Non-Human Primate Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink eye tracker non-human primate research publications up until 2024 (with some early 2025s) are listed below by year. You can search the eye-tracking publications using keywords such as Temporal Cortex, Macaque, Antisaccade, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink non-human primate articles, please email us!
2024 |
Carmen Julia Coloma; Ernesto Guerra; Zulema De Barbieri; Andrea Helo; Zulema De Barbieri; Andrea Helo; Carmen Julia; Ernesto Guerra; Zulema De Barbieri; Andrea Helo Article comprehension in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with developmental language disorder: A longitudinal eye tracking study Journal Article In: International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 105–117, 2024. @article{Coloma2024, Purpose: Article-noun disagreement in spoken language is a marker of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, the evidence is less clear regarding article comprehension. This study investigates article comprehension in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with and without DLD. Method: Eye tracking methodology used in a longitudinal experimental design enabled the examination of real time article comprehension. The children at the time 1 were 40 monolingual Spanish-speaking preschoolers (20 with DLD and 20 with typical language development [TLD]). A year later (time 2), 27 of these children (15 with DLD and 12 with TLD) were evaluated. Children listened to simple phrases while inspecting a four object visual context. The article in the phrase agreed in number and gender with only one of the objects. Result: At the time 1, children with DLD did not use articles to identify the correct image, while children with TLD anticipated the correct picture. At the time 2, both groups used the articles' morphological markers, but children with DLD showed a slower and weaker preference for the correct referent compared to their age-matched peers. Conclusion: These findings suggest a later emergence, but a similar developmental trajectory, of article comprehension in children with DLD compared to their peers with TLD. |
Ying Fu; Simon Liversedge; Xuejun Bai; Maleeha Moosa; Chuanli Zang Word length and frequency effects in natural Chinese reading: Evidence for character representations in lexical identification Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Fu2024a, Word length and frequency are two of the “big three” factors that affect eye movements in natural reading (Clifton et al., 2016). Whilst these factors have been extensively investigated, all previous studies manipulating word length have been confounded with changes in visual complexity (longer words have more letters and are more visually complex). We controlled stroke complexity across one-character (short) and two-character (long) high- and low-frequency Chinese words (to avoid complexity confounds) and recorded readers' eye movements during sentence reading. Both word length and frequency yielded strong main effects for fixation time measures. For saccadic targeting and skipping probability, word length effects, but not word frequency effects, occurred. Critically, the interaction was not significant regardless of stroke complexity, indicating that word length and frequency independently influence lexical identification and saccade target selection during Chinese reading. The results provide evidence for character level representations during Chinese word recognition in natural reading. |
Zuzanna Fuchs Processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish: Evidence from the Visual World Paradigm Journal Article In: Morphology, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 1–32, 2024. @article{Fuchs2024, This paper presents a psycholinguistic study of the processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish, which has three gender categories (masculine, feminine, neuter), as well as what language-internal factors impact this processing. Results from an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm show that, during real-time language comprehension, adult monolingual speakers of Polish use cues from gender agreement on a prenominal adjective to anticipate the upcoming noun. An exploration of language-internal factors affecting this anticipatory processing finds this effect in all three genders, suggesting that encountering the relevant nominative-case agreement morpheme during language comprehension leads to automatic activation of a gender node in the mental lexicon, consistent with the literature on other languages with grammatical gender. These results hold true for the neuter agreement morpheme, despite the fact that this morpheme also instantiates default gender agreement in the language and is syncretic with the nominative plural agreement morpheme in all three genders. Further investigation finds that, while agreement morphemes for each gender prompt anticipatory processing, the reliability of a masculine agreement morpheme as a cue to gender is reduced in the presence of a neuter distractor, and vice versa. This raises questions regarding phonological proximity between the realized suffix and the suffix that would cue the distractor, with implications for the acquisition and processing of gender agreement morphology in Polish. |
Zuzanna Fuchs; Wenqi Zeng Facilitative processing of grammatical gender in heritage speakers with two gender systems Book 2024. @book{Fuchs2024a, This study investigates facilitative processing of grammatical gender in heritage Spanish speakers whose dominant language is German, using eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm. Bilinguals with two gender systems are known to have an integrated mental lexicon with shared gender features that are co-activated during language processing and can result in interference. The present study shows that, despite observed effects of gender congruency with German, heritage speakers were able to use gender information on prenominal articles in Spanish to facilitate lexical retrieval of the target noun. This suggests that processing of gender agreement in the heritage language is resilient to competition from gender in the dominant language during real-time spoken-language comprehension. Moreover, direct comparison with previous results from heritage Spanish speakers in the USA does not show evidence that overall speed of facilitative processing in the heritage language is modulated by the presence or absence of gender in the majority language. |
Natsumi Funasaki; Masataka Yano Role of prosody and word order in identifying focus: Evidence from pupillometry Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 23–40, 2024. @article{Funasaki2024, This study investigated the role of prosody and word order in identifying the focus of sentences in Japanese. Native Japanese speakers listened to sentences with different types of word order (subject–object–verb (SOV) vs. object–subject–verb (OSV)), prosody (whether the first noun phrase is stressed or not) and preceding contexts (object- vs. subject-wh questions), while processing costs were measured using pupillometry. Although syntactically non-basic OSV was more difficult to process than basic SOV, this processing difficulty was considerably reduced when the supportive context (the subject-wh question) required S to be focused. The time–course analysis of pupillometry revealed that the Japanese speakers immediately used prosodic cues to determine the focus of sentences, but the effect of word order cues for focus was delayed until the sentence-final verb was encountered. This study advances our understanding of the temporal dynamics of focus processing and the interplay between syntactic and information structures in sentence comprehension. |
John C. B. Gamboa; Leigh B. Fernandez; Shanley E. M. Allen Investigating the Uniform Information Density hypothesis with complex nominal compounds Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 45, pp. 322–367, 2024. @article{Gamboa2024, The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers communicate by transmitting information close to a constant rate. When choosing between two syntactic variants, it claims that speakers prefer the variant distributing information most evenly, avoiding signal peaks and troughs. If speakers prefer transmitting information uniformly, then comprehenders should also prefer a uniform signal, experiencing difficulty whenever confronted with informational peaks. However, the literature investigating this hypothesis has focused mostly on production, with only a few studies considering comprehension. In this study, we investigate comprehension in two eye-tracking experiments. Participants read sentences of two different lengths, reflecting different degrees of density, containing either a dense structure (a nominal compound, NC) or a structure that spreads the information through more words (a noun followed by a prepositional phrase, PP). Favoring the UID hypothesis, participants gazed longer at text segments following the critical structure when it was an NC than when it was a PP. They also regressed more in sentences containing longer structures. However, the pattern of results was not as clear as expected, potentially reflecting participants' experience with the denser structure or task differences between production and comprehension. These aspects should be taken into account in future research investigating the UID hypothesis for comprehension. |
Lei Gao; Lin Li; Xiaolei Gao; Xue Sui Processing causal structure sentences in Mandarin Chinese: An eye movements study Journal Article In: PeerJ, vol. 12, no. 8, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Gao2024a, It remains uncertain whether causal structure prediction can improve comprehension in Chinese sentences and whether the position of the headword mediates the prediction effect. We conducted an experiment to explore the effect of causal prediction and headword position in Chinese sentence reading. Participants were asked to read sentences containing causal connectives with their eye movements recorded. In the experiment, we manipulated the causal structure of the sentence and the position of the headword. We found a promoting effect of causal structure on first-pass reading time and a hindering impact on total reading time. However, the effect was not mediated by the headword position. The results show that causal syntactic prediction facilitated early-stage processing and increased the integration cost in the late stage of Chinese sentence processing. These findings also support the constraint-based approach, which suggests an isolation between semantic and syntactic processing. |
Verónica García-Castro; Norbert Vanek Syntactic engagement of new words: The garden-path method applied to track sensitivity to structural ambiguity Journal Article In: Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 1–18, 2024. @article{GarciaCastro2024, This article proposes an innovative approach to examining garden-path (GP) effects in sentence processing. It applies GP effects as a method to a new domain, specifically to syntactic engagement of recently learned verbs. We tested twenty-seven English native speakers and twenty Spanish learners of English to verify method validity. Three main components characterise the method, namely training of new word meaning through definitions and example sentences, eye-tracking while reading plausible and implausible GP sentences after sleep consolidation, and a meaning recall test. We also examined if participants' phonological working memory and vocabulary size play a role in how they syntactically engage new words. Results showed that recently learned verbs can elicit syntactic engagement in both native and nonnative readers. Both vocabulary size and phonological working memory capacity could predict ambiguity reprocessing, irrespective of language group. These results indicate that garden pathing can reliably signal effort to detect and resolve subject-object ambiguities in both first language (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Pickering & Traxler, 1998) and second language readers (Chen et al., 2021, Jegerski, 2012). This feasibility study is a pioneering attempt to map new vocabulary knowledge as a window into emergent structural representations. The significance of this method lies in its potential to track syntactic engagement of new lexis, while accounting for individual differences, and following the principle that to know a word entails knowing its form, meaning, as well as its grammatical use (Nation, 2001). |
Daniil Gnetov; Victor Kuperman Reading proficiency predicts spatial eye-movement control in the first and second language Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 50, no. 8, pp. 1315–1328, 2024. @article{Gnetov2024, Research on first language (L1) reading has long since established the link between the proficiency of the reader and their efficiency in oculomotor control. More proficient readers make longer saccades and land closer to the word's center, which is a word's optimal viewing position, and make fewer refixations. Eye-tracking studies of second language (L2) reading have so far provided little evidence in this regard. This study analyzes spatial oculomotor measures in the Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus, which contains data on English text reading and its component skills from 543 participants representing 12 different L1s. Our analyses establish a strong role of proficiency in English, both for L1 and L2 readers of English. While most effects replicated ones observed in L1 reading, we also found that more proficient readers of English were less accurate in targeting optimal viewing positions. We link this finding to Fitts' law of motor control for aimed movements. This article discusses the theoretical implications of the novel findings for reading research. |
Ernesto Guerra; Carmen Julia Coloma; Andrea Helo Lexical-semantic processing in preschoolers with Developmental Language Disorder: An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Guerra2024, This study examined lexical-semantic processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) during visually situated comprehension of real-time spoken words. Existing evidence suggests that children with DLD may experience challenges in lexical access and retrieval, as well as greater lexical competition compared to their peers with Typical Development (TD). However, the specific nature of these difficulties remains unclear. Using eye-tracking methodology, the study investigated the real-time comprehension of semantic relationships in children with DLD and their age-matched peers. The results revealed that, for relatively frequent nouns, both groups demonstrated similar comprehension of semantic relationships. Both groups favored the semantic competitor when it appeared with an unrelated visual referent. In turn, when the semantic competitor appeared with the visual referent of the spoken word, both groups disregarded the competitor. This finding shows that, although children with DLD usually present a relatively impoverished vocabulary, frequent nouns may not pose greater difficulties for them. While the temporal course of preference for the competitor or the referent was similar between the two groups, numerical, though non-significant, differences in the extension of the clusters were observed. In summary, this research demonstrates that monolingual preschoolers with DLD exhibit similar lexical access to frequent words compared to their peers with TD. Future studies should investigate the performance of children with DLD on less frequent words to provide a comprehensive understanding of their lexical-semantic abilities. |
Zhe-chen Guo; Rajka Smiljanic Ham or hamster? Eye-tracking evidence of a clear speech benefit for word segmentation in quiet and in noise Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 609–631, 2024. @article{Guo2024b, This study examined whether intelligibility-enhancing hyperarticulated clear speaking styles improve word segmentation during real-time speech processing in quiet and in noise. English-speaking listeners heard clearly and conversationally spoken sentences in which the target (e.g. ham) was temporarily ambiguous with a competitor (e.g. hamster) across a word boundary (e.g. ham starting) while their eye fixations to target and competitor images were recorded. Relative to conversational speech, clear speech led listeners to fixate the target image over the competitor image to a greater degree, indicating facilitation of word segmentation. Such facilitation emerged in quiet and in noise even before disambiguating segmental information (e.g. /ɑ/ in starting) was available. A parallel clear speech benefit was not found when the disyllabic word (e.g. hamster) was the target. The findings suggest that improved word segmentation partly underlies the well-documented clear speech perceptual and cognitive benefits and may arise from the enhancements of multiple word boundary cues. |
Yang Han; Yongsheng Wang; Feifei Liang; Xin Li; Jie Ma; Xuejun Bai Phonological decoding does not affect incidental Chinese novel word learning in Uyghur readers: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, pp. 1–21, 2024. @article{Han2024a, Vocabulary is an important foundation for reading skills. Dual-route cascaded model believes that when form-sound correspondence is irregular, phonetic decoding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for word acquisition. Lexical access in syllabic scripts involves a morphological-phonetic-semantic approach, where phonological decoding is crucial. However, in ideographic scripts, pronunciation plays a relatively small or even no role. Further exploration is needed to determine whether the morphological-phonetic-semantic approach is commonly used as a lexical access strategy in second language learning, particularly when considering two significantly different languages like Uyghur and Chinese. These languages differ in terms of language systems, lexical morphology, and writing direction. In the paradigm of repeated learning novel words, two-pseudocharacter words were constructed as novel words to control the readability of novel words' phonetic radical, which was classified into readable and unreadable categories. Readers deduced the words meaning in different contexts. There was no difference in semantic selection correctness between phonetic radical readable and unreadable conditions, and in terms of dwell time, total fixation duration, and fixation counts, the unreadable gaze time and fixation counts were significantly less than the readable condition, and the refixation ratio was lower than the readable condition. These results show that phonological decoding doesn't change how well Uyghur readers' make semantic inferences from Chinese incidental novel word learning. They also show that Uyghur readers can rapidly activate the lexical-semantic pathway when they can't complete phonological decoding and quickly inhibit the phonological decoding process. When phonological decoding is successful, they rapidly activate the lexical-phonological-semantic. |
