EyeLink Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2024 (with some early 2025s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Visual World, Comprehension, Speech Production, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink reading or language articles, please email us!
2025 |
Ming Yan; Jinger Pan; Reinhold Kliegl The Beijing Sentence Corpus II: A cross-script comparison between traditional and simplified Chinese sentence reading Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methodsl, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Yan2025a,We introduce a sentence corpus with eye-movement data in traditional Chinese (TC), based on the original Beijing Sentence Corpus (BSC) in simplified Chinese (SC). The most noticeable difference between TC and SC character sets is their visual complexity. There are reaction time corpora in isolated TC character/word lexical decision and naming tasks. However, up to now natural TC sentence reading corpus with recorded eye movements has not been available for general public. We report effects of word frequency, visual complexity, and predictability on eye movements on fixation location and duration based on 60 native TC readers. In addition, because the current BSC-II sentences are nearly identical to the original BSC sentences, we report similarities and differences of the linguistic influences on eye movements for the two varieties of written Chinese. The results shed light on how visual complexity affects eye movements. Together, the two sentence corpora comprise a useful tool to establish cross-script similarities and differences in TC and SC. |
Zheng Yang; Bing Han; Xinbo Gao; Zhi Hui Zhan Eye-movement-prompted large image captioning model Journal Article In: Pattern Recognition, vol. 159, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Yang2025a,Pretrained large vision-language models have shown outstanding performance on the task of image captioning. However, owing to the insufficient decoding of image features, existing large models sometimes lose important information, such as objects, scenes, and their relationships. In addition, the complex “black-box” nature of these models makes their mechanisms difficult to explain. Research shows that humans learn richer representations than machines do, which inspires us to improve the accuracy and interpretability of large image captioning models by combining human observation patterns. We built a new dataset, called saliency in image captioning (SIC), to explore relationships between human vision and language representation. One thousand images with rich context information were selected as image data of SIC. Each image was annotated with five caption labels and five eye-movement labels. Through analysis of the eye-movement data, we found that humans efficiently captured comprehensive information for image captioning during their observations. Therefore, we propose an eye-movement-prompted large image captioning model, which is embedded with two carefully designed modules: the eye-movement simulation module (EMS) and the eye-movement analyzing module (EMA). EMS combines the human observation pattern to simulate eye-movement features, including the positions and scan paths of eye fixations. EMA is a graph neural network (GNN) based module, which decodes graphical eye-movement data and abstracts image features as a directed graph. More accurate descriptions can be predicted by decoding the generated graph. Extensive experiments were conducted on the MS-COCO and NoCaps datasets to validate our model. The experimental results showed that our network was interpretable, and could achieve superior results compared with state-of-the-art methods, i.e., 84.2% BLEU-4 and 145.1% CIDEr-D on MS-COCO Karpathy test split, indicating its strong potential for use in image captioning. |
Masataka Yano; Keiyu Niikuni; Ruri Shimura; Natsumi Funasaki; Masatoshi Koizumi Producing non-basic word orders in (in)felicitous contexts: Evidence from pupillometry and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 1–22, 2025. @article{Yano2025,The present study examined why speakers of languages with flexible word orders are more likely to use syntactically complex non-basic word orders when they provide discourse-given information earlier in sentences. This may be because they are more efficient for speakers to produce (the Speaker Economy Hypothesis). Alternatively, speakers may produce them to help listeners understand sentences more efficiently (the Listener Economy Hypothesis), given that previous studies showed that the processing of non-basic word orders was facilitated when the felicitous context was provided (i.e. a displaced object refers to discourse-given information). We addressed this issue by conducting a picture-description experiment, in which participants uttered sentences with syntactically basic Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) or non-basic Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) in felicitous or infelicitous contexts while cognitive load was tracked using pupillometry and functional near-infrared spectroscopy. The results showed that the felicitous context facilitated the filler-gap dependency formation of OSVs in production, supporting the Speaker Economy Hypothesis. |
Panpan Yao; Xin Jiang; Xinwei Chen; Xingshan Li Explore the processing unit of L2 Chinese learners in on-line Chinese reading Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 3 –19, 2025. @article{Yao2025,The present study explored the processing units of high-proficiency second language (L2) Chinese learners in on-line reading in an eye-tracking experiment. The critical aim was to investigate how learners segment continuous characters into words without the aid of word boundary demarcations. Based on previous studies, the embedded words of 2- and 3-character incremental words were manipulated to be either plausible or implausible with the preceding verbs, while the incremental words themselves were always plausible. The results revealed an effect of the plausibility manipulation, which suggested that L2 Chinese learners activated embedded words first and integrated embedded words with previous sentence context as soon as they read them. |
Taishen Zeng; Longxia Lou; Zhi-Fang Liu; Chaoyang Chen; Zhijun Zhang Coregistration of eye movements and EEG reveals frequency effects of words and their constituent characters in natural silent Chinese reading Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Zeng2025,We conducted two experiments to examine the lexical and sub-lexical processing of Chinese two-character words in reading. We used a co-registration electroencephalogram (EEG) for the first fixation on target words. In Experiment 1, whole-word occurrence frequency and initial constituent character frequency were orthogonally manipulated, while in Experiment 2, whole-word occurrence frequency and end constituent character frequency were orthogonally manipulated. Results showed that word frequency facilitated eye-tracking measures, while initial and end character frequencies inhibited them. Classical word frequency effects on N170 and N400 in the posterior region and reversed word frequency effects over the anterior region were consistently observed in both experiments. Experiment 1 revealed an inhibiting effect of initial character frequency on anterior N170. In Experiment 2, interaction between end-character frequency and word frequency showed reliable effects on anterior N170 and N400. These results demonstrate both facilitating and inhibiting word frequency effects, along with inhibiting effects of character frequency and that word frequency moderates the inhibiting effects of end constituent character frequency during natural silent Chinese reading. |
Taishen Zeng; Longxia Lou; Zhifang Liu; Zhijun Zhang Age-related depreciation in predictive processing during Chinese reading: Insights from fixation-related potentials Journal Article In: Current Psychology, no. 2004, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Zeng2025a,To overcome methodological deficiencies in previous eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERP) studies, the fixa- tion-related potential (FRP) approach was used to investigate how aging affects predictive processing in silent Chinese free-view reading. Forty older and 42 young adults participated in the experiment. All of them reported good reading abilities and none suffered from physical, mental, or cognitive diseases. The older participants were over 60 years of age (62.670 ± 3.018), and they did not differ from the younger group in the schooling years (11.43 vs. 12.10 |
Zhenghua Zhang; Qingfang Zhang Linear incrementality in focus and accentuation processing during sentence production: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Zhang2025d,Introduction: While considerable research in language production has focused on incremental processing during conceptual and grammatical encoding, prosodic encoding remains less investigated. This study examines whether focus and accentuation processing in speech production follows linear or hierarchical incrementality. Methods: We employed visual world eye-tracking to investigate how focus and accentuation are processed during sentence production. Participants were asked to complete a scenario description task where they were prompted to use a predetermined sentence structure to accurately convey the scenario, thereby spontaneously accentuate the corresponding entity. We manipulated the positions of focus with accentuation (initial vs. medial) by changing the scenarios. The initial and medial positions correspond to the first and second nouns in sentences like "N1 is above N2, not N3." Results: Our findings revealed that speech latencies were significantly shorter in the sentences with initial focus accentuation than those with medial focus accentuation. Furthermore, eye-tracking data demonstrated that speakers quickly displayed a preference for fixating on initial information after scenarios onset. Crucially, the time-course analysis revealed that the onset of the initial focus accentuation effect (around 460 ms) preceded that of the medial focus accentuation effect (around 920 ms). Discussion: These results support that focus and accentuation processing during speech production prior to articulation follows linear incrementality rather than hierarchical incrementality. |
Zhenghua Zhanga; Qingfang Zhang Accentuation affects the planning scope and focus – accentuation consistency modulates sentence production: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, pp. 1–27, 2025. @article{Zhanga2025,Purpose: Previous studies have shown that the planning scope of sentence production is flexible and influenced by a range of linguistic and extralinguistic factors. However, one important aspect that remains underexplored is the role of prosody, a key component of language, in shaping the planning scope. While it has been established that both conceptual and grammatical information influence sentence production and conceptual information is closely linked with prosodic cues, it remains unclear whether and how prosody, particularly accentuation, affects the planning process. Additionally, there is limited understanding of how conceptual (focus) and prosodic (accentuation) information interact to influence sentence production. Therefore, this study aims to investigate whether prosody (specifically, sentence accentuation) influences the planning scope and how the interaction between conceptual focus and prosodic accentuation jointly shapes sentence production. Method: Question-answer pairs were used to create focus, and a red dot was added in scenarios as a cue for accentuation. Participants were asked to complete a picture description task and accent the entity with a red dot. We manipulated the accentuation position (initial vs. medial) and focus-accentuation consistency (consistent vs. inconsistent). Results: Speech latencies with initial accentuation were shorter than with medial accentuation. Eye-tracking data indicated that speakers preferred to fixate on accented pictures before articulation in initial accentuation, whereas in medial accentuation, speakers first preferred to fixate on deaccented pictures before shifting to accented ones. Both speech and first fixation latencies on accented pictures were shorter in the consistent condition. In the initial accentuation, accented-deaccented advantage scores were higher in the consistent condition from scenario onset to speech onset, while in the medial accentuation, this difference emerged after 220 ms. In addition, a focus inconsistent with the accentuation position slightly increases the acoustic prominence of deaccented information. Conclusions: Accentuation positions affect planning scope, with a larger scope for medial accentuation. Additionally, the consistency between focus and accentuation influences sentence production, broadly affecting the processing of accented information and impacting external acoustic prominence. This influence on accented information processing occurs during the conceptualization and linguistic encoding phases, with processing starting more quickly and taking priority when focus and accentuation are consistent. This study provides a more comprehensive understanding of how various linguistic components interact to shape sentence production. |
Fang Xie; Wanying Chen; Lei Zhang; Xiaohua Cao; Kayleigh L. Warrington Exploring the role of word segmentation on parafoveal processing during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Xie2025,The importance of the word as a unit of meaning is well-established for readers of both alphabetic languages and Chinese. However, the unspaced nature of written Chinese raises questions about how readers use upcoming information to guide word segmentation and to adjust the parafoveal processing of subsequent characters. Using an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether Chinese readers pre-process character C2 more when it forms a word with C1 than when they belong to separate words. The boundary paradigm was used to manipulate the preview of C2, such that readers saw either an identity (normal) or pseudo-character preview. Linear mixed-effects models revealed reduced preview benefit when C1 and C2 were separate words. These results suggest that despite the absence of visual segmentation cues, Chinese readers are able to utilise the parafoveal preview to support the identification of word boundaries and modulate the extent of their parafoveal processing to prioritise the processing of word units. |
Xiaodong Xu; Cailing Ji; Taohui Li; Martin J. Pickering The prediction of segmental and tonal information in Mandarin Chinese: An eye-tracking investigation Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 56–70, 2025. @article{Xu2025a,There is controversy about the extent to which people predict phonology during comprehension. In three visual-world experiments, we ask whether it occurs in Mandarin, a tonal language. Participants heard sentences containing a target word that was highly predictable (Cloze 80.2%, Experiment 1) or very highly predictable (Cloze 93.9%, Experiments 2–3) and saw an array of objects containing one whose name matched the target word (Experiments 1–2), was unrelated to the target word (Experiments 1–3), or matched the target word in segment and tone (Experiments 1–3), in segment only (Experiments 1–3), or tone only (Experiment 3). In comparison to the unrelated object, participants looked more at the segment + tone object (Experiments 1–3), and sometimes at the segment object (Experiments 1 and 3), but not at the tone object. We conclude that participants predict segmental information independently of tone. |
Duygu F. Şafak; Holger Hopp Learning L2 grammar from prediction errors? Verb biases in structural priming in comprehension and production Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Safak2025,This study tests whether prediction error underlies structural priming in a later-learnt L2 across two visual world eye-tracking priming experiments. Experiment 1 investigates priming when learners encounter verbs biased to double-object-datives (DO, “pay”) or prepositional-object- datives (PO, “send”) in the other structure in prime sentences. L1-German–L2-English learners read prime sentences crossing verb bias and structure (DO/PO). Subsequently, they heard target sentences – with unbiased verbs (“show”) – while viewing visual scenes. In line with implicit learning models, gaze data revealed priming and prediction-error effects, namely, more pre- dictive looks consistent with PO following PO primes with DO-bias verbs. Priming in compre- hension persisted into (unprimed) production, indicating that priming by prediction error leads to longer-term learning. Experiment 2 investigates the effects of target verb bias on error-based priming. Priming and prediction-error effects were reduced for targets with non-alternating verbs (“donate”) that only allow PO structures, suggesting learners' knowledge of the L2 grammar modulates prediction-error-based priming. Highlights |
Rosa Salmela; Minna Lehtonen; Seppo Vainio; Raymond Bertram Challenges in inflected word processing for L2 speakers The role of stem allomorphy Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, pp. 1–28, 2025. @article{Salmela2025,Morphological knowledge refers to the ability to recognize and use morphemes correctly in syntactic contexts and word formation. This is crucial for learning a morphologically rich language like Finnish, which features both agglutinative and fusional morphology. In Finnish, agglutination occurs in forms like aamu: aamu+lla (‘morning: in the morning'), where a suffix is transparently added. Fusional features, as seen in ilta: illa+lla (‘evening: in the evening'), involve allomorphic stemchanges that reduce transparency. We investigated the challenges posed by stem allomorphy for word recognition in isolation and in context for L2 learners and L1 speakers ofFinnish. In a lexical decision task, L2 speakers had longer response times and higher error rates for semitransparent inflections, while L1 speakers showed longer response times for both transparent and semitransparent inflection types. In sentence reading, L2 speakers exhibited longer fixation times for semitransparent forms, whereas L1 speakers showed no significant effects. The results suggest that the challenges in L2 inflectional processing are more related to fusional than agglutinative features of the Finnish language. |
