchmidt2017, Three experiments examined the influence of gradient acoustic information on referential interpretation during spoken language processing and how this influence persists over time. Acoustic continua varying between the pronouns “he” and “she” were created and validated in two offline experiments. A third experiment examined whether these acoustic differences influence online pronoun interpretation, and whether this influence persists across words in a discourse. Measures of eye gaze showed immediate sensitivity to graded acoustic information. Moreover, acoustically induced uncertainty persisted across a five-word delay: When listeners encountered a word that disambiguated the referent of the pronoun differently than it had originally been interpreted, the amount of time they took to recover from an initial misinterpretation was directly related to distance along the acoustic continuum between the pronoun and the endpoint corresponding to the correct referent.These findings show that fine-grained acoustic detail induces referential uncertainty that is maintained over extended periods of time. |
Yulia Esaulova; Chiara Reali; Lisa Stockhausen Prominence of gender cues in the assignment of thematic roles in German Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 1133–1172, 2017. @article{Esaulova2017, Two eye-tracking experiments examined influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues on the assignment of thematic roles in German. Participants (N 1 = 32, N 2 = 40) read sentences with subject- and object-extracted relative clauses, where thematic agents and patients remained ambiguous until the end of the relative clause. The results reveal a linguistic gender bias: agent roles are assigned more easily to grammatically masculine than feminine role nouns and stereotypically neutral than female ones. The opposite pattern is observed in the assignment of patient roles for stereotypical but not grammatical gender. The findings are discussed within the framework of situation model theories as well as in constraint-based and similarity-based interference accounts, while gender is viewed as a dimension of prominence. |
Michael A. Eskenazi; Jocelyn R. Folk Regressions during reading: The cost depends on the cause Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 1211–1216, 2017. @article{Eskenazi2017, The direction and duration of eye movements during reading is predominantly determined by cognitive and linguistic processing, but some low-level oculomotor effects also influence the duration and direction of eye movements. One such effect is inhibition of return (IOR), which results in an increased latency to return attention to a target that has been previously attended (Posner & Cohen, Attention and Performance X: Control of Language Processes, 32, 531– 556, 1984). Although this is a low level effect, it has also been found in the complex task of reading (Henderson & Luke, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19(6), 1101–1107, 2012; Rayner, Juhasz, Ashby, & Clifton, Vision Research, 43(9), 1027–1034, 2003). The purpose of the current study was to isolate the potentially different causes ofregressive eye movements: to adjust for oculomotor error and to assist with comprehension difficulties. We found that readers demonstrated an IOR effect when regressions were caused by oculomotor error, but not when regressions were caused by comprehension difficulties. The results suggest that IOR is primarily associated with low-level oculomotor control of eye movements, and that regressive eye movements that are controlled by comprehension processes are not subject to IOR effects. The results have implications for understanding the relationship between oculomotor and cognitive control ofeye movements and for models ofeye movement control. |
Claudia Felser; Janna Deborah Drummer Sensitivity to crossover constraints during native and non-native pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 771–789, 2017. @article{Felser2017, We report the results from two experiments examining native and non-native Ger-man speakers' sensitivity to crossover constraints on pronoun resolution. Our critical stimuli sentences contained personal pronouns in either strong (SCO) or weak crossover (WCO) configurations. Using eye-movement monitoring during reading and a gender-mismatch par-adigm, Experiment 1 investigated whether a fronted wh-phrase would be considered as a potential antecedent for a pronoun intervening between the wh-phrase and its canonical position. Both native and non-native readers initially attempted coreference in WCO but not in SCO configurations, as evidenced by early gender-mismatch effects in our WCO conditions. Experiment 2 was an offline antecedent judgement task whose results mirrored the SCO/WCO asymmetry observed in our reading-time data. Taken together, our results show that the SCO constraint immediately restricts pronoun interpretation in both native and non-native comprehension, and further suggest that SCO and WCO constraints derive from different sources. |
