EyeLink Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2023 (with some early 2024s) 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!
2018 |
Michael C. W. Yip; Mingjun Zhai Processing homophones interactively: Evidence from eye-movement data Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 8, pp. 9812, 2018. @article{Yip2018, The question of how to process an ambiguous word in context has been long-studied in psycholinguistics and the present study examined this question further by investigating the spoken word recognition processes of Cantonese homophones (a common type of ambiguous word) in context. Sixty native Cantonese listeners were recruited to participate in an eye-tracking experiment. Listeners were instructed to listen carefully to a sentence ending with a Cantonese homophone and then look at different visual probes (either Chinese characters or line-drawing pictures) presented on the computer screen simultaneously. Two findings were observed. First, the results revealed that sentence context exerted an early effect on homophone processes. Second, visual probes that serve as phonological competitors only had a weak effect on the spoken word recognition processes. Consistent with previous studies, the patterns of eye-movement results appeared to support an interactive processing approach in homophone recognition. |
Si On Yoon; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Aim low: Mechanisms of audience design in multiparty conversation Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 566–592, 2018. @article{Yoon2018, It is well established in studies of two-party conversation that conversational partners jointly establish brief labels for repeatedly mentioned entities. When speaking to a new partner who is unfamiliar with the labels, speakers use longer expressions to facilitate understanding. How this process of audience design scales up to multiparty conversation, where individuals differ in mutual knowledge, is unknown. Here we propose, and test, three potential hypotheses regarding how speakers design referring expressions in three-party conversation. Participants completed a referential communication task in groups of three in which one participant, the Director, gave instructions to two Matchers who differed in their knowledge of referential labels. Directors flexibly alternated between partner-specific representations of common ground (CG), producing longer descriptions for low-CG than for high-CG partners. When addressing multiple parties at once, speakers tailored descriptions for the least knowledgeable person. These findings shed light on the mechanisms that support audience design in multiparty conversation: Audience design begins with access to distinct representations of common ground held with the intended addressee or addressees. These distinct representations support an audience design process in which utterances are tailored to accommodate the least knowledgeable addressee in a group. |
Miao Yu; Han Yan; Guoli Yan Is the word the basic processing unit in Chinese sentence reading: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Lingua, vol. 205, no. 57, pp. 29–39, 2018. @article{Yu2018, This study sets out to explore the basic processing unit in Chinese sentence reading in an eye movement experiment. In the experiment, four analogous conditions were created: normal Chinese sentence with no highlighting, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that marked the unit under slow reading conditions and highlighting that marked the unit under natural reading conditions. All eye movement measures indicated that sentence processing under the word condition was the most difficult. As a result, it was revealed that the word was not a basic processing unit in Chinese sentence reading. The segmented unit, which is the ‘prosodic word' under the slow reading condition, is the smallest prosodic unit that can be accepted by the readers and within reader's perceptual span, and is thus more likely to be the basic processing unit in Chinese sentence reading. Moreover, the duration of pause is an objective marker of the basic processing unit. |
Chuanli Zang; Ying Fu; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Investigating word length effects in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 44, no. 12, pp. 1831–1841, 2018. @article{Zang2018a, A word's length in English is fundamental in determining whether readers fixate it, and how long they spend processing it during reading. Chinese is unspaced, and most words are two characters long: Is word length an important cue to eye guidance in Chinese reading? Eye movements were recorded as participants read sentences containing a one-, two-, or three-character word matched for frequency. Results showed that longer words took longer to process (primarily driven by refixations). Furthermore, skips were fewer, incoming saccades longer, and landing positions further to the right of long than short words. Additional analyses of a three-character region (matched stroke number) showed an incremental processing cost when character(s) belonged to different, rather than the same, word. These results demonstrate that word length affects both lexical identification and saccade target selection in Chinese reading. |
Chuanli Zang; Manman Zhang; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Bernhard Angele; Simon P. Liversedge Skipping of the very-high-frequency structural particle de (的) in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 152–160, 2018. @article{Zang2018, How do readers decide whether to skip or fixate a word? Angele and Rayner [2013. Processing the in the parafovea: Are articles skipped automatically? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39, 649–662] showed that English readers base skipping decisions on the parafoveal information available, but not the sentential context. Due to the increased visual density of the language, Chinese readers may be able to process a parafoveal word and integrate it with the sentence context to a greater extent than English readers. Consequently, influences on skipping decisions in Chinese may differ from those in English. In a boundary paradigm experiment, participants read sentences containing a single-character target verb (e.g., 取 meaning get) whose preview was manipulated in three conditions: identity preview; a preview consisting of the syntactically anomalous high-frequency structural particle de (的), or a pseudocharacter preview. The results showed that Chinese readers were more likely to skip the target when the preview was de than in either of the other conditions, suggesting that de-skipping is triggered by the parafoveal preview of a highly frequent particle word rather than on the likelihood of the upcoming word given the sentential context. |
Tao Zeng; Taoyan Zhu; Zhang Min; Xiaoya Li Parallelism effects in Chinese coordinate structure: Evidence from eye movement study Journal Article In: American Journal of Psychology and Cognitive Science, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 8–16, 2018. @article{Zeng2018, When reading two phrases or clauses with the same structures, the second constituent of the parallel structure is processed faster when it parallels the first constituent, this phenomenon is named as parallelism effects. In English, parallelism effect occurs in coordinate structure which is also a common type of phrase structure in Chinese, so this effect also happens in processing Chinese coordinate structure. In Chinese, several coordinate phrase structures coexist such as coordinate structure with conjunction “HE”(and) or Chinese punctuation marker (、), as well as label free coordinate structure. In the present study, a single factor and two-level experimental design was carried out to explore the parallelism effects of different coordinate phrase structures in Chinese. By adopting eye tracker, the experiment involved 41 Chinese native coming from different schools of Hunan University. Results showed that: 1) There were parallelism effects in coordinate structures with “HE” and Chinese punctuation marker (、), while the parallelism effect in processing of label free coordinate structure is not obvious. 2) There were significant differences in eye movement among these three Chinese coordinate structures during reading process. 3) The parallelism effect in Chinese coordinate structure is a special form of syntactic prediction, and it is not the result of syntactic priming. |
Fabrizio Zeri; Shehzad A. Naroo; Pierluigi Zoccolotti; Maria De Luca Pattern of reading eye movements during monovision contact lens wear in presbyopes Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 8, pp. 15574, 2018. @article{Zeri2018, Monovision can be used as a method to correct presbyopia with contact lenses (CL) but its effect on reading behavior is still poorly understood. In this study eye movements (EM) were recorded in fifteen presbyopic participants, naïve to monovision, whilst they read arrays of words, non-words, and text passages to assess whether monovision affected their reading. Three conditions were compared, using daily disposable CLs: baseline (near correction in both eyes), conventional monovision (distance correction in the dominant eye, near correction in the non-dominant eye), and crossed monovision (the reversal of conventional monovision). Behavioral measures (reading speed and accuracy) and EM parameters (single fixation duration, number of fixations, dwell time per item, percentage of regressions, and percentage of skipped items) were analyzed. When reading passages, no differences in behavioral and EM measures were seen in any comparison of the three conditions. The number of fixations and dwell time significantly increased for both monovision and crossed monovision with respect to baseline only with word and non-word arrays. It appears that monovision did not appreciably alter visual processing when reading meaningful texts but some limited stress of the EM pattern was observed only with arrays of unrelated or meaningless items under monovision, which require the reader to have more in-depth controlled visual processing. |