Yuqi Hao; Yingyi Luo; Kenneth Han‑yang Lin‑Hong; Ming Yan Shared translation in second language activates unrelated words in first language Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 1245–1255, 2024. @article{Hao2024, The present study explored bilingual coactivation during natural monolingual sentence-reading comprehension. Native Chinese readers who had learned Japanese as a second language and those who had not learned it at all were tested. The results showed that unrelated Chinese word pairs that shared a common Japanese translation could parafoveally prime each other. Critically, this translation-related preview effect was modulated by the readers' language-learning experiences. It was found only among the late Chinese–Japanese bilinguals, but not among the monolingual Chinese readers. By setting a novel step, which was testing bilingual coactivation of semantic knowledge in a natural reading scenario without an explicit presentation of L2 words, our results suggest that bilingual word processing can be automatic, unconscious and nonselective. The study reveals an L2-to-L1 influence on readers' lexical activation during natural sentence reading in an exclusively native context. |
Tami Harel-Arbeli; Hagit Shaposhnik; Yuval Palgi; Boaz M. Ben-David Taking the extra listening mile: Processing spoken semantic context is more effortful for older than young adults Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, pp. 315–324, 2024. @article{HarelArbeli2024, Objectives: Older adults use semantic context to generate predictions in speech processing, compensating for aging-related sensory and cognitive changes. This study aimed to gauge aging-related changes in effort exertion related to context use. Design: The study revisited data from Harel-Arbeli et al. (2023) that used a “visual-world” eye-tracking paradigm. Data on efficiency of context use (response latency and the probability to gaze at the target before hearing it) and effort exertion (pupil dilation) were extracted from a subset of 14 young adults (21 to 27 years old) and 13 older adults (65 to 79 years old). Results: Both age groups showed a similar pattern of context benefits for response latency and target word predictions, however only the older adults group showed overall increased pupil dilation when listening to context sentences. Conclusions: Older adults' efficient use of spoken semantic context appears to come at a cost of increased effort exertion. |
Jasenia Hartman; Jenny Saffran; Ruth Litovsky Word learning in deaf adults who use cochlear implants: The role of talker variability and attention to the mouth Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 337–350, 2024. @article{Hartman2024, OBJECTIVES: Although cochlear implants (CIs) facilitate spoken language acquisition, many CI listeners experience difficulty learning new words. Studies have shown 29that highly variable stimulus input and audiovisual cues improve speech perception in CI listeners. However, less is known whether these two factors improve perception in a word learning context. Furthermore, few studies have examined how CI listeners direct their gaze to efficiently capture visual information available on a talker's face. The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) to examine whether talker variability could improve word learning in CI listeners and (2) to examine how CI listeners direct their gaze while viewing a talker speak. DESIGN: Eighteen adults with CIs and 10 adults with normal hearing (NH) learned eight novel word-object pairs spoken by a single talker or six different talkers (multiple talkers). The word learning task comprised of nonsense words following the phonotactic rules of English. Learning was probed using a novel talker in a two-alternative forced-choice eye gaze task. Learners' eye movements to the mouth and the target object (accuracy) were tracked over time. RESULTS: Both groups performed near ceiling during the test phase, regardless of whether they learned from the same talker or different talkers. However, compared to listeners with NH, CI listeners directed their gaze significantly more to the talker's mouth while learning the words. CONCLUSIONS: Unlike NH listeners who can successfully learn words without focusing on the talker's mouth, CI listeners tended to direct their gaze to the talker's mouth, which may facilitate learning. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that CI listeners use a visual processing strategy that efficiently captures redundant audiovisual speech cues available at the mouth. Due to ceiling effects, however, it is unclear whether talker variability facilitated word learning for adult CI listeners, an issue that should be addressed in future work using more difficult listening conditions. |
2023 |
Chuanli Zang; Zhichao Zhang; Manman Zhang; Federica Degno; Simon P. Liversedge; Zhang Manman; Federica Degno; Simon P. Liversedge Examining semantic parafoveal-on-foveal effects using a Stroop boundary paradigm Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 128, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Zang2023, The issue of whether lexical processing occurs serially or in parallel has been a central and contentious issue in respect of models of eye movement control in reading for well over a decade. A critical question in this regard concerns whether lexical parafoveal-on-foveal effects exist in reading. Because Chinese is an unspaced and densely packed language, readers may process parafoveal words to a greater extent than they do in spaced alphabetic languages. In two experiments using a novel Stroop boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), participants read sentences containing a single-character color-word whose preview was manipulated (identity or pseudocharacter, printed in black [no-color], or in a color congruent or incongruent with the character meaning). Two boundaries were used, one positioned two characters before the target and one immediately to the left of the target. The previews changed from black to color and then back to black as the eyes crossed the first and then the second boundary respectively. In Experiment 1 four color-words (red, green, yellow and blue) were used and in Experiment 2 only red and green color-words were used as targets. Both experiments showed very similar patterns such that reading times were increased for colored compared to no-color previews indicating a parafoveal visual interference effect. Most importantly, however, there were no robust interactive effects. Preview effects were comparable for congruent and incongruent color previews at the pretarget region when the data were combined from both experiments. These results favour serial processing accounts and indicate that even under very favourable experimental conditions, lexical semantic parafoveal-on-foveal effects are minimal. |
Yao Yao; Katrina Connell; Stephen Politzer-Ahles Hearing emotion in two languages : A pupillometry study of Cantonese – Mandarin bilinguals ' perception of affective cognates in L1 and L2 Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Yao2023, Differential affective processing has been widely documented for bilinguals: L1 affective words elicit higher levels of arousal and stronger emotionality ratings than L2 affective words (Pavlenko, 2012). In this study, we focus on two closely related Chinese languages, Mandarin and Cantonese, whose affective lexicons are highly overlapping, with shared lexical items that only differ in pronunciation across languages. We recorded L1 Cantonese – L2 Mandarin bilinguals' pupil responses to auditory tokens of Cantonese and Mandarin affective words. Our results showed that Cantonese–Mandarin bilinguals had stronger pupil responses when the affective words were pronounced in Cantonese (L1) than when the same words were pronounced in Mandarin (L2). The effect was most evident in taboo words and among bilinguals with lower L2 proficiency. We discuss the theoretical implications of the findings in the frameworks of exemplar theory and models of the bilingual lexicon. © |
Haojue Yu; Miyoung Kwon Central and peripheral visual field examination Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 64, no. 13, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Yu2023, PURPOSE. Although foveal vision provides fine spatial information, parafoveal and peripheral vision are also known to be important for efficient reading behaviors. Here we systematically investigate how different types and sizes of visual field defects affect the way visual information is acquired via eye movements during reading. METHODS. Using gaze-contingent displays, simulated scotomas were induced in 24 adults with normal or corrected-to-normal vision during a reading task. The study design included peripheral and central scotomas of varying sizes (aperture or scotoma size of 2°, 4°, 6°, 8°, and 10°) and no-scotoma conditions. Eye movements (e.g., forward/backward saccades, fixations, microsaccades) were plotted as a function of either the aperture or scotoma size, and their relationships were characterized by the best fitting model. RESULTS. When the aperture size of the peripheral scotoma decreased below 6° (11 visible letters), there were significant decreases in saccade amplitude and velocity, as well as substantial increases in fixation duration and the number of fixations. Its dependency on the aperture size is best characterized by an exponential decay or growth function in log-linear coordinates. However, saccade amplitude and velocity, fixation duration, and forward/regressive saccades increased more or less linearly with increasing central scotoma size in log-linear coordinates. CONCLUSIONS. Our results showed differential impacts of central and peripheral vision loss on reading behaviors while lending further support for the importance of foveal and parafoveal vision in reading. These apparently deviated oculomotor behaviors may in part reflect optimal reading strategies to compensate for the loss of visual information. |
Tania S. Zamuner; Theresa Rabideau; Margarethe McDonald; H. Henny Yeung Developmental change in children's speech processing of auditory and visual cues: An eyetracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Child Language, vol. 50, pp. 27–51, 2023. @article{Zamuner2023, This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from explicit behavioural measures. Participants were presented with familiar words in audio-visual (AV), audio-only (A-only) or visual-only (V-only) speech modalities, then presented with target and distractor images, and looking to targets was measured. Adults showed high accuracy, with slightly less target-image looking in the V-only modality. Developmentally, looking was above chance for both AV and A-only modalities, but not in the V-only modality until 6 years of age (earlier on /k/-initial words). Flexible use of visual cues for lexical access develops throughout childhood. |
Andrea M. Zawoyski; Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder The impact of test-taking strategies on eye movements of elementary students during reading comprehension assessment Journal Article In: School Psychology, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 59–66, 2023. @article{Zawoyski2023, Teachers often encourage students to use test-taking strategies during reading comprehension assessments, but these strategies are not always evidence-based. One common strategy involves teaching students to read the questions before reading an associated passage. Research findings comparing the passage-first (PF) and questions-first (QF) strategies are mixed. The present study employed eye-tracking technology to record 84 third and fourth-grade participants' eye movements (EMs) as they read a passage and responded to multiple-choice (MC) questions using PF and QF strategies in a within-subject design. Although there were no significant differences between groups in accuracy on MC questions, EM measures revealed that the PF condition was superior to the QF condition for elementary readers in terms of efficiency in reading and responding to questions. These findings suggest that the PF strategy supports a more comprehensive understanding of the text. Ultimately, within the PF condition, students required less time to obtain the same accuracy outcomes they attained when reading in the QF condition. School psychologists can improve reading comprehension instruction by encouraging the importance of teaching children to gain meaning from the text rather than search the passage for answers to MC questions |
Nina Zdorova; Svetlana Malyutina; Anna Laurinavichyute; Anastasiia Kaprielova; Anastasia Ziubanova; Anastasiya Lopukhina Do we rely on good-enough processing in reading under auditory and visual noise? Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Zdorova2023, Noise, as part of real-life communication flow, degrades the quality of linguistic input and affects language processing. According to predictions of the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, noise should make comprehenders rely more on word-level semantics instead of actual syntactic relations. However, empirical evidence supporting this prediction is still lacking. For the first time, we investigated whether auditory (three-talker babble) and visual (short idioms appearing next to a target sentence on the screen) noise would trigger greater reliance on semantics and make readers of Russian sentences process the sentences superficially. Our findings suggest that, although Russian speakers generally relied on semantics in sentence comprehension, neither auditory nor visual noise increased this reliance. The only effect of noise on semantic processing was found in reading speed under auditory noise measured by first fixation duration: only without noise, the semantically implausible sentences were read slower than semantically plausible ones. These results do not support the predictions of the study based on the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, which is discussed in light of the methodological differences among the studies of noise and their possible limitations. |
Nina Zdorova; Olga Parshina; Bela Ogly; Irina Bagirokova; Ekaterina Krasikova; Anastasiia Ziubanova; Shamset Unarokova; Susanna Makerova; Olga Dragoy Eye movement corpora in Adyghe and Russian: An eye-tracking study of sentence reading in bilinguals Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Zdorova2023a, The present study expands the eye-tracking-while reading research toward less studied languages of different typological classes (polysynthetic Adyghe vs. synthetic Russian) that use a Cyrillic script. In the corpus reading data from the two languages, we confirmed the widely studied effects of word frequency and word length on eye movements in Adyghe-Russian bilingual individuals for both languages. We also confirmed morphological effects in Adyghe reading (part-of-speech class and the number of lexical affixes) that were previously shown in some morphologically-rich languages. Importantly, we demonstrated that bilinguals' reading in Adyghe does differ quantitatively (the effect of language on reading times) and qualitatively (different effects of landing and previous/upcoming words on the eye movements within a current word) from their reading in Russian. |
Biao Zeng; Guoxing Yu; Nabil Hasshim; Shanhu Hong Primacy of mouth over eyes to perceive audiovisual Mandarin lexical tones Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Zeng2023, The visual cues of lexical tones are more implicit and much less investigated than consonants and vowels, and it is still unclear what facial areas contribute to facial tones identification. This study investigated Chinese and English speakers' eye movements when they were asked to identify audiovisual Mandarin lexical tones. The Chinese and English speakers were presented with an audiovisual clip of Mandarin monosyllables (for instance, /ă/, /à/, /ĭ/, /ì/) and were asked to identify whether the syllables were a dipping tone (/ă/, / ĭ/) or a falling tone (/ à/, /ì/). These audiovisual syllables were presented in clear, noisy and silent (absence of audio signal) conditions. An eye-tracker recorded the participants' eye movements. Results showed that the participants gazed more at the mouth than the eyes. In addition, when acoustic conditions became adverse, both the Chinese and English speakers increased their gaze duration at the mouth rather than at the eyes. The findings suggested that the mouth is the primary area that listeners utilise in their perception of audiovisual lexical tones. The similar eye movements between the Chinese and English speakers imply that the mouth acts as a perceptual cue that provides articulatory information, as opposed to social and pragmatic information. |
Martin Zettersten; Daniel Yurovsky; Tian Linger Xu; Sarp Uner; Angeline Sin Mei Tsui; Rose M. Schneider; Annissa N. Saleh; Stephan C. Meylan; Virginia A. Marchman; Jessica Mankewitz; Kyle MacDonald; Bria Long; Molly Lewis; George Kachergis; Kunal Handa; Benjamin DeMayo; Alexandra Carstensen; Mika Braginsky; Veronica Boyce; Naiti S. Bhatt; Claire Augusta Bergey; Michael C. Frank Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 55, no. 5, pp. 2485–2500, 2023. @article{Zettersten2023, The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a target label. We present a large-scale, open database of infant and toddler eye-tracking data from looking-while-listening tasks. The goal of this effort is to address theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development. We first present how we created the database, its features and structure, and associated tools for processing and accessing infant eye-tracking datasets. Using these tools, we then work through two illustrative examples to show how researchers can use Peekbank to interrogate theoretical and methodological questions about children's developing word recognition ability. |
Likan Zhan; Peng Zhou The online processing of hypothetical events Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 70, no. 2, pp. 108–117, 2023. @article{Zhan2023, Abstract. A conditional statement If P then Q is formed by combining the two propositions P and Q together with the conditional connective If ··· then ···. When embedded under the conditional connective, the two propositions P and Q describe hypothetical events that are not actualized. It remains unclear when such hypothetical thinking is activated in the real-time comprehension of conditional statements. To tackle this problem, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm. Participants' eye movements on the concurrent image were recorded when they were listening to the auditorily presented conditional statements. Depending on when and what critical information is added into the auditory input, there are four possible temporal slots to observe in the online processing of the conditional statement: the sentential connective If, the antecedent P, the consequent Q, and the processing of the sentence following the conditional. We mainly focused on the first three slots. First, the occurrence of the conditional connective should trigger participants to search in the visual world for the event that could not assign a truth-value to the embedded proposition. Second, if the embedded proposition P can be determined as true by an event, the hypothetical property implied by the connective would prevent the participants from excluding the consideration of other events. The consideration of other events would yield more fixations on the events where the proposition is false. |