Evelyn C. Ferstl; Laura Israel; Lisa Putzar Humor facilitates text comprehension: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 259–284, 2017. @article{Ferstl2017, One crucial property of verbal jokes is that the punchline usually contains an incongruency that has to be resolved by updating the situation model representation. In the standard pragmatic model, these processes are considered to require cognitive effort. However, only few studies compared jokes to texts requiring a situation model revision without being funny. In the present study participants' eye movements were recorded while they read short texts falling into four categories: jokes, texts that made a revision of the situation model necessary without being funny (revision texts), and two types of control texts. Jokes were read faster and elicited fewer regressive eye movements than the other text categories. Women were more sensitive to revision and inference demands of nonhumorous texts than men, and this was particularly the case when the instructions required a meta-linguistic evaluation. In contrast to the predictions of the two-stage model of pragmatics, humor appreciation facilitated text comprehension, and this effect was more pronounced for men than for women. |
Ruth Filik; Emily Brightman; Chloe Gathercole; Hartmut Leuthold The emotional impact of verbal irony: Eye-tracking evidence for a two-stage process Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 93, pp. 193–202, 2017. @article{Filik2017, In this paper we investigate the socio-emotional functions of verbal irony. Specifically, we use eye-tracking while reading to assess moment-to-moment processing of a character's emotional response to ironic versus literal criticism. In Experiment 1, participants read stories describing a character being upset following criticism from another character. Results showed that participants initially more easily integrated a hurt response following ironic criticism; but later found it easier to integrate a hurt response following literal criticism. In Experiment 2, characters were instead described as having an amused response, which participants ultimately integrated more easily following ironic criticism. From this we propose a two-stage process of emotional responding to irony: While readers may initially expect a character to be more hurt by ironic than literal criticism, they ultimately rationalize ironic criticism as being less hurtful, and more amusing. |
Francesca Foppolo; Marco Marelli No delay for some inferences Journal Article In: Journal of Semantics, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 659–681, 2017. @article{Foppolo2017, We present an eye-tracking study on the incremental derivation of the some-but not- all scalar implicature (SI) associated to the scalar quantifier some. This question has been the matter of a vivid debate, both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics (Chemla & Singh 2014a,b). Experimentally, it was addressed by means of eyetracking and different results were obtained: while Huang & Snedeker (2009) found evidence for a delay of some with respect to all, Grodner et al. (2010) argued for a rapid integration of pragmatic some. More recently, Breheny et al. (2013a,b) raised some criticism on the paradigm employed in those studies and contributed with a looking-while-listening task showing incremental derivation of the scalar inference. We first raise some methodological questions, arguing that the paradigm used in previous studies was not apt to distinguish whether a scalar inference was derived or not, for different reasons. By means of a novel visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which we exploit the notion of focus in the activation of scalar alternatives, we show new evidence for the incremental derivation of the pragmatic some-but not- all interpretation of some. We interpret these results within a grammatical approach to SIs (Chierchia et al. 2012; Chierchia 2013), according to which, when scalar alternatives are active, the SI is factored in locally and incrementally during the online processing of the scalar quantifier. |
Steven Frisson; David R. Harvey; Adrian Staub No prediction error cost in reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 95, pp. 200–214, 2017. @article{Frisson2017, Two eye movement while reading experiments address the issue of how reading of an unpredictable word is influenced by the presence of a more predictable alternative. The experiments replicate the robust effects of predictability on the probability of skipping and on early and late reading time measures. However, in both experiments, an unpredictable but plausible word was read no more slowly when another word was highly predictable (i.e., in a constraining context) than when no word was highly predictable (i.e., in a neutral context). In fact, an unpredictable word that was semantically related to the predictable alternative demonstrated facilitation in the constraining context, in relatively late eye movement measures. These results, which are consistent with Luke and Christianson's (2016) corpus study, provide the first evidence from a controlled experimental design for the absence of a prediction error cost, and for facilitation of an unpredictable but semantically related word, during normal reading. The findings support a model of lexical predictability effects in which there is broad pre-activation of potential continuations, rather than discrete predictions of specific lexical items. Importantly, pre-activation of likely continuations does not result in processing difficulty when some other word is actually encountered. |