Daniel Schmidtke; Julie A. Van Dyke; Victor Kuperman DerLex: An eye‑movement database of derived word reading in English Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Schmidtke2025,This paper introduces a new database of eye-tracking data on English derived words, DerLex. A total of 598 unique derived suffixed words were embedded in sentences and read by 357 participants representing both university convenience pools and community pools of non-college-bound adults. Besides the eye-movement record of reading derived suffixed words, the DerLex database provides the author recognition test (ART) scores for each participant, tapping into their reading proficiency, as well as multiple lexical variables reflecting distributional, orthographic, phonological, and semantic features of the words, their constituent morphemes, and morphological families. The paper additionally reports the main effects of select lexical variables and their interactions with the ART scores. It also produces estimates of statistical power and sample sizes required to reliably detect those lexical effects. While some effects are robust and can be readily detected even in a small-scale typi- cal experiment, the over-powered DerLex database does not offer sufficient power to detect many other effects—including those of theoretical importance for existing accounts of morphological processing. We believe that both the availability of the new data resource and the limitations it provides for the planning and design of upcoming experiments are useful for future research on morphological complexity. |
Jens Schmidtke; Dana Bsharat-Maalouf; Tamar Degani; Hanin Karawani How lexical frequency, language dominance and noise affect listening effort–insights from pupillometry insights from pupillometry Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 195–208, 2025. @article{Schmidtke2025a,Acoustic, listener, and stimulus-related factors modulate speech-in-noise processes. This study examined how noise, listening experience, manipulated at two levels, native [L1] vs. second language [L2], and lexical frequency impact listening effort. Forty-seven participants, tested in their L1 Hebrew and L2 English, completed a word recognition test in quiet and noisy conditions while pupil size was recorded to assess listening effort. Results showed that listening in L2 was overall more effortful than in L1, with frequency effects modulated by language and noise. In L1, pupil responses to high and low frequency words were similar in both conditions. In L2, low frequency words elicited a larger pupil response, indicating greater effort, but this effect vanished in noise. A time-course analysis of the pupil response suggests that L1–L2 processing differences occur during lexical selection, indicating that L2 listeners may struggle to match acoustic-phonetic signals to long-term memory representations. |
Sarah Schuster; Kim Lara Weiss; Florian Hutzler; Martin Kronbichler; Stefan Hawelka Interactive and additive effects of word frequency and predictability: A fixation-related fMRI study Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 260, pp. 1–7, 2025. @article{Schuster2025,The effects of word frequency and predictability are informative with respect to bottom-up and top-down mechanisms during reading. Word frequency is assumed to index bottom-up, whereas word predictability top-down information. Findings regarding potential interactive effects, however, are inconclusive. An interactive effect would suggest an early lexical impact of contextual top-down mechanisms where both variables are processed concurrently in early stages of word recognition. An additive effect, to the contrary, would suggest that contextual top-down processing only occurs post-lexically. We evaluated potential interactions between word frequency and predictability during silent reading by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging and simultaneous eye-tracking (i.e., fixation-related fMRI). Our data revealed exclusively additive effects. Specifically, we observed effects of word frequency and word predictability in left inferior frontal regions, whereas word frequency additionally exhibited an effect in the left occipito-temporal cortex. We interpret our findings in terms of contextual top-down processing facilitation. |
Irina A. Sekerina; Olga Parshina; Vladislava Staroverova; Natalia Gagarina Attention–language interface in Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 249, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Sekerina2025,The current study employed the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to test comprehension of narrative macrostructure in Russian in a visual world eye-tracking paradigm. The four MAIN visual narratives are structurally similar and question referents' goals and internal states (IS). Previous research revealed that children's MAIN comprehension differed among the four narratives in German, Swedish, Russian, and Turkish, but it is not clear why. We tested whether the difference in comprehension was (a) present, (b) caused by complicated inferences in understanding IS compared with goals, and (c) ameliorated by orienting visual attention to the referents whose IS was critical for accurate comprehension. Our findings confirmed (a) and (b) but found no effect of attentional cues on accuracy for (c). The multidimensional theory of narrative organization of children's knowledge of macrostructure needs to consider the type of inferences necessary for IS that are influenced by subjective interpretation and reasoning. |
Kathryn A. Tremblay; Katja Mcbane; Katherine S. Binder The role of morphology and sentence context in word processing for adults with low literacy Journal Article In: Journal of Learning Disabilities, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Tremblay2025,Both vocabulary skill and morphological complexity, or whether words can be broken down into root words and affixes, have a significant impact on word processing for adults with low literacy. We investigated the influence of word-level variables of morphological complexity and root word frequency, and the sentence-level variable of context strength on word processing in adults with low literacy, who differed on levels of vocabulary depth skills, which was a participant- level variable. Our findings demonstrate that morphological complexity, root word frequency, and context strength are all related to how adult learners process words while reading, but their effects are dependent on participants' vocabulary depth. Participants with higher levels of vocabulary depth were able to more quickly process morphologically complex words and make better use of supportive sentence context as compared to individuals with lower levels of vocabulary depth. These findings suggest that both morphological complexity and vocabulary depth are important for word processing and reading comprehension in adults with low literacy. |
Lauren N. Slivka; Kenna R. H. Clayton; Greg D. Reynolds Mask-wearing affects infants' selective attention to familiar and unfamiliar audiovisual speech Journal Article In: Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, vol. 3, pp. 1–8, 2025. @article{Slivka2025,This study examined the immediate effects of mask-wearing on infant selective visual attention to audiovisual speech in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Infants distribute their selective attention to regions of a speaker's face differentially based on their age and language experience. However, the potential impact wearing a face mask may have on infants' selective attention to audiovisual speech has not been systematically studied. We utilized eye tracking to examine the proportion of infant looking time to the eyes and mouth of a masked or unmasked actress speaking in a familiar or unfamiliar language. Six-month-old and 12-month-old infants (n = 42, 55% female, 91%White Non-Hispanic/Latino) were shown videos of an actress speaking in a familiar language (English) with and without a mask on, as well as videos of the same actress speaking in an unfamiliar language (German) with and without a mask. Overall, infants spent more time looking at the unmasked presentations compared to the masked presentations. Regardless of language familiarity or age, infants spent more time looking at the mouth area of an unmasked speaker and they spent more time looking at the eyes of a masked speaker. These findings indicate mask-wearing has immediate effects on the distribution of infant selective attention to different areas of the face of a speaker during audiovisual speech. |
Lukas Suveg; Tanvi Thakkar; Emily Burg; Shelly P. Godar; Daniel Lee; Ruth Y. Litovsky The relationship between spatial release from masking and listening effort among cochlear implant users with single-sided deafness Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Suveg2025,Objectives: To examine speech intelligibility and listening effort in a group of patients with single-sided deafness (SSD) who received a cochlear implant (CI). There is limited knowledge on how effectively SSD-CI users can integrate electric and acoustic inputs to obtain spatial hearing benefits that are important for navigating everyday noisy environments. The present study examined speech intelligibility in quiet and noise simultaneously with measuring listening effort using pupillometry in individuals with SSD before, and 1 year after, CI activation. The study was designed to examine whether spatial separation between target and interfering speech leads to improved speech understanding (spatial release from masking [SRM]), and is associated with a decreased effort (spatial release from listening effort [SRE]) measured with pupil dilation (PPD). Design: Eight listeners with adult-onset SSD participated in two visits: (1) pre-CI and (2) post-CI (1 year after activation). Target speech consisted of Electrical and Electronics Engineers sentences and masker speech consisted of AzBio sentences. Outcomes were measured in three target-masker configurations with the target fixed at 0° azimuth: (1) quiet, (2) co-located target/maskers, and (3) spatially separated (±90° azimuth) target/maskers. Listening effort was quantified as change in peak proportional PPD on the task relative to baseline dilation. Participants were tested in three listening modes: acoustic-only, CI-only, and SSD-CI (both ears). At visit 1, the acoustic-only mode was tested in all three target-masker configurations. At visit 2, the acoustic-only and CI-only modes were tested in quiet, and the SSD-CI listening mode was tested in all three target-masker configurations. Results: Speech intelligibility scores in quiet were at the ceiling for the acoustic-only mode at both visits, and in the SSD-CI listening mode at visit 2. In quiet, at visit 2, speech intelligibility scores were significantly worse in the CI-only listening modes than in all other listening modes. Comparing SSD-CI listening at visit 2 with pre-CI acoustic-only listening at visit 1, speech intelligibility scores for co-located and spatially separated configurations showed a trend toward improvement (higher scores) that was not significant. However, speech intelligibility was significantly higher in the separated compared with the co-located configuration in acoustic-only and SSD-CI listening modes, indicating SRM. PPD evoked by speech presented in quiet was significantly higher with CI-only listening at visit 2 compared with acoustic-only listening at visit 1. However, there were no significant differences between co-located and spatially separated configurations on PPD, likely due to the variability among this small group of participants. There was a negative correlation between SRM and SRE, indicating that improved speech intelligibility with spatial separation of target and masker is associated with a greater decrease in listening effort on those conditions. Conclusions: The small group of patients with SSD-CI in the present study demonstrated improved speech intelligibility from spatial separation of target and masking speech, but PPD measures did not reveal the effects of spatial separation on listening effort. However, there was an association between the improvement in speech intelligibility (SRM) and the reduction in listening effort (SRE) from spatial separation of target and masking speech. |
Zohre Soleymani Tekbudak; Mehdi Purmohammad; Ayşegül Özkan; Cengiz Acartürk The PSR corpus: A Persian sentence reading corpus of eye movements Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Tekbudak2025,The present study introduces the Persian Sentence Reading (PSR) Corpus, aiming to expand empirical data for Persian, an under-investigated language in research on oculomotor control in reading. Reading research has largely focused on Latin script languages with a left-to-right reading direction. However, languages with different reading directions, such as right-to-left and top-to-bottom, and particularly Persian script-based languages like Farsi and Dari, have remained understudied. This study pioneers in providing an eye movement dataset for reading Persian sentences, enabling further exploration of the influences of unique Persian characteristics on eye movement patterns during sentence reading. The core objective of the study is to provide data about how word characteristics impact eye movement patterns. The research also investigates the characteristics of the interplay between neighboring words and eye movements on them. By broadening the scope of reading research beyond commonly studied languages, the study aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary approach to reading research, exemplifying investigations through various theoretical and methodological perspectives. |
Jinghua Huang; Mingyan Wang; Ting Zhang; Dongliang Zhang; Yi Zhou; Lujin Mao; Mengyao Qi Investigating the effect of emoji position on eye movements and subjective evaluations on Chinese sarcasm comprehension Journal Article In: Ergonomics, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 251–266, 2025. @article{Huang2025,Evidence indicated that emojis could influence sarcasm comprehension and sentence processing in English. However, the effect of emojis on Chinese sarcasm comprehension remains unclear. Therefore, this study investigated the impact of the smiley emoji position and semantics on eye movements and subjective assessments during Chinese online communication. Our results showed that the presence of a smiley emoji improved participants' interpretation and perception of sarcasm. We also found shorter dwell times on sarcastic words compared to literal words under the comment-final emoji condition. Additionally, we clarified the time course of emojified sentence processing during Chinese reading: the presence of emoji initially decreased first fixation durations compared to the absence of emoji and then the comment-final emoji shortened dwell times on sarcastic words compared to literal words in the critical area of interest. Our findings suggested that the comment-final emoji was the preferable choice for avoiding semantic comprehension bias in China. |
Lingshan Huang The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Linguistics Vanguard, no. 288, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Huang2025a,This study explores the cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language (L2) reading, aiming to investigate the potential differences and their effects on comprehension performance. Twenty-five Chinese students read an English text while their eye movements were recorded. A reading comprehension test evaluated the participants' L2 reading comprehension performance. The results reveal a significant difference in total reading time between nouns and verbs. Additionally, total reading time, gaze duration, and the number of fixations on both nouns and verbs are negatively correlated with L2 reading comprehension performance. These findings suggest that while the initial processing mechanisms of nouns and verbs may be similar, they diverge in late stages of processing. |
Sarah C. Creel Connecting the tots: Strong looking-pointing correlations in preschoolers' word learning and implications for continuity in language development Journal Article In: Child Development, vol. 96, pp. 87–103, 2025. @article{Creel2025,How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or pointing (preschoolers and older). With little empirical evidence of the relationship between the two measures, developmental change is difficult to assess. This paper analyzes 914 pointing, looking children (451 female, varied ethnicities, 2.5–6.5 years, dates: 2009–2019) in 36 word- or sound-learning experiments with two-alternative test trials. Looking proportions and pointing accuracy correlated strongly (r =.7). Counter to the “looks first” hypothesis, looks were not sensitive to incipient knowledge that pointing missed: when pointing is at chance, looking proportions are also. Results suggest one possible path forward for assessing continuous developmental change. Methodological best practices are discussed. |
Jack Dempsey; Anna Tsiola; Nigel Bosch; Kiel Christianson; Mallory Stites Eye-movement indices of reading while debugging Python source code Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 89–107, 2025. @article{Dempsey2025,Unlike text reading, the eye-movement behaviours associated with reading Python, a computer programming language, are largely understudied through a psycholinguistic lens. A general understanding of the eye movements involved in reading while troubleshooting Python, and how these behaviours compare to proofreading text, is critical for developing educational interventions and interactive tools for helping programmers debug their code. These data may also highlight to what extent humans use their underlying text reading ability when reading source code. The current work provides a profile of global reading behaviours associated with reading Python source code for debugging purposes. To this end, we recorded experienced programmers' eye movements while they determined whether 21 different Python functions would produce the desired output, an incorrect output, or an error message. Some reading behaviours seem to mirror those found in text reading (e.g. effects of stimulus complexity), while others may be specific to reading code. Results suggest that semantic errors that produce undesired outputs in programming source code may influence early stages of processing, likely due to the largely top-down strategy employed by experienced programmers when reading source code. The findings are framed to invigorate discussion and further exploration into psycholinguistic analysis of human source code reading. |