Lijuan Zhang; Zhiwei Liu; Sainan Zhao; Jingxin Wang Semantic plausibility preferentially affects the semantic preview benefit in Chinese reading: Evidence from an eye-movement study Journal Article In: PeerJ, vol. 11, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Zhang2023a, Background: Numerous studies have confirmed that skilled readers can benefit from a semantically related preview word (i.e., semantic preview benefit, SPB), suggesting that readers can extract semantic information from the parafovea to achieve efficient reading. It is still under debate whether the occurrence of this benefit is because of the semantic association between the preview and target words or because of the contextual fit of the preview word in the sentence context. Methods: Two independent factors, preview plausibility (preview plausible/ implausible) and semantic relatedness (semantically related/unrelated), were manipulated, and we further strictly controlled for syntactic plausibility in the present study. Results: The results showed that the first-pass reading times of the target words were significantly shorter in the plausible preview condition than in the implausible preview condition. However, the main effect of semantic relatedness was found only in the gaze duration measure. Discussion: The pattern of results revealed that semantic plausibility affects the semantic preview benefit preferentially in Chinese reading, supporting the contextual fit account. Our findings have implications for a better understanding of parafoveal processing and provide empirical support for the eye-movement control model. |
Songzhu Zhang In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 2919–2935, 2023. @article{Zhang2023d, This study is based on an experimental method of eye-tracking to investigate how translators perceive and understand translated literary texts and how different stylistic features influence their perception. This methodology allowed us to observe which parts of the text translators focused on the most, providing valuable data on their reading patterns and cognitive processes. Among English-Chinese translators, 95 out of 120 participants (79%) showed a tendency to prioritize faithfully conveying the source text's meaning over crafting a target text that aligns with Chinese stylistically. In the specific context of Chinese-English translation out of the 120 instances examined, the translators exhibited a reduced fixation duration on words in the source language, accounting for 34 instances (28%). This suggests a greater concern for preserving the source text's meaning rather than adapting it to the target culture. This research can assist translators and linguists in translating the stylistic features of English and Chinese literary texts more effectively. Future studies can explore other language stylistic features that may impact translation and compare translation styles across various literary genres and language pairs. |
Bin Zhao; Gaoyan Zhang; Longbiao Wang; Jianwu Dang Multimodal evidence for predictive coding in sentence oral reading Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 33, no. 13, pp. 8620–8632, 2023. @article{Zhao2023, Sentence oral reading requires not only a coordinated effort in the visual, articulatory, and cognitive processes but also supposes a top-down influence from linguistic knowledge onto the visual-motor behavior. Despite a gradual recognition of a predictive coding effect in this process, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive demonstration regarding the time-varying brain dynamics that underlines the oral reading strategy. To address this, our study used a multimodal approach, combining real-time recording of electroencephalography, eye movements, and speech, with a comprehensive examination of regional, inter-regional, sub-network, and whole-brain responses. Our study identified the top-down predictive effect with a phrase-grouping phenomenon in the fixation interval and eye-voice span. This effect was associated with the delta and theta band synchronization in the prefrontal, anterior temporal, and inferior frontal lobes. We also observed early activation of the cognitive control network and its recurrent interactions with the visual-motor networks structurally at the phrase rate. Finally, our study emphasizes the importance of cross-frequency coupling as a promising neural realization of hierarchical sentence structuring and calls for further investigation. |
Wei Zhou; Yi Fan; Yulin Chang; Wenjuan Liu; Jiuju Wang; Yufeng Wang Pathogenesis of comorbid adhd and chinese developmental dyslexia: Evidence from eye-movement tracking and rapid automatized naming Journal Article In: Journal of Attention Disorders, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 294–306, 2023. @article{Zhou2023f, Background: ADHD and Chinese developmental dyslexia (DD) have a very high comorbidity rate; however, which cognitive deficits characterize the comorbidity and when they occur during cognitive processing are still under debate. Methods: Rapid automatic naming (RAN) tasks with eye-movement tracking were conducted with 75 children who were typically developing, had comorbid ADHD and DD, had only ADHD, and had only DD. Results: The clinical groups had longer first fixation durations than the control for RAN digits. Temporal eye-movement measures, such as gaze duration and total reading time, were found to vary between the comorbidity and ADHD groups. Spatial eye-movement measures, such as regression probability and incoming saccade amplitude, differed between the comorbidity and DD groups. Conclusions: These results indicate that investigation with eye-movement measures combined with RAN tasks can strengthen the understanding of the pathogenesis of comorbid ADHD and DD. |
Anastasia A. Ziubanova; Anna K. Laurinavichyute; Olga Parshina Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers? Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Ziubanova2023, Introduction: Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors – early access to sign and/or spoken language – on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers. Methods: In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested. Results: Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found. Discussion: Our results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children. |
Wei Zhou; Sile Wang; Ming Yan Fixation-related fMRI analysis reveals the neural basis of natural reading of unspaced and spaced Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 33, no. 19, pp. 10401–10410, 2023. @article{Zhou2023b, Although there are many eye-movement studies focusing on natural sentence reading and functional magnetic resonance imaging research on reading with serial visual presentation paradigms, there is a scarcity of investigations into the neural mechanism of natural sentence reading. The present study recruited 33 adults to read unspaced and spaced Chinese sentences with the eye tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging data recorded simultaneously. By using fixation-related functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis, this study showed that natural reading of Chinese sentences produced activations in ventral visual, dorsal attention, and semantic brain regions, which were modulated by the properties of words such as word length and word frequency. The multivoxel pattern analysis showed that the activity pattern in the left middle temporal gyrus could significantly predict the visual layout categories (i.e. unspaced vs. spaced conditions). Dynamic causal modeling analysis showed that there were bidirectional brain connections between the left middle temporal gyrus and the left inferior occipital cortex in the unspaced Chinese sentence reading but not in the spaced reading. These results provide a neural mechanism for the natural reading of Chinese sentences from the perspective of word segmentation. |
Olympia Simantiraki; Anita E. Wagner; Martin Cooke The impact of speech type on listening effort and intelligibility for native and non-native listeners Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Simantiraki2023, Listeners are routinely exposed to many different types of speech, including artificially-enhanced and synthetic speech, styles which deviate to a greater or lesser extent from naturally-spoken exemplars. While the impact of differing speech types on intelligibility is well-studied, it is less clear how such types affect cognitive processing demands, and in particular whether those speech forms with the greatest intelligibility in noise have a commensurately lower listening effort. The current study measured intelligibility, self-reported listening effort, and a pupillometry-based measure of cognitive load for four distinct types of speech: (i) plain i.e. natural unmodified speech; (ii) Lombard speech, a naturally-enhanced form which occurs when speaking in the presence of noise; (iii) artificially-enhanced speech which involves spectral shaping and dynamic range compression; and (iv) speech synthesized from text. In the first experiment a cohort of 26 native listeners responded to the four speech types in three levels of speech-shaped noise. In a second experiment, 31 non-native listeners underwent the same procedure at more favorable signal-to-noise ratios, chosen since second language listening in noise has a more detrimental effect on intelligibility than listening in a first language. For both native and non-native listeners, artificially-enhanced speech was the most intelligible and led to the lowest subjective effort ratings, while the reverse was true for synthetic speech. However, pupil data suggested that Lombard speech elicited the lowest processing demands overall. These outcomes indicate that the relationship between intelligibility and cognitive processing demands is not a simple inverse, but is mediated by speech type. The findings of the current study motivate the search for speech modification algorithms that are optimized for both intelligibility and listening effort. |
Tiana V. Simovic; Craig G. Chambers How do antecedent semantics influence pronoun interpretation? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Simovic2023, Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of retrieval, whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic form. The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation by examining whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Participants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases, the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., “Move the house on the left to area 12,” where the result was that a different house is now the leftmost one). In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun (“Now, move it…”) should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation. |
Joshua Snell; Jeremy Yeaton; Jonathan Mirault; Jonathan Grainger Parallel word reading revealed by fixation-related brain potentials Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 162, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Snell2023, During reading, the brain is confronted with many relevant objects at once. But does lexical processing occur for multiple words simultaneously? Cognitive science has yet to answer this prominent question. Recently it has been argued that the issue warrants supplementing the field's traditional toolbox (response times, eye-tracking) with neuroscientific techniques (EEG, fMRI). Indeed, according to the OB1-reader model, upcoming words need not impact oculomotor behavior per se, but parallel processing of these words must nonetheless be reflected in neural activity. Here we combined eye-tracking with EEG, time-locking the neural window of interest to the fixation on target words in sentence reading. During these fixations, we manipulated the identity of the subsequent word so that it posed either a syntactically legal or illegal continuation of the sentence. In line with previous research, oculomotor measures were unaffected. Yet, syntax impacted brain potentials as early as 100 ms after the target fixation onset. Given the EEG literature on syntax processing, the presently observed timings suggest parallel word reading. We reckon that parallel word processing typifies reading, and that OB1-reader offers a good platform for theorizing about the reading brain. |
Katrine Falcon Soby; Evelyn Arko Milburn; Line Burholt Kristensen; Valentin Vulchanov; Mila Vulchanova In the native speaker's eye: Online processing of anomalous learner syntax Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 1–28, 2023. @article{Soby2023, How do native speakers process texts with anomalous learner syntax? Second-language learners of Norwegian, and other verb-second (V2) languages, frequently place the verb in third position (e.g.,*Adverbial-Subject-Verb), although it is mandatory for the verb in these languages to appear in second position (Adverbial-Verb-Subject). In an eye-Tracking study, native Norwegian speakers read sentences with either grammatical V2 or ungrammatical verb-Third (V3) word order. Unlike previous eye-Tracking studies of ungrammaticality, which have primarily addressed morphosyntactic anomalies, we exclusively manipulate word order with no morphological or semantic changes. We found that native speakers reacted immediately to ungrammatical V3 word order, indicated by increased fixation durations and more regressions out on the subject, and subsequently on the verb. Participants also recovered quickly, already on the following word. The effects of grammaticality were unaffected by the length of the initial adverbial. The study contributes to future models of sentence processing which should be able to accommodate various types of noisy input, that is, non-standard variation. Together with new studies of processing of other L2 anomalies in Norwegian, the current findings can help language instructors and students prioritize which aspects of grammar to focus on. |
Linda Sommerfeld; Maria Staudte; Nivedita Mani; Jutta Kray Even young children make multiple predictions in the complex visual world Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 235, pp. 1–29, 2023. @article{Sommerfeld2023, Children can anticipate upcoming input in sentences with semantically constraining verbs. In the visual world, the sentence context is used to anticipatorily fixate the only object matching potential sentence continuations. Adults can process even multiple visual objects in parallel when predicting language. This study examined whether young children can also maintain multiple prediction options in parallel during language processing. In addition, we aimed at replicating the finding that children's receptive vocabulary size modulates their prediction. German children (5–6 years |
Sybren Spit; Andreea Geambașu; Daan Renswoude; Elma Blom; Paula Fikkert; Sabine Hunnius; Caroline Junge; Josje Verhagen; Ingmar Visser; Frank Wijnen; Clara C. Levelt Robustness of the cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants: A close multi-center replication of Kovács and Mehler (2009) Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Spit2023, We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the screen for nine trials and then switched to the other side. In the original experiment, both mono- and bilingual infants anticipated where the visual stimulus would appear during pre-switch trials. However, during post-switch trials, only bilingual children anticipated that the stimulus would appear on the other side of the screen. The authors took this as evidence of a cognitive advantage. Using the exact same materials in combination with novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses), we assessed the robustness of these findings in four babylabs (N = 98). Our results did not replicate the original findings: although anticipatory looks increased slightly during post-switch trials for both groups, bilingual infants were not better switchers than monolingual infants. After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence either. The results highlight the importance of multicenter replications and more fine-grained statistical analyses to better understand child development. Highlights: We carried out an exact replication across four baby labs of the high-impact study by Kovács and Mehler (2009). We did not replicate the findings of the original study, calling into question the robustness of the claim that bilingual infants have enhanced cognitive abilities. After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants correctly associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence. The use of novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses) allowed us to draw better-informed conclusions. |
Vladislava Staroverova; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Nina Zdorova; Nina Ladinskaya; Olga Vedenina; Sofya Goldina; Anastasiia Kaprielova; Ksenia Bartseva; Olga Dragoy Phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian children and adults Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 226, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Staroverova2023, Studies on German and English have shown that children and adults can rely on phonological and orthographic information from the parafovea during reading, but this reliance differs between ages and languages. In the current study, we investigated the development of phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian-speaking 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The participants read sentences with embedded nouns that were presented in original, pseudohomophone, control for pseudohomophone, transposed-letter, and control for transposed-letter conditions in the parafoveal area to assess phonological and orthographic preview benefit effects. The results revealed that all groups of participants relied only on orthographic but not phonological parafoveal information. These findings indicate that 8-year-old children already preprocess parafoveal information similarly to adults. |
Yankui Su; Meiling He; Rongbao Li The effects of background music on English reading comprehension for English foreign language learners: Evidence from an eye movement study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Su2023, Based on previous literature, the present study examines the effects of background music on English reading comprehension using eye tracking techniques. All the participants, whose first language was Chinese, were selected from a foreign language college and all of them were sophomores who majored in English. The experiment in this study was a 2 (music tempo: fast and slow) × 2 (text difficulty: difficult and easy) × 2 (background music preference: high and low) mixed design. Both musical tempo and English reading passage were within-subjects factors, and the level of music listening preference was a between-subjects factor. The results showed that the main effect of the music tempo was statistically significant, which indicated that participants read texts more quickly in the fast-tempo music condition than in the slow-tempo music condition. Furthermore, the main effect of the text difficulty was statistically significant. Additionally, the interaction between the text difficulty and music tempo was statistically significant. The music tempo had a greater effect on easy texts than on difficult texts. The results of this study reveal that it is beneficial for people who have a stronger preference for music listening to conduct English reading tasks with fast-tempo music. It is detrimental for people who have little preference for background music listening to complete difficult English reading tasks with slow-tempo music. |