Kumiko Fukumura; Roger P. G. Gompel How do violations of Gricean maxims affect reading? Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 95, pp. 1–18, 2017. @article{Fukumura2017, Four eye-tracking experiments examined how violations of the Gricean maxim of quantity affect reading. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that first-pass reading times for size-modified definite nouns (the small towel) were longer when the modifier was redundant, as the context contained one rather than two possible referents, whereas first-pass times for bare nouns (the towel) were unaffected by whether the context contained multiple referents that resulted in ambiguity. Experiment 3 showed that unlike redundant size modifiers, redundant color modifiers did not increase first-pass times. Experiment 4 confirmed this finding, demonstrating that the effect of redundancy was dependent on the meaning of the modifier. We propose that initial referential processing is led by the lexico-semantic representation of the referring expression rather than Gricean expectations about optimal informativeness: Redundancy of a size-modifier immediately disrupts comprehension because the processor fails to activate the referential contrast implied by the meaning of the modifier, whereas referential ambiguity has no immediate effect, as it allows the activation of at least one semantically-compatible referent. |
Lesya Y. Ganushchak; Agnieszka E. Konopka; Yiya Chen Accessibility of referent information influences sentence planning: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 250, 2017. @article{Ganushchak2017, This study investigated the time-course of online sentence formulation (i.e., incrementality in sentence planning) as a function of the preceding discourse context. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants described pictures of transitive events (e.g., a frog catching a fly). The accessibility of the agent (Experiment 1) and patient (Experiment 2) was manipulated in the discourse preceding each picture. In the Literal condition, participants heard a story where the agent or patient was mentioned explicitly (fly, frog). In the Associative condition, the agent or patient was not mentioned but was primed by the story (via semantically or associatively related words such as insect, small, black, wings). In the No Mention condition, the stories did not explicitly mention or prime either character. The target response was expected to have the same structure and content in all conditions (SVO sentences: The frog catches the fly). The results showed that participants generally looked first at the agent, before speech onset, regardless of condition, and then at the patient around and after speech onset. Analyses of eye movements in time window associated with linguistic planning showed that formulation was sensitive mainly to whether the agent was literally mentioned in the context or not and to lesser extent to conceptual accessibility (Experiment 1). Furthermore, accessibility of the patient (be it literal mention of its name or only availability of the concept) showed no effect on the time-course of utterance planning (Experiment 2). Together, these results suggest that linguistic planning before speech onset was influenced only by the accessibility of the first character name in the sentence, providing further evidence for highly incremental planning in sentence production. |
Daniel J. Acheson; Peter Hagoort Stimulating the brainʼs language network: Syntactic ambiguity resolution after TMS to the inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 25, no. 10, pp. 1664–1677, 2017. @article{Acheson2017, The posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) are two critical nodes of the brainʼs language network. Previous neuroimaging evidence has supported a dis- sociation in language comprehension in which parts of the MTG are involved in the retrieval of lexical syntactic informa- tion and the IFG in unification operations that maintain, select, and integrate multiple sources of information over time. In the present investigation, we tested for causal evidence of this dis- sociation by modulating activity in IFG and MTG using an off- line TMS procedure: continuous theta-burst stimulation. Lexical–syntactic retrieval was manipulated by using sentences with and without a temporarily word-class (noun/verb) ambiguity (e.g., run). In one group of participants, TMS was applied to the IFG and MTG, and in a control group, no TMS was applied. Eye movements were recorded and quantified at two critical sentence regions: a temporarily ambiguous region and a disambig- uating region. Results show that stimulation of the IFG led to a modulation of the ambiguity effect (ambiguous–unambiguous) at the disambiguating sentence region in three measures: first fixation durations, total reading times, and regressive eye movements into the region. Both IFG and MTG stimulation modulated the ambiguity effect for total reading times in the temporarily ambiguous sentence region relative to the control group. The current results demonstrate that an offline repetitive TMS protocol can have influences at a different point in time during online processing and provide causal evidence for IFG involvement in unification operations during sentence comprehension. |