Likan Zhan Using eye movements recorded in the visual world paradigm to explore the online processing of spoken language Journal Article In: Journal of Visualized Experiments, no. 140, pp. 1–12, 2018. @article{Zhan2018a, In a typical eye tracking study using the visual world paradigm, participants' eye movements to objects or pictures in the visual workspace are recorded via an eye tracker as the participant produces or comprehends a spoken language describing the concurrent visual world. This paradigm has high versatility, as it can be used in a wide range of populations, including those who cannot read and/or who cannot overtly give their behavioral responses, such as preliterate children, elderly adults, and patients. More importantly, the paradigm is extremely sensitive to fine grained manipulations of the speech signal, and it can be used to study the online processing of most topics in language comprehension at multiple levels, such as the fine grained acoustic phonetic features, the properties of words, and the linguistic structures. The protocol described in this article illustrates how a typical visual world eye tracking study is conducted, with an example showing how the online processing of some semantically complex statements can be explored with the visual world paradigm. |
Wei Zhou; Zhichao Xia; George K. Georgiou; Hua Shu The distinct roles of dorsal and ventral visual systems in naming of Chinese characters Journal Article In: Neuroscience, vol. 390, pp. 256–264, 2018. @article{Zhou2018d, We aimed to investigate the role of dorsal and ventral visual systems in rapid naming of simple Chinese characters. Twenty college students (10 female; M age = 22.5 years) were required to covertly read a character- and a cross-matrix during an fMRI experiment. A basic prosaccade and a prosaccade-naming task were also performed to confirm the functional significance of the findings. The results of whole brain analysis showed that both dorsal and ventral visual systems were activated in the character-matrix reading. The cross-matrix scanning elicited weaker activation in the left middle frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Next, whereas both top-down and bottom-up effective connectivities (ECs) were found between these two systems in the character-matrix reading, only top-down ECs were observed in the cross-matrix scanning. Moreover, in the character-matrix reading, we found a negative correlation between the reaction time of naming in the prosaccade-naming task and the EC strength from visual word form area to superior temporal gyrus and a positive correlation between the reaction time in the basic prosaccade task and the EC strength from middle frontal gyrus to intraparietal sulcus. The cross-matrix scanning did not show any brain-behavior relationship. These results suggest that while the dorsal visual system is mainly engaged in eye-movement control, the ventral system is associated more with orthographic processing and orthography-phonology mapping. |
Wei Zhou; Aiping Wang; Hua Shu; Reinhold Kliegl; Ming Yan Word segmentation by alternating colors facilitates eye guidance in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 729–740, 2018. @article{Zhou2018c, During sentence reading, low spatial frequency information afforded by spaces between words is the primary factor for eye guidance in spaced writing systems, whereas saccade generation for unspaced writing systems is less clear and under debate. In the present study, we investigated whether word-boundary information, provided by alternating colors (consistent or inconsistent with word-boundary information) influences saccade-target selection in Chinese. In Experiment 1, as compared to a baseline (i.e., uniform color) condition, word segmentation with alternating color shifted fixation location towards the center of words. In contrast, incorrect word segmentation shifted fixation location towards the beginning of words. In Experiment 2, we used a gaze-contingent paradigm to restrict the color manipulation only to the upcoming parafoveal words and replicated the results, including fixation location effects, as observed in Experiment 1. These results indicate that Chinese readers are capable of making use of parafoveal word-boundary knowledge for saccade generation, even if such information is unfamiliar to them. The present study provides novel support for the hypothesis that word segmentation is involved in the decision about where to fixate next during Chinese reading. |
Wei Zhou; Hua Shu; Kevin Miller; Ming Yan Reliance on orthography and phonology in reading of Chinese: A developmental study Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 370–391, 2018. @article{Zhou2018, Background: Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods: With eye-movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers rely on orthographic or phonological cues, substitutions that contain such cues should cause less disruption reading than do unrelated substitutions. Results: On pretarget words, there was a reliable reduction in gaze duration due to homophonic substitution only for children. On target words, we observed reliable recovery effects due to orthographic similarity for adults. On post-target words, adults had better orthographic-based and phonological-based recovery abilities than children. Conclusions: The combination of eye movement recording and the error detection paradigm offers a novel implicit paradigm for studying reading development: during sentence reading, beginning readers of Chinese may rely on phonological mediation, while skilled readers have more direct access to semantics from orthography. |
Peng Zhou; Weiyi Ma; Likan Zhan; Huimin Ma Using the visual world paradigm to study sentence comprehension in Mandarin-speaking children with autism Journal Article In: Journal of Visualized Experiments, no. 140, pp. 1–8, 2018. @article{Zhou2018g, Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is currently a paucity of research exploring how preschool children with autism understand sentences using different types of cues. The mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension remains largely unclear. The present study presents a protocol to examine the sentence comprehension abilities of preschool children with autism. More specifically, a visual world paradigm of eye-tracking is used to explore the moment-to-moment sentence comprehension in the children. The paradigm has multiple advantages. First, it is sensitive to the time course of sentence comprehension and thus can provide rich information about how sentence comprehension unfolds over time. Second, it requires minimal task and communication demands, so it is ideal for testing children with autism. To further minimize the computational burden of children, the present study measures eye movements that arise as automatic responses to linguistic input rather than measuring eye movements that accompany conscious responses to spoken instructions. |
Peng Zhou; Weiyi Ma Children's use of morphological cues in real-time event representation Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 241–260, 2018. @article{Zhou2018a, The present study investigated whether and how fast young children can use information encoded in morphological markers during real-time event representation. Using the visual world paradigm, we tested 35 adults, 34 5-year-olds and 33 3-year-olds. The results showed that the adults, the 5-year-olds and the 3-year-olds all exhibited eye gaze patterns that reflected a rapid use of morphological cues during real-time event representation. There was no difference in the time course of the eye gaze patterns of the 5-year-olds and those of the adults, indicating that 5-year-old children already have adult-like processing abilities and they can use morphological cues as effectively as adults during real-time event representation. However, a 400 ms delay was observed in the eye gaze patterns by the 3-year-olds as compared to the 5-year-olds and the adults. We proposed that the observed difference might reflect a difference in the general cognitive processing abilities between the three age groups. Due to the immature cognitive processing abilities of 3-year-olds, it took longer for them to progress their eye movements to the target pictures as compared to older children and adults. |
Peiyun Zhou; Yun Yao; Kiel Christianson When structure competes with semantics: Reading Chinese relative clauses Journal Article In: Collabra: Psychology, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2018. @article{Zhou2018f, An ongoing debate in Chinese psycholinguistics is whether subject-relative clauses or object-relative clauses are more difficult to process. The current study asks what happens when structure and plausibility are pitted against each other in Chinese relative clause processing. Chinese relative clause structures and semantic plausibility were manipulated to create both plausible and implausible versions of subject- and object-relative clauses. This method has been used in other languages (e.g., English) to elicit thematic role reversal comprehension errors. Importantly, these errors—as well as online processing difficulties—are especially frequent in implausible versions of dispreferred (noncanoncial) structures. If one relative clause structure in Chinese is highly dispreferred, the structural factor and plausibility factor should interact additively. If, however, the structures are relatively equally difficult to process, then there should be only a main effect of plausibility. Sentence reading times as well as analyses on lexical interest areas revealed that Chinese readers used plausibility information almost exclusively when reading the sentences. Relative clause structure had no online effect and small but consistent offline effects. Taken together, the results support a slight preference in offline comprehension for Chinese subject-relative clauses, as well as a central role for semantic plausibility, which appears to be the dominant factor in online processing and a strong determinant of offline comprehension. |
Junyi Zhou; Guojie Ma; Xingshan Li; Marcus Taft The time course of incremental word processing during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 607–625, 2018. @article{Zhou2018b, In the current study, we report two eye movement experiments investigating how Chinese readers process incremental words during reading. These are words where some of the component characters constitute another word (an embedded word). In two experiments, eye movements were monitored while the participants read sentences with incremental words whose first two characters (Experiment 1) or last two characters (Experiment 2) constituted a word (referred to respectively as “head-embedded” and “tail embedded”). Reading times on these words were longer when the frequencies of the embedded words were lower. However, this was only seen on first fixation duration for head-embedded words. These results suggest that embedded words are activated when Chinese readers process incremental words, and that this activation is earlier for a head-embedded word than for a tail-embedded word. These results support a hierarchical model which assumes that the representation for whole word is activated via the representation of its constituent morphemes. |