Longjiao Sui; Nicolas Dirix; Evy Woumans; Wouter Duyck GECO-CN: Ghent Eye-tracking COrpus of sentence reading for Chinese-English bilinguals Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 2743–2763, 2023. @article{Sui2023, The current work presents the very first eye-tracking corpus of natural reading by Chinese-English bilinguals, whose two languages entail different writing systems and orthographies. Participants read an entire novel in these two languages, presented in paragraphs on screen. Half of the participants first read half of the novel in their native language (Simplified Chinese) and then the rest of the novel in their second language (English), while the other half read in the reverse language order. This article presents some important basic descriptive statistics of reading times and compares the difference between reading in the two languages. However, this unique eye-tracking corpus also allows the exploration of theories of language processing and bilingualism. Importantly, it provides a solid and reliable ground for studying the difference between Eastern and Western languages, understanding the impact and consequences of having a completely different first language on bilingual processing. The materials are freely available for use by researchers interested in (bilingual) reading. |
Eunkyung Sung; Sehoon Jung; Sunhee Lee Word recognition in English place assimilation by L1 and L2 listeners: An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics, vol. 23, pp. 175–191, 2023. @article{Sung2023, This study explores the dynamics of lexical activation by comparing the time course of word recognition between assimilated forms (e.g., ca[t p] in cat box) and noncoronal forms (e.g., ca[p] in cap box). Using the Visual World Paradigm, an eye-tracking method, the main goal was to investigate how gradient modification in place assimilation context influences L1 and L2 listeners' real time word recognition in English. Twenty native Korean learners of English, as well as fourteen native English listeners took part in the listening task integrated into the eye-tracking experiment. The participants were given aural input in the form of instructions (e.g., look at the cat/cap box) and asked to pick the word they had just heard between two options (e.g., cat or cap) on the screen while or after they listened to the input. Their eye movements over the visual screen while listening, along with their keyboard-press responses were recorded for the main analysis. The results showed both English and Korean listeners displayed higher proportions of fixations on the target (e.g., cat) than on the competitor words (e.g., cap) in assimilation contexts (e.g., ca[t p] box), as well as higher proportions of fixations on targets (e.g., cap) than on competitors (e.g., cat) in non-assimilation contexts (e.g., ca[p] box). However, the discrepancy of fixation proportions between targets and competitors was more obvious for the English listeners than for the Korean listeners. In other words, although the L2 listenersin addition to L1 listeners were able to use acoustic variations when identifying the target phonemes, the L1 listeners revealed a higher certainty level than their L2 counterparts. Furthermore, the divergence points between targets and competitors wereshown to appear earlier for the L1 listeners than for the L2 listeners. |
Jamie Taylor; Yoichi Mukai Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence with different-script languages: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 635–667, 2023. @article{Taylor2023, This study compared patterns of nonselective cross-language activation in L1 and L2 visual word recognition with different-script bilinguals. The aim was to determine (1) whether lexical processing is nonselective in the L1 (as in L2), and (2) if the same cross-linguistic factors affected processing similarly in each language. To examine the time course of activation, eye movements were tracked during lexical decision. Thirty-two Japanese-English bilinguals responded to 250 target words in Japanese and in English. The same participants and items (i.e., cognate translation equivalents) were used to directly compare L1 and L2 processing. Response latencies as well as eye movements representing early and late processing were analyzed using mixed-effects regression modeling. Similar cross-linguistic effects, namely cognate word frequency, phonological similarity, and semantic similarity, were found in both languages. These factors affected processing to different degrees in each language, however. While cognate frequency was significant as early as the first fixation, effects of cross-linguistic phonological and semantic similarity arose later in time. Increased phonological similarity slowed responses in L2 but speeded them in L1, while greater semantic overlap was facilitatory in both languages. Results are discussed from the perspective of the BIA+ model of visual word recognition. |
Yasuo Terao; Shin-ichi Tokushige; Satomi Inomata-Terada; Tai Miyazaki; Naoki Kotsuki; Francesco Fisicaro; Yoshikazu Ugawa How do patients with Parkinson's disease and cerebellar ataxia read aloud? -Eye–voice coordination in text reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–25, 2023. @article{Terao2023a, Background: The coordination between gaze and voice is closely linked when reading text aloud, with the gaze leading the reading position by a certain eye–voice lead (EVL). How this coordination is affected is unknown in patients with cerebellar ataxia and parkinsonism, who show oculomotor deficits possibly impacting coordination between different effectors. Objective: To elucidate the role of the cerebellum and basal ganglia in eye–voice coordination during reading aloud, by studying patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and spinocerebellar degeneration (SCD). Methods: Participants were sixteen SCD patients, 18 PD patients, and 30 age-matched normal subjects, all native Japanese speakers without cognitive impairment. Subjects read aloud Japanese texts of varying readability displayed on a monitor in front of their eyes, consisting of Chinese characters and hiragana (Japanese phonograms). The gaze and voice reading the text was simultaneously recorded by video-oculography and a microphone. A custom program synchronized and aligned the gaze and audio data in time. Results: Reading speed was significantly reduced in SCD patients (3.53 ± 1.81 letters/s), requiring frequent regressions to compensate for the slow reading speed. In contrast, PD patients read at a comparable speed to normal subjects (4.79 ± 3.13 letters/s vs. 4.71 ± 2.38 letters/s). The gaze scanning speed, excluding regressive saccades, was slower in PD patients (9.64 ± 4.26 letters/s) compared to both normal subjects (12.55 ± 5.42 letters/s) and SCD patients (10.81 ± 4.52 letters/s). PD patients' gaze could not far exceed that of the reading speed, with smaller allowance for the gaze to proceed ahead of the reading position. Spatial EVL was similar across the three groups for all texts (normal: 2.95 ± 1.17 letters/s, PD: 2.95 ± 1.51 letters/s, SCD: 3.21 ± 1.35 letters/s). The ratio of gaze duration to temporal EVL was lowest for SCD patients (normal: 0.73 ± 0.50, PD: 0.70 ± 0.37, SCD: 0.40 ± 0.15). Conclusion: Although coordination between voice and eye movements and normal eye-voice span was observed in both PD and SCD, SCD patients made frequent regressions to manage the slowed vocal output, restricting the ability for advance processing of text ahead of the gaze. In contrast, PD patients experience restricted reading speed primarily due to slowed scanning, limiting their maximum reading speed but effectively utilizing advance processing of upcoming text. |
Malathi Thothathiri; Jeremy Kirkwood; Abhijeet Patra; Anna Krason; Erica L. Middleton Multimodal measures of sentence comprehension in agrammatism Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 169, pp. 309–325, 2023. @article{Thothathiri2023, Agrammatic or asyntactic comprehension is a common language impairment in aphasia. We considered three possible hypotheses about the underlying cause of this deficit, namely problems in syntactic processing, over-reliance on semantics, and a deficit in cognitive control. We tested four individuals showing asyntactic comprehension on their comprehension of syntax-semantics conflict sentences (e.g., The robber handcuffed the cop), where semantic cues pushed towards a different interpretation from syntax. Two of the four participants performed above chance on such sentences indicating that not all agrammatic individuals are impaired in structure-based interpretation. We collected additional eyetracking measures from the other two participants, who performed at chance on the conflict sentences. These measures suggested distinct underlying processing profiles in the two individuals. Cognitive assessments further suggested that one participant might have performed poorly due to a linguistic cognitive control impairment while the other had difficulty due to over-reliance on semantics. Together, the results highlight the importance of multimodal measures for teasing apart aphasic individuals' underlying deficits. They corroborate findings from neurotypical adults by showing that semantics can strongly influence comprehension and that cognitive control could be relevant for choosing between competing sentence interpretations. They extend previous findings by demonstrating variability between individuals with aphasia—cognitive control might be especially relevant for patients who are not overly reliant on semantics. Clinically, the identification of distinct underlying problems in different individuals suggests that different treatment paths might be warranted for cases who might look similar on behavioral assessments. |
Elizabeth L. Tighe; Gal Kaldes; Amani Talwar; Scott A. Crossley; Daphne Greenberg; Stephen Skalicky In: Journal of Learning Disabilities, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 25–42, 2023. @article{Tighe2023, Comprehension monitoring is a meta-cognitive skill that is defined as the ability to self-evaluate one's comprehension of text. Although it is known that struggling adult readers are poor at monitoring their comprehension, additional research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying comprehension monitoring and their role in reading comprehension in this population. This study used a comprehension monitoring task with struggling adult readers, which included online eye movements (reread and regression path durations) and an offline verbal protocol (oral explanations of key information). We examined whether eye movements predicted accuracy on the passages' reading comprehension questions, a norm-referenced reading assessment, and an offline verbal protocol after controlling for age and traditional component skills (i.e., decoding, oral language, working memory). Regression path duration uniquely predicted accuracy on the questions; however, decoding and oral vocabulary were the most salient predictors of the norm-referenced reading comprehension measure. Regression path duration also predicted the offline verbal protocol, such that those who exhibited longer regression path duration were also better at explaining key information. These results contribute to the literature regarding struggling adults' reading component skills, eye movement behaviors involved in processing connected text, and future considerations in assessing comprehension monitoring. |
Satu Saalasti; Jussi Alho; Juha M. Lahnakoski; Mareike Bacha-Trams; Enrico Glerean; Iiro P. Jääskeläinen; Uri Hasson; Mikko Sams Lipreading a naturalistic narrative in a female population: Neural characteristics shared with listening and reading Journal Article In: Brain and Behavior, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Saalasti2023, Introduction: Few of us are skilled lipreaders while most struggle with the task. Neural substrates that enable comprehension of connected natural speech via lipreading are not yet well understood. Methods: We used a data-driven approach to identify brain areas underlying the lipreading of an 8-min narrative with participants whose lipreading skills varied extensively (range 6–100% |
Nuria Sagarra; Joseph V. Casillas Practice beats age: Co-activation shapes heritage speakers' lexical access more than age of onset Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Sagarra2023, Probabilistic associations make language processing efficient and are honed through experience. However, it is unclear what language experience factors explain the non-monolingual processing behaviors typical of L2 learners and heritage speakers (HSs). We investigated whether AoO, language proficiency, and language use affect the recognition of Spanish stress-tense suffix associations involving a stressed syllable that cues a present suffix (SALta “s/he jumps”) and an unstressed syllable that cues a past suffix (SALtó “s/he jumped”). Adult Spanish-English HSs, English-Spanish L2 learners, and Spanish monolinguals saw a paroxytone verb (stressed initial syllable) and an oxytone verb (unstressed initial syllable), listened to a sentence containing one of the verbs, and chose the one they heard. Spanish proficiency measured grammatical and lexical knowledge, and Spanish use assessed percentage of current usage. Both bilingual groups were comparable in Spanish proficiency and use. Eye-tracking data showed that all groups fixated on target verbs above chance before hearing the syllable containing the suffix, except the HSs in the oxytones. Monolinguals fixated on targets more and earlier, although at a slower rate, than HSs and L2 learners; in turn, HSs fixated on targets more and earlier than L2 learners, except in oxytones. Higher proficiency increased target fixations in HSs (oxytones) and L2 learners (paroxytones), but greater use only increased target fixations in HSs (oxytones). Taken together, our data show that HSs' lexical access depends more on number of lexical competitors (co-activation of two L1 lexica) and type (phonotactic) frequency than token (lexical) frequency or AoO. We discuss the contribution of these findings to models in phonology, lexical access, language processing, language prediction, and human cognition. |
Hannah S. Sarvasy; Adam Milton Morgan; Jenny Yu; Victor S. Ferreira; Shota Momma Cross-clause planning in Nungon (Papua New Guinea): Eye-tracking evidence Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 666–680, 2023. @article{Sarvasy2023, Hundreds of languages worldwide use a sentence structure known as the “clause chain,” in which 20 or more clauses can be stacked to form a sentence. The Papuan language Nungon is among a subset of clause chaining languages that require “switch-reference” suffixes on nonfinal verbs in chains. These suffixes announce whether the subject of each upcoming clause will differ from the subject of the previous clause. We examine two major issues in psycholinguistics: predictive processing in comprehension, and advance planning in production. Whereas previous work on other languages has demonstrated that sentence planning can be incremental, switch-reference marking would seem to prohibit strictly incremental planning, as it requires speakers to plan the next clause before they can finish producing the current one. This suggests an intriguing possibility: planning strategies may be fundamentally different in Nungon. We used a mobile eye-tracker and solar-powered laptops in a remote village in Papua, New Guinea, to track Nungon speakers' gaze in two experiments: comprehension and production. Curiously, during comprehension, fixation data failed to find evidence that switch-reference marking is used for predictive processing. However, during production, we found evidence for advance planning of switch-reference markers, and, by extension, the subjects they presage. We propose that this degree of advance syntactic planning pushes the boundaries of what is known about sentence planning, drawing on data from a novel morpheme type in an understudied language. |
Daniel Schmidtke; Sadaf Rahmanian; Anna L. Moro Tracking reading development in an English language university-level bridging program: evidence from eye-movements during passage reading Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 26, pp. 356–370, 2023. @article{Schmidtke2023, Increasing numbers of international students enter university education via English language bridging programs. Much research has overlooked the nature of second language reading development during a bridging program, focusing instead on the development of literacy skills of international students who already meet the language requirement for undergraduate admission. We report a longitudinal eye-movement study assessing English passage reading efficiency and comprehension in 405 Chinese-speaking bridging program students. Incoming IELTS reading scores were used as an index of baseline reading ability. Linear mixed-effects regression models fitted to global eye-movement measures and reading comprehension indicated that despite initial between-subjects differences, within-subject change at each ability level progressed at the same rate, following parallel growth trajectories. Therefore, there was significant overall reading progress during the bridging program, but no evidence that the gap between low and high ability readers either closed or widened over time. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Sara Milligan; Victoria M. Estevez Event-related potentials show that parafoveal vision is insufficient for semantic integration Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 60, no. 7, pp. 1–25, 2023. @article{Schotter2023, Readers extract information from a word from parafoveal vision prior to looking at it. It has been argued that parafoveal perception allows readers to initiate linguistic processes, but it is unclear which stages of word processing are engaged: the process of extracting letter information to recognize words, or the process of extracting meaning to comprehend them. This study used the event-related brain potential (ERP) technique to investigate how word recognition (indexed by the N400 effect for unexpected or anomalous compared to expected words) and semantic integration (indexed by the Late-positive component; LPC effect for anomalous compared to expected words) are or are not elicited when the word is perceived only in parafoveal vision. Participants read a target word following a sentence that made it expected, unexpected, or anomalous, and read the sentences presented three words at a time in the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) with flankers paradigm so that words were perceived in parafoveal and foveal vision. We orthogonally manipulated whether the target word was masked in parafoveal and/or foveal vision to dissociate the processing associated with perception of the target word from either location. We found that the N400 effect was generated from parafoveally perceived words, and was reduced for foveally perceived words if they were previously perceived parafoveally. In contrast, the LPC effect was only elicited if the word was perceived foveally, suggesting that readers must attend to a word directly in foveal vision in order to attempt to integrate its meaning into the sentence context. |