Khaled H. A. Abdel-Latif; Thomas Koelewijn; Deniz Başkent; Hartmut Meister Assessment of speech processing and listening effort associated with speech-on-speech masking using the visual world paradigm and pupillometry Journal Article In: Trends in hearing, vol. 29, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{AbdelLatif2025,Speech-on-speech masking is a common and challenging situation in everyday verbal communication. The ability to segregate competing auditory streams is a necessary requirement for focusing attention on the target speech. The Visual World Paradigm (VWP) provides insight into speech processing by capturing gaze fixations on visually presented icons that reflect the speech signal. This study aimed to propose a new VWP to examine the time course of speech segregation when competing sentences are presented and to collect pupil size data as a measure of listening effort. Twelve young normal-hearing participants were presented with competing matrix sentences (structure "name-verb-numeral-adjective-object") diotically via headphones at four target-to-masker ratios (TMRs), corresponding to intermediate to near perfect speech recognition. The VWP visually presented the number and object words from both the target and masker sentences. Participants were instructed to gaze at the corresponding words of the target sentence without providing verbal responses. The gaze fixations consistently reflected the different TMRs for both number and object words. The slopes of the fixation curves were steeper, and the proportion of target fixations increased with higher TMRs, suggesting more efficient segregation under more favorable conditions. Temporal analysis of pupil data using Bayesian paired sample t-tests showed a corresponding reduction in pupil dilation with increasing TMR, indicating reduced listening effort. The results support the conclusion that the proposed VWP and the captured eye movements and pupil dilation are suitable for objective assessment of sentence-based speech-on-speech segregation and the corresponding listening effort. |
Maryam A. Aljassmi; Kayleigh L. Warrington; Victoria A. Mcgowan; Fang Xie; Kevin B. Paterson Parafoveal preview benefit effects in vertical alphabetic reading Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{Aljassmi2025,The present study examines the extent to which the cognitive processes underlying reading can adapt to accommodate changes in text orientation. For readers of English, processing times are slowed substantially when reading text in the non-conventional vertical direction, but little is known about the processes underlying this slowdown. Accordingly, participants read English text presented in the conventional horizontal orientation, or rotated 90° clockwise to create a vertical orientation. Lexical processing was explored with word frequency effects and parafoveal processing was measured through parafoveal preview benefit. Reading times were longer, and word frequency effects were larger for vertical, compared with horizotonally presented text, in line with findings for reading in unfamiliar formats. Crucially, while clear preview benefit effects were observed for horizontal reading, these effects were entirely absent during vertical reading. These results provide novel insight into perceptual flexibility in foveal and parafoveal processing during reading. |
Dale J. Barr; Hanna Sirniö; Beáta Kovács; Kieran J. O'Shea; Shannon McNee; Alistair Beith; Heather Britain; Qintong Li Perspective conflict disrupts pragmatic inference in real-time language comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Barr2025,In two visual-world eyetracking experiments, we investigated how effectively addressees use information about a speaker's perspective to resolve temporary ambiguities in spoken expressions containing prenominal scalar adjectives (e.g., the small candle). The experiments used a new “Display Change” task to create situations where an addressee's perspective conflicted with that of a speaker, allowing the point of disambiguation (early vs. late) to be specified independently from each perspective. Contrary to existing perspective-taking theories, the only situation in which addressees resolved references early was when both perspectives afforded early disambiguation. When perspectives conflicted, addressees exhibited a lower rate of preferential looks to the target and slower response times. This disruption to contrastive inference reflects either the suspension of pragmatic inferencing or cognitive limitations on the simultaneous representation and use of incompatible perspectives. |
Rita Cersosimo; Paul E. Engelhardt; Leigh Fernandez; Filippo Domaneschi Novel metaphor processing in dyslexia: A visual world eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, pp. 1–21, 2025. @article{Cersosimo2025,Metaphor comprehension has been investigated in neurodevelopmental disorders, but studies devoted to adults with dyslexia are few and present inconsistent results. The present study sought to investigate how adults with dyslexia process novel metaphors. Individual differences in vocabulary, working memory, and Theory of Mind were also assessed. An online metaphor comprehension task based on the Visual World Paradigm was carried out with eye-tracking. Metaphors and corresponding literal sentences were aurally presented in isolation, and participants were asked to select a picture that best corresponded to the sentence they heard. Our results indicated that participants with dyslexia chose metaphor interpretations at a similar rate as did the control group. However, online processing data indicated generally slower response times, with a particular delay in processing metaphorical utterances. Eye movement analyses provided further insights into the underlying nature of the processing slowdowns, highlighting specific challenges encountered by individuals with dyslexia when interpreting figurative language. |
Jürgen Cholewa; Annika Kirschenkern; Frederike Steinke; Thomas Günther In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Cholewa2025,Purpose: Predictive language comprehension has become a major topic in psycholinguistic research. The study described in this article aims to investigate if German children with developmental language disorder (DLD) use grammatical gender agreement to predict the continuation of noun phrases in the same way as it has been observed for typically developing (TD) children. The study also seeks to differentiate between specific and general deficits in predictive processing by exploring the anticipatory use of semantic information. Additionally, the research examines whether the processing of gender and semantic information varies with the speed of stimulus presentation. Method: The study included 30 children with DLD (average age = 8.7 years) and 26 TD children (average age = 8.4 years) who participated in a visual-world eye- tracking study. Noun phrases, consisting of an article, an adjective, and a noun, were presented that matched with only one of two target pictures. The phrases contained a gender cue, a semantic cue, a combination of both, or none of these cues. The cues were provided by the article and/or adjective and could be used to identify the target picture before the noun itself was presented. Results: Both groups, TD children and those with DLD, utilized predictive processing strategies in response to gender agreement and semantic information when decoding noun phrases. However, children with DLD were only able to consider gender cues when noun phrases were presented at a slower speech rate, and even then, their predictive certainty remained below the typical level for their age. Conclusion: Based on these findings, the article discusses the potential relevance of the prediction framework for explaining comprehension deficits in chil- dren with DLD, as well as the clinical implications of the results. |
Andriana L. Christofalos; Nicole M. Arco; Madison Laks; Heather Sheridan The impact of interword spacing on inference processing during text reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Christofalos2025,Removing interword spacing has been shown to disrupt lower-level oculomotor processes and word identification during text reading. However, the impact of these disruptions on higher-level processes remains unclear. To examine the influence of spacing on inferential processing, we monitored eye movements while participants read spaced and unspaced passages that were strongly or weakly constrained toward an inference. Removing spaces disrupted reading fluency, as evidenced by longer reading times, longer fixation durations, reduced skipping, and shorter saccades. We also observed the effects of inferential constraint for spaced passages as characterized by longer reading times, more regressions, and longer regression-path durations for weakly than strongly constrained passages. However, these constraint effects were absent for unspaced passages, suggesting that removing spaces disrupts inferential processing. Our results are consistent with models of reading and discourse processing that assume that higher-level reading processes depend on the quality of lexical representations developed at earlier, word-level reading stages. |
Zuzanna Fuchs; Olga Parshina; Irina A. Sekerina; Maria Polinsky Processing of verbal versus adjectival agreement: Implications for syntax and psycholinguistics Journal Article In: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–35, 2025. @article{Fuchs2025,Linguistic theories distinguish between external and internal agreement (e.g., noun-verb agreement vs.noun-modifier agreement, the latter also known as concord) and model them using different mechanisms.While this distinction has garnered considerable attention in syntactic theory, it remains largely unexplored in experimental work.In an effort to address this gap, we conducted two studies of external/internal agreement in Russian using self-paced reading and eye-tracking while reading.We measured the response to violations generated when native speakers encounter a noun that mismatches the features on an earlier element inflected for agreement (verb, modifying adjective, and predicative adjective).Both experimental studies found strong effects of ungrammaticality: participants were sensitive to agreement mismatches between the agreeing element and the trigger.However, there was no interaction observed between the effect of grammaticality and the type of agreeing element, suggesting that, while participants are sensitive to mismatches, the processing of the mismatches does not differ between external and internal agreement.Despite the cross-methodological replication of the null interaction effect, interpreting this result is necessarily tentative.We discuss possible implications, should the result be further replicated by future high-powered studies.We suggest that this outcome may indicate that differences in real-time processing of internal vs.external agreement may not be observable in time-course measures, or that the lack of such differences constitutes support for analyses of agreement as a two-step process, with one step in syntax, and the other, post-syntactic.We invite future work to test these hypotheses further. |
Helena Ghorbani; Gülcenur Özturan; Andrea Albonico; Jason J. S. Barton Reading words versus seeing font or handwriting style: A study of hemifield processing Journal Article In: Experimental Brain Research, vol. 243, no. 2, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Ghorbani2025,Tachistoscopic studies have established a right field advantage for the perception of visually presented words, which has been interpreted as reflecting a left hemispheric specialization. However, it is not clear whether this is driven by the linguistic task of word processing, or also occurs when processing properties such as the style and regularity of text. We had 23 subjects perform a tachistoscopic study while they viewed five-letter words in either computer font or handwriting. The task in one block was to respond if the word in the peripheral field matched a word just seen in the central field. In a second block with the same stimuli, the task was to respond if the style (handwriting or font) matched. We found a main effect of task: there was a right-field advantage for reading the word, but no field advantage for reporting the style of text. There was no effect of stimulus type and no interaction between task and stimulus type. We conclude that the field advantage for processing text is driven by the task, being specific for the processing the identity of the word and not the perception of the style of the text. We did not find evidence to support prior assertions that the type of text and its regularity influenced the field advantage during the word-reading task. |
Magdalena Gruner; Andreas Widmann; Stefan Wöhner; Erich Schröger; Jörg D. Jescheniak Semantic context effects in picture and sound naming: Evidence from event-related potentials and pupillometric data Journal Article In: Journal of cognitive neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 443–463, 2025. @article{Gruner2025,When a picture is repeatedly named in the context of semantically related pictures (homogeneous context), responses are slower than when the picture is repeatedly named in the context of unrelated pictures (heterogeneous context). This semantic interference effect in blocked-cyclic naming plays an important role in devising theories of word production. Wöhner, Mädebach, and Jescheniak [Wöhner, S., Mädebach, A., & Jescheniak, J. D. Naming pictures and sounds: Stimulus type affects semantic context effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 47, 716-730, 2021] have shown that the effect is substantially larger when participants name environmental sounds than when they name pictures. We investigated possible reasons for this difference, using EEG and pupillometry. The behavioral data replicated Wöhner and colleagues. ERPs were more positive in the homogeneous compared with the heterogeneous context over central electrode locations between 140-180 msec and 250-350 msec for picture naming and between 250 and 350 msec for sound naming, presumably reflecting semantic interference during semantic and lexical processing. The later component was of similar size for pictures and sounds. ERPs were more negative in the homogeneous compared with the heterogeneous context over frontal electrode locations between 400 and 600 msec only for sounds. The pupillometric data showed a stronger pupil dilation in the homogeneous compared with the heterogeneous context only for sounds. The amplitudes of the late ERP negativity and pupil dilation predicted naming latencies for sounds in the homogeneous context. The latency of the effects indicates that the difference in semantic interference between picture and sound naming arises at later, presumably postlexical processing stages closer to articulation. We suggest that the processing of the auditory stimuli interferes with phonological response preparation and self-monitoring, leading to enhanced semantic interference. |
Laurel Brehm; Nora Kennis; Christina Bergmann When is a ranana a banana? Disentangling the mechanisms of error repair and word learning Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, pp. 1–21, 2025. @article{Brehm2025,When faced with an ambiguous novel word such as ‘ranana', how do listeners decide whether they heard a mispronunciation of a familiar target (‘banana') or a label for an unfamiliar novel item? We examined this question by combining visual-world eye-tracking with an offline forced-choice judgment paradigm. In two studies, we show evidence that participants entertain repair and novel label interpretations of novel words that were created by editing a familiar target word in multiple phonetic features (Experiment 1) or a single phonetic feature (Experiment 2). Repair (‘ranana' = a banana) and learning (‘ranana' = a novel referent) were both common interpretation strategies, and learning was strongly associated with visual attention to the novel image after it was referred to in a sentence. This indicates that repair and learning are both valid strategies for understanding novel words that depend upon a set of similar mechanisms, and suggests that attention during listening is causally related to whether one learns or repairs. |
Laurence Bruggeman; Evan Kidd; Rachel Nordlinger; Anne Cutler Incremental processing in a polysynthetic language (Murrinhpatha) Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 257, pp. 1–7, 2025. @article{Bruggeman2025,Language processing is rapidly incremental, but evidence bearing upon this assumption comes from very few languages. In this paper we report on a study of incremental processing in Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic Australian language, which expresses complex sentence-level meanings in a single verb, the full meaning of which is not clear until the final morph. Forty native Murrinhpatha speakers participated in a visual world eyetracking experiment in which they viewed two complex scenes as they heard a verb describing one of the scenes. The scenes were selected so that the verb describing the target scene had either no overlap with a possible description of the competitor image, or overlapped from the start (onset overlap) or at the end of the verb (rhyme overlap). The results showed that, despite meaning only being clear at the end of the verb, Murrinhpatha speakers made incremental predictions that differed across conditions. The findings demonstrate that processing in polysynthetic languages is rapid and incremental, yet unlike in commonly studied languages like English, speakers make parsing predictions based on information associated with bound morphs rather than discrete words. |
Andrew M Burleson; Pamela E Souza The time course of cognitive effort during disrupted speech Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–18, 2025. @article{Burleson2025,Listeners often find themselves in scenarios where speech is disrupted, misperceived, or otherwise difficult to recognise. In these situations, many individuals report exerting additional effort to understand speech, even when repairing speech may be difficult or impossible. This investigation aimed to characterise cognitive efforts across time during both sentence listening and a post-sentence retention interval by observing the pupillary response of participants with normal to borderline-normal hearing in response to two interrupted speech conditions: sentences interrupted by gaps of silence or bursts of noise. The pupillary response serves as a measure of the cumulative resources devoted to task completion. Both interruption conditions resulted in significantly greater levels of pupil dilation than the uninterrupted speech condition. Just prior to the end of a sentence, trials periodically interrupted by bursts of noise elicited greater pupil dilation than the silent-interrupted condition. Compared to the uninterrupted condition, both interruption conditions resulted in increased dilation after sentence end but before repetition, possibly reflecting sustained processing demands. Understanding pupil dilation as a marker of cognitive effort is important for clinicians and researchers when assessing the additional effort exerted by listeners with hearing loss who may use cochlear implants or hearing aids. Even when successful perceptual repair is unlikely, listeners may continue to exert increased effort when processing misperceived speech, which could cause them to miss upcoming speech or may contribute to heightened listening fatigue. |