Likan Zhan; Peng Zhou; Stephen Crain Using the visual-world paradigm to explore the meaning of conditionals in natural language Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 8, pp. 1049–1062, 2018. @article{Zhan2018, This paper reports three eye-tracking experiments using the visual world paradigm to explore the meaning of conditionals in Mandarin Chinese. Experiment 1 found that, when all the tokens were actually true in the experimental setting, the conditional connective if…then… didn't elicit significantly more anticipatory fixations than the conjunctive connective …and… on a token that is appropriately to be merged by the sentential connectives. By contrast, Experiments 2 and 3 found that, when a token was designed as hypothetically but not actually true in the experimental setting, the conditional connective elicited significantly more anticipatory fixations than the conjunctive connective on this hypothetical token. The implications of the experimental paradigm and the observed results were then discussed in relation to theories of conditionals, and to models of rationality in general. |
Jing Zhao; Hang Yang; Xuchu Weng; Zhiguo Wang Emergent attentional bias toward visual word forms in the environment: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 1378, 2018. @article{Zhao2018, Young children are frequently exposed to environmental prints (e.g., billboards and product labels) that contain visual word forms on a daily basis. As the visual word forms in environmental prints are frequently used to convey information critical to an individual's survival and wellbeing (e.g., "STOP" in the stop sign), it is conceivable that an attentional bias toward words in the environment may emerge as the reading ability of young children develops. Empirical findings relevant to this issue, however, are inconclusive so far. The present study examines this issue in children in the early stages of formal reading training (grades 1, 3, and 5) with the eye-tracking technique. Children viewed images with word and non-word visual information (environmental prints) and images with the same words in standard typeface on a plain background (standard prints). For children in grade 1, the latency of their first fixations on words in environmental prints was longer than those in standard prints. This latency cost, however, was markedly reduced in grades 3 and 5, suggesting that in older children an attentional bias toward words has emerged to help filter out the non-word visual information in environmental prints. Importantly, this attentional bias was found to correlate moderately with word reading ability. These findings show that an attentional bias toward visual word forms emerges shortly after the start of formal schooling and it is closely linked to the development of reading skills. |
Adrian Staub; Francesca Foppolo; Caterina Donati; Carlo Cecchetto Relative clause avoidance: Evidence for a structural parsing principle Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 98, pp. 26–44, 2018. @article{Staub2018, Three eye movement experiments investigated the processing of the syntactic ambiguity in strings such as the information that the health department provided, where the that-clause can be either a relative clause (RC) or the start of a nominal complement clause (CC; the information that the health department provided a cure). The experiments tested the prediction that comprehenders should avoid the RC analysis because it involves an unforced filler-gap dependency. Readers showed difficulty upon disambiguation toward the RC analysis, and showed facilitated processing of the ambiguous material itself when the CC analysis was available; both patterns suggest rapid initial adoption of the CC analysis in preference to the RC analysis. The strength of the bias of a specific head noun (e.g., information) to appear with a CC did not modulate these effects, nor were these effects reliably modulated by the tendency of an ambiguous string to be completed off-line as a CC or an RC. These results add to the evidence that structural principles guide the processing of filler-gap dependencies. |
Andrew J. Stewart; Elizabeth Le-Luan; Jeffrey S. Wood; Bo Yao; Matthew Haigh Comprehension of indirect requests is influenced by their degree of imposition Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 187–196, 2018. @article{Stewart2018a, In everyday conversation much communication is achieved using indirect language. This is particularly true when we utter requests. The decision to use indirect language is influenced by a number of factors, including deniability, politeness, and the degree of imposition on the receiver of a request. In this article we report the results of an eye-tracking experiment examining the influence on reading of the degree of imposition of a request. We manipulate whether context describes a situation in which the level of imposition on the receiver of the request is high (which thus motivates the use of indirect language) with one in which the level of imposition is low (and thus does not motivate the use of indirect language). We compare the comprehension of statements that are phrased indirectly with the comprehension of statements that are phrased more directly. We find that statements phrased indirectly are read more quickly in contexts where the level of imposition on the receiver is high versus when the level of imposition is low. In contrast, we find the processing of statements phrased directly does not vary as a function of level of imposition. This indicates that readers use pragmatic knowledge to guide interpretation of indirect requests. Our data provide an insight into the interface between pragmatic and semantic processing. |
Andrew J. Stewart; Jeffrey S. Wood; Elizabeth Le-Luan; Bo Yao; Matthew Haigh 'It's hard to write a good article': The online comprehension of excuses as indirect replies Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 6, pp. 1265–1269, 2018. @article{Stewart2018, In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined how readers comprehend indirect replies when they are uttered in reply to a direct question. Participants read vignettes that described two characters engaged in dialogue. Each dialogue contained a direct question (e.g., How are you doing in Chemistry?) answered with an excuse (e.g., The exams are not fair). In response to direct questions, such indirect replies are typically used to avoid a face-threatening disclosure (e.g., doing badly on the Chemistry course). Our goal was to determine whether readers are sensitive during reading to the indirect meaning communicated by such replies. Of the three contexts we examined, the first described a negative, face-threatening situation and the second a positive, non-face threatening situation, while the third was neutral. Analysis of reading times to the replies provides strong evidence that readers are sensitive online to the face-saving function of indirect replies. |
Ekaterina Stupina; Andriy Myachykov; Yury Y. Shtyrov Automatic lexical access in visual modality: Eye-tracking evidence Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 1847, 2018. @article{Stupina2018, Language processing has been suggested to be partially automatic, with some studies suggesting full automaticity and attention-independence of at least early neural stages of language comprehension, in particular, lexical access. Existing neurophysiological evidence has demonstrated early lexically-specific brain responses (enhanced activation for real words) to orthographic stimuli presented parafoveally even under the condition of withdrawn attention. These studies, however, did not control participants' eye movements leaving a possibility that they may have foveated the stimuli, leading to overt processing. To address this caveat, we recorded eye movements to words, pseudowords, and non-words presented parafoveally for a short duration while participants performed a dual non-linguistic feature detection task (color combination) foveally, in the focus of their visual attention. Our results revealed very few saccades to the orthographic stimuli or even to their previous locations. However, analysis of post-experimental recall and recognition performance showed above-chance memory performance for the linguistic stimuli. These results suggest that partial lexical access may indeed take place in the presence of an unrelated demanding task and in the absence of overt attention to the linguistic stimuli. As such, our data further inform automatic and largely attention-independent theories of lexical access. |
Patrick Sturt; Nayoung Kwon Processing information during regressions: An application of the reverse boundary-change paradigm Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 1630, 2018. @article{Sturt2018, Although 10-15% of eye-movements during reading are regressions, we still know little about the information that is processed during regressive episodes. Here, we report an eye-movement study that uses what we call the reverse boundary change technique to examine the processing of lexical-semantic information during regressions, and to establish the role of this information during recovery from processing difficulty. In the critical condition of the experiment, an initially implausible sentence (e.g., There was an old house that John had ridden when he was a boy) was rendered plausible by changing a context word (house) to a lexical neighbor (horse) using a gaze-contingent display change, at the point where the reader's gaze crossed an invisible boundary further on in the sentence. Due to the initial implausibility of the sentence, readers often launched regressions from the later part of the sentence. However, despite this initial processing difficulty, reading was facilitated, relative to a condition where the display change did not occur (i.e., the word house remained on screen throughout the trial). This result implies that the relevant lexical semantic information was processed during the regression, and was used to aid recovery from the initial processing difficulty. |