Laura Schwalm; Ralph Radach Parafoveal syntactic processing from word N + 2 during reading: The case of gender-specific German articles Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 87, no. 8, pp. 2511–2532, 2023. @article{Schwalm2023, Previous research has suggested that some syntactic information such as word class can be processed parafoveally during reading. However, it is still unclear to what extent early syntactic cueing within noun phrases can facilitate word processing during dynamic reading. Two experiments (total N = 72) were designed to address this question using a gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm to manipulate the syntactic fit within a nominal phrase. Either the article (Experiment 1) or the noun (Experiment 2) was manipulated in the parafovea, resulting in a syntactic mismatch, depending on the condition. Results indicated a substantial elevation of viewing times on both parts of the noun phrase when conflicting syntactic information had been present in the parafovea. In Experiment 1, the article was also fixated more often in the syntactic mismatch condition. These results provide direct evidence of parafoveal syntactic processing. Based on the early time-course of this effect, it can be concluded that grammatical gender is used to generate constraints for the processing of upcoming nouns. To our knowledge, these results also provide the first evidence that syntactic information can be extracted from a parafoveal word N + 2. |
Soroosh Shalileh; Dmitry Ignatov; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Olga Dragoy Identifying dyslexia in school pupils from eye movement and demographic data using artificial intelligence Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–26, 2023. @article{Shalileh2023, This paper represents our research results in the pursuit of the following objectives: (i) to introduce a novel multi-sources data set to tackle the shortcomings of the previous data sets, (ii) to propose a robust artificial intelligence-based solution to identify dyslexia in primary school pupils, (iii) to investigate our psycholinguistic knowledge by studying the importance of the features in identifying dyslexia by our best AI model. In order to achieve the first objective, we collected and annotated a new set of eye-movement-during-reading data. Furthermore, we collected demographic data, including the measure of non-verbal intelligence, to form our three data sources. Our data set is the largest eye-movement data set globally. Unlike the previously introduced binary-class data sets, it contains (A) three class labels and (B) reading speed. Concerning the second objective, we formulated the task of dyslexia prediction as regression and classification problems and scrutinized the performance of 12 classifications and eight regressions approaches. We exploited the Bayesian optimization method to fine-tune the hyperparameters of the models: and reported the average and the standard deviation of our evaluation metrics in a stratified ten-fold cross-validation. Our studies showed that multi-layer perceptron, random forest, gradient boosting, and k-nearest neighbor form the group having the most acceptable results. Moreover, we showed that although separately using each data source did not lead to accurate results, their combination led to a reliable solution. We also determined the importance of the features of our best classifier: our findings showed that the IQ, gender, and age are the top three important features; we also showed that fixation along the y-axis is more important than other fixation data. Dyslexia detection, eye fixation, eye movement, demographic, classification, regression, artificial intelligence. |
Jing Shen; Elizabeth Heller Murray; Erin R. Kulick The effect of breathy vocal quality on speech intelligibility and listening effort in background noise Journal Article In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 27, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Shen2023, Speech perception is challenging under adverse conditions. However, there is limited evidence regarding how multiple adverse conditions affect speech perception. The present study investigated two conditions that are frequently encountered in real-life communication: background noise and breathy vocal quality. The study first examined the effects of background noise and breathiness on speech perception as measured by intelligibility. Secondly, the study tested the hypothesis that both noise and breathiness affect listening effort, as indicated by linear and nonlinear changes in pupil dilation. Low-context sentences were resynthesized to create three levels of breathiness (original, mild-moderate, and severe). The sentences were presented in a fluctuating nonspeech noise with two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of −5 dB (favorable) and −9 dB (adverse) SNR. Speech intelligibility and pupil dilation data were collected from young listeners with normal hearing thresholds. The results demonstrated that a breathy vocal quality presented in noise negatively affected speech intelligibility, with the degree of breathiness playing a critical role. Listening effort, as measured by the magnitude of pupil dilation, showed significant effects with both severe and mild-moderate breathy voices that were independent of noise level. The findings contributed to the literature by demonstrating the impact of vocal quality on the perception of speech in noise. They also highlighted the complex dynamics between overall task demand and processing resources in understanding the combined impact of multiple adverse conditions. |
Meng Shen; Zibei Niu; Lei Gao; Tianzhi Li; Danhui Wang; Shan Li; Man Zeng; Xuejun Bai; Xiaolei Gao Examining the extraction of parafoveal semantic information in Tibetan Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Shen2023a, This study conducted two experiments to investigate the extraction of semantic preview information from the parafovea in Tibetan reading. In Experiment 1, a single-factor (preview type: identical vs. semantically related vs. unrelated) within-subject experimental design was used to investigate whether there is a parafoveal semantic preview effect (SPE) in Tibetan reading. Experiment 2 used a 2 (contextual constraint: high vs. low) × 3 (preview type: identical vs. semantically related vs. unrelated) within-subject experimental design to investigate the influence of contextual constraint on the parafoveal semantic preview effect in Tibetan reading. Supporting the E-Z reader model, the experimental results showed that in Tibetan reading, readers could not obtain semantic preview information from the parafovea, and contextual constraint did not influence this process. However, comparing high- and low-constrained contexts, the latter might be more conducive to extracting semantic preview information from the parafovea. |
Florence Van Meenen; Nicolas Masson; Leen Catrysse; Liesje Coertjens Taking a closer look at how higher education students process and use (discrepant) peer feedback Journal Article In: Learning and Instruction, vol. 84, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{VanMeenen2023, Little is known on how students process peer feedback (PF) and use it to improve their work. We asked 59 participants to read the feedback of two peers on a fictional essay and to revise it, while we recorded their gaze behaviour. Regarding the PF processing subphase, discrepant PF led to more transitions, but only for participants who reported the discrepancy afterwards. Counterintuitively, participants who did not report the discrepancy, showed longer first-pass reading times. Concerning the PF use subphase, dwell time on essay correlated positively with the quality of the revised essays assessed by professors. Participants with a high-quality revision spent more time addressing higher order comments, corrected one or two lower order aspects at a time and proofread in the end, in which they went beyond the suggestions provided in the PF. These insights can be used when designing training to foster students' uptake of (discrepant) PF. |
Martin R. Vasilev; Michael Lowman; Katherine Bills; Fabrice B. R. Parmentier; Julie A. Kirkby Unexpected sounds inhibit the movement of the eyes during reading and letter scanning Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 60, no. 12, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Vasilev2023, Novel sounds that unexpectedly deviate from a repetitive sound sequence are well known to cause distraction. Such unexpected sounds have also been shown to cause global motor inhibition, suggesting that they trigger a neurophysiological response aimed at stopping ongoing actions. Recently, evidence from eye movements has suggested that unexpected sounds also temporarily pause the movements of the eyes during reading, though it is unclear if this effect is due to inhibition of oculomotor planning or inhibition of language processes. Here, we sought to distinguish between these two possibilities by comparing a natural reading task to a letter scanning task that involves similar oculomotor demands to reading, but no higher level lexical processing. Participants either read sentences for comprehension or scanned letter strings of these sentences for the letter ‘o' in three auditory conditions: silence, standard, and novel sounds. The results showed that novel sounds were equally distracting in both tasks, suggesting that they generally inhibit ongoing oculomotor processes independent of lexical processing. These results suggest that novel sounds may have a global suppressive effect on eye-movement control. |
Aaron Veldre; Erik D. Reichle; Lili Yu; Sally Andrews Understanding the visual constraints on lexical processing: New empirical and simulation results Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 152, no. 3, pp. 693–722, 2023. @article{Veldre2023, Word identification is slower and less accurate outside central vision, but the precise relationship between retinal eccentricity and lexical processing is not well specified by models of either word identification or reading. In a seminal eye-movement study, Rayner and Morrison (1981) found that participants made remarkably accurate naming and lexical-decision responses to words displayed more than 3 degrees from the center of vision—even under conditions requiring fixed gaze. However, the validity of these findings is challenged by a range of methodological limitations. We report a series of gaze-contingent lexical-decision and naming experiments that replicate and extend Rayner and Morrison's study to provide a more accurate estimate of how visual constraints delimit lexical processing. Simulations were conducted using the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2012) to assess the implications for understanding eye-movement control during reading. Augmenting the model's assumptions about the impact of both eccentricity and visual crowding on the rate of lexical processing provided good fits to the observed data without impairing the model's ability to simulate benchmark eye-movement effects. The findings are discussed with a view toward the development of a complete model of reading |
Marie Vernet; Stéphanie Bellocchi; Jérémy Danna; Delphine Massendari; Marianne Jover; Yves Chaix; Stéphanie Ducrot The determinants of saccade targeting strategy in neurodevelopmental disorders: The influence of suboptimal reading experience Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 204, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Vernet2023, Whether eye-movements deficits are causal in reading disorders (RD) or rather a consequence of linguistic processing difficulty experienced by disabled readers has been extensively debated. Since RD are frequently comorbid with the Neurofibromatosis type1 (NF1), children with NF1 were used as a comparison group for children with dyslexia in this study. Eye movements were recorded while 21 dyslexic, 20 NF1, and 20 typically developing children performed an oculomotor lateralized bisection task. In this experiment, we manipulated the type of stimulus - discrete (words and strings of hashes) versus continuous (solid lines) - and the visual field where the stimulus was displayed (left vs right). The results showed that (1) only proficient readers (TD and NF1 without RD) showed fully developed oculomotor mechanisms for efficient reading, with a clear preferred viewing location located to the left of the word's centre in both visual fields, and fine-tuned saccade targeting guided by the between-character space information and (2) NF1 poor readers mirrored the dyslexic eye movement behaviour, with less accuracy and more variability in saccadic programming, no sensitivity to the discreteness of the stimuli, particularly in the left visual field. We concluded that disruption to oculomotor behaviour reflects the fact that many of the processes involved in reading are not yet automatized for children with RD, independently of NF1. This suggests that the differences in saccade targeting strategy between children with and without RD would be secondary consequences of their reduced reading experience. |
Margreet Vogelzang; Nanna Fuhrhop; Tobias Mundhenk; Esther Ruigendijk Influence of capitalisation and presence of an article in noun phrase recognition in German: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 294–311, 2023. @article{Vogelzang2023, Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus be context-dependent, that is, dependent on other cues. Precisely this context dependency is investigated in the current study: Is there an effect of capitalisation on reading and is this affected by the presence of other cues such as a determiner (specifically, an article)?. Methods: We ran an eye-tracking study with 30 German-speaking adults, measuring fixations during sentence reading. Critical NPs either contained correctly capitalised nouns or not and were presented either with or without a determiner. Results: The results show that both the presence of capitalisation on the noun and the presence of a determiner led to faster reading. When no determiner was present to signal the NP, the presence of noun capitalisation aided reading most. Conclusions: From these results, we conclude that the influence of capitalisation is indeed context dependent: Capitalisation aids processing most when no other cue is present. Thus, different cues play a role in NP recognition. Based on these findings, we argue that noun capitalisation should not be studied in isolation. We argue that a better understanding of capitalisation as a reading aid is relevant for teaching reading strategies. |
Katie Von Holzen; Sandrien Ommen; Katherine S. White; Thierry Nazzi The impact of phonological biases on mispronunciation sensitivity and novel accent adaptation Journal Article In: Language Learning and Development, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 303–322, 2023. @article{VonHolzen2023, Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers' lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers are exposed to a novel accent in which these changes occur systematically. The flexibility to deal with different types of variation may not be the same for toddlers learning different first languages, however, as language structure shapes early phonological biases. We examined French-learning 19-month-olds' sensitivity and adaptation to a novel accent that shifted either the standard pronunciation of /a/ from [a] to [ɛ] (Experiment 1) or the standard pronunciation of /p/ from [p] to [t] (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, French-learning toddlers recognized words with /a/ produced as [ɛ], regardless of whether they were previously exposed to an accent that contained this vowel shift or not. In Experiment 2, toddlers did not recognize words with /p/ pronounced as [t] at test unless they were first familiarized with an accent that contained this consonant shift. These findings are consistent with evidence that French-learning toddlers privilege consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Together with previous work, these results demonstrate both differences and similarities in how French- and English-learning children treat variation, in line with their language-specific phonological biases. |
Andi Wang; Ana Pellicer-Sánchez Examining the effectiveness of bilingual subtitles for comprehension: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 882–905, 2023. @article{Wang2023b, The present study examined the relative effectiveness of bilingual subtitles for L2 viewing comprehension, compared to other subtitling types. Learners' allocation of attention to the image and subtitles/captions in different viewing conditions, as well as the relationship between attention and comprehension, were also investigated. A total of 112 Chinese learners of English watched an English documentary clip in one of four conditions (bilingual subtitles, captions, L1 subtitles, no subtitles) while their eye movements were recorded. The results revealed that bilingual subtitles were as beneficial as L1 subtitles for comprehension, which both outscored captions and no subtitles. Participants using bilingual subtitles spent significantly more time processing L1 than L2 lines. L1 lines in bilingual subtitles were processed significantly longer than in L1 subtitles, but L2 lines were processed significantly shorter than in captions. No significant relationship was found between the processing time and comprehension for either the L1 or L2 lines of bilingual subtitles. |
Danhui Wang; Man Zeng; Han Zhao; Lei Gao; Shan Li; Zibei Niu; Xuejun Bai; Xiaolei Gao Effects of syllable boundaries in Tibetan reading Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 314, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Wang2023, Interword spaces exist in the texts of many languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In most cases, interword spaces, as a kind of word boundary information, play an important role in the reading process of readers. Tibetan also uses alphabetic writing, its text has no spaces between words as word boundary markers. Instead, there are intersyllable tshegs (“."), which are superscript dots. Interword spaces play an important role in reading as word boundary information. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate the role of tshegs and what effect replacing tshegs with spaces will have on Tibetan reading. To answer these questions, Experiment 1 was conducted in which 72 Tibetan undergraduates read three-syllable-boundary conditions (normal, spaced, and untsheged). However, in Experiment 1, because we performed the experimental operations of deleting tshegs and replacing tshegs, the spatial information distribution of Tibetan sentences under different operating conditions was different, which may have a certain potential impact on the experimental results. To rule out the underlying confounding factor, in Experiment 2, 58 undergraduates read sentences for both untsheged and alternating-color conditions. Overall, the global and local analyses revealed that tshegs, spaces, and alternating-color markers as syllable boundaries can help readers segment syllables in Tibetan reading. In Tibetan reading, both spaces and tshegs are effective visual syllable segmentation cues, and spaces are more effective visual syllable segmentation cues than tshegs. |
Jingwen Wang; Jinmian Yang; Chris Biemann; Xingshan Li Mechanism of semantic processing of lexicalized and novel compound words: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 49, no. 11, pp. 1812–1822, 2023. @article{Wang2023f, The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information ofcompound words with contexts in the present study. By manipulating the temporary plausibility of the first constituent through varying the preceding verb, we aimed to investigate how readers process semantic information of compound words during normal reading. A significant plausibility effect pattern in the first constituent region was observed for the four-character novel words, but not for the lexicalized compound words and two-character novel compound words. However, for both two-character and four-character novel compound words, a reverse plausibility effect was found in the second constituent region. This was not the case for lexicalized compound words. These results indicate that novel compound words are integrated with the context in a decompositional manner, while lexicalized compound words are integrated holistically. |