Leigh B. Fernandez; Muzna Shehzad; Lauren V. Hadley Younger adults may be faster at making semantic predictions, but older adults are more efficient Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, pp. 1–8, 2025. @article{Fernandez2025,While there is strong evidence that younger adults use contextual information to generate semantic predictions, findings from older adults are less clear. Age affects cognition in a variety of different ways that may impact prediction mechanisms; while the efficiency of memory systems and processing speed decrease, life experience leads to complementary increases in vocabulary size, real-world knowledge, and even inhibitory control. Using the visual world paradigm, we tested prediction in younger (n = 30, between 18 and 35 years of age) and older adults (n = 30, between 53 and 78 years of age). Importantly, we differentiated early stage predictions based on simple spreading activation from the more resource-intensive tailoring of predictions when additional constraining information is provided. We found that older adults were slower than younger adults in generating early stage predictions but then quicker than younger adults to tailor those predictions given additional information. This suggests that while age may lead to delays in first activating relevant lexical items when listening to speech, increased linguistic experience nonetheless increases the efficiency with which contextual information is used. These findings are consistent with reports of age having positive as well as negative impacts on cognition and suggest conflation of different stages of prediction as a basis for the inconsistency in the aging-related literature to date. |
Seema Prasad; Shivam Puri; Keerthana Kapiley; Riya Rafeekh Looking without knowing: Evidence for language-mediated eye movements to masked words in Hindi-English bilinguals Journal Article In: Languages, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Prasad2025,Cross-linguistic activation has been frequently demonstrated in bilinguals through eye movements using the visual world paradigm. In this study, we explored if such activations could operate below thresholds of awareness, at least in the visual modality. Participants listened to a spoken word in Hindi or English and viewed a display containing masked printed words. One of the printed words was a phonological cohort of the translation equivalent of the spoken word (TE cohort). Previous studies using this paradigm with clearly visible words on a similar sample have demonstrated robust activation of TE cohorts. We tracked eye movements to a blank screen where the masked written words had appeared accompanied by spoken words. Analyses of fixation proportions and dwell times revealed that participants looked more often and for longer duration at quadrants that contained the TE cohorts compared to distractors. This is one of the few studies to show that cross-linguistic activation occurs even with masked visual information. We discuss the implications for bilingual parallel activation and unconscious processing of habitual visual information. |
Manuel F. Pulido; Marijana Macis; Suhad Sonbul The effects of adjacent and nonadjacent collocations on processing: Eye-tracking evidence from “nested” collocations Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Pulido2025,There is now robust evidence of priming effects during sentence processing for adjacent words that form collocations (statistically associated combinations). However, there is very limited evidence regarding how nonadjacent collocations might facilitate processing. Furthermore, no previous research has examined how nonadjacent collocations interplay with other (non)collocational material in the surrounding context. We employed “nested” collocations for the first time, in which more than one contextual element (verb, adjective) is a potential collocate for a noun. For example, in a verb–adjective–noun (V-A-N) phrase, two collocations may be “nested” (“express concerns” + “valid concerns” = “express valid concerns”) or only the verb (nonadjacent) or adjective (adjacent) might be collocational. In an eye-tracking experiment with L1 English speakers, we manipulated the collocational status of adjectives adjacent to the noun, (V)-A-N, and verbs nonadjacent to the noun, V-(A)-N. Our results replicated the basic adjacent effect and produced evidence of facilitation for nonadjacent collocations. Additionally, we find preliminary evidence for a syntactic primacy effect, whereby collocational links involving the verb prove more impactful than adjective–noun collocations, despite nonadjacency. Importantly, the results reveal cumulative facilitation in “nested collocations,” with a boost resulting from the simultaneous effects observed in adjacent and nonadjacent collocations. Altogether, the results extend our understanding of collocational priming effects beyond single collocations. wibble99: |
Michela Redolfi; Chiara Melloni Processing adjectives in development: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Child Language, vol. 52, pp. 270–293, 2025. @article{Redolfi2025,Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic differences among (subsective) adjectives is underinvestigated. A visual-world experiment explores how Italian-learning children (N=38, 2;4-5;3) process noun-adjective phrases and whether their processing strategies adapt based on the adjective class. Our investigation substantiates the proficient integration of noun and adjective semantics by children. Nevertheless, alligning with previous research, a notable asymmetry is evident in the interpretation of nouns and adjectives, the latter being integrated more slowly. Remarkably, by testing toddlers across a wide age range, we observe a developmental trajectory in processing, supporting a continuity approach to children's development. Moreover, we reveal that children exhibit sensitivity to the distinct interpretations associated with each subsective adjective. |
Tracy E Reuter; Lauren L Emberson Relative contributions of predictive vs associative processes to infant looking behavior during language comprehension Journal Article In: Journal ofChild Language, pp. 1–24, 2025. @article{Reuter2025,Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to semantic-relatedness to differentiate associative vs. predictive processes, the present study used eye-tracking to begin to disentangle the contributions of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms to infants' real-time language processing. Replicating prior results, infants (14-19 months old) use successive semantically-related words across sentences (e.g., eat, yum, mouth) to predict upcoming nouns (e.g., cookie). However, we also provide evidence that using successive semantically-related words to predict is distinct from the bottom-up activation of the word itself. In a second experiment, we investigate the potential effects of repetition on the findings. This work is the first to reveal that infant language comprehension is affected by both associative and predictive processes. |
Lilly Roth; Hans Christoph Nuerk; Felix Cramer; Gabriella Daroczy In: Psychological Research, vol. 89, no. 1, pp. 1–24, 2025. @article{Roth2025,Solving arithmetic word problems requires individuals to create a correct mental representation, and this involves both text processing and number processing. The latter comprises understanding the semantic meaning of numbers (i.e., their magnitudes) and potentially executing the appropriate mathematical operation. However, it is not yet clear whether number processing occurs after text processing or both take place simultaneously. We hypothesize that number processing occurs early and simultaneously with other problem-solving processes such as text processing. To test this hypothesis, we created non-solvable word problems that do not require any number processing and we manipulated the calculation difficulty using carry/borrow vs. non-carry/non-borrow within addition and subtraction problems. According to a strictly sequential model, this manipulation should not matter, because when problems are non-solvable, no calculation is required. In contrast, according to an interactive model, attention to numbers would be higher when word problems require a carry/borrow compared to a non-carry/non-borrow operation. Eye-tracking was used to measure attention to numbers and text in 63 adults, operationalized by static (duration and count of fixations and regressions) and dynamic measures (count of transitions). An interaction between difficulty and operation was found for all static and dynamic eye-tracking variables as well as for response times and error rates. The observed number processing in non-solvable word problems, which indicates that it occurs simultaneously with text processing, is inconsistent with strictly sequential models. |
Óscar Loureda Lamas; Mathis Teucher; Celia Hernández Pérez; Adriana Cruz Rubio; Carlos Gelormini-Lezama (Re)categorizing lexical encapsulation: An experimental approach Journal Article In: Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 239, pp. 4–15, 2025. @article{LouredaLamas2025,Anaphoric encapsulation is a discursive mechanism by which a noun phrase recovers an explicature. This eye tracking study addresses the question of whether categorizing versus recategorizing encapsulation lead to different processing patterns. Results show that (1) encapsulating noun phrases are cognitively prominent areas, (2) recategorization is never less effortful than categorization, (3) the prominence and instructional asymmetry of the encapsulating noun phrase with respect to the antecedent is greater in cases of recategorizing encapsulation. Overall, encapsulating noun phrases initiate a complex cognitive operation due to the nature of their antecedent, which includes both encoded and inferred information. A distinctive processing pattern emerges for recategorizing encapsulating noun phrases: greater local efforts, due to the introduction of new information, do not result in higher total reading times. Beyond the introductory section, the structure of this study is as follows: Section 2 discusses the properties of categorizing and recategorizing mechanisms. Section 3 reviews experimental research on nominal anaphoric encapsulation in Spanish. Section 4 outlines the key aspects of the experimental design and execution. Finally, sections 5 and 6 present the results of the experiment and offer a theoretical discussion of the findings. |
Margarethe Mcdonald; Tania S. Zamuner The relationship between language experience variables and the time course of spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–21, 2025. @article{Mcdonald2025,During spoken word recognition, words that are related phonologically (e.g., dog and dot) and words that are related semantically (e.g., dog and bear) are known to become active within the first second of word recognition. The time course of activation and resolution of these competing words changes as a function of linguistic knowledge. This preregistered study aimed to examine how a less commonly used linguistic predictor, percent lifetime language exposure, affects the time course of target and competitor activation in an eye-tracking visual world paradigm. Lifetime exposure was expected to capture variability in the representations and processes that contribute to individual differences in spoken word recognition. Results show that when putting lifetime exposure to French on a scale, more lifetime exposure was related to target fixations and slightly related to early phonological coactivation, but not related to semantic coactivation. These analyses demonstrate how generalized additive mixed models might help examine time course data with more continuous linguistic variables. Exploratory analyses looked at the amount of variance captured by three linguistic experience predictors (lifetime French exposure, recent French exposure, French vocabulary) on indices of target, phonological, and semantic fixations and identified vocabulary size as most frequently explaining significant variance, but the pattern of results did not differ from those of lifetime language exposure. These findings suggest that lifetime language exposure may not fully capture subtle differences in linguistic experience that affect lexical coactivation such as those brought upon by differences in exposure trajectories across the lifetime or differences in the setting of language exposure. |
Ivan Iotzov; Lucas C. Parra Effects of noise and reward on pupil size and electroencephalographic speech tracking in a word-detection task Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 61, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Iotzov2025,Speech is hard to understand when there is background noise. Speech intelligibility and listening effort both affect our ability to understand speech, but the relative contribution of these factors is hard to disentangle. Previous studies suggest that speech intelligibility could be assessed with EEG speech tracking and listening effort via pupil size. However, these measures may be confounded, because poor intelligibility may require a larger effort. To address this, we developed a novel word-detection paradigm that allows for a rapid behavioural assessment of speech processing. In this paradigm, words appear on the screen during continuous speech, similar to closed captioning. In two listening experiments with a total of 51 participants, we manipulated intelligibility by changing signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and modulated effort by varying monetary reward. Increasing SNR improved detection performance along with EEG speech tracking. Additionally, we find that pupil size increases with increased SNR. Surprisingly, when we modulated both reward and SNR, we found that reward modulated only pupil size, whereas SNR modulated only EEG speech tracking. We interpret this as the effects of arousal and listening effort on pupil size and of intelligibility on EEG speech tracking. The experimental paradigm |
Yu Cin Jian; Leo Yuk Ting Cheung Prediction of text-and-diagram reading comprehension by eye-movement indicators: A longitudinal study in elementary schools Journal Article In: European Journal of Psychology of Education, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 1–25, 2025. @article{Jian2025,Eye-movement technology has been often used to examine reading processes, but research has seldom examined the relationship between the reading process and comprehension performance, and whether the relationships are similar or different across grades. To investigate this, we conducted a 3-year longitudinal study starting at grade 4, with 175 effect samples to track the development data of eye movements on text-and-diagram reading. A series of temporal and spatial eye-movement predictors were identified to predict reading comprehension in various grades. The result of a hierarchical regression model established that total fixation duration measures (reflects processing level) and mean fixation duration (reflects decoding efficiency) were relatively better predictors of the post-reading tests at grades 5 and 6. That is, the readers made more mental efforts and had better decoding ability, which predict better post-reading test scores. Meanwhile, in grades 5 and 6, rereading total fixation duration on both the main text and diagrams consistently predicted the post-reading tests, indicating that the readers' self-regulated study time on re-processing some specific information is important for reading comprehension. Besides, a longitudinal structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that the readers' fixation durations and text-and-diagram regression count in the lower fourth grade could significantly predict the same indicators in the following 2 years. In summary, this study identified the critical eye-movement indicators for predicting reading-test performance, and these predictions were more effective for the readers in upper grades than for those in the lower grades. |
Zhiwei Liu; Yan Li; Jingxin Wang Flexible word position encoding in Chinese reading: Evidence from parafoveal preprocessing Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Liu2025b,Accurately encoding word positions plays a critical role in fluent reading, allowing readers to facilitate efficient comprehension. However, whether word position information can be encoded parafoveally remains unknown, particularly in unspaced languages like Chinese. This study investigated whether Chinese readers can extract word order information from parafoveal vision using the boundary paradigm and eye-tracking. Participants read sentences containing identical, transposed, or unrelated preview words, which were replaced by the target words upon the eyes crossing an invisible boundary. Results showed that reading times on the target words were longer for transposed compared to identical previews but shorter than unrelated previews. These findings suggest that word positional information can be encoded parafoveally during Chinese reading, but not in a strictly precise manner. The implications of the findings for the Chinese reading model are discussed. |
Belén López Assef; Tania Zamuner Task effects in children's word recall: Expanding the reverse production effect Journal Article In: Journal of Child Language, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{LopezAssef2025,Words said aloud are typically recalled more than words studied under other techniques. In certain circumstances, production does not lead to this memory advantage. We investigated the nature of this effect by varying the task during learning. Children aged five to six years were trained on novel words which required no action (Heard) compared to Verbal-Speech (production), Non-Verbal-Speech (stick out tongue), and Non-Verbal-Non-Speech (touch nose). Eye-tracking showed successful learning of novel words in all training conditions, but no differences between conditions. Both non-verbal tasks disrupted recall, demonstrating that encoding can be disrupted when children perform different types of concurrent actions. |
Ryan M. O'Leary; Nicole M. Amichetti; Zoe Brown; Alexander J. Kinney; Arthur Wingfield Congruent prosody reduces cognitive effort in memory for spoken sentences: A pupillometric study with young and older adults Journal Article In: Experimental Aging Research, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 35–58, 2025. @article{OLeary2025,Background: In spite of declines in working memory and other processes, older adults generally maintain good ability to understand and remember spoken sentences. In part this is due to preserved knowledge of linguistic rules and their implementation. Largely overlooked, however, is the support older adults may gain from the presence of sentence prosody (pitch contour, lexical stress, intra-and inter-word timing) as an aid to detecting the structure of a heard sentence. Methods: Twenty-four young and 24 older adults recalled recorded sentences in which the sentence prosody corresponded to the clausal structure of the sentence, when the prosody was in conflict with this structure, or when there was reduced prosody uninformative with regard to the clausal structure. Pupil size was concurrently recorded as a measure of processing effort. Results: Both young and older adults' recall accuracy was superior for sentences heard with supportive prosody than for sentences with uninformative prosody or for sentences in which the prosodic marking and causal structure were in conflict. The measurement of pupil dilation suggested that the task was generally more effortful for the older adults, but with both groups showing a similar pattern of effort-reducing effects of supportive prosody. Conclusions: Results demonstrate the influence of prosody on young and older adults' ability to recall accurately multi-clause sentences, and the significant role effective prosody may play in preserving processing effort. |