Katja Suckow; Roger P. G. Gompel Number attraction affects reanalysis in sentence processing Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2018. @article{Suckow2018, Many studies have shown evidence for number attraction effects in production. Recent cross-linguistic findings suggest that number attraction can also affect comprehension of ungrammatical sentences. We present an eye-tracking experiment that investigates number attraction during recovery from garden-path sentences. The sentences contrasted locally ambiguous with unambiguous structures containing a plural or a singular attractor noun before a singular verb. Reading time data from the experiment suggest that number attraction effects occur when the processor has difficulty finding a grammatical analysis: Sentences with a local ambiguity had longer regression-path times when there was a plural number attractor than when there was a singular number attractor. The attractor number did not affect the processing of the unambiguous sentences. |
Keren Taub; Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg The perception of text triggers reflexive oculomotor orienting Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 106, pp. 114–119, 2018. @article{Taub2018, As you read this text, your brain is busy integrating numerous different processes - perceptual, cognitive and motor. While you acquire the semantic and linguistic contents of this abstract, your eyes traverse its lines with speed and coordination. The oculomotor response to text is so rapid and precise that it is hypothesized it to be partially based on reflexive orienting mechanisms. In this study we examined the hypothesis that the presentation of written text triggers reflexive orienting toward the direction of reading, similarly to the effect of peripheral stimulation or that of symbolic directional cues (arrows or gazing eyes). In three experiments, participants (N = 120) were presented with task-irrelevant text, shortly followed by a left/right pro-saccade task. The first experiment confirmed the hypothesis by showing that saccades which are congruent with the direction of reading are faster than those which are incongruent. This was observed both in right-to-left (Hebrew) and in left-to-right (English) reading-systems and similarly in native-Hebrew and native-English readers. A second experiment showed that this directional bias is found not only for readable text but also for meaningless strings of letters. This confirmed that the bias is driven pre-reading non-lexical processes. The third experiment examined the time-course of this effect. We conclude that text-perception actives early reflexive eye-movements programs and suggest that this link is an essential building-block of fast and effortless reading. |
Malathi Thothathiri; Christine T. Asaro; Nina S. Hsu; Jared M. Novick Who did what? A causal role for cognitive control in thematic role assignment during sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 178, pp. 162–177, 2018. @article{Thothathiri2018, Thematic role assignment – generally, figuring out who did what to whom – is a critical component of sentence comprehension, which is influenced by both syntactic and semantic cues. Conflict between these cues can result in temporary consideration of multiple incompatible interpretations during real-time sentence processing. We tested whether the resolution of syntax-semantics conflict can be expedited by the online engagement of cognitive control processes that are routinely used to regulate behavior across domains. In this study, cognitive control deployment from a previous Stroop trial influenced eye movements during subsequent sentence comprehension. Specifically, when syntactic and semantic cues competed for influence on interpretation, dynamic cognitive control engagement led to (a) fewer overall looks to a picture illustrating the competing but incorrect interpretation (Experiment 1), or (b) steeper growth in looks to a picture illustrating the correct interpretation (Experiment 2). Thus, prior cognitive control engagement facilitated the resolution of syntax-semantics conflict by biasing processing towards the intended analysis. This conflict adaptation effect demonstrates a causal connection between cognitive control and real-time thematic role assignment. Broader patterns demonstrated that prior cognitive control engagement also modulated sentence processing irrespective of the presence of conflict, reflecting increased integration of newly arriving cues with prior sentential content. Together, the results suggest that cognitive control helps listeners determine correct event roles during real-time comprehension. |
Simon P. Tiffin-Richards; Sascha Schroeder The development of wrap-up processes in text reading: A study of children's eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 7, pp. 1051–1063, 2018. @article{TiffinRichards2018, Reading comprehension is the product of constructing a coherent mental model of a text. Although some of the processes that are necessary to construct such a mental model are executed incrementally, others are deferred to the end of the clause or sentence, where integration processing is wrapped up before the reader progresses further in the text. In this longitudinal study of 65 German-speaking children across Grades 2, 3, and 4, we investigated the development of wrap-up processes at clause and sentence boundaries by tracking the children's eye movements while they read age-appropriate texts. Our central finding was that children in Grade 2 showed strong wrap-up effects that then slowly decreased across school grades. Children in Grades 3 and 4 also increasingly used clause and sentence boundaries to initiate regressions and rereading. Finally, children in Grade 2 were shown to be significantly disrupted in their reading at line breaks, which are inherent in continuous text. This disruption decreased as the children progressed to Grades 3 and 4. Overall, our results show that children exhibit an adultlike pattern of wrap-up effects by the time they reach Grade 4. We discuss this developmental trajectory in relation to models of text processing and mechanisms of eye-movement control. |
David J. Townsend Stage salience and situational likelihood in the formation of situation models during sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Lingua, vol. 206, pp. 1–20, 2018. @article{Townsend2018, Two experiments examined the relation between event structure, situational likelihood and eye fixation time while reading predicate modifiers in isolated sentences. Experiment 1 used activity predicates and preparatory process predicates (climbed a mountain), which make salient the process that leads to a culmination. Preparatory process predicates increased first pass time on durative modifiers (for several years) and decreased total time on frequency modifiers (e.g., every year). Situational likelihood was associated with fixation times on frame modifiers (last year) but not with fixation times on durative or frequency modifiers. Experiment 2 used activity predicates and result state predicates (halted a class), which make salient the result that follows from a culmination. Result state predicates had no effect on fixation times on durative modifiers and decreased total time on frequency modifiers. Situational likelihood was associated only with total time on durative modifiers. These results demonstrate that readers use the meanings of predicates and modifiers to form an initial model of a sentence and that the likelihood of the reported situation is related to reading time relatively late. The results are discussed in terms of type coercion theory and situation models in sentences and narratives. |
Annie Tremblay; Mirjam Broersma; Caitlin E. Coughlin The functional weight of a prosodic cue in the native language predicts the learning of speech segmentation in a second language Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 640–652, 2018. @article{Tremblay2018a, This study newly investigates whether the functional weight of a prosodic cue in the native language predicts listeners' learning and use of that cue in second-language speech segmentation. It compares English and Dutch listeners' use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. F0 rise signals word-initial boundaries in English and Dutch, but has a weaker functional weight in English than Dutch because it is more strongly correlated with vowel quality in English than Dutch. English- and Dutch-speaking learners of French matched in French proficiency and experience, and native French listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in French where they monitored words ending with/out an F0 rise (replication of Tremblay, Broersma, Coughlin & Choi, 2016). Dutch listeners made earlier/greater use of the F0 rise than English listeners, and in one condition they made greater use of F0 rise than French listeners, extending the cue-weighting theory to speech segmentation. |
Annie Tremblay; Elsa Spinelli; Caitlin E. Coughlin; Jui Namjoshi Syntactic cues take precedence over distributional cues in native and non-native speech segmentation Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 615–631, 2018. @article{Tremblay2018, This study investigates whether syntactic cues take precedence over distributional cues in native and non-native speech segmentation by examining native and non-native speech segmentation in potential French-liaison contexts. Native French listeners and English-speaking second-language learners of French completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment. Half the stimuli contained the pivotal consonant /t/, a frequent word onset but infrequent liaison consonant, and half contained /z/, a frequent liaison consonant but rare word onset. In the adjective–noun condition (permitting liaison), participants heard a consonant-initial target (e.g., le petit tatoué; le fameux zélé) that was temporarily ambiguous at the segmental level with a vowel-initial competitor (e.g., le petit [t]athée; le fameux [z]élu); in the noun–adjective condition (not permitting liaison), they heard a consonant-initial target (e.g., le client tatoué; le Français zélé) that was not temporarily ambiguous with a vowel-initial competitor (e.g., le client [*t]athée; le Français [*z]élu). Growth- curve analyses revealed that syntactic context modulated both groups' fixations (noun–adjective > adjective–noun), and pivotal consonant modulated both groups' fixations (/t/ > /z/) only in the adjective–noun condition, with the effect of the consonant decreasing in more proficient French learners. These results suggest that syntactic cues override distributional cues in the segmentation of French words in potential liaison contexts. |