Tao Wang; Mingyao Geng; Yue Wang; Min Zhao; Tongquan Zhou; Yiming Yang Chinese EFL learners different from English natives in cataphora resolution: Evidence from eye-tracking studies Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Wang2023i, Previous studies on English natives have shown that encountering an English cataphoric pronoun triggers an active search for its antecedent and this searching process is modulated by syntactic constraints. It remains unknown whether the conclusion is universal to EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, particularly those with distinct L1 like Chinese in linguistic typology. Therefore, this study used two eye-tracking experiments to investigate how Chinese EFL learners resolve English cataphora. The experiments adopted the gender-mismatch paradigm. Experiment 1 investigated whether Chinese EFL learners with different proficiency would adopt the similar processing pattern to English natives and found that gender congruency elicited longer reading times than gender incongruency between the first potential antecedent and the cataphoric pronoun, the effect early observed in high-proficiency relative to low-proficiency learners. Experiment 2 explored whether the cataphora resolution process was modulated by Binding Principle B and revealed that longer first fixation durations and first pass reading times were observed in gender-mismatch than in gender-match conditions no matter the antecedents are binding-accessible or not while longer regression path durations occurred in gender-mismatch than in gender-match conditions only as the antecedents are binding-accessible. Taken together, these results indicate that Chinese EFL learners also adopt an active search mechanism to resolve cataphoric pronouns, yet along a processing path distinct from English natives'. Specifically, Chinese EFL learners predictively link a cataphoric pronoun to the first potential antecedent in the sentence but only a gender-matching antecedent can prompt them to engage in deep processing of the antecedent. Moreover, the processing time varies with the learners' English proficiency. Furthermore, unlike native English speakers' early application of syntactic constraints in their cataphora resolution, Chinese EFL learners try to establish co-reference relations between cataphoric pronouns and antecedents regardless of following or flouting Binding Principle B in early processing stages whereas they exclusively link the cataphoric pronouns to the binding-accessible antecedents in late processing stages. This study adds evidence to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis whereby L2 learners resort to lexical prior to syntactic cues to process sentences in general, which is just opposite to the fashion adopted by the natives. |
Youxi Wang; Suke Duan; Guojie Ma; Wei Shen Segmentation of spoken overlapping ambiguity strings in chinese: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 66, no. 12, pp. 4913–4933, 2023. @article{Wang2023k, PURPOSE: Using the printed-word paradigm with eye tracking, this study conducted three experiments to examine (a) how multiple words in spoken overlapping ambiguity strings (OASs) are activated, (b) how word frequency influences the word segmentation of spoken OASs, and (c) whether the multiple words in spoken OASs are activated competitively or independently. METHOD: In this study, participants listened to a four-character spoken OAS (ABCD) and were presented with a visual display composed of a semantic associate of the "middle word" (BC; Experiments 1 and 2) or the "left word" (AB; Experiment 3) and two distractors. In Experiment 1, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be higher than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 2, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be either higher or lower than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 3, participants listened to either spoken OASs (ABCD) or spoken unambiguous strings (ABEF). RESULTS: In Experiment 1, we observed a significant semantic competition effect; that is, more fixations fell on the semantic competitors than on distractors, suggesting that the semantic information of the middle words in the spoken OASs was activated. In Experiment 2, the semantic competition effect was only observed in the high-frequency condition and was absent in the low-frequency condition. In Experiment 3, the results showed significant semantic competition effects for the left words under both conditions, and the observed effect was similar between the ambiguity condition and the control condition. CONCLUSIONS: These findings show that multiple words in spoken OASs are all activated and the activation level is modulated by word frequency. In addition, multiple words in the spoken OASs may be processed independently during spoken comprehension. |
Kim Lara Weiss; Stefan Hawelka; Florian Hutzler; Sarah Schuster Stronger functional connectivity during reading contextually predictable words in slow readers Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Weiss2023, The effect of word predictability is well-documented in terms of local brain activation, but less is known about the functional connectivity among those regions associated with processing predictable words. Evidence from eye movement studies showed that the effect is much more pronounced in slow than in fast readers, suggesting that speed-impaired readers rely more on sentence context to compensate for their difficulties with visual word recognition. The present study aimed to investigate differences in functional connectivity of fast and slow readers within core regions associated with processing predictable words. We hypothesize a stronger synchronization between higher-order language areas, such as the left middle temporal (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and the left occipito-temporal cortex (OTC) in slow readers. Our results show that slow readers exhibit more functional correlations among these connections; especially between the left IFG and OTC. We interpret our results in terms of the lexical quality hypothesis which postulates a stronger involvement of semantics on orthographic processing in (speed-)impaired readers. |
Ana Werkmann Horvat; Marianna Bolognesi; Nadja Althaus Attention to the source domain of conventional metaphorical expressions: Evidence from an eye tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 215, pp. 131–144, 2023. @article{WerkmannHorvat2023, This study investigates whether the metaphorical status of conventional expressions can be reactivated when elements of the source domain are present in the context. In indirect metaphors the source domain (or literal meaning) is not expressed (e.g., The father cut the budget). The literal meaning of cutting remains latently encoded in the predicate and readers' attention is not required to move from the finance domain to the domain of physical cuts. Such conventional metaphoric expressions are likely to be processed via lexical disambiguation of a polysemous (metaphorical) verb. Using an eye tracking combined with a forced-choice semantic relatedness task we investigated whether by adding linguistic material referring to the source domain (e.g., father cut the budget like grass), we can direct readers' attention to the source domain of the metaphorical predicate and stimulate them to interpret conventional metaphorical expressions by means of cross-domain mapping. The results indicate that in the reactivated condition participants dwell on the object (budget) significantly longer in their second run and when they regress to it after the final region than where there is no source domain activation. These findings may offer new insight into the limited experimental evidence related to the deliberate metaphor theory. |
Alex L. White; Kendrick N. Kay; Kenny A. Tang; Jason D. Yeatman Engaging in word recognition elicits highly specific modulations in visual cortex Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 33, no. 7, pp. 1308–1320, 2023. @article{White2023, A person's cognitive state determines how their brain responds to visual stimuli. The most common such effect is a response enhancement when stimuli are task relevant and attended rather than ignored. In this fMRI study, we report a surprising twist on such attention effects in the visual word form area (VWFA), a region that plays a key role in reading. We presented participants with strings of letters and visually similar shapes, which were either relevant for a specific task (lexical decision or gap localization) or ignored (during a fixation dot color task). In the VWFA, the enhancement of responses to attended stimuli occurred only for letter strings, whereas non-letter shapes evoked smaller responses when attended than when ignored. The enhancement of VWFA activity was accompanied by strengthened functional connectivity with higher-level language regions. These task-dependent modulations of response magnitude and functional connectivity were specific to the VWFA and absent in the rest of visual cortex. We suggest that language regions send targeted excitatory feedback into the VWFA only when the observer is trying to read. This feedback enables the discrimination of familiar and nonsense words and is distinct from generic effects of visual attention. |
Veronica Whitford; Narissa Byers; Gillian A. O'Driscoll; Debra Titone Eye movements and the perceptual span in disordered reading: A comparison of schizophrenia and dyslexia Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Research: Cognition, vol. 34, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Whitford2023, Increasing evidence of a common neurodevelopmental etiology between schizophrenia and developmental dyslexia suggests that neurocognitive functions, such as reading, may be similarly disrupted. However, direct comparisons of reading performance in these disorders have yet to be conducted. To address this gap in the literature, we employed a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to examine sentence-level reading fluency and perceptual span (breadth of parafoveal processing) in adults with schizophrenia (dataset from Whitford et al., 2013) and psychiatrically healthy adults with dyslexia (newly collected dataset). We found that the schizophrenia and dyslexia groups exhibited similar reductions in sentence-level reading fluency (e.g., slower reading rates, more regressions) compared to matched controls. Similar reductions were also found for standardized language/reading and executive functioning measures. However, despite these reductions, the dyslexia group exhibited a larger perceptual span (greater parafoveal processing) than the schizophrenia group, potentially reflecting a disruption in normal foveal-parafoveal processing dynamics. Taken together, our findings suggest that reading and reading-related functions are largely similarly disrupted in schizophrenia and dyslexia, providing additional support for a common neurodevelopmental etiology. |
Bogusława Whyatt; Olga Witczak; Ewa Tomczak-Łukaszewska; Olha Lehka-Paul The proof of the translation process is in the reading of the target text: An eyetracking reception study Journal Article In: Ampersand, vol. 11, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Whyatt2023, This article is an attempt to bridge the divide between translation process research (TPR) which has investigated how translators as specialised bilingual professionals use their expertise to translate texts and translation reception which explores how the texts are read and received by the target language readers. Over the last thirty years, TPR has provided empirically grounded findings to demonstrate the complexity of the cognitive processes in the translator's mind but much less empirical interest has been paid to how translated texts are read and processed by the readers. To redress this imbalance, we hypothesise that the cognitive effort invested in reading a translated text can be taken as proof of how successful the translation process has been. We report on an exploratory study in which two groups of participants read a high-quality and a low-quality translation of the same text while their eye movements were recorded by an eyetracker. We compare the readers' cognitive effort indexed by character-adjusted dwell time, number of runs and re-reading in the second and third run with the translators' character-adjusted cognitive effort invested in producing the target texts. The results show that the relationship between the translation process and the reading experience is not straightforward and depends on the quality of the target text. |
Yushu Wu; Chunyu Kit Hong Kong Corpus of Chinese Sentence and Passage Reading Journal Article In: Scientific Data, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Wu2023e, Recent years have witnessed a mushrooming of reading corpora that have been built by means of eye tracking. This article showcases the Hong Kong Corpus of Chinese Sentence and Passage Reading (HKC for brevity), featured by a natural reading of logographic scripts and unspaced words. It releases 28 eye-movement measures of 98 native speakers reading simplified Chinese in two scenarios: 300 one-line single sentences and 7 multiline passages of 5,250 and 4,967 word tokens, respectively. To verify its validity and reusability, we carried out (generalised) linear mixed-effects modelling on the capacity of visual complexity, word frequency, and reading scenario to predict eye-movement measures. The outcomes manifest significant impacts of these typical (sub)lexical factors on eye movements, replicating previous findings and giving novel ones. The HKC provides a valuable resource for exploring eye movement control; the study contrasts the different scenarios of single-sentence and passage reading in hopes of shedding new light on both the universal nature of reading and the unique characteristics of Chinese reading. |
Xinyi Xia; Yanping Liu; Lili Yu; Erik D. Reichle Are there preferred viewing locations in Chinese reading? Evidence from eye-tracking and computer simulations Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 607–625, 2023. @article{Xia2023, The Chinese writing system is different from English in that individual words both comprise one to four characters and are not separated by clear word boundaries (e.g., interword spaces). These differences raise the question of how readers of Chinese know where to move their eyes to support efficient lexical processing? The widely accepted default-targeting hypothesis suggests that Chinese readers direct their eyes to a small number of preferred-viewing locations (PVLs), such as the beginning or middle of upcoming words. In this article, we report two eye-movement experiments testing this hypothesis. In both experiments, participants read sentences comprising entirely two-character words, but either without (Experiment 1) or with (Experiment 2) explicit knowledge of this structure prior to their participation. The results of both experiments indicate the absence of PVLs. Simulations using implemented versions of a simple oculomotor-based hypothesis, two variants of the default-targeting hypothesis, and the hypothesis that saccade lengths are modulated as a function of estimated parafoveal-processing difficulty (i.e., dynamic-adjustment hypothesis) suggest that the latter provides the best account of saccadictargeting during Chinese reading. These results are discussed in relation to broader issues of eye-movement control during reading and how models of such must be modified to provide more accurate accounts of the reading of Chinese and other languages |
Xue-Zhen Xiao; Gaoding Jia; Aiping Wang Semantic preview benefit of Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Language Learning and Development, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Xiao2023a, When reading Chinese, skilled native readers regularly gain a preview benefit (PB) when the parafoveal word is orthographically or semantically related to the target word. Evidence shows that non-native, beginning Chinese readers can obtain an orthographic PB during Chinese reading, which indicates the parafoveal processing of low-level visual information. However, whether non-native Chinese readers who are more proficient in Chinese can make use of high-level parafoveal information remains unknown. Therefore, this study examined parafoveal processing during Chinese reading among Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals with high Chinese proficiency and compared their PB effects with those from native Chinese readers. Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals demonstrated both orthographic and semantic PB but did not show phonological PB and only differed from native Chinese in the identical PB when preview characters were identical to the targets. These findings demonstrate that non-native Chinese readers can extract semantic information from parafoveal preview during Chinese reading and highlight the modulation of parafoveal processing efficiency by reading proficiency. The results are in line with the direct route to access the mental lexicon of visual Chinese characters among non-native Chinese speakers. |
Jianping Xiong; Lili Yu; Aaron Veldre; Erik D. Reichle; Sally Andrews A multitask comparison of word- and character-frequency effects in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 793–811, 2023. @article{Xiong2023, In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of twocharacter target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The character-frequency effects, however, were facilitatory for naming but inhibitory for both lexical decision and reading. Further correlational analyses indicated that participants' performance (as measured using overall response latencies and the sizes of the frequency effects) was not consistent across tasks but was relatively reliable within the lexical-decision and reading tasks. These findings are discussed in relation to what is known about the reading of Chinese versus alphabetic scripts, word-identification tasks, and models of word identification. |
Licheng Xue; Ying Xiao; Tianying Qing; Urs Maurer; Wei Wang; Huidong Xue; Xuchu Weng; Jing Zhao Attention to the fine-grained aspect of words in the environment emerges in preschool children with high reading ability Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 85–96, 2023. @article{Xue2023, Attention to words is closely related to the process of learning to read. However, it remains unclear how attention to words in environmental print (such as words on product labels) is changed with the growth of preschool children's reading ability. We thus used eye tracking technique to compare attention to words in environmental print in children at low (32, 15 males, 5.12 years) and high (32, 17 males, 5.16 years) reading levels during a free viewing task. To characterize which aspects of visual word form children attend to, we constructed three types of stimuli embedded in the same context: words in environment print, symbol strings (similar shape to words but without strokes), and character strings (comparable with words in the number of strokes and the structures). We observed that children at both reading levels showed lower percentages of fixations and fixation time in words relative to symbol strings, suggesting they start to attend to the coarse aspect of visual word form. Interestingly, only children at higher reading level showed lower percentages of fixations and fixation time for words relative to character strings, suggesting that attention to the fine-grained aspect of visual word form emerged, and was closely to reading ability. |