Carlos Aguilar; Eric Castet Evaluation of a gaze-controlled vision enhancement system for reading in visually impaired people Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. e0174910, 2017. @article{Aguilar2017, People with low vision, especially those with Central Field Loss (CFL), need magnification to read. The flexibility of Electronic Vision Enhancement Systems (EVES) offers several ways of magnifying text. Due to the restricted field of view of EVES, the need for magnification is conflicting with the need to navigate through text (panning). We have developed and implemented a real-time gaze-controlled system whose goal is to optimize the possibility of magnifying a portion of text while maintaining global viewing of the other portions of the text (condition 1). Two other conditions were implemented that mimicked commercially available advanced systems known as CCTV (closed-circuit television systems)-conditions 2 and 3. In these two conditions, magnification was uniformly applied to the whole text without any possibility to specifically select a region of interest. The three conditions were implemented on the same computer to remove differences that might have been induced by dissimilar equipment. A gaze-contingent artificial 10° scotoma (a mask continuously displayed in real time on the screen at the gaze location) was used in the three conditions in order to simulate macular degeneration. Ten healthy subjects with a gaze-contingent scotoma read aloud sentences from a French newspaper in nine experimental one-hour sessions. Reading speed was measured and constituted the main dependent variable to compare the three conditions. All subjects were able to use condition 1 and they found it slightly more comfortable to use than condition 2 (and similar to condition 3). Importantly, reading speed results did not show any significant difference between the three systems. In addition, learning curves were similar in the three conditions. This proof of concept study suggests that the principles underlying the gaze-controlled enhanced system might be further developed and fruitfully incorporated in different kinds of EVES for low vision reading. |
Noor Z. Al Dahhan; John R. Kirby; Donald C. Brien; Douglas P. Munoz Eye movements and articulations during a letter naming speed task: Children with and without Dyslexia Journal Article In: Journal of Learning Disabilities, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 275–285, 2017. @article{AlDahhan2017, Abstract Naming speed (NS) refers to how quickly and accurately participants name a set of familiar stimuli (e.g., letters). NS is an established predictor of reading ability, but controversy remains over why it is related to reading. We used three techniques (stimulus manipulations to emphasize phonological and/or visual aspects, decomposition of NS times into pause and articulation components, and analysis of eye movements during task performance) with three groups of participants (children with dyslexia, ages 9–10; chronological-age [CA] controls, ages 9–10; reading-level [RL] controls, ages 6–7) to examine NS and the NS–reading relationship. Results indicated (a) for all groups, increasing visual similarity of the letters decreased letter naming efficiency and increased naming errors, saccades, regressions (rapid eye movements back to letters already fixated), pause times, and fixation durations; (b) children with dyslexia performed like RL controls and were less efficient, had longer articulation times, pause times, fixation durations, and made more errors and regressions than CA controls; and (c) pause time and fixation duration were the most powerful predictors of reading. We conclude that NS is related to reading via fixation durations and pause times: Longer fixation durations and pause times reflect the greater amount of time needed to acquire visual/orthographic information from stimuli and prepare the correct response. |
Noor Al-Zanoon; Michael Dambacher; Victor Kuperman Evidence for a global oculomotor program in reading Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 81, no. 4, pp. 863–877, 2017. @article{AlZanoon2017, Recent corpus studies of eye-movements in reading revealed a substantial increase in saccade amplitudes and fixation durations as the eyes move over the first words of a sentence. This start-up effect suggests a global oculomotor program, which operates on the level of an entire line, in addition to the well-established local programs operating within the visual span. The present study investigates the nature of this global program experimentally and examines whether the start-up effect is predicated on generic visual or specific linguistic characteristics and whether it is mainly reflected in saccade amplitudes, fixation durations or both measures. Eye movements were recorded while 38 participants read (a) normal sentences, (b) sequences of randomly shuffled words and (c) sequences of z-strings. The stimuli were, therefore, similar in their visual features, but varied in the amount of syntactic and lexical information. Further, the stimuli were composed of words or strings that either varied naturally in length (Nonequal condition) or were all restricted to a specific length within a sentence (Equal). The latter condition constrained the variability of saccades and served to dissociate effects of word position in line on saccade amplitudes and fixation durations. A robust start-up effect emerged in saccade amplitudes in all Nonequal stimuli, and-in an attenuated form-in Equal sentences. A start-up effect in single fixation durations was observed in Nonequal and Equal normal sentences, but not in z-strings. These findings support the notion of a global oculomotor program in reading particularly for the spatial characteristics of motor planning, which rely on visual rather than linguistic information. |