Wesley Orth; Shayne Sloggett; Masaya Yoshida Positive polarity items: An illusion of ungrammaticality Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, pp. 1–25, 2025. @article{Orth2025,Negative Polarity Item (NPIs) produce an illusion of grammaticality in some contexts with negation. Many approaches to modelling the NPI illusion propose that it is driven by the processor's attempt to link an NPI to a negative element. We investigate an illusion effect observed with Positive Polarity Item (PPIs), another class of polarity sensitive element. While NPIs must be licensed by a negative element, PPIs are anti-licensed by negative elements. We find an illusion of ungrammaticality for PPIs in environments where an illusion of grammaticality is observed for NPIs. Thus, we argue there is a general polarity illusion. We find that several accounts of the NPI illusion either predict this PPI illusion or can capture this effect with a straightforward extension. The approaches which are able to predict this effect share a reliance on structural representation, highlighting the importance of both the licensing features of polarity items and the structural detail in sentence processing representations. |
Ascensión Pagán; Federica Degno; Sara V. Milledge; Richard D. Kirkden; Sarah J. White; Simon P. Liversedge; Kevin B. Paterson Aging and word predictability during reading: Evidence from eye movements and fixation-related potentials Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, pp. 1–26, 2025. @article{Pagan2025,The use of context to facilitate the processing of words is recognized as a hallmark of skilled reading. This capability is also hypothesized to change with older age because of cognitive changes across the lifespan. However, research investigating this issue using eye movements or event-related potentials (ERPs) has produced conflicting findings. Specifically, whereas eye-movement studies report larger context effects for older than younger adults, ERP findings suggest that context effects are diminished or delayed for older readers. Crucially, these contrary findings may reflect methodological differences, including use of unnatural sentence displays in ERP research. To address these limitations, we used a coregistration technique to record eye movements (EMs) and fixation-related potentials (FRPs) simultaneously while 44 young adults (18–30 years) and 30 older adults (65+ years) read sentences containing a target word that was strongly or weakly predicted by prior context. Eye-movement analyses were conducted over all data (full EM dataset) and only data matching FRPs. FRPs were analysed to capture early and later components 70–900 ms following fixation-onset on target words. Both eye-movement datasets and early FRPs showed main effects of age group and context, while the full EM dataset and later FRPs revealed larger context effects for older adults. We argue that, by using coregistration methods to address limitations of earlier ERP research, our experiment provides compelling complementary evidence from eye movements and FRPs that older adults rely more on context to integrate words during reading. |
Adam J. Parker; Timothy J. Slattery Frequency and predictability effects for line final words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 92–112, 2025. @article{Parker2025,Computational models of eye movement control during reading have revolutionized the study of visual, perceptual, and linguistic processes underlying reading. However, these models can only simulate and test predictions about the reading of single lines of text. Here we report two studies that examined how input var- iables for lexical processing (frequency and predictability) in these models influence the processing of line- final words. The first study was a linear mixed-effects analysis of the Provo Corpus, which included data from 84 readers reading 55 multiline texts. The second study was a preregistered eye movement experiment, where 32 participants read 128 items where frequency, predictability, and position (intraline vs. line-final) were orthogonally manipulated. Both studies were consistent in showing that reading timeswere shorter on line-final words.While therewasmixed evidence for frequency and predictability effects in the ProvoCorpus, our exper- imental data confirmed additive effects of frequency and predictability for line-final words, which did not differ from those for intralinewords.We conclude that while models that make additive assumptions about the role of frequency and predictability may be better suited to modeling the current findings, additional assumptions are required if models are to be capable of modeling shorter reading times on line-final words. |
Olga Parshina; Anna Smirnova; Sofya Goldina; Emily Bainbridge The effect of the global language context on bilingual language control during L1 reading Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Parshina2025,The proactive gain control hypothesis suggests that the global language context regulates lexical access to the bilinguals' languages during reading. Specifically, with increasing exposure to non-target language cues, bilinguals adjust the lexical activation to allow non-target language access from the earliest word recognition stages. Using the invisible boundary paradigm, we examined the flow of lexical activation in 50 proficient Russian-English bilinguals reading in their native Russian while the language context shifted from a monolingual to a bilingual environment. We gradually introduced non-target language cues (the language of experimenter and fillers) while also manipulating the type of word previews (identical, code-switches, unrelated code-switches, pseudowords). The results revealed the facilitatory reading effects of code-switches but only in the later lexical processing stages and these effects were independent of the global language context manipulation. The results are discussed from the perspective of limitations imposed by script differences on bilingual language control flexibility. |
Marianna Kyriacou; Franziska Köder The cognitive underpinnings of irony comprehension: Fluid intelligence but not working memory modulates processing Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 45, pp. 1219–1250, 2025. @article{Kyriacou2025,The comprehension of irony involves a sophisticated inferential process requiring language users to go beyond the literal meaning of an utterance. Because of its complex nature, we hypothesized that working memory (WM) and fluid intelligence, the two main components of executive attention, would be involved in the understanding of irony: the former by maintaining focus and relevant information active during processing, the latter by disengaging irrelevant information and offering better problem-solving skills. In this eye-tracking reading experiment, we investigated how adults (N = 57) process verbal irony, based on their executive attention skills. The results indicated a null (or indirect) effect for WM, while fluid intelligence directly modulated the comprehension and processing of irony during reading. As fluid intelligence is an important individual-difference variable, the findings pave the way for future research on developmental and clinical populations who tend to struggle with nonliteral language. |
Melanie Labusch; Manuel Perea The CASE of brand names during sentence reading Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 89, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{Labusch2025,Brand names typically maintain a distinctive letter case (e.g., IKEA, Google). This element is essential for theoretical (word recognition models) and practical (brand design) reasons. In abstractionist models, letter case is considered irrelevant, whereas instance-based models use surface information like letter case during lexical retrieval. Previous brand identification tasks reported faster responses to brands in their characteristic letter case (e.g., IKEA and Google faster than ikea and GOOGLE), favoring instance-based models. We examined whether this pattern can be generalized to normal sentence reading: Participants read sentences in which well-known brand names were presented intact (e.g., IKEA, Google) or with a modified letter case (e.g., Ikea, GOOGLE). Results showed a cost for brands written in uppercase, independently of their characteristic letter case, in early eye fixation measures (probability of first-fixation, first-fixation duration). However, for later measures (gaze duration and total times), fixation times were longer when the brand's letter case was modified, restricted to those brands typically written in lowercase (e.g., GOOGLE > Google, whereas Ikea ≲ IKEA). Thus, during sentence reading, both the actual letter case and the typical letter case of brand names interact dynamically, posing problems for abstractionist models of reading. |
Haiting Lan; Sixin Liao; Jan Louis Kruger Do advertisements disrupt reading? evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 39, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Lan2025,Reading online texts is often accompanied by visual distractors such as advertisements. Although previous studies have found that visual distractors are attention-demanding, little is known about how they impact reading. Drawing on text-based and word-based eye-movement measures, the current study examines how three types of ads (static image, flashing text and video) influence readers' reading comprehension and reading process. Results show that increasingly animated ads were more distracting than static ones at the text level, as evidenced by more and longer fixations, and more regressions. Moreover, the word frequency effect was stronger when reading with ads with flashing text than without ads on gaze duration and total reading time, suggesting that linguistic-related animated ads interfere with word processing. Although visual distractors reduced their reading speed and word processing efficiency, readers managed to maintain sufficient comprehension by adopting a more mindful reading strategy, indicating how metacognition functions in complex reading situations. |
Zhu Meng; Guoli Yan; John E. Marsh; Simon P. Liversedge Primary task demands modulate background speech disruption during reading of Chinese tongue twisters: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, pp. 1–18, 2025. @article{Meng2025,This study investigated how the semantic and phonological properties of background speech affect reading, depending on primary task processing. Chinese participants were randomly assigned to two groups and read Chinese tongue twisters while exposed to meaningful, meaningless, spectrally-rotated speech (acoustically similar to normal speech but without linguistic information), or silence. One group engaged in a semantic task, comprehending sentences and responding to “yes-no” questions, while the other performed a phonological task, identifying the most frequent initial phoneme in sentences and selecting a corresponding character. Although background speech did not significantly influence accuracy for either task, it differentially impacted eye movements and reading rates. Semantic properties disrupted the semantic task without significantly affecting the phonological task, while phonological properties influenced both tasks, particularly the phonological one. These findings indicate that the nature of the reading task modulates the disruptive effects of background speech, supporting the interference-by-process account. |
Maria Eleonora Minissi; Alexia Antzaka; Simona Mancini; Marie Lallier Can playing video games enhance reading skills through more efficient serial visual search mechanisms? Insights from an eye tracking study Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 209–230, 2025. @article{Minissi2025,Reading disorders are associated with atypical top-down visual attention (VA) processes like reduced VA span and slower serial visual search (SVS). In contrast, expert action video game (AVG) players, known for their efficient top-down VA, exhibit improved reading abilities. It is unclear whether these benefits stem solely from AVGs or apply to other gaming experiences. To explore this, AVG players (AVGPs), players of genres excluding AVGs (VGPs), and non-players were evaluated on their VA span, and behavioural and oculomotor performance in SVS. VGPs, but not AVGPs, demonstrated enhanced performance and oculomotor behaviour in SVS compared to non-players, while both player groups showed a trend towards better VA span skills. Notably, reading-related skills were enhanced in the two player groups, but particularly more so in VGPs. These findings support the existence of potential benefits of playing video games different from classical AVGs for the development of top-down VA and reading-related abilities. |
2024 |
Hannah Mechtenberg; Cristal Giorio; Emily B. Myers Pupil dilation reflects perceptual priorities during a receptive speech task Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 425–440, 2024. @article{Mechtenberg2024,Objectives: The listening demand incurred by speech perception fluctuates in normal conversation. At the acoustic-phonetic level, natural variation in pronunciation acts as speedbumps to accurate lexical selection. Any given utterance may be more or less phonetically ambiguous - a problem that must be resolved by the listener to choose the correct word. This becomes especially apparent when considering two common speech registers - clear and casual - that have characteristically different levels of phonetic ambiguity. Clear speech prioritizes intelligibility through hyperarticulation which results in less ambiguity at the phonetic level, while casual speech tends to have a more collapsed acoustic space. We hypothesized that listeners would invest greater cognitive resources while listening to casual speech to resolve the increased amount of phonetic ambiguity, as compared with clear speech. To this end, we used pupillometry as an online measure of listening effort during perception of clear and casual continuous speech in two background conditions: quiet and noise. Design: Forty-eight participants performed a probe detection task while listening to spoken, nonsensical sentences (masked and unmasked) while recording pupil size. Pupil size was modeled using growth curve analysis to capture the dynamics of the pupil response as the sentence unfolded. Results: Pupil size during listening was sensitive to the presence of noise and speech register (clear/casual). Unsurprisingly, listeners had overall larger pupil dilations during speech perception in noise, replicating earlier work. The pupil dilation pattern for clear and casual sentences was considerably more complex. Pupil dilation during clear speech trials was slightly larger than for casual speech, across quiet and noisy backgrounds. Conclusions: We suggest that listener motivation could explain the larger pupil dilations to clearly spoken speech. We propose that, bounded by the context of this task, listeners devoted more resources to perceiving the speech signal with the greatest acoustic/phonetic fidelity. Further, we unexpectedly found systematic differences in pupil dilation preceding the onset of the spoken sentences. Together, these data demonstrate that the pupillary system is not merely reactive but also adaptive - sensitive to both task structure and listener motivation to maximize accurate perception in a limited resource system. |
Xiaolin Mei; Shuyuan Chen; Xinyi Xia; Bo Yang; Yanping Liu Neural correlates for word-frequency effect in Chinese natural reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, no. April, 2024. @article{Mei2024,Word frequency effect has always been of interest for reading research because of its critical role in exploring mental processing underlying reading behaviors. Access to word frequency information has long been considered an indicator of the beginning of lexical processing and the most sensitive marker for studying when the brain begins to extract semantic information Sereno & Rayner, Brain and Cognition, 42, 78–81, (2000), Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 489–493, (2003). While the word frequency effect has been extensively studied in numerous eye-tracking and traditional EEG research using the RSVP paradigm, there is a lack of corresponding evidence in studies of natural reading. To find the neural correlates of the word frequency effect, we conducted a study of Chinese natural reading using EEG and eye-tracking coregistration to examine the time course of lexical processing. Our results reliably showed that the word frequency effect first appeared in the N200 time window and the bilateral occipitotemporal regions. Additionally, the word frequency effect was reflected in the N400 time window, spreading from the occipital region to the central parietal and frontal regions. Our current study provides the first neural correlates for word-frequency effect in natural Chinese reading so far, shedding new light on understanding lexical processing in natural reading and could serve as an important basis for further reading study when considering neural correlates in a realistic manner. |
Natalia Meir; Olga Parshina; Irina A. Sekerina Prediction in bilingual sentence processing Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 544–576, 2024. @article{Meir2024,The Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2012) accounts for cross-linguistic differences in thematic role mapping. We investigated production and predictive use of accusative case morphology in Russian-Hebrew bilingual children. We also investigated the role of production in predictive processing testing the Prediction-by-Production Account (Pickering & Garrod, 2018) vs. the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White, 2000). Three groups of children aged 4–8 participated: Russian-Hebrew-speaking bilinguals, Russian-speaking and Hebrew-speaking monolingual controls. All children participated in the accusative case production and Visual-World eye-tracking comprehension experiments. Bilinguals were tested in both of their languages. The results of the study confirmed the predictions of the Unified Competition Model showing typological differences in the strength of the case-marking cue and its predictive use in sentence processing in Russian- and Hebrew-speaking controls. While Russian-speaking monolinguals relied on case marking to predict the upcoming agent/patient, the performance of Hebrew-speaking monolingual children varied. The findings for bilinguals showed that despite their lower production accuracy in both languages, they were either indistinguishable from monolinguals or showed an advantage in the predictive use of case morphology. The findings support the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis , which predicts a dissociation between production and comprehension. |