Shuwei Xue; Jana Lüdtke; Arthur M. Jacobs Once known, twice hedonic: Enjoying Shakespeare's sonnets through rereading-a deep learning perspective Journal Article In: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Xue2023a, Reading poetry is a popular hobby, but what does it involve in terms of the mind? Through quantitative nar- rative analysis, we computed seven surface features and two affective–semantic features of Shakespeare's sonnets and then added them to predict readers' eye movements during reading. Using the neural nets model, we found that the gaze duration, the regression time, the total reading time, and the fixation probability all depended mainly on surface features, no matter how often a poem was read. We also found that word-based valence and arousal were important as well and became more important in the course of repeated readings. In the last reading, valence became as important as the main surface features. Findings imply that the first impression of a poem is due mainly to surface features but then becomes enriched by meaning and mood. |
Ming Yan; Yingyi Luo; Jinger Pan Monolingual and bilingual phonological activation in Cantonese Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 751–761, 2023. @article{Yan2023, Previous research has provided evidence for cross-language phonological activation during visual word recognition. However, such findings mainly came from alphabetic languages, and readers' familiarity with the two scripts might differ. The present study aimed to test whether such cross-language phonological activation can be observed in Chinese, a logographic script, without the confounding factor of script familiarity as readers read the same script in different languages. Cantonese–Mandarin bilinguals were tested in an eye-tracking experiment in which they were instructed to read sentences silently. A target word in the sentence was replaced by either a homophone in both Cantonese and Mandarin, a homophone in Cantonese or in Mandarin only, or an unrelated character. The results showed that native Cantonese readers could activate phonological representations of L1 and L2 while reading Chinese sentences silently. However, the degree to which they relied on phonological decoding in L1 and L2 varied in the two languages. |
Ming Yan; Jinger Pan Joint effects of individual reading skills and word properties on Chinese children's eye movements during sentence reading Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Yan2023a, Word recognition during the reading of continuous text has received much attention. While a large body of research has investigated how linguistic properties of words affect eye movements during reading, it remains to be established how individual differences in reading skills affect momentary cognitive processes during sentence reading among typically developing Chinese readers. The present study set out to test the joint influences of word properties and individual reading skills on eye movements during reading among Chinese children. We recorded eye movements of 30 grade 3 (G3) children and 27 grade 5 (G5) children when they read sentences silently for comprehension. Predictors of linear mixed models included word frequency, visual complexity, and launch site distance, in addition to the participants' offline psychometric performances in rapid naming, morphological awareness, word segmenting, and character recognition. The results showed that word properties affected word recognition during sentence reading in both G3 and G5 children. Moreover, word segmenting predicted the G3 children's fixation durations and the G5 children's fixation location, whereas rapid naming predicted the G5 children's fixation duration. Implications are discussed based on the current findings, in light of how different literacy skills contribute to reading development. |
Eva M. Nunnemann; Helene Kreysa; Pia Knoeferle The effects of referential gaze in spoken language comprehension: Human speaker vs. virtual agent listener gaze Journal Article In: Frontiers in Communication, vol. 8, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Nunnemann2023, Introduction: Four studies addressed effects of human speaker gaze vs. virtual agent listener gaze on eye movements during spoken sentence comprehension. Method: Participants saw videos in which a static scene depicting three characters was presented on a screen. Eye movements were recorded as participants listened to German subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences describing an interaction between two of these characters. Participants' task was to verify whether the sentence matched a schematic depiction of the event. Two critical factors were manipulated across all four experiments: (1) whether the human speaker—uttering the sentence—was visible, and (2) whether the agent listener was present. Moreover, in Experiments 2 and 4, the target second noun phrase (NP2) was made inaudible, and in Experiments 3 and 4, the gaze time course of the agent listener was altered: it looked at the NP2 referent about 400 ms before the speaker did. These manipulations served to increase the value of the speaker's and listener's gaze cues for correctly anticipating the NP2 referent. Results: Human speaker gaze led to increased fixations of the NP2 referent in all experiments, but primarily after the onset of its mention. Only in Experiment 3 did participants reliably anticipate the NP2 referent, in this case making use of both the human speaker's and the virtual agent listener's gaze. In all other cases, virtual agent listener gaze had no effect on visual anticipation of the NP2 referent, even when it was the exclusive cue. Discussion: Such information on the use of gaze cues can refine theoretical models of situated language processing and help to develop virtual agents that act as competent communication partners in conversations with human interlocutors. |
Ryan M. O'Leary; Jonathan Neukam; Thomas A. Hansen; Alexander J. Kinney; Nicole Capach; Mario A. Svirsky; Arthur Wingfield In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 27, pp. 1–22, 2023. @article{OLeary2023, Speech that has been artificially accelerated through time compression produces a notable deficit in recall of the speech content. This is especially so for adults with cochlear implants (CI). At the perceptual level, this deficit may be due to the sharply degraded CI signal, combined with the reduced richness of compressed speech. At the cognitive level, the rapidity of time-compressed speech can deprive the listener of the ordinarily available processing time present when speech is delivered at a normal speech rate. Two experiments are reported. Experiment 1 was conducted with 27 normal-hearing young adults as a proof-of-concept demonstration that restoring lost processing time by inserting silent pauses at linguistically salient points within a time-compressed narrative (“time-restoration”) returns recall accuracy to a level approximating that for a normal speech rate. Noise vocoder conditions with 10 and 6 channels reduced the effectiveness of time-restoration. Pupil dilation indicated that additional effort was expended by participants while attempting to process the time-compressed narratives, with the effortful demand on resources reduced with time restoration. In Experiment 2, 15 adult CI users tested with the same (unvocoded) materials showed a similar pattern of behavioral and pupillary responses, but with the notable exception that meaningful recovery of recall accuracy with time-restoration was limited to a subgroup of CI users identified by better working memory spans, and better word and sentence recognition scores. Results are discussed in terms of sensory-cognitive interactions in data-limited and resource-limited processes among adult users of cochlear implants. |
Henri Olkoniemi; Sohvi Halonen; Penny M. Pexman; Tuomo Häikiö Children's processing of written irony: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 238, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Olkoniemi2023, Ironic language is challenging for many people to understand, and particularly for children. Comprehending irony is considered a major milestone in children's development, as it requires inferring the intentions of the person who is being ironic. However, the theories of irony comprehension generally do not address developmental changes, and there are limited data on children's processing of verbal irony. In the present pre-registered study, we examined, for the first time, how children process and comprehend written irony in comparison to adults. Seventy participants took part in the study (35 10-year-old children and 35 adults). In the experiment, participants read ironic and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded. They also responded to a text memory question and an inference question after each story, and children's levels of reading skills were measured. Results showed that for both children and adults comprehending written irony was more difficult than for literal texts (the “irony effect”) and was more challenging for children than for adults. Moreover, although children showed longer overall reading times than adults, processing of ironic stories was largely similar between children and adults. One group difference was that for children, more accurate irony comprehension was qualified by faster reading times whereas for adults more accurate irony comprehension involved slower reading times. Interestingly, both age groups were able to adapt to task context and improve their irony processing across trials. These results provide new insights about the costs of irony and development of the ability to overcome them. |
Jinger Pan; Aiping Wang; Catherine McBride; Jeung Ryeul Cho; Ming Yan Online assessment of parafoveal morphological processing/Awareness during reading among Chinese and Korean adults Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 232–252, 2023. @article{Pan2023, Purpose: The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity. Method: Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated the relation between the homographic parafoveal preview morphemes and the target words in Chinese and Korean, respectively, in two experiments. We tested 57 Chinese and 45 Korean university students. Together with baseline conditions in which the previews were either identical or unrelated to the target, we had two critical conditions in which the homographs shared/did not share the same morphemic meaning (i.e., same morpheme/different morpheme) with the target morpheme. Results: Across the two experiments, the differences between the same and different morpheme conditions in a number of eye movement indices were significant, consistently showing that appropriate morpho-semantic information facilitates lexical processing. The different-morpheme previews facilitated the target word processing in Chinese but not in Korean reading. Conclusion: These findings suggest that morphemic meanings are activated early on during word recognition in Chinese, a logographic orthography, and Korean Hangul, a phonologically transparent writing system, before the word is fixated upon. |
Yali Pan; Tzvetan Popov; Steven Frisson; Ole Jensen Saccades are locked to the phase of alpha oscillations during natural reading Journal Article In: PLoS Biology, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Pan2023b, AU We:saccade Pleaseconfirmthatallheadinglevelsarerepresentedcorrectly 3 to 5 times per second when reading. However,:little is known about the neuronal mechanisms coordinating the oculomotor and visual system during such rapid processing. Here, we ask if brain oscillations play a role in the temporal coordination of the visuomotor integration. We simultaneously acquired MEG and eye-tracking data while participants read sentences silently. Every sentence was embedded with a target word of either high or low lexical frequency. Our key finding demonstrated that saccade onsets were locked to the phase of alpha oscillations (8 to 13 Hz), and in particular, for saccades towards low frequency words. Source modelling demonstrated that the alpha oscillations to which the saccades were locked, were generated in the right-visual motor cortex (BA 7). Our findings suggest that the alpha oscillations serve to time the processing between the oculomotor and visual systems during natural reading, and that this coordination becomes more pronounced for demanding words. |
Adam J. Parker; Milla Räsänen; Timothy J. Slattery What is the optimal position of low-frequency words across line boundaries? An eye movement investigation Journal Article In: Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 161–173, 2023. @article{Parker2023, When displaying text on a page or a screen, only a finite number of characters can be presented on a single line. If the text exceeds that finite value, then text wrapping occurs. Often this process results in longer, more difficult to process words being positioned at the start of a line. We conducted an eye movement study to examine how this artefact of text wrapping affects passage reading. This allowed us to answer the question: should word difficulty be used when determining line breaks? Thirty-nine participants read 20 passages where low-frequency target words were either line-initial or line-final. There was no statistically reliable effect of our manipulation on passage reading time or comprehension despite several effects at a local level. Regarding our primary research question, the evidence suggests that word difficulty may not need to be accounted for when determining line breaks and assigning words to new lines. |
Marco Pedrotti; Anne Françoise Chambrier; Paolo Ruggeri; Jasinta Dewi; Myrto Atzemian; Catherine Thevenot; Catherine Martinet; Philippe Terrier Raw eye tracking data of healthy adults reading aloud words, pseudowords and numerals Journal Article In: Data in Brief, vol. 49, pp. 1–6, 2023. @article{Pedrotti2023, This paper describes data from de Chambrier et al. (2023). The dataset [2] contains raw eye tracking data of 36 healthy adults, collected using an EyeLink 1000 (SR Research Ltd., ON, Canada) during an on-screen reading task. Participants read 96 items including words, pseudowords and numerals. Each item was presented at the center of the screen until the participant produced an oral response and pressed the keyboard's space bar. Part of the data were analyzed to extract key metrics such as fixation number, fixation duration, saccade number, and saccade amplitude identified by the EyeLink 1000 [1]. Reuse potential includes (but is not limited to) pupil diameter data analysis, identification of fixations and saccades using custom algorithms, and secondary analyses using participant demographics (age, gender) as independent variables. |
Maud Pélissier; Dag Haugland; Bjørn Handeland; Beatrice Zitong Urland; Allison Wetterlin; Linda Wheeldon; Steven Frisson Competition between form-related words in bilingual sentence reading: Effects of language proficiency Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 384–401, 2023. @article{Pelissier2023, Sentence reading involves constant competition between lexical candidates. Previous research with monolinguals has shown that the neighbours of a read word are inhibited, making their retrieval as a subsequent target more difficult, but the duration of this interference may depend on reading skills. In this study, we examined neighbour priming effects in sentence reading among proficient Norwegian–English bilinguals reading in their L2. We investigated the effects of the distance between prime and target (short vs. long) and the nature of the overlap between the two words (beginning or end), and related these to differences in individual cognitive skills. Our results replicated the inhibition effects found in monolinguals, albeit slightly delayed. Interference between form-related words was affected by the L2 reading skills and, crucially, by the phonological decoding abilities of the bilingual reader. We discuss the results in light of competition models of bilingual reading as well as episodic memory accounts. |
A. I. Pérez; E. Schmidt; I. M. Tsimpli Inferential evaluation and revision in L1 and L2 text comprehension: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Bilingualism, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Perez2023, Text comprehension frequently demands the resolution of no longer plausible interpretations to build an accurate situation model, an ability that might be especially challenging during second language comprehension. Twenty-two native English speakers (L1) and twenty-two highly proficient non-native English speakers (L2) were presented with short narratives in English. Each text required the evaluation and revision of an initial prediction. Eye movements in the text and a comprehension sentence indicated less efficient performance in the L2 than in L1 comprehension, in both inferential evaluation and revision. Interestingly, these effects were determined by individual differences in inhibitory control and linguistic proficiency. Higher inhibitory control reduced the time rereading previous parts of the text (better evaluation) as well as revisiting the text before answering the sentence (better revision) in L2 comprehenders, whereas higher proficiency reduced the time in the sentence when the story was coherent, suggesting better general comprehension in both languages. |
Katharina Pittrich; Sascha Schroeder Reading vertically and horizontally mirrored text: An eye movement investigation Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 76, no. 2, pp. 271–283, 2023. @article{Pittrich2023, This study examined the cognitive processes involved in reading vertically and horizontally mirrored text. We tracked participants' eye movements while they were reading the Potsdam Sentence Corpus which consists of 144 sentences with target words that are manipulated for length and frequency. Sentences were presented in three different conditions: In the normal condition, text was presented with upright letters, in the vertical condition, each letter was flipped around its vertical (left-right) axis while in the horizontal condition, letters were flipped around their horizontal (up-down) axis. Results show that reading was slowed down in both mirror conditions and that horizontal mirroring was particularly disruptive. In both conditions, we found larger effects of word length than in the normal condition indicating that participants read the sentences more serially and effortfully. Similarly, frequency effects were larger in both mirror conditions in later reading measures (gaze duration, go-past time, and total reading time) and particularly pronounced in the horizontal condition. This indicates that reading mirrored script involves a late checking mechanism that is particularly important for reading a horizontally mirrored script. Together, our findings demonstrate that mirroring affects both early visual identification and later linguistic processes. |