Jorge R. Valdés Kroff; Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo; Paola E. Dussias Experimental contributions of eye-tracking to the understanding of comprehension processes while hearing and reading code-switches Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 98–133, 2018. @article{ValdesKroff2018, Researchers who study code-switching using lab-based approaches face a series of methodological challenges; these include, but are not limited to, using adequate techniques and tasks that allow for processing that reflects real-language usage and selecting stimuli that reflect the participants' code-switching community norms. We present two illustrative eye-tracking studies that consider these challenges. Study 1 tests whether experience with code-switching leads to differential processing of Spanish determiner-English noun code-switches (e.g., una cookie ‘a cookie'). Study 2 examines auxiliary-verb code-switches involving the progressive structure (e.g., están cooking ‘are cooking') and perfect structure (e.g., han cooked ‘have cooked') while participants read either for comprehension or provide grammaticality judgments. The results of both studies highlight the advantages that eye-tracking provides when its use is accompanied by an appropriate bilingual sample, by stimuli that reflect actual bilingual language use, and by secondary tasks that do not invoke metalinguistic processes. |
Geertje Bergen; Hans Rutger Bosker Linguistic expectation management in online discourse processing: An investigation of Dutch inderdaad ‘indeed' and eigenlijk ‘actually' Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 103, pp. 191–209, 2018. @article{Bergen2018, Interpersonal discourse particles (DPs), such as Dutch inderdaad (≈‘indeed') and eigenlijk (≈‘actually') are highly frequent in everyday conversational interaction. Despite extensive theoretical descriptions of their polyfunctionality, little is known about how they are used by language comprehenders. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments involving an online dialogue completion task, we asked to what extent inderdaad, confirming an inferred expectation, and eigenlijk, contrasting with an inferred expectation, influence real-time understanding of dialogues. Answers in the dialogues contained a DP or a control adverb, and a critical discourse referent was replaced by a beep; participants chose the most likely dialogue completion by clicking on one of four referents in a display. Results show that listeners make rapid and fine-grained situation-specific inferences about the use of DPs, modulating their expectations about how the dialogue will unfold. Findings further specify and constrain theories about the conversation-managing function and polyfunctionality of DPs. |
Emiel Hoven; Evelyn C. Ferstl The roles of implicit causality and discourse context in pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Frontiers in Communication, vol. 3, pp. 53, 2018. @article{Hoven2018, Some interpersonal verbs show a bias in the proportion of times their subject and object arguments are rementioned in a sample of explanations for the eventuality the verb describes. This bias is known as the implicit causality bias. Several studies have shown that readers and listeners rapidly use the implicit causality bias during pronoun resolution. Whether listeners also rapidly incorporate relevant contextual information during pronoun resolution, is an open question. In the current paper, we report two visual world eye-tracking studies intended to answer this question. Participants listened to stories that included implicit causality verbs followed by a “because” clause with an ambiguous pronoun in its subject position. During the story, the participants looked at a screen on which potential referents of the ambiguous pronoun were displayed. In Experiment 1, a simple main effect of implicit causality bias on looks toward the character that was congruent with the bias was found among items in one of the two discourse conditions. Discourse context, however, only affected looks for a subset of verbs and in the opposite direction of what was hypothesized. In Experiment 2, no main effects of IC Bias or discourse context were found, but there was a marginally significant interaction which was not hypothesized. In both experiments, discourse context influenced looks only for a subset of verbs and never in the predicted direction. The results favor an account in which the influence of lexical semantics is, at least initially, stronger than the influence of world knowledge, and discourse context. Additional exploratory analyses suggested that eye movements already reveal remention biases at an early point in the sentence, whereas the causal potency of the subject argument is predicted by looks starting from the onset of the causal connective. |
André Vandierendonck; Maaike Loncke; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Timothy Desmet The role of executive control in resolving grammatical number conflict in sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 3, pp. 759–778, 2018. @article{Vandierendonck2018, In sentences with a complex subject noun phrase, like “The key to the cabinets is lost”, the grammatical number of the head noun (key) may be the same or different from that of the modifier noun phrase (cabinets). When the number is the same, comprehension is usually easier than when it is different. Grammatical number computation may occur while processing the modifier noun (integration phase) or while processing the verb (checking phase). We investigated at which phase number conflict and plausibility of the modifier noun as subject for the verb affect processing, and we imposed a gaze-contingent tone discrimination task in either phase to test whether number computation involves executive control. At both phases, gaze durations were longer when a concurrent tone task was present. Additionally, at the integration phase, gaze durations were longer under number conflict, and this effect was enhanced by the presence of a tone task, whereas no effects of plausibility of the modifier were observed. The finding that the effect of number match was larger under load shows that computation of the grammatical number of the complex noun phrase requires executive control in the integration phase, but not in the checking phase. |
Patrice Speeter Beddor; Kevin B. McGowan; Andries W. Coetzee; Will Styler; Julie E. Boland The time course of individuals' perception of coarticulatory information is linked to their production: Implications for sound change Journal Article In: Language, vol. 94, no. 4, pp. 931–968, 2018. @article{Beddor2018, Understanding the relation between speech production and perception is foundational to pho-netic theory, and is similarly central to theories of the phonetics of sound change. For sound changes that are arguably perceptually motivated, it is particularly important to establish that an individual listener's selective attention-for example, to the redundant information afforded by coarticulation-is reflected in that individual's own productions. This study reports the results of a pair of experiments designed to test the hypothesis that individuals who produce more consistent and extensive coarticulation will attend to that information especially closely in perception. The production experiment used nasal airflow to measure the time course of participants' coarticulatory vowel nasalization; the perception experiment used an eye-tracking paradigm to measure the time course of those same participants' attention to coarticulated nasality. Results showed that a speaker's coarticulatory patterns predicted, to some degree, that individual's perception, thereby supporting the hypothesis: participants who produced earlier onset of coarticulatory nasalization were, as listeners, more efficient users of nasality as that information unfolded over time. Thus, an individual's perception of coarticulated speech is made public through their productions. |
Nathalie N. Bélanger; Michelle Lee; Elizabeth R. Schotter Young skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 291–301, 2018. @article{Belanger2018, Recent evidence suggests that deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli in the parafovea in comparison to hearing people. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to pre-process upcoming words and decide where to look next. We investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading, and compared the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less skilled readers to that of skilled hearing readers. Compared to hearing readers, deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected by their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during a complex cognitive task such as reading. |
Nicoletta Biondo; Francesco Vespignani; Luigi Rizzi; Simona Mancini Widening agreement processing: A matter of time, features and distance Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 7, pp. 890–911, 2018. @article{Biondo2018, Existing psycholinguistic models typically describe agreement relations as monolithic phenomena amounting to mechanisms that check mere feature consistency. This eye-tracking study aimed at widening this perspective by investigating the time spent reading subject-verb (number, person) and adverb-verb (tense) violations on an inflected verb during sentence comprehension in Spanish. Results suggest that (i) distinct processing mechanisms underlie the analysis of subject-verb and adverb-verb relations, (ii) the parser is sensitive to the different interpretive properties that characterise the person, number and tense features encoded in the verb (i.e. anchoring to discourse for person and tense interpretation, as opposed to anchoring to cardinality information for number), and (iii) the (local, distal) position of the agreement controller with respect to the verb affects the interpretation of these dependencies. An account is proposed that capitalises on the importance of enriching current sentence processing formalizations using a feature and relation-based approach. |
Jo Black; David Williams; Heather J. Ferguson Imagining counterfactual worlds in autism spectrum disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 9, pp. 1444–1463, 2018. @article{Black2018, Two experiments are presented that explore online counterfactual processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using eye-tracking. Participants' eye movements were tracked while they read factual and counterfactual sentences in an anomaly detection task. In Experiment 1, the sentences depicted everyday counterfactual situations (e.g., If Joanne had remembered her umbrella, her hair would have been dry/wet when she arrived home). Sentences in Experiment 2 depicted counterfactual versions of real world events (e.g., If the Titanic had not hit an iceberg, it would have survived/sunk along with all the passengers). Results from both experiments suggest that counterfactual understanding is undiminished in adults with ASD. In fact, participants with ASD were faster than Typically Developing (TD) participants to detect anomalies within realistic, discourse-based counterfactuals (Experiment 1). Detection was comparable for TD and ASD groups when understanding could be grounded in knowledge about reality (Experiment 2), though the 2 groups used subtly different strategies for responding to and recovering from counterfactual inconsistent words. These data argue against general difficulties in global coherence and complex integration in ASD. |