Nathan Arnett; Matthew Wagers Subject encodings and retrieval interference Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 93, pp. 22–54, 2017. @article{Arnett2017, Interference has been identified as a cause of processing difficulty in linguistic dependencies, such as the subject-verb relation (Van Dyke and Lewis, 2003). However, while mounting evidence implicates retrieval interference in sentence processing, the nature of the retrieval cues involved - and thus the source of difficulty - remains largely unexplored. Three experiments used self-paced reading and eyetracking to examine the ways in which the retrieval cues provided at a verb characterize subjects. Syntactic theory has identified a number of properties correlated with subjecthood, both phrase-structural and thematic. Findings replicate and extend previous findings of interference at a verb from additional subjects, but indicate that retrieval outcomes are relativized to the syntactic domain in which the retrieval occurs. One, the cues distinguish between thematic subjects in verbal and nominal domains. Two, within the verbal domain, retrieval is sensitive to abstract syntactic properties associated with subjects and their clauses. We argue that the processing at a verb requires cue-driven retrieval, and that the retrieval cues utilize abstract grammatical properties which may reflect parser expectations. |
Laura Winther Balling; Johannes Kizach Effects of surprisal and locality on Danish sentence processing: An eye-tracking investigation Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 1119–1136, 2017. @article{Balling2017, An eye-tracking experiment in Danish investigates two dominant accounts of sentence processing: locality-based theories that predict a processing advantage for sentences where the distance between the major syntactic heads is minimized, and the surprisal theory which predicts that processing time increases with big changes in the relative entropy of possible parses, sometimes leading to anti-locality effects. We consider both lexicalised surprisal, expressed in conditional trigram probabilities, and syntactic surprisal expressed in the manipulation of the expectedness of the second NP in Danish constructions with two postverbal NP-objects. An eye-tracking experiment showed a clear advantage for local syntactic relations, with only a marginal effect of lexicalised surprisal and no effect of syntactic surprisal. We conclude that surprisal has a relatively marginal effect, which may be clearest for verbs in verb-final languages, while locality is a robust predictor of sentence processing. |
Chiara Banfi; Ferenc Kemény; Melanie Gangl; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Kristina Moll; Karin Landerl Visuo-spatial cueing in children with differential reading and spelling profiles Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 7, pp. e0180358, 2017. @article{Banfi2017, Dyslexia has been claimed to be causally related to deficits in visuo-spatial attention. In particular, inefficient shifting of visual attention during spatial cueing paradigms is assumed to be associated with problems in graphemic parsing during sublexical reading. The current study investigated visuo-spatial attention performance in an exogenous cueing paradigm in a large sample (N = 191) of third and fourth graders with different reading and spelling profiles (controls, isolated reading deficit, isolated spelling deficit, combined deficit in reading and spelling). Once individual variability in reaction times was taken into account by means of z-transformation, a cueing deficit (i.e. no significant difference between valid and invalid trials) was found for children with combined deficits in reading and spelling. However, poor readers without spelling problems showed a cueing effect comparable to controls, but exhibited a particularly strong right-over-left advantage (position effect). Isolated poor spellers showed a significant cueing effect, but no position effect. While we replicated earlier findings of a reduced cueing effect among poor nonword readers (indicating deficits in sublexical processing), we also found a reduced cueing effect among children with particularly poor orthographic spelling (indicating deficits in lexical processing). Thus, earlier claims of a specific association with nonword reading could not be confirmed. Controlling for ADHD-symptoms reported in a parental questionnaire did not impact on the statistical analysis, indicating that cueing deficits are not caused by more general attentional limitations. Between 31 and 48% of participants in the three reading and/or spelling deficit groups as well as 32% of the control group showed reduced spatial cueing. These findings indicate a significant, but moderate association between certain aspects of visuo-spatial attention and subcomponents of written language processing, the causal status of which is yet unclear. |