Johannes M. Meixner; Jochen Laubrock Executive functioning predicts development of reading skill and perceptual span seven years later Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 136, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Meixner2024,What is the role of executive functions in longitudinally predicting reading success in general and perceptual-span size in particular? We present two new waves of our sequential-cohort longitudinal study of perceptual-span development, including five waves totally spanning grades 1 to 10. Using nonlinear mixed effects growth-curve modeling we here show that executive functioning measured in the early primary-school years predicts reading performance seven years later, even if controlled for initial reading performance. Moreover, the two variables exerted an interactive influence, suggesting mutual benefit. Effects of initial executive functioning on the final perceptual span were even more pronounced than on reading rate, suggesting a substantial contribution of executive processes to perceptual-span development. Perceptual-span development is critical for successful reading: The initial reading-rate difference between slower and faster readers diverged at the point when perceptual-span development was fastest, and stabilized at inflated differences thereafter. In an educational setting, early tests of executive functioning may be useful for identifying children who are likely to need intervention to become proficient readers. |
David Melcher; Ani Alaberkyan; Chrysi Anastasaki; Xiaoyi Liu; Michele Deodato; Gianluca Marsicano; Diogo Almeida An early effect of the parafoveal preview on post-saccadic processing of English words Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, pp. 1–26, 2024. @article{Melcher2024,A key aspect of efficient visual processing is to use current and previous information to make predictions about what we will see next. In natural viewing, and when looking at words, there is typically an indication of forthcoming visual information from extrafoveal areas of the visual field before we make an eye movement to an object or word of interest. This “preview effect” has been studied for many years in the word reading literature and, more recently, in object perception. Here, we integrated methods from word recognition and object perception to investigate the timing of the preview on neural measures of word recognition. Through a combined use of EEG and eye-tracking, a group of multilingual participants took part in a gaze-contingent, single-shot saccade experiment in which words appeared in their parafoveal visual field. In valid preview trials, the same word was presented during the preview and after the saccade, while in the invalid condition, the saccade target was a number string that turned into a word during the saccade. As hypothesized, the valid preview greatly reduced the fixation-related evoked response. Interestingly, multivariate decoding analyses revealed much earlier preview effects than previously reported for words, and individual decoding performance correlated with participant reading scores. These results demonstrate that a parafoveal preview can influence relatively early aspects of post-saccadic word processing and help to resolve some discrepancies between the word and object literatures. |
Daniela Mertzen; Anna Laurinavichyute; Brian W. Dillon; Ralf Engbert; Shravan Vasishth Crosslinguistic evidence against interference from extra-sentential distractors Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 137, pp. 1–23, 2024. @article{Mertzen2024,Cue-based retrieval theories of sentence processing posit that long-distance dependency formation is guided by a cue-based retrieval mechanism: dependents are retrieved via retrieval cues associated with a verb. When retrieval cues match multiple similar items in memory, this leads to cue-based retrieval interference. A landmark study by Van Dyke and McElree tested interference from sentence-external items: retrieval cues were manipulated to (mis-)match semantically similar items presented prior to a target dependency. The support for interference of this type is weak, and only comes from English object cleft constructions. Our study provides a cross-linguistic investigation of interference from sentence-external items: Three eyetracking studies in English, German and Russian tested interference in the online processing of filler-gap dependencies under varying task demands. A fourth study attempted to replicate the Van Dyke and McElree study using self-paced reading. Bayes factors analyses show cross-linguistic evidence against interference from sentence-external items. A broader implication from these data is that cue-based retrieval interference is driven by sentence-internal distracting items, suggesting that a cue-based search is restricted to the current linguistic context. |
Elizabeth R. Merwin; Jacqueline Hammack; Teresa Wilcox Robotic arm perception: An eyetracking study exploring causal relations and perceived trust Journal Article In: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 1740 –1746, 2024. @article{Merwin2024,With the increased integration of robots into industrial, service, and educational spaces, it is imperative to understand factors that influence human-robot interactions. While the existing literature has explored human perception of robot-produced verbal communication, there is a notable gap in understanding how adults process robot-produced nonverbal communication. Current research focuses on subjective measures of the individual's perception of robots during interactions, but often fails to have objective measures or control groups in their designs which limits the conclusions that can be made. In this study, we aim to implement a design that allows for the comparison of robot and human nonverbal communication understanding and perceiving through both objective eye-tracking measures and subjective survey measures. This design should prove useful to gain insights into how people understand information provided by robots and humans when watching their nonverbal gestures, and their perceptions of the agents after their interactions. |
Diane C. Mézière; Lili Yu; Genevieve McArthur; Erik D. Reichle; Titus Malsburg Scanpath regularity as an index of reading comprehension Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 79–100, 2024. @article{Meziere2024,Purpose: Recent research on the potential of using eye-tracking to measure reading comprehension ability suggests that the relationship between standard eye-tracking measures and reading comprehension is influenced by differences in task demands between comprehension assessments. We compared standard eye-tracking measures and scanpath regularity as predictors of reading comprehension scores. Method: We used a dataset in which 79 participants (mean age: 22 years, 82% females, 76% monolingual English speakers) were administered three widely-used reading comprehension assessments with varying task demands while their eye movements were monitored: the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension; (YARC), the Gray Oral Reading Test; (GORT-5), and the sentence comprehension subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test; (WRAT-4). Results: Results showed that scanpath regularity measures, similarly to standard eye-tracking measures, were influenced by differences in task demands between the three tests. Nevertheless, both types of eye-tracking measures made unique contributions as predictors of comprehension and the best set of predictors included both standard eye-tracking measures and at least one scanpath measure across tests. Conclusion: The results provide evidence that scanpaths capture differences in eye-movement patterns missed by standard eye-tracking measures. Overall, the results highlight the effect of task demands on eye-movement behavior and suggest that reading goals and task demands need to be considered when interpreting eye-tracking data. |
Sara Milligan; Elizabeth R. Schotter Do readers here what they sea?: Effects of lexicality, predictability, and individual differences on the phonological preview benefit Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 135, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Milligan2024,For decades, researchers have debated whether readers benefit from translating visual word forms into phonological codes. A focus of this debate has been on the earliest moments of processing when a word is perceived in parafoveal vision (i.e., phonological preview benefit). A recent meta-analysis (Vasilev et al., 2019) concluded that the phonological preview benefit may be small and unreliable but they did not take into account potentially important stimulus-level or participant-level factors that varied across the included studies. Therefore, we conducted two well-powered experiments that systematically investigated the effects of sentence constraint, preview lexicality, and participant language skills on the phonological preview benefit effect. We found phonological preview benefits that were larger in high versus low constraint sentences, larger for words than pseudowords, and larger for better spellers. We conclude that phonological codes do facilitate early word recognition during reading, but that the phonological preview benefit magnitude depends on subject- and stimulus-level factors. |
Padraic Monaghan; Lana S. Jago; Lydia Speyer; Heather Turnbull; Katie J. Alcock; Caroline F. Rowland; Kate Cain Statistical learning ability at 17 months relates to early reading skills via oral language Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 246, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Monaghan2024,Statistical learning ability has been found to relate to children's reading skills. Yet, statistical learning is also known to be vital for developing oral language skills, and oral language and reading skills relate strongly. These connections raise the question of whether statistical learning ability affects reading via oral language or directly. Statistical learning is multifaceted, and so different aspects of statistical learning might influence oral language and reading skills distinctly. In a longitudinal study, we determined how two aspects of statistical learning from an artificial language tested on 70 17-month-old infants—segmenting sequences from speech and generalizing the sequence structure—related to oral language skills measured at 54 months and reading skills measured at approximately 75 months. Statistical learning segmentation did not relate significantly to oral language or reading, whereas statistical learning generalization related to oral language, but only indirectly related to reading. Our results showed that children's early statistical learning ability was associated with learning to read via the children's oral language skills. |
Corrin Moss; Scott P. Ardoin; Joshua A. Mellott; Katherine S. Binder The effects of question previewing on response accuracy and text processing: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Journal of School Psychology, vol. 104, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Moss2024,The present study investigated the impact of manipulating reading strategies (i.e., reading the questions first [QF] or reading the passage first [PF]) during a reading comprehension test where we explored how reading strategy was related to student characteristics (i.e., reading achievement and working memory capacity). Participants' eye movements were monitored as they read 12 passages and answered multiple-choice questions. We examined differences in (a) response accuracy, (b) average total time on words in the text, (c) total task reading time, and (d) time reading text relevant to questions as a function of PF and QF strategies. Analyses were conducted to examine whether findings varied as a function of student characteristics (i.e., reading achievement and working memory capacity) and grade level (Grades 3, 5, and 8). Several interesting findings emerged from our study, including a limited effect of reading strategy use on response accuracy, with only eighth graders demonstrating better accuracy in the QF condition, and several demonstrations of PF leading to more efficient test-taking processes, including (a) longer average total reading times on words in the passage in the PF condition that could be associated with creating a better mental model of the text, (b) often being associated with less total-task time, and (c) being associated with more successful search strategies. Implications for providing teachers and students with strategies are discussed. |
Corrin Moss; Sharon Kwabi; Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder In: Reading and Writing, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 703–729, 2024. @article{Moss2024a,The ability to form a mental model of a text is an essential component of successful reading comprehension (RC), and purpose for reading can influence mental model construction. Participants were assigned to one of two conditions during an RC test to alter their purpose for reading: concurrent (texts and questions were presented simultaneously) and sequential (texts were presented first, then questions were shown without text access). Their eye movements were recorded during testing. Working memory capacity (WMC) and centrality of textual information were measured. Participants in the sequential condition had longer first-pass reading times compared to participants in the concurrent condition, while participants in the concurrent condition had longer total processing times per word. In addition, participants with higher WMC had longer total reading times per word. Finally, participants in the sequential condition with higher WMC had longer processing times in central regions. Even among skilled college readers, participants with lower WMC had difficulty adjusting their reading behaviors to meet the task demands such as distinguishing central and peripheral ideas. However, participants with higher WMC increased attention to important text areas. One potential explanation is that participants with higher WMC are better able to construct a coherent mental model of the text, and attending to central text areas is an essential component of mental model formation. Therefore, these results help clarify the relationship between the purpose for reading and mental model development. |
Kimberley Mulder; Sophie Brand; Lou Boves; Mirjam Ernestus Processing reduced speech in the L1 and L2: A combined eye-tracking and ERP study Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 527–551, 2024. @article{Mulder2024,We examined the cognitive processes underlying the comprehension of reduced word pronunciation variants in natives and advanced learners of French. In a passive listening visual world task, participants heard sentences containing either a reduced or a full form and saw pictures representing the target word, a phonological competitor and two neutral distractors. After each sentence they saw a picture and had to decide whether it matched the content of that sentence. Eye movements and EEG were recorded simultaneously. Because the two recordings offer complementary information about cognitive processes, we developed methods for analysing the signals in combination. We found a stronger effect of reduction on phonetic processing and semantic integration in learners than in natives, but the effects are different from the N100/N400 and P600 effects found in previous research. Time-locking EEG signals on fixation moments in the eye movements offers a window onto the time course of semantic integration. |
Andriy Myachykov; Christoph Scheepers Lexical and perceptual biases in speakers' syntactic choices Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Myachykov2024,Russell Tomlin's groundbreaking work laid a foundation for the explorations of the interplay between linguistic and nonlinguistic factors determining structural choice during sentence production. The present article investigates the interplay between two such factors, lexical priming and visual cueing, which may prioritize a particular referent of an event for privileged subject status within a sentence. To this end, native speakers of English read noun names of either the agent or the patient prior to describing a transitive event. Before the event description, an exogenous visual cue directed their attention to the location of one of the event's referents. Analysis of the proportion of passive-voice descriptions revealed a strong effect of lexical priming with more passives after patient-related lexical primes but no effect of visual cueing. This highlights potential constraints on previously documented visual cueing effects on speakers' structural choices. |
Laura Nadal; Antonella Bove Gender doublets as a mark of gender inclusive language: An experimental study on language processing Journal Article In: International Journal of Linguistics, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 38–57, 2024. @article{Nadal2024,Over the last decades, gender inclusive language has become a debated issue in which two opposing positions hardly reach a meeting point: those who believe that the masculine plural form for groups of people can be interpreted as neutral, unmarked and inclusive of both biological sexes compared to those who claim that the generic masculine is a sexist use of language, while the gender doublet forms (los políticos y políticas) are alternatives that offer greater visibility to women. The purpose of our study is to contribute to this debate by means of objective data obtained out of experimental linguistics. In this context, an eyetracking experiment was carried out with 88 native speakers of Spanish at the National University of Colombia, with the aim of testing whether one of the first alternatives proposed as an inclusive language strategy, that is gender doublet, affects the cognitive efforts required to process written sentences. The results show that gender desinences significantly affect the cognitive effort required by readers during the information retrieval phase. |