Giulia Borghini; Valerie Hazan Listening effort during sentence processing is increased for non-native listeners: A pupillometry study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 12, pp. 152, 2018. @article{Borghini2018, Current evidence demonstrates that even though some non-native listeners can achieve native-like performance for speech perception tasks in quiet, the presence of a background noise is much more detrimental to speech intelligibility for non-native compared to native listeners. Even when performance is equated across groups, it is likely that greater listening effort is required for non-native listeners. Importantly, the added listening effort might result in increased fatigue and a reduced ability to successfully perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Task-evoked pupil responses have been demonstrated to be a reliable measure of cognitive effort and can be useful in clarifying those aspects. In this study we compared the pupil response for 23 native English speakers and 27 Italian speakers of English as a second language. Speech intelligibility was tested for sentences presented in quiet and in background noise at two performance levels that were matched across groups. Signal-to-noise levels corresponding to these sentence intelligibility levels were pre-determined using an adaptive intelligibility task. Pupil response was significantly greater in non-native compared to native participants across both intelligibility levels. Therefore, for a given intelligibility level, a greater listening effort is required when listening in a second language in order to understand speech in noise. Results also confirmed that pupil response is sensitive to speech intelligibility during language comprehension, in line with previous research. However, contrary to our predictions, pupil response was not differentially modulated by intelligibility levels for native and non-native listeners. The present study corroborates that pupillometry can be deemed as a valid measure to be used in speech perception investigation, because it is sensitive to differences both across participants, such as listener type, and across conditions, such as variations in the level of speech intelligibility. Importantly, pupillometry offers us the possibility to uncover differences in listening effort even when those do not emerge in the performance level of individuals. |
Helen L. Breadmore; Julia M. Carroll Sublexical and syntactic processing during reading: Evidence from eye movements of typically developing and dyslexic readers Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 177–197, 2018. @article{Breadmore2018, Skilled, typically developing readers and children with dyslexia read correct sentences and sentences that contained verb errors that were pseudo-homophones, morphological over-regularisations or syntactic errors. All errors increased looking time but the nature of the error and participant group influenced the time course of the effects. The pseudo-homophone effect was significant in all eye-movement measures for adults (N= 26), intermediate (N= 37) and novice typically developing readers (N= 38). This effect was larger for intermediate readers than other groups in total duration. In contrast, morphological over-regularisations increased gaze and total duration (but not first fixation) for intermediate and novice readers, and only total duration for adult readers. Syntactic errors only increased total duration. Children with dyslexia (N= 19) demonstrated smaller effects of pseudo-homophones and over-regularisations than controls, but their processing of syntactic errors was similar. We conclude that dyslexic children's difficulties with reading are linked to overreliance on phonological decoding and underspecified morphological processing, which impacts on word level reading. We highlight that the findings fit well within the grain-size model of word reading [Grainger, J., & Ziegler, J. C. (2011). A dual-route approach to orthographic processing. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 54. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00054]. |
Andreas Brocher; Jean Pierre Koenig; Gail Mauner; Stephani Foraker About sharing and commitment: The retrieval of biased and balanced irregular polysemes Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 443–466, 2018. @article{Brocher2018, We examined how the degree of semantic similarity between an ambiguous word's meanings (homonyms vs. irregular polysemes) and meaning frequency (biased vs. balanced meanings) interact during lexical access and disambiguation. In Experiment 1, which was a continuous priming experiment, and with an ITI of 50 ms, we observed exhaustive access of meanings for all ambiguous words. With an ITI of 200 ms, we found a dominance effect for biased homonyms. There was no priming for biased irregular polysemes. For balanced homonyms and polysemes, we observed strong and roughly equivalent priming for target words associated with either meaning. In Experiment 2, using sentence reading, all ambiguous words elicited longer reading times in the absence of biasing context, while only biased and balanced homonyms also led to longer reading times in subsequent subordinate-biased context. Taken together, our data support a shared features model of irregular polyseme representation and retrieval. |
Andreas Brocher; Klaus Heusinger A dual-process activation model: Processing definiteness and information status Journal Article In: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1–34, 2018. @article{Brocher2018a, The introduction of a new discourse referent with a descriptive noun phrase involves the introduction of a new concept and the assignment of a referent to that concept. Concepts can be inferred from previous context, and thus be pre-activated (e.g., gym activates the concept of the noun trainer), or can be discourse-new. The function of the definite article is to signal unique identifiability of the referent, and the function of the indefinite article is to assert the existence of a set introduced by the descriptive content. We tested to what extent concept pre-activation and the function of the definite and indefinite article affect referent activation during retrieval and integration as well as referent activation at the sentence level. In Experiment 1, a visual world eye tracking experiment, we found that inferred referents of definite noun phrases were more accessible at subsequent pronoun resolution than inferred referents of indefinite noun phrases. No effects of definiteness were observed for referents with brand-new concepts. In Experiment 2, recording event-related potentials at the noun phrase itself, referents with pre-activated concepts were accessed and integrated more easily than referents with brand-new concepts. Furthermore, definite and indefinite articles yielded differently large frontal negativities. We discuss our results within a Dual-Process Activation Model, which distinguishes two processes in referent management: concept activation and referent activation. Our data suggest that these processes not only affect noun phrase processing but also trigger specific pragmatic inferences at the sentence level. |
Heather J. Ferguson; Lewis T. Jayes Plausibility and perspective influence the processing of counterfactual narratives Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, pp. 166–186, 2018. @article{Ferguson2018, Previous research has established that readers' eye movements are sensitive to the difficulty with which a word is processed. One important factor that influences processing is the fit of a word within the wider context, including its plausibility. Here we explore the influence of plausibility in counter-factual language processing. Counterfactuals describe hypothetical versions of the world but are grounded in the implication that the described events are not true. We report an eye-tracking study that examined the processing of counterfactual premises that varied the plausibility of a described action and manipulated the narrative perspective ("you" vs. "he/she"). Results revealed a comparable pattern to previous plausibility experiments. Readers were sensitive to the inconsistent thematic relation in anomalous and implausible conditions. The fact that these anomaly detection effects were evident within a counterfactual frame suggests that participants were evaluating incoming information within the counterfactual world and did not suspend processing based on an inference about reality. Interestingly, perspective modulated the speed with which anomalous but not implausible words were detected. |
Eunice G. Fernandes; Paula Luegi; Eduardo Correa Soares; Israel Fuente; Barbara Hemforth Adaptation in pronoun resolution: Evidence From Brazilian and European Portuguese Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 12, pp. 1986–2008, 2018. @article{Fernandes2018, Previous research accounting for pronoun resolution as a problem of probabilistic inference has not explored the phenomenon of adaptation, whereby the processor constantly tracks and adapts, rationally, to changes in a statistical environment. We investigate whether Brazilian (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) speakers adapt to variations in the probability of occurrence of ambiguous overt and null pronouns, in two experiments assessing resolution toward subject and object referents. For each variety (BP, EP), participants were faced with either the same number of null and overt pronouns (equal distribution), or with an environment with fewer overt (than null) pronouns (unequal distribution). We find that the preference for interpreting overt pronouns as referring back to an object referent (object-biased interpretation) is higher when there are fewer overt pronouns (i.e., in the unequal, relative to the equal distribution condition). This is especially the case for BP, a variety with higher prior frequency and smaller object-biased interpretation of overt pronouns, suggesting that participants adapted incrementally and integrated prior statistical knowledge with the knowledge obtained in the experiment. We hypothesize that comprehenders adapted rationally, with the goal of maintaining, across variations in pronoun probability, the likelihood of subject and object referents. Our findings unify insights from research in pronoun resolution and in adaptation, and add to previous studies in both topics: They provide evidence for the influence of pronoun probability in pronoun resolution, and for an adaptation process whereby the language processor not only tracks statistical information, but uses it to make interpretational inferences. |