Sotiris Plainis; Emmanouil Ktistakis; Miltiadis K. Tsilimbaris Presbyopia correction with multifocal contact lenses: Evaluation of silent reading performance using eye movements analysis Journal Article In: Contact Lens and Anterior Eye, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 1–8, 2023. @article{Plainis2023, Purpose: Many activities of daily living rely on reading, thus is not surprising that complaints from presbyopes originate in reading difficulties rather in visual acuity. Here, the effectiveness of presbyopia correction with multifocal contact lenses (CLs) is evaluated using an eye-fixation based method of silent reading performance. Μethods: Visual performance of thirty presbyopic volunteers (age: 50 ± 5 yrs) was assessed monocularly and binocularly following 15 days of wear of monthly disposable CLs (AIR OPTIX™ plus HydraGlyde™, Alcon Laboratories) with: (a) single vision (SV) lenses – uncorrected for near (b) aspheric multifocal (MF) CLs. LogMAR acuity was measured with ETDRS charts. Reading performance was evaluated using standard IReST paragraphs displayed on a screen (0.4 logMAR print size at 40 cm distance). Eye movements were monitored with an infrared eyetracker (Eye-Link II, SR Research Ltd). Data analysis included computation of reading speed, fixation duration, fixations per word and percentage of regressions. Results: Average reading speed was 250 ± 68 and 235 ± 70 wpm, binocularly and monocularly, with SV CLs, improving statistically significantly to 280 ± 67 (p = 0.002) and 260 ± 59 wpm (p = 0.01), respectively, with MF CLs. Moreover, fixation duration, fixations per word and ex-Gaussian parameter of fixation duration, μ, showed a statistically significant improvement when reading with MF CLs, with fixation duration exhibiting the stronger correlation (r = 0.79, p < 0.001) with improvement in reading speed. The correlation between improvement in VA and reading speed was moderate (r = 0.46 |
Eva Puimège; Maribel Montero Perez; Elke Peters Promoting L2 acquisition of multiword units through textually enhanced audiovisual input: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 471–492, 2023. @article{Puimege2023, This study examines the effect of textual enhancement on learners' attention to and learning of multiword units from captioned audiovisual input. We adopted a within-participants design in which 28 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) watched a captioned video containing enhanced (underlined) and unenhanced multiword units. Using eye-tracking, we measured learners' online processing of the multiword units as they appeared in the captions. Form recall pre- and posttests measured learners' acquisition of the target items. The results of mixed effects models indicate that enhanced items received greater visual attention, with longer reading times, less single word skipping and more rereading. Further, a positive relationship was found between amount of visual attention and learning odds: items fixated longer, particularly during the first pass, were more likely to be recalled in an immediate posttest. Our findings provide empirical support for the positive effect of visual attention on form recall of multiword units encountered in captioned television. The results also suggest that item difficulty and amount of attention were more important than textual enhancement in predicting learning gains. |
Ying Que; Yueyuan Zheng; Janet H. Hsiao; Xiao Hu Studying the effect of self-selected background music on reading task with eye movements Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Que2023, Using background music (BGM) during learning is a common behavior, yet whether BGM can facilitate or hinder learning remains inconclusive and the underlying mechanism is largely an open question. This study aims to elucidate the effect of self-selected BGM on reading task for learners with different characteristics. Particularly, learners' reading task performance, metacognition, and eye movements were examined, in relation to their personal traits including language proficiency, working memory capacity, music experience and personality. Data were collected from a between-subject experiment with 100 non-native English speakers who were randomly assigned into two groups. Those in the experimental group read English passages with music of their own choice played in the background, while those in the control group performed the same task in silence. Results showed no salient differences on passage comprehension accuracy or metacognition between the two groups. Comparisons on fine-grained eye movement measures reveal that BGM imposed heavier cognitive load on post-lexical processes but not on lexical processes. It was also revealed that students with higher English proficiency level or more frequent BGM usage in daily self-learning/reading experienced less cognitive load when reading with their BGM, whereas students with higher working memory capacity (WMC) invested more mental effort than those with lower WMC in the BGM condition. These findings further scientific understanding of how BGM interacts with cognitive tasks in the foreground, and provide practical guidance for learners and learning environment designers on making the most of BGM for instruction and learning. |
Begoña Arechabaleta Regulez; Silvina Montrul Production, acceptability, and online comprehension of Spanish differential object marking by heritage speakers and L2 learners Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Regulez2023, We analyzed the production, acceptability and online comprehension of Spanish differential object marking (DOM) by two groups of bilingual speakers living in the U.S.: heritage speakers and L2 learners. DOM is the overt marking of direct objects that are higher on the animacy and referentiality scales, such as animate and specific objects in Spanish, marked by the preposition a (Juan ve a María ‘Juan sees DOM María'). Previous studies have reported variability and high omission rates of obligatory DOM in bilingual situations where Spanish is in contact with a non-DOM language.Our study combined different methodologies to tap knowledge of DOM in the two groups. The results showed that heritage speakers and L2 learners (1) exhibited variability with DOM in production (in two oral tasks), comprehension (in an acceptability judgement task), and processing (in an eye-tracking reading task); (2) can integrate DOM into their production, judgments and processing, but they do so inconsistently, and (3) type of task and type of sentence each have an effect on speakers' use of DOM. |
Anja Rettig; Ulrich Schiefele Relations between reading motivation and reading efficiency—evidence from a longitudinal eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 685–709, 2023. @article{Rettig2023, Studies on the relation between children's reading motivation and early developmental stages of reading competence are rare and have neglected on-line measures of reading skill (e.g., eye movements indicating word decoding). For this reason, we investigated the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation on the efficiency of reading processes based on eye-movement data. Moreover, we examined reading efficiency as a mediator of the relation between motivation and comprehension. German elementary school students in Grades 1–3 (N = 131) were tested on three measurement occasions. Specifically, we assessed reading motivation, reading amount, and sentence comprehension at Time 1, reading efficiency at Time 2 (2 months after Time 1), and all of the variables again at Time 3 (10 months after Time 2). Reading efficiency was assessed while children read age-appropriate sentences and comprised measures of first-fixation duration, gaze duration, total reading time, forward-saccade length, and refixation probability. Linear and cross-lagged panel models showed significant favorable relations between intrinsic reading motivation (operationalized as involvement and enjoyment of reading), but not extrinsic reading motivation (operationalized as striving to outperform one's peers), and most measures of reading efficiency, while controlling for gender, grade level, and reading amount. The reverse effects of reading-efficiency indicators on intrinsic reading motivation were all significant. Moreover, the test of the mediation model revealed a significant indirect effect of Time 1 intrinsic reading motivation on Time 3 sentence comprehension mediated by Time 2 reading efficiency. We concluded that intrinsic reading motivation, in contrast to extrinsic reading motivation, facilitates reading comprehension through its effect on reading efficiency, independent of variations in reading amount. |
Tracy Reuter; Carolyn Mazzei; Casey Lew-Williams; Lauren Emberson Infants' lexical comprehension and lexical anticipation abilities are closely linked in early language development Journal Article In: Infancy, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 532–549, 2023. @article{Reuter2023, Theories across cognitive domains propose that anticipating upcoming sensory input supports information processing. In line with this view, prior findings indicate that adults and children anticipate upcoming words during real-time language processing, via such processes as prediction and priming. However, it is unclear if anticipatory processes are strictly an outcome of prior language development or are more entwined with language learning and development. We operationalized this theoretical question as whether developmental emergence of comprehension of lexical items occurs before or concurrently with the anticipation of these lexical items. To this end, we tested infants of ages 12, 15, 18, and 24 months (N = 67) on their abilities to comprehend and anticipate familiar nouns. In an eye-tracking task, infants viewed pairs of images and heard sentences with either informative words (e.g., eat) that allowed them to anticipate an upcoming noun (e.g., cookie), or uninformative words (e.g., see). Findings indicated that infants' comprehension and anticipation abilities are closely linked over developmental time and within individuals. Importantly, we do not find evidence for lexical comprehension in the absence of lexical anticipation. Thus, anticipatory processes are present early in infants' second year, suggesting they are a part of language development rather than solely an outcome of it. |
Stephanie Rich; Jesse A. Harris Global expectations mediate local constraint: Evidence from concessive structures Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 302–327, 2023. @article{Rich2023, Numerous studies have found facilitation for lexical processing in highly constraining contexts. However, less is known about cases in which immediately preceding (local) and broader (global) contextual constraint conflict. In two eye-tracking while reading experiments, local and global context were manipulated independently, creating a critical condition where local context biases towards a word that is incongruent with global context. Global context consisted of a clause introduced by a concessive marker generating broad expectations about upcoming material. Experiment 1 compared high- and low-predictability critical words, whereas Experiment 2 held the critical word constant and manipulated the preceding verb to impose different levels of local constraint. Facilitation from local context was reduced when it was incongruent with global context, supporting models in which information from global and local context is rapidly integrated during early lexical processing over models that would initially prioritise only local or only global context. |
Miriam Rivero-Contreras; Paul E. Engelhardt; Pablo Delgado; David Saldaña Does the timing of visual support affect sentence comprehension? An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Education, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{RiveroContreras2023, Purpose: Recent research suggests that visual elements improve sentence processing for students, even at the university level. However, few studies have systematically examined the timing of visual support in reading. Method: We examined the impact of visual support and its timing on sentence comprehension in a sample of 40 typically developing university students. Across 60 sentences, half with images and half without, participants either viewed images simultaneously with sentences or before sentences. Word frequency was also manipulated. Results: Results showed that visual support facilitated sentence processing and that participants who viewed images before sentences exhibited a lower probability of regressions. Conclusion: In conclusion, incorporating images with text can benefit language comprehension. Moreover, the results suggest implications regarding the timing of visual support. |
Miriam Rivero-Contreras; Paul E. Engelhardt; David Saldaña Do easy-to-read adaptations really facilitate sentence processing for adults with a lower level of education? An experimental eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Learning and Instruction, vol. 84, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{RiveroContreras2023a, The Easy-to-Read guidelines recommend visual support and lexical simplification to facilitate text processing, but few studies have empirically verified the efficacy of these guidelines. This study examined the influence of these recommendations on sentence processing by examining eye movements at the text- and word-level in adult readers. We tested 30 non-university adults (low education level) and 30 university adults (high education level). The experimental task consisted of 60 sentences. Half were accompanied by an image and half were not, and half contained a low-frequency word and half a high-frequency word. Results showed that visual support and lexical simplification facilitated processing in both groups of adults, and non-university adults were significantly slower than university adults at sentence processing. However, lexical simplification resulted in faster processing in the non-university adults' group. Conclusions focus on the mechanisms in which both adaptations benefit readers, and practical implications for reading comprehension. |
Camilo R. Ronderos; Ernesto Guerra; Pia Knoeferle When sequence matters: The processing of contextually biased German verb–object metaphors Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–28, 2023. @article{Ronderos2023, Several studies have investigated the comprehension of decontextualized English nominal metaphors. However, not much is known about how contextualized, non-nominal, non-English metaphors are processed, and how this might inform existing theories of metaphor comprehension. In the current work, we investigate the effects of context and of sequential order for an under-studied type of construction: German verb–object metaphors. In two visual-world, eye-tracking experiments, we manipulated whether a discourse context biased a spoken target utterance toward a metaphoric or a literal interpretation. We also manipulated the order of verb and object in the target utterances (e.g., Stefan interviewt eine Hyäne , ‘Stefan interviews a hyena', verb→object; and Stefan wird eine Hyäne interviewen , ‘Stefan will a hyena interview', object→verb). Experiment 1 shows that contextual cues interacted with sequential order, mediating the processing of verb–object metaphors: When the context biased toward a metaphoric interpretation, participants readily understood the object metaphorically for the verb→object sequence, whereas they likely first understood it literally for the object→verb sequence. Crucially, no such effect of sequential order was found when context biased toward a literal interpretation. Experiment 2 suggests that differences in processing found in Experiment 1 were brought on by the interaction of discourse context and sequential order and not by sequential order alone. We propose ways in which existing theoretical views could be extended to account for these findings. Overall, our study shows the importance of context during figurative language comprehension and highlights the need to test the predictions of metaphor theories on non-English and non-nominal metaphors. |
Mylène Ross-Plourde; Mylène Lachance-Grzela; Andréanne Charbonneau; Mylène Dumont; Annie Roy-Charland Parental stereotypes and cognitive processes: Evidence for a double standard in parenting roles when reading texts Journal Article In: Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 74–82, 2023. @article{RossPlourde2023, While the characteristics associated with fathers have taken on more maternal traits more recently, a similar shift has not been observed for maternal characteristics. The role of mother remains stereotyped, and those who do not adhere to this often face criticism. This study examines the impact of parental stereotypes on the cognitive processes associated with reading. A sample of 32 individuals read 24 experimental passages introducing a parent (mother or father) in a traditional or non-traditional role, and in a neutral or disambiguating context. Results show a significant interaction between the type of role and gender of the parent on reading times. Simple main effect tests revealed that for traditional roles, fixation durations were longer when the protagonist was a father than when the protagonist was a mother. There was no effect of role type for fathers, yet for mothers, fixation durations were longer when they were depicted in non-traditional roles than when they were depicted in traditional roles. This disruption of information processing of schema incongruent content suggests that mothers' parenting stereotypes remain anchored in society and are more rigid than those of fathers, supporting the idea of a double standard in parenting roles. |
Daniela Mertzen; Dario Paape; Brian Dillon; Ralf Engbert; Shravan Vasishth Syntactic and semantic interference in sentence comprehension: Support from English and German eye-tracking data Journal Article In: Glossa Psycholinguistics, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–48, 2023. @article{Mertzen2023, A long-standing debate in the sentence processing literature concerns the time course of syntactic and semantic information processing in online sentence comprehension. The default assumption in cue-based models of parsing is that syntactic and semantic retrieval cues simultaneously guide dependency resolution. When retrieval cues match multiple items in memory, this leads to similarity-based interference. Both semantic and syntactic interference have been shown to occur in English. However, the relative timing of syntactic vs. semantic interference remains unclear. In this cross-linguistic investigation of the time course of syntactic vs. semantic interference, the data from two eye-tracking during reading experiments (English and German) suggest that the two types of interference can in principle arise simultaneously during retrieval. However, the data also indicate that semantic cues are evaluated with a small timing lag in German compared to English. This cross-linguistic difference between English and German may be due to German having richer morphosyntactic marking than English, resulting in syntactic cues dominating over semantic cues during dependency resolution. More broadly, our cross-linguistic results pose a challenge for the cue-based retrieval model's default assumption that syntactic and semantic cues are used simultaneously during long-distance dependency formation. Our work also highlights the importance of collecting cross-linguistic data on psycholinguistic phenomena which can potentially advance theory development. |