Adrienne E. Barnes; Young-Suk Kim; Elizabeth L. Tighe; Christian Vorstius Readers in adult basic education: Component skills, eye movements, and fluency Journal Article In: Journal of Learning Disabilities, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 180–194, 2017. @article{Barnes2017, The present study explored the reading skills of a sample of 48 adults enrolled in a basic education program in northern Florida, United States. Previous research has reported on reading component skills for students in adult education settings, but little is known about eye movement patterns or their relation to reading skills for this population. In this study, reading component skills including decoding, language comprehension, and reading fluency are reported, as are eye movement variables for connected-text oral reading. Eye movement comparisons between individuals with higher and lower oral reading fluency revealed within- and between-subject effects for word frequency and word length as well as group and word frequency interactions. Bivariate correlations indicated strong relations between component skills of reading, eye movement measures, and both the Test of Adult Basic Education (Reading subtest) and the Woodcock-Johnson III Diagnostic Reading Battery Passage Comprehension assessments. Regression analyses revealed the utility of decoding, language comprehension, and lexical activation time for predicting achievement on both the Woodcock Johnson III Passage Comprehension and the Test of Adult Basic Education Reading Comprehension. |
Florión Goller; Donghoon Lee; Ulrich Ansorge; Soonja Choi Effects of language background on gaze behavior: A crosslinguistic comparison between Korean and German speakers Journal Article In: Advances in Cognitive Psychology, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 267–279, 2017. @article{Goller2017, Languages differ in how they categorize spatial relations: While German differentiates between containment (in) and support (auf) with distinct spatial words-(a) den Kuli IN die Kappe stecken ("put pen in cap"); (b) die Kappe AUF den Kuli stecken ("put cap on pen")-Korean uses a single spatial word (kkita) collapsing (a) and (b) into one semantic category, particularly when the spatial enclosure is tight-fit. Korean uses a different word (i.e., netha) for loose-fits (e.g., apple in bowl). We tested whether these differences influence the attention of the speaker. In a crosslinguistic study, we compared native German speakers with native Korean speakers. Participants rated the similarity of two successive video clips of several scenes where two objects were joined or nested (either in a tight or loose manner). The rating data show that Korean speakers base their rating of similarity more on tight-versus loose-fit, whereas German speakers base their rating more on containment versus support (in vs. auf). Throughout the experiment, we also measured the participants' eye movements. Korean speakers looked equally long at the moving Figure object and at the stationary Ground object, whereas German speakers were more biased to look at the Ground object. Additionally, Korean speakers also looked more at the region where the two objects touched than did German speakers. We discuss our data in the light of crosslinguistic semantics and the extent of their influence on spatial cognition and perception. |
Axel Grzymisch; Cathleen Grimsen; Udo A. Ernst Contour integration in dynamic scenes: Impaired detection performance in extended presentations Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 1501, 2017. @article{Grzymisch2017, Since scenes in nature are highly dynamic, perception requires an on-going and robust 5 integration of local information into global representations. In vision, contour integration (CI) 6 is one of these tasks, and it is performed by our brain in a seemingly effortless manner. 7 Following the rule of good continuation, oriented line segments are linked into contour percepts, 8 thus supporting important visual computations such as the detection of object boundaries. 9 This process has been studied almost exclusively using static stimuli, raising the question of 10 whether the observed robustness and “pop-out” quality of CI carries over to dynamic scenes. 11 We investigate contour detection in dynamic stimuli where targets appear at random times by 12 Gabor elements aligning themselves to form contours. In briefly presented displays (230ms), 13 a situation comparable to classical paradigms in CI, performance is about 87%. Surprisingly, 14 we find that detection performance decreases to 67% in extended presentations (about 1.9- 15 3.8s) for the same target stimuli. In order to observe the same reduction with briefly presented 16 stimuli, presentation time has to be drastically decreased to intervals as short as 50ms. Cueing a 17 specific contour position or shape helps in partially compensating this deterioration, and only in 18 extended presentations combining a location and a shape cue was more efficient than providing 19 a single cue. Our findings challenge the notion of CI as a mainly stimulus-driven process leading 20 to pop-out percepts, indicating that top-down processes play a much larger role in supporting 21 fundamental integration processes in dynamic scenes than previously thought. |