Ruth Filik; Hannah Howman; Christina Ralph-Nearman; Rachel Giora The role of defaultness and personality factors in sarcasm interpretation: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading Journal Article In: Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 148–162, 2018. @article{Filik2018, Theorists have debated whether our ability to understand sarcasm (pertaining here to verbal irony) is principally determined by the context or by properties of the comment itself. The current research investigated an alternative view that broadens the focus on the comment itself, suggesting that mitigating a highly positive concept by using negation generates sarcastic interpretations by default. In the current study, pretests performed on the target utterances presented in isolation established their default interpretations; novel affirmative phrases (e.g., He is the best lawyer) were interpreted literally, whereas equally novel negative counterparts (e.g., He isn't the best lawyer) were interpreted sarcastically. In Experiment 1 (an eye-tracking study), prior context biased these utterances toward literal or sarcastic interpretations. Results showed that target utterances were easier to process in contexts supporting their default interpretations, regardless of affirmation/negation. Results from a second eye-tracking experiment suggested that readers' tendency to interpret negative phrases sarcastically is related to their own tendency to use malicious humor. Our findings suggest that negation leads to certain ambiguous utterances receiving sarcastic interpretations by default and that this process may be further intensified by personality factors. |
Tori E. Foster; Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder Reliability and validity of eye movement measures of children's reading Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 71–89, 2018. @article{Foster2018, Although strong claims have been made regarding the educational utility of eye tracking, such statements seem somewhat unfounded in the absence of clear evidence regarding the technical adequacy of eye movement (EM) data. Past studies have yielded direct and indirect evidence concerning the utility of EMs as measures of reading, but recent research explicitly investigating their reliability and validity has been lacking. The current study updates and extends past research by investigating the reliability and validity of recently used EM measures of children's reading. Participants were 175 second- grade students whose EMs were monitored during silent reading of narrative text(s) at two timepoints. Participants were also individually administered measures of reading achievement. Results indicate adequate reliability and validity for passage- level measures of fixation duration but suggest that elementary stu- dents' reading behaviors relative to specific words are weakly associated with their normative levels of reading achievement. |
Aline Frey; Benoît Lemaire; Laurent Vercueil; Anne Guérin-Dugué An eye fixation-related potential study in two reading tasks: Reading to memorize and reading to make a decision Journal Article In: Brain Topography, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 640–660, 2018. @article{Frey2018, We investigated how two different reading tasks, namely reading to memorize [Read & Memorize (RM)] and reading to decide whether a text was relevant to a given topic [Read & Decide (RD)], modulated both eye movements (EM) and brain activity. To this end, we set up an ecological paradigm using the eye fixation-related potentials (EFRP) technique, in which participants freely moved their eyes to process short paragraphs, while their electroencephalography (EEG) activity was recorded in synchronization with their EM. A general linear model was used to estimate at best EFRP, taking account of the overlap between adjacent potentials, and more precisely with the potential elicited at text onset, as well as saccadic potentials. Our results showed that EM patterns were top-down modulated by different task demands. More interestingly, in both tasks, we observed slow-wave potentials that gradually increased across the first eye fixations. These slow waves were larger in the RD task than in the RM task, specifically over the left hemisphere. These results suggest that the decision-making process during reading in the RD task engendered a greater memory load in working memory than that generated in a classic reading task. The significance of these findings is discussed in the light of recent theories and models of working memory processing. |
Melanie Gangl; Kristina Moll; Chiara Banfi; Stefan Huber; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Karin Landerl Reading strategies of good and poor readers of German with different spelling abilities Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 174, pp. 150–169, 2018. @article{Gangl2018, Reading and spelling abilities are thought to be highly correlated during development, and orthographic knowledge is assumed to underpin both literacy skills. Interestingly, recent studies showed that reading and spelling skills can also dissociate. The current study investigated whether spelling skills (indicating orthographic knowledge) are associated with the application of orthographic strategies during reading. We examined eye movements of 137 third- and fourth-graders who were either good or poor readers with or without a spelling deficit: 43 children with typical reading and spelling skills, 28 with isolated spelling deficits, 28 with isolated reading deficits, and 38 with combined reading and spelling deficits. Although we expected to find reduced reliance on orthographic reading processes among poor spellers, this was evident for the group with combined deficits only. Both isolated deficit groups applied sublexical and lexical processes in a similar amount to typically developing children. Our findings suggest that reading rests on orthographic strategies even if lexical representations are poor as indicated by a deficit in spelling skills. Findings also show that dysfluent reading does not result only from overreliance on decoding. |
Melanie Gangl; Kristina Moll; Manon W. Jones; Chiara Banfi; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Karin Landerl Lexical reading in dysfluent readers of German Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 24–40, 2018. @article{Gangl2018a, Dyslexia in consistent orthographies like German is characterized by dysfluent reading, which is often assumed to result from failure to build up an orthographic lexicon and overreliance on decoding. However, earlier evidence indicates effects of lexical processing at least in some German dyslexic readers. We investigated variations in reading style in an eye-tracking paradigm with German dysfluent 3rd and 4th graders. Twenty-six TypFix-readers (fixation counts within the range of 47 age-matched typical readers) were compared with 42 HighFix-readers (increased fixation counts). Both groups showed lexical access: Words were read more efficiently than nonwords and pseudohomophones. TypFix-readers showed stronger reliance on lexical reading than HighFix-readers (smaller length effects for number of fixations and total reading time, stronger lexicality effects for gaze duration, stronger word-pseudohomophone effects for mean saccade amplitude). We conclude that in both groups, sublexical and lexical reading processes were impaired due to inefficient visual-verbal integration. |
Carolina A. Gattei; Yamila Sevilla; Ángel J. Tabullo; Alejandro J. Wainselboim; Luis A. París; Diego E. Shalom Prominence in Spanish sentence comprehension: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 587–607, 2018. @article{Gattei2018, We report an eye-tracking experiment that examined argument linking and the role of prominence in Spanish sentence comprehension by testing the interplay between word order and verb type. Previous evidence from a self-paced reading study (Gattei, Dickey, Wainselboim, & París, 2015). showed that comprehenders use morphosyntactic information to form predictions about the thematic structure of the upcoming verb. In this study we focussed on the time course of this process. Results showed an interaction between verb type and word order for late eye movement measures but not for early eye movement measures. Participants regressed more and for longer time when word order did not match the canonical order for each verb class. This interaction is observed from the verb region onwards, independently of word order. We interpret that these effects take place due to the misinterpretation of the prominence status of the preverbal argument, leading to differential reading strategies. |
Ian Cunnings; Patrick Sturt Retrieval interference and semantic interpretation Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 102, pp. 16–27, 2018. @article{Cunnings2018a, Similarity-based interference has played an important role in motivating cue-based models of memory retrieval during language comprehension. One example of interference comes from illusions of grammaticality, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g. ‘the key to the cabinets were rusty'). While such effects indicate interference influences perception of sentence grammaticality, less is known about how interference influences the semantic interpretation assigned to a sentence. We report two reading experiments that manipulated sentence plausibility, rather than grammaticality, as a diagnostic of interference. In both experiments, although reading times were longer for implausible sentences, this plausibility effect was reliably attenuated when a distractor item partially matched the cues at retrieval. We interpret these results as being compatible with the predictions of cue-based parsing. The illusions of plausibility that we report indicate that similarity-based retrieval interference has a potent influence on the semantic interpretation that is assigned to a sentence during processing. |