Krishnaveni Nagarajan; Kavya Ravi; Shakthi Pradheepa Periakaruppan; Prem Nandhini Satgunam When noise becomes signal: A study of blink rate using an eye tracker Journal Article In: The Ocular Surface, vol. 34, pp. 516–520, 2024. @article{Nagarajan2024,Purpose: Although blink rate is considered important for digital eye strain and dry eye conditions, its assessment has been mostly manual. This study aimed at quantifying blink rate automatically using the Eyelink 1000 Plus eye tracker and comparing it with manual counting. Additionally, blink rate was correlated with reading eye movements and reading speed. Methods: Thirty participants (mean age 26.8 ± 3.5 years; 19 females) were enrolled. An on-screen reading task for 3 min duration, was repeated 3 times with a 2-min break between the repetitions. During this task, eye movements and blinks were measured through the Eyelink 1000 Plus eye tracker. The blink was also counted manually by the examiner in real time from a video feed. Results: The blink rate obtained by the eye tracker (median [Q1, Q3]:11.7 [6.8,15.5] blinks/min) and manual counting (11.6 [7.1, 15.4] blinks/min) were comparable (p > 0.5). No significant correlations were observed between the blink rate and any of the reading eye movement parameters except saccadic amplitude (Spearman's rho |
Shingo Nahatame; Tomoko Ogiso; Yukino Kimura; Yuji Ushiro TECO: An eye-tracking corpus of Japanese L2 English learners' text reading Journal Article In: Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{Nahatame2024,Eye-tracking corpora are invaluable resources for understanding human text processing. In recent years, some corpora have been developed that incorporate second-language (L2) English readers' eye-movement recordings. However, these face limitations such as small data sizes, the absence of multiple and longer text sources, and a scarcity of data from learners whose first languages are linguistically distinct from English. Addressing these gaps, this study introduces Tsukuba Eye-tracking Corpus (TECO), a dataset of eye-tracking records from Japanese L2 English learners engaged in text reading. TECO encompasses eye-tracking data for over 410,000 tokens, collected from 41 Japanese students who each read 30 English passages ranging in length from 300–400 words. In this article, we detail the design of TECO and report on the reliability of commonly used eye-tracking measures (e.g., skipping, first fixation duration, and regression) along with their descriptive statistics and distribution. We also validate the corpus by illustrating the impact of several lexical and reader factors (e.g., word length and reading proficiency) on some eye-tracking measures. TECO will serve as a valuable resource for researchers who are keen on exploring the cognitive processes involved in L2 reading. The corpus is freely accessible at the Open Science Framework [https://osf.io/wrvj3/], and we are committed to its continuous expansion by adding participants from diverse backgrounds and incorporating more detailed text information. |
Yoko Nakano; Shuhei Kadota; Mariko Kawasaki; Hiroshi Nakanishi; Naoya Hase; Osato Shiki An eye-tracking study on the effects of speaker's face on shadowing performance Journal Article In: Language, Education, & Technology, vol. 61, pp. 29–58, 2024. @article{Nakano2024,Since the influence of audiovisual materials on shadowing performance has not yet been studied well, this study compared the effects of two types of materials—auditory texts presented together with either a still or moving image of a face of a speaker who was reading the text aloud—on shadowing reproduction rates and loci of eye-gaze of learners. Twenty-four L1-Japanese learners of English (13 upper-level and 11 lower-level learners) participated in an eye-tracking experiment. In the results, the participants shadowed more accurately for moving images of a speaker's face than for still images; when the moving images were presented, the lower-proficiency level group gazed at the speaker's mouth longer than any other region, but the upper-proficiency level group gazed at the eyes and mouth equally longer than the other facial regions. The reproduction rates did not statistically differ between the eyes and mouth in the lower-proficiency group, but the upper-proficiency group exhibited better reproduction rates for the eyes compared to the mouth. On the one hand visual cues, such as movements of mouth and chin of a speaker's face, help some learners perceive auditorily presented texts, and on the other hand some learners may have difficulty in linking speech sounds and mouth movements during shadowing. |
Aine Ito Effects of task instructions on predictive eye movements and word recognition during second language sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Language Learning, pp. 1–31, 2024. @article{Ito2024a,This study tested whether encouraging prediction enhances prediction in second language (L2) speakers. L2 English speakers listened to English sentences like The woman … will read/buy one of the newspapers while viewing the target (a newspaper) and distractor objects (a rose, a bowl, and a mango) on a screen and clicked on the target as quickly as possible. The target was predictable (read) or unpredictable (buy) from the verb meaning. Participants looked at the target longer and were quicker to move the mouse to it when instructed to predict sentence continuation than when they were merely instructed to comprehend sentences. This result held true both when the target was predictable and unpredictable. Furthermore, only when instructed to predict did the participants make more clicking errors when the target was unpredictable than predictable, which suggested that encouraging prediction can interfere with word recognition accuracy in unpredictable contexts due to reduced cognitive resources or failed predictions. |
Aine Ito; Ana Bautista; Clara Martin Cognate facilitation effect on verb-based semantic prediction in L2 is modulated by L2 proficiency Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Ito2024b,We tested whether verb-based prediction in late bilinguals is facilitated when the verb is a cognate versus non-cognate. Spanish-English bilinguals and Chinese-English bilinguals (control) listened to English sentences such as “The girl will adopt the dog” while viewing a scene containing either a dog and unadoptable objects (predictable condition) or a dog and other adoptable animals (unpredictable condition). The verb was either a cognate or non-cognate between Spanish and English and never a cognate between Chinese and English. Both groups of bilinguals were more likely to look at the target (the dog) in the predictable versus unpredictable condition. However, only low-proficient L1 Spanish bilinguals showed greater and earlier prediction when the verb was cognate than when it was non-cognate, suggesting that cognate facilitation effect occurs not only on the cognate word itself but also on prediction based on this cognate word, and that this effect is modulated by L2 proficiency. |
Aine Ito; Huong Thi Thu Nguyen; Pia Knoeferle German-dominant Vietnamese heritage speakers use semantic constraints of German for anticipation during comprehension in Vietnamese Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 27, pp. 57–74, 2024. @article{Ito2024,To test effects of German on anticipation in Vietnamese, we recorded eye-movements during comprehension and manipulated i) verb constraints (different vs. similar in German and Vietnamese) and ii) classifier constraints (absent in German). In each of two experiments, participants listened to Vietnamese sentences like "Mai mac mot chic áo."('Mai wears a [classifier] shirt.'), while viewing four objects. Between experiments, we contrasted bilingual background: L1 Vietnamese-L2 German late bilinguals (Experiment 1) and heritage speakers of Vietnamese in Germany (Experiment 2). Both groups anticipated verb-compatible and classifier-compatible objects upon hearing the verb/classifier. However, when the (verb) constraints differed (e.g., Vietnamese: mac 'wear (a shirt/#earrings)' - German: tragen 'wear (a shirt/earrings)'), the heritage speakers were distracted by the object (earrings) compatible with the German (but not the Vietnamese) verb constraints. These results demonstrate that competing information in the two languages can interfere with anticipation in heritage speakers. |
Charlotte Jeppsen; Keith Baxelbaum; Bruce Tomblin; Kelsey Klein; Bob McMurray The development of lexical processing: Real-time phonological competition and semantic activation in school age children Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–22, 2024. @article{Jeppsen2024,Prior research suggests that the development of speech perception and word recognition stabilises in early childhood. However, recent work suggests that development of these processes continues throughout adolescence. This study aimed to investigate whether these developmental changes are based solely within the lexical system or are due to domain general changes, and to extend this investigation to lexical-semantic processing. We used two Visual World Paradigm tasks: one to examine phonological and semantic processing, one to capture non-linguistic domain-general skills. We tested 43 seven- to nine-year-olds, 42 ten- to thirteen-year-olds, and 30 sixteen- to seventeen-year-olds. Older children were quicker to fixate the target word and exhibited earlier onset and offset of fixations to both semantic and phonological competitors. Visual/cognitive skills explained significant, but not all, variance in the development of these effects. Developmental changes in semantic activation were largely attributable to changes in upstream phonological processing. These results suggest that the concurrent development of linguistic processes and broader visual/cognitive skills lead to developmental changes in real-time phonological competition, while semantic activation is more stable across these ages. |
Yu Cin Jian; Leo Yuk Ting Cheung A longitudinal eye-movement study of text-diagram integrative processing during multimedia reading among upper elementary children Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, pp. 1–22, 2024. @article{Jian2024,This study aimed to investigate whether elementary school students have different reading strategies based on various levels of text-diagram integrative processing and whether these reading strategies remain consistent or change over a three-year period. The study followed 176 students from grades four to six and observed their eye movements while reading scientific texts. Data were collected once each year. Text-diagram integrative behavior was analyzed using various eye-movement indicators. The number of saccades between the text and diagram was evaluated, as well as the total fixation durations of the longest eye-fixation run that stayed within the paragraph and diagram regions and the remaining eye-fixation runs on the same regions. A separate K-means cluster analysis was conducted on two different text sets (one identical and the other different across grades) to identify three reading strategy patterns at each grade level. The results showed that those associated with integrative processing (i.e., the “integrative group”) constituted a minority across grades (16–25% of students), followed closely by those focusing largely on the main text (“textual group”) (17–28%). The latter group showed a strong motivation to read but failed to utilize the diagrams for knowledge construction. The majority of the students (52–67%) were categorized into the “shallow group,” which showed a relative weakness in both integrative processing and intensive text reading. There was greater consistency in group assignments for individual students between the two text sets within a given year (63% on average) compared to across grade levels (30%), suggesting the instability of reading strategies over time. A growing trend in integrative processing toward higher grades was not observed. |
Shang Jiang Does the processing advantage of formulaic language persist in its nonadjacent forms? Evidence from eye movements of Chinese collocations Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 1–29, 2024. @article{Jiang2024a,It has been well documented that formulaic language (such as collocations; e.g., provide information) enjoys a processing advantage over novel language (e.g., compare information). In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences are often inserted with words intervening in between the individual constituents (e.g., provided information → provide some of the information). Whether or not the processing advantage persists in nonadjacent forms remains largely unknown. The present study thus sought to address this gap by recording the eye movements of Chinese native speakers when they were reading sentences embedded with formulaic sequences (high frequency collocations) versus novel phrases (low frequency controls), in their adjacent (e.g., 解决困难 ‘resolve difficulties' vs. 经历困难 ‘experience difficulties'), short-insertion (e.g., 解决这些困难 ‘resolve these difficulties' vs. 经历这些困难 ‘experience these difficulties'), and long-insertion forms (e.g., 解决了这么多困难 ‘resolved so many difficulties' vs. 经历了这么多困难 ‘experienced so many difficulties'). Results suggested that the processing advantage for formulaic language over novel language existed not only in their adjacent form, but also in their short-insertion form, albeit the magnitude of the processing advantage diminished with the increase of insertion length. The persistence of FL processing advantage is in line with usage-based approach to language learning, processing, and use. |
Jian Jin; Siyun Liu The influences of narrative perspective shift and scene detail on narrative semantic processing Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 1366–1394, 2024. @article{Jin2024,The embodied view of semantic processing holds that readers achieve reading comprehension through mental simulation of the objects and events described in the narrative. However, it remains unclear whether and how the encoding of linguistic factors in narrative descriptions impacts narrative semantic processing. This study aims to explore this issue under the narrative context with and without perspective shift, which is an important and common linguistic factor in narratives. A sentence-picture verification paradigm combined with eye-tracking measures was used to explore the issue. The results showed that (1) the inter-role perspective shift made the participants' to evenly allocate their first fixation to different elements in the scene following the new perspective; (2) the internal–external perspective shift increased the participants' total fixation count when they read the sentence with the perspective shift; (3) the scene detail depicted in the picture did not influence the process of narrative semantic processing. These results suggest that perspective shift can disrupt the coherence of situation model and increase the cognitive load of readers during reading. Moreover, scene detail could not be constructed by readers in natural narrative reading. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Cara Koch; Megan Wootten Keep clam and carry on: Misperceptions of transposed-letter neighbours Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 77, no. 7, pp. 1363–1374, 2024. @article{Johnson2024a,Previous research has provided evidence that readers experience processing difficulty when reading words that have a transposed-letter (TL) neighbour (e.g., TRAIL has the TL neighbour TRIAL). Here, we provide direct evidence that this interference is driven by explicit misidentifications of the word for its TL neighbour. Experiment 1 utilised an eye-tracking task in which participants read sentences aloud and reading errors were coded. Sentences had a target word that either (1) had a TL neighbour or (2) was a matched control word with no TL neighbour. In Experiment 2, participants identified words within sentences that they consciously misread and reported the interloper. In both experiments, readers explicitly misidentified many more of the TL words than control words, and most often for their TL neighbour. These findings support the idea that TL interference effects are due primarily to initial misperceptions and post-lexical checking rather than co-activation at the lexical level. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Timothy J. Slattery Processing difficulty while reading words with neighbors is not due to increased foveal load: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 86, no. 4, pp. 1360–1374, 2024. @article{Johnson2024,Words with high orthographic relatedness are termed “word neighbors” (angle/angel; birch/birth). Activation-based models of word recognition assume that lateral inhibition occurs between words and their activated neighbors. However, studies of eye movements during reading have not found inhibitory effects in early measures assumed to reflect lexical access (e.g., gaze duration). Instead, inhibition in eye-movement studies has been found in later measures of processing (e.g., total time, regressions in). We conducted an eye-movement boundary change study (Rayner, Cognitive Psychology, 7(1), 65-81, 1975) that manipulated the parafoveal preview of the word following the neighbor word (word N+1). In this way, we explored whether the late inhibitory effects seen with transposed letter words and words with higher-frequency neighbors result from reduced parafoveal preview due to increased foveal load and/or interference during late stages of lexical processing (the L2 stage within the E-Z Reader framework). For word N+1, while there were clear preview effects, there was not an effect of the neighborhood status of word N, nor a significant interaction. This suggests that the late inhibitory effects of earlier eye-movement studies are driven by misidentification of neighbor words rather than being due to increased foveal load. |
Jookyoung Jung; Andrea Révész; Matt Stainer; Ana Pellicer-Sánchez; Yoojin Chung; Danni Shi The impact of gaze-contingent highlighting on incidental learning of collocations from computer-mediated reading Journal Article In: Language Teaching, pp. 1–3, 2024. @article{Jung2024,The present study compared the effects of gaze-contingent highlighting and pro- active highlighting on learners' attentional processes during computer-mediated reading tasks and sub- sequent learning of L2 collocations. Proactive highlighting referred to the pre-highlighting of target L2 collocations before reading. Gaze-contingent highlighting, on the other hand, involved highlighting target L2 collocations when participants' eye-fixations were detected on them during reading. 1. To what extent do proactive and gaze-contingent highlighting affect L2 learners' attention to target collocations embedded in reading texts? 2. To what extent do proactive and gaze-contingent highlighting affect L2 learners' development in the knowledge of the target collocation forms? 3. To what extent does L2 learners' development in the knowledge of the forms of target collocations correlate with We found that both highlighting techniques resulted in longer and more frequent eye fixations on the target collocations. Participants' stimulated recall comments from both highlighting groups further revealed that participants tended to become aware of the highlighting, actively tried to infer the meanings of the target collocations, and recognized subsequent encounters with them. Additionally, from the gaze-contingent highlighting group, participants occasionally expressed surprise at unexpected blinking (associated with gaze-contingent highlighting)while reading. Importantly, both highlightingmethods significantlyimproved posttest scores. The impact of gaze-contingent highlighting, in particular, was sustained in the delayed recall their attention to the target collocations? test. However, there were no significant correlations between eye movement measurements and posttest scores, suggesting that the amount of visual attention may not necessarily indicate depth ofprocessing. |