Marc Guasch; Pilar Ferré; Juan Haro Pupil dilation is sensitive to the cognate status of words: Further evidence for non-selectivity in bilingual lexical access Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 49–54, 2017. @article{Guasch2017, The cognate facilitation effect (i.e., a processing advantage for cognates compared to non-cognates) is an evidence of language non-selectivity in bilingual lexical access. Several studies using behavioral or electrophysiological measures have demonstrated that this effect is modulated by the degree of formal overlap between translations. However, it has never been tested with a psychophysiological measure such as pupillometry. In the present study we replicate the cognate facilitation effect by examining reaction times and pupil responses. Our results endorse pupillometry as a promising tool for bilingual research, and confirm the modulation of the cognate effect by the degree of formal similarity. |
Ernesto Guerra; Pia Knoeferle In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 92, pp. 43–56, 2017. @article{Guerra2017, Recent experimental evidence suggests that spatial distance between two depicted objects in a non-referential visual context (i.e., when neither spatial distance nor the objects were mentioned) can rapidly and incrementally modulate the processing of semantic similarity between and-coordinated subject noun phrases in a sentence. The present research examines in three eye-tracking reading experiments whether these spatial distance effects extend to another abstract domain (social relations). More importantly, we assessed how precisely cognitive mechanisms link spatial information to sentence interpretation. To this end we varied between experiments the (order of the) constituents conveying information about social relations. We examined to what extent object distance effects on sentence interpretation depend upon a one-to-one mapping (relating objects to nouns). The eye-tracking record showed that spatial distance effects extended to abstract language other than semantic similarity and that these effects occurred as soon as the readers encountered linguistic information about social relations - independent of whether that information was conveyed by the (coordinated) nouns or by other constituents. Finally, the direction of the spatial distance effects seemed to depend on the activation level of the spatial distance representations, as determined by the constituent order. We discuss the contribution of these results to accounts of situated sentence comprehension. |
Juan Haro; Marc Guasch; Blanca Vallès; Pilar Ferré Is pupillary response a reliable index of word recognition? Evidence from a delayed lexical decision task Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 1930–1938, 2017. @article{Haro2017, Previous word recognition studies have shown that the pupillary response is sensitive to a word's frequency. However, such a pupillary effect may be due to the process of executing a response, instead of being an index of word processing. With the aim of exploring this possibility, we recorded the pupillary responses in two experiments involving a lexical decision task (LDT). In the first experiment, participants completed a standard LDT, whereas in the second they performed a delayed LDT. The delay in the response allowed us to compare pupil dilations with and without the response execution component. The results showed that pupillary response was modulated by word frequency in both the standard and the delayed LDT. This finding supports the reliability of using pupillometry for word recognition research. Importantly, our results also suggest that tasks that do not require a response during pupil recording lead to clearer and stronger effects. |
Hannah Harvey; Hayward J. Godwin; Gemma Fitzsimmons; Simon P. Liversedge; Robin Walker Oculomotor and linguistic processing effects in reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 518–536, 2017. @article{Harvey2017, Two experiments are reported investigating oculomotor behavior and linguistic processing when reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text (compared to reading normal static text). Three factors known to modulate processing time in normal reading were investigated: Word length and word frequency were examined in Experiment 1, and target word predictability in Experiment 2. An analysis of global oculomotor behavior across the 2 experiments showed that participants made fewer and longer fixations when reading scrolling text, with shorter progressive and regressive saccades between these fixations. Comparisons of the linguistic manipulations showed evidence of a dissociation between word-level and sentence-level processing. Word-level processing (Experiment 1) was preserved for the dynamic scrolling text condition with no difference in length and frequency effects between scrolling and static text formats. However, sentence-level integration (Experiment 2) was reduced for scrolling compared to static text in that we obtained no early facilitation effect for predictable words under scrolling text conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record |