Jookyoung Jung; Chin Lung Yang The impact of task guidance on incidental collocation learning from task-based reading Journal Article In: Language Teaching Research, pp. 1–24, 2024. @article{Jung2024a,This study explored how to promote incidental collocation learning from task-based reading. In this study, 101 Cantonese speakers read three English texts that contained 12 target collocations. Playing a role as an editor of a magazine, participants were asked to determine if the three texts were acceptable to be published in the next issue. While half of the participants (– Guidance |
Paul Prasse; David R. Reich; Silvia Makowski; Tobias Scheffer; Lena A. Jäger Improving cognitive-state analysis from eye gaze with synthetic eye-movement data Journal Article In: Computers & Graphics, vol. 119, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Prasse2024,Eye movements can be used to analyze a viewer's cognitive capacities or mental state. Neural networks that process the raw eye-tracking signal can outperform methods that operate on scan paths preprocessed into fixations and saccades. However, the scarcity of such data poses a major challenge. We therefore develop SP-EyeGAN, a neural network that generates synthetic raw eye-tracking data. SP-EyeGAN consists of Generative Adversarial Networks; it produces a sequence of gaze angles indistinguishable from human ocular micro- and macro-movements. We explore the use of these synthetic eye movements for pre-training neural networks using contrastive learning. We find that pre-training on synthetic data does not help for biometric identification, while results are inconclusive for the detection of ADHD and gender classification. However, for the eye movement-based assessment of higher-level cognitive skills such general reading comprehension, text comprehension, and the distinction of native from non-native readers, pre-training on synthetic eye-gaze data improves the models' performance and even advances the state-of-the-art for reading comprehension. The SP-EyeGAN model, pre-trained on GazeBase, along with the code for developing your own raw eye-tracking machine learning model with contrastive learning, is available at https://github.com/aeye-lab/sp-eyegan. |
Aikaterini Premeti; Frédéric Isel; Maria Pia Bucci In: Neurology International, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 312–326, 2024. @article{Premeti2024,Whether dyslexia is caused by phonological or attentional dysfunction remains a widely debated issue. To enrich this debate, we compared the eye movements of 32 French university students with (14 students) and without (18 students) dyslexia while performing a delayed phonological lexical decision task on 300 visually presented stimuli. The processing stimuli involved either a lexical (i.e., words) or a non-lexical route relying on a grapheme-phoneme correspondence (pseudohomophones and pseudowords), while other stimuli involved only a visual search (consonant and symbol sequences). We recorded the number of fixations, the duration of the first fixation and the amplitude of saccades made on the stimuli. Compared to the controls, the participants with dyslexia made more fixations while reading regardless of the type of stimulus (lexical and non-lexical). Crucially, the participants with dyslexia exhibited longer first fixations in particular while reading phonologically challenging stimuli such as pseudohomophones and pseudowords compared to stimuli involving a simple visual search (consonants, symbols). Taken together, these results suggest that both visual and phonological impairments may be implicated in dyslexia, supporting the hypothesis that dyslexia is a multifactorial deficit. |
Claire Prendergast Losing the thread: How three- and five-year-olds predict the outcome of a story when non-literal language is used to update events Journal Article In: Cogent Psychology, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Prendergast2024,How do children learn to interpret nonliteral utterances nonliterally? A multidisciplinary report highlighting the role of reasoning about abstract meanings in nonliteral language comprehension is presented to shed light on why young children struggle to infer some, but not all, nonliteral meanings. An experimental paradigm using picture selection is then used to test differences in three- and five-year-old's predictions when idioms are used to update stories. Norwegian-speaking children (N = 162; N = 86 females) are asked to predict story outcomes that are based on cognitive heuristics. The results show that five-year-olds are more likely than three-year-olds to choose literal interpretations of idioms as outcomes (δ = 0.12). Five-year-olds choose the correct outcome more when there is no literal outcome available (δ = 0.15). The increase in literalism observed with age is explained through development in metalinguistic reflexivity. This suggests that children may increasingly hold speakers at their word, enabling access to abstract meanings over time. |
Cecilia Puebla; Claudia Felser Discourse-based pronoun resolution in non-native sentence processing Journal Article In: Bilingualism, vol. 27, pp. 557–571, 2024. @article{Puebla2024,Personal pronouns can potentially be resolved in logical syntax by means of variable binding (VB) or at the discourse-representational level through coreference assignment (CR). Previous research suggests that real-time reference resolution is guided more strongly by discourse-level cues in a non-native language (L2) than in a native language (L1). Here we use the VB/CR distinction to further test this hypothesis. Using eye-movement monitoring during reading and a complementary questionnaire task, we compared L1 German and L1 Russian/L2 German speakers' resolution of object pronouns. While both our participant groups ultimately preferred CR over VB interpretations, only the L2 participants showed evidence of favouring a sentence-external CR antecedent from early on during processing. Our L1 group, by contrast, favoured a VB antecedent during processing. The observed L1/L2 processing differences reveal divergent antecedent search strategies, with L2 but not L1 speakers being primarily guided by discourse-level cues during real-time comprehension. |
Eva Puimege; Maribel Montero Perez; Elke Peters; Maribel Montero Perez; Elke Peters The effects of typographic enhancement on L2 collocation processing and learning from reading: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Applied Linguistics, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 88–110, 2024. @article{Puimege2024,Collocations play a crucial part in the development of fluent, native-like second language knowledge. Several studies have shown that typographic enhancement can promote learners' engagement with, and learning of collocations in meaning-focused activities such as reading. However, it is unclear whether the attention-raising effect of TE extends to later encounters in unenhanced contexts, and how the combination of TE and unenhanced repetition affects collocation knowledge. The present study used eye-tracking and offline tests to examine the effects of typographic enhancement and repeated exposure on L2 learning of collocations from reading. The results show that the attention-raising effect of typographic enhancement does not necessarily extend to later exposures, and that repeated exposure following enhanced attention has minimal effects on learners' collocation knowledge. These findings have implications for the use of typographic enhancement in second language reading materials, and may be interpreted in relation to the role of salience in collocation learning from meaning-focused activities. |
Zhen Qin; Jingwei Zhang The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Linguistics Vanguard, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 81–91, 2024. @article{Qin2024,Previous eye-tracking studies suggest listeners closely track coarticulatory segmental information to facilitate spoken word recognition. In tonal languages such as Cantonese, the F0 value of high-level and rising tones is higher when preceding a low tone than preceding a high tone. Given the tonal coarticulation effect in Cantonese, this study used a printed-word version of the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate Macau Cantonese listeners' real-time processing of coarticulatory information through two types of word pairings, in which target words and competitor words are either matched or mismatched in coarticulatory pattern (i.e., preceding a low or high tone). The results of the growth curve analysis on the difference between target and competitor fixations show that a fixation advantage of target words increases more quickly over time in the mismatch condition than in the match condition. The overall findings suggest that native listeners closely attend to the coarticulatory tonal information to facilitate lexical activation during moment-by-moment processing. Since the mechanisms of the coarticulatory effect may differ between segments and lexical tones, this research calls for further eye-tracking studies that manipulate coarticulation cues in segmental and suprasegmental domains. |
Maarten Renckens In: Visible Language, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 6–37, 2024. @article{Renckens2024,The Latin script has a vertical stripe pattern in it, which is known to cause visual discomfort. This study started from the hypothesis that a lower stripe pattern could result in better visual comfort than a taller stripe pattern. I evaluated this hypothesis with several letterforms and their correlating stripe patterns, tested in four independent tests: a ranking test, reading progression, measuring neurological response, and measuring eye movements. The results provide some indications that taller stripe patterns are less comfortable, but those results were mostly outside the range of common letter sizes for reading texts. Also, results for letterforms and plain stripe patterns differed. The results suggest that multiple design parameters influence reading comfort simultaneously, and that ‘the number of design details per surface' is a design parameter that could play an important role in determining reading comfort. This needs to be evaluated in further studies. |
Laura Rettie; John E. Marsh; Simon P. Liversedge; Mengsi Wang; Federica Degno Auditory distraction during reading: Investigating the effects of background sounds on parafoveal processing Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–24, 2024. @article{Rettie2024,Previous research suggests that unexpected (deviant) sounds negatively affect reading performance by inhibiting saccadic planning, which models of reading agree takes place simultaneous to parafoveal processing. This study examined the effect of deviant sounds on foveal and parafoveal processing. Participants read single sentences in quiet, standard (repeated sounds), or deviant sound conditions (a new sound within a repeated sound sequence). Sounds were presented with a variable delay coincident with the onset of fixations on target words during a period when saccadic programming and parafoveal processing occurred. We used the moving window paradigm to manipulate the amount of information readers could extract from the parafovea (the entire sentence or a 13-character window of text). Global, sentence-level analyses showed typical disruption to reading by the window, and under quiet conditions similar effects were observed at the target and post-target word in the local analyses. Standard and deviant sounds also produced clear distraction effects of differing magnitudes at the target and post-target words, though at both regions, these effects were qualified by interactions. Effects at the target word suggested that with sounds, readers engaged in less effective parafoveal processing than under quiet. Similar patterns of effects due to standard and deviant sounds, each with a different time course, occurred at the post-target word. We conclude that distraction via auditory deviation causes disruption to parafoveal processing during reading, with such effects being modulated by the degree to which a sound's characteristics are more or less unique. |
Audun Rosslund; Julien Mayor; Alejandrina Cristia; Natalia Kartushina Native and non-native vowel discrimination in 6-month-old Norwegian infants Journal Article In: Infant Behavior and Development, vol. 77, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Rosslund2024,In the current preregistered study, we tested n = 67 6-month-old Norwegian infants' discrimination of a native vowel contrast /y-i/ and a non-native (British) vowel contrast /ʌ-æ/ in an eye-tracking habituation paradigm. Our results showed that, on a group level, infants did not discriminate either contrast. Yet, exploratory analyses revealed a negative association between infants' performance in each experiment, that is, better discrimination of the native contrast was associated with worse discrimination of the non-native contrast. Potentially, infants in this study might have been on the cusp of perceptual reorganisation towards their native language. |
Priscila López-Beltrán; Paola E. Dussias Heritage speakers' processing of the Spanish subjunctive: A pupillometric study Priscila Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 809–855, 2024. @article{LopezBeltran2024,We investigated linguistic knowledge of subjunctive mood in heritage speakers of Spanish who live in a long-standing English-Spanish bilingual community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Three experiments examine the constraints on subjunctive selection. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 employed pupillometry to investigate heritage speakers' online sensitivity to the presence of the subjunctive with non-variable governors (Lexical conditioning) and with negated governors (Structural conditioning). Experiment 3 employed an elicited production task to examine production of subjunctive in the same contexts. The findings of the heritage group were compared to those of a group ofSpanish-dominant Mexican bilinguals. Results showed that in comprehension and production, heritage speakers were as sensitive as the Spanish-dominant bilinguals to the lexical and structural factors that condition mood selection. In comprehension, the two groups experienced an increased pupillary dilation in conditions where the indicative was used but the subjunctive was expected. In addition, high- frequency governors and irregular subordinate verbs boosted participants' sensitivity to the presence of the subjunctive. In production, there were no significant differences between heritage speakers and Spanish-dominant bilinguals when producing the subjunctive with non-variable and negated governors. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Adrian Zhou; Peter C. Gordon The lab discovered: Place-for-institution metonyms appearing in subject position are processed as agents Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 50, no. 7, pp. 1152–1166, 2024. @article{Lowder2024,“Hospital” can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syntactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.g., “The hospital [that was] requested by the doctor…”). If com-prehenders have a bias to interpret metonyms in subject position as agents (Fishbein & Harris, 2014), they should initially access the figurative (institutional) sense of the metonym. This interpretation is rendered incorrect at the disambiguating by-phrase, which should lead to reanalysis (i.e., garden-path effects). In Experiment 1, larger garden-path effects were observed for metonyms compared to inanimate control nouns that did not have a figurative sense. In Experiment 2, garden-path effects were equivalent for metonyms and animate sentence subjects. In addition, there was some evidence that readers exhibited initial difficulty at the verb (e.g., “requested”) when it immediately followed the metonym compared to the inanimate control nouns in Experiment 1. Overall, the results suggest that the subject-as-agent heuristic is a powerful cue during sentence processing, which can prompt the comprehender to access a figurative interpretation of a metonym. |
Xiaojun Lu; Andrea Révész; Marije Michel; Nektaria Kourtali; Minjin Lee; Lais Borges In: Applied Linguistics Review, pp. 1–29, 2024. @article{Lu2024,In this study, we examined the extent to which fluency, pausing, and eye-gaze behaviours relate to linguistic complexity and accuracy in L2 independent and integrated writing task performance. Sixty Chinese L2 users of English performed two independent and two integrated TOEFL iBT tasks over two sessions. Their keystrokes and eye movements during task performance were captured. The written outputs were analysed in terms of linguistic complexity and accuracy. Linear mixed effects regression analyses revealed stronger relationships of fluency and pausing behaviours to linguistic complexity and accuracy for independent than integrated writing, while stronger relationships of eye-gaze behaviours to linguistic complexity and accuracy were identified for integrated than independent writing. In addition, we found that greater accuracy in writing was linked to shorter pause duration between words for independent writing and shorter forward saccades for integrated writing, writing behaviours associated with more automated linguistic encoding processes. |
Zhang Lu; Na Ri; Wang Jingxin The role of predictive and preview effects in Mongolian reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Lu2024b,Introduction: The research on contextual predictability in reading has been thoroughly investigated in the context of horizontal text comprehension. However, the performance of contextual predictive effects in Mongolian vertical reading remains unknown. Methods: To explore this, we conducted an eye-tracking study using a boundary paradigm. Our study aimed to investigate contextual predictability and preview effects in Mongolian reading. Results: We found significant main effects of predictability and previewing on temporal indicators. However, there were no significant effects on skipping rates, and no interaction between predictability and previewing was observed. Discussion: We speculate that the unique reading orientation and writing features of Mongolian, compared to horizontally read phonetic scripts, reduce the parafoveal processing of preview information, leading to lower skipping rates in Mongolian reading. |