Ian Cunnings; Patrick Sturt Coargumenthood and the processing of pronouns Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 10, pp. 1235–1251, 2018. @article{Cunnings2018, We report three eye-movement experiments and an offline task investigating structural constraints on pronoun resolution in different contexts. This included “coargument” contexts in which a pronoun was the direct object of a verb (“The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had noticed him”), so-called picture noun phrases (“The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had a picture of him”) and picture noun phrases with a possessor (“The surgeon remembered about Jonathan's picture of him”). In each eye-movement experiment, we observed longer reading times when the nonlocal antecedent (“the surgeon”) mismatched in stereotypical gender with the pronoun, but little evidence of the gender of the local antecedent (“Jonathan”) influencing reading times. The offline task suggested readers occasionally interpret pronouns as referring to local antecedents, especially in non-coargument contexts. These results suggest that structural constraints constitute more highly weighted cues to antecedent retrieval than gender congruency during the initial stages of memory retrieval during pronoun resolution. |
Michael G. Cutter; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Reading sentences of uniform word length – II: Very rapid adaptation of the preferred saccade length Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 1435–1440, 2018. @article{Cutter2018a, In the current study we investigated whether readers adjust their preferred saccade length (PSL) during reading on a trial-by-trial basis. The PSL refers to the distance between a saccade launch site and saccade target (i.e., the word center during reading) when participants neither undershoot nor overshoot this target (McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola in Vision Research, 28, 1107-1118, 1988). The tendency for saccades longer or shorter than the PSL to under or overshoot their target is referred to as the range error. Recent research by Cutter, Drieghe, and Liversedge (Journal ofExperimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2017) has shown that the PSL changes to be shorter when readers are presented with 30 consecutive sentences exclusively made of three-letter words, and longer when presented with 30 consecutive sentences exclusively made of five-letter words. We replicated and extended this work by this time presenting participants with these uniform sentences in an unblocked design. We found that adaptation still occurred across different sentence types despite participants only having one trial to adapt. Our analyses suggested that this effect was driven by the length ofthe words readers were making saccades away from, rather than the length of the words in the rest of the sentence. We propose an account of the range error in which readers use parafoveal word length information to estimate the length of a saccade between the center of two parafoveal words (termed the Centre-Based Saccade Length) prior to landing on the first of these words. |
Jérémy Danna; Delphine Massendari; Benjamin Furnari; Stéphanie Ducrot The optimal viewing position effect in printed versus cursive words: Evidence of a reading cost for the cursive font Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 188, pp. 110–121, 2018. @article{Danna2018, Two eye-movement experiments were conducted to examine the effects of font type on the recognition of words presented in central vision, using a variable-viewing-position technique. Two main questions were addressed: (1) Is the optimal viewing position (OVP) for word recognition modulated by font type? (2) Is the cursive font more appropriate than the printed font in word recognition in children who exclusively write using a cursive script? In order to disentangle the role of perceptual difficulty associated with the cursive font and the impact of writing habits, we tested French adults (Experiment 1) and second-grade French children, the latter having exclusively learned to write in cursive (Experiment 2). Results revealed that the printed font is more appropriate than the cursive for recognizing words in both adults and children: adults were slightly less accurate in cursive than in printed stimuli recognition and children were slower to identify cursive stimuli than printed stimuli. Eye-movement measures also revealed that the OVP curves were flattened in cursive font in both adults and children. We concluded that the perceptual difficulty of the cursive font degrades word recognition by impacting the OVP stability. |
Isabelle Dautriche; Laia Fibla; Anne Caroline Fievet; Anne Christophe Learning homophones in context: Easy cases are favored in the lexicon of natural languages Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 104, pp. 83–105, 2018. @article{Dautriche2018, Even though ambiguous words are common in languages, children find it hard to learn homophones, where a single label applies to several distinct meanings (e.g., Mazzocco, 1997). The present work addresses this apparent discrepancy between learning abilities and typological pattern, with respect to homophony in the lexicon. In a series of five experiments, 20-month-old French children easily learnt a pair of homophones if the two meanings associated with the phonological form belonged to different syntactic categories, or to different semantic categories. However, toddlers failed to learn homophones when the two meanings were distinguished only by different grammatical genders. In parallel, we analyzed the lexicon of four languages, Dutch, English, French and German, and observed that homophones are distributed non-arbitrarily in the lexicon, such that easily learnable homophones are more frequent than hard-to-learn ones: pairs of homophones are preferentially distributed across syntactic and semantic categories, but not across grammatical gender. We show that learning homophones is easier than previously thought, at least when the meanings of the same phonological form are made sufficiently distinct by their syntactic or semantic context. Following this, we propose that this learnability advantage translates into the overall structure of the lexicon, i.e., the kinds of homophones present in languages exhibit the properties that make them learnable by toddlers, thus allowing them to remain in languages. |
Avital Deutsch; Hadas Velan; Tamar Michaly Decomposition in a non-concatenated morphological structure involves more than just the roots: Evidence from fast priming Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 85–92, 2018. @article{Deutsch2018, Complex words in Hebrew are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: a consonantal root embedded in a nominal or verbal word-pattern morpho-phonological unit made up of vowels or vowels and consonants. Research on written-word recognition has revealed a robust effect of the roots and the verbal- patterns, but not of the nominal-patterns, on word recognition. These findings suggest that the Hebrew lexicon is organized and accessed via roots. We explored the hypothesis that the absence of a nominal-pattern effect reflects methodological limitations of the experimental paradigms used in previous studies. Specifically, the potential facilitative effect induced by a shared nominal-pattern was counteracted by an interference effect induced by the competition between the roots of two words derived from different roots but with the same nominal-pattern. In the current study, a fast-priming paradigm for sentence reading and a “delayed-letters” procedure were used to isolate the initial effect of nominal-patterns on lexical access. The results, based on eye-fixation latency, demonstrated a facilitatory effect induced by nominal-pattern primes relative to orthographic control primes when presented for 33 or 42 ms. The results are discussed in relation to the role of the word-pattern as an organizing principle of the Hebrew lexicon, together with the roots. |
Linda Drijvers; Asli Özyürek; Ole Jensen Hearing and seeing meaning in noise: Alpha, beta, and gamma oscillations predict gestural enhancement of degraded speech comprehension Journal Article In: Human Brain Mapping, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 2075–2087, 2018. @article{Drijvers2018, During face-to-face communication, listeners integrate speech with gestures. The semantic information conveyed by iconic gestures (e.g., a drinking gesture) can aid speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions. In this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we investigated the spatiotemporal neural oscillatory activity associated with gestural enhancement of degraded speech comprehension. Participants watched videos of an actress uttering clear or degraded speech, accompanied by a gesture or not and completed a cued-recall task after watching every video. When gestures semantically disambiguated degraded speech comprehension, an alpha and beta power suppression and a gamma power increase revealed engagement and active processing in the hand-area of the motor cortex, the extended language network (LIFG/pSTS/STG/MTG), medial temporal lobe, and occipital regions. These observed low- and high-frequency oscillatory modulations in these areas support general unification, integration and lexical access processes during online language comprehension, and simulation of and increased visual attention to manual gestures over time. All individual oscillatory power modulations associated with gestural enhancement of degraded speech comprehension predicted a listener's correct disambiguation of the degraded verb after watching the videos. Our results thus go beyond the previously proposed role of oscillatory dynamics in unimodal degraded speech comprehension and provide first evidence for the role of low- and high-frequency oscillations in predicting the integration of auditory and visual information at a semantic level. |
Janna Deborah Drummer; Claudia Felser Cataphoric pronoun resolution in native and non-native sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 101, pp. 97–113, 2018. @article{Drummer2018, Encountering a cataphoric pronoun triggers a search for a suitable referent. Previous research indicates that this search is constrained by binding Condition C, which prohibits coreference between a cataphoric pronoun and a referential expression within its c-command domain. We report the results from a series of eye-movement monitoring and questionnaire experiments investigating cataphoric pronoun resolution in German. Given earlier findings suggesting that the application of structure-sensitive constraints on reference resolution may be delayed in non-native language processing, we tested both native and proficient non-native speakers of German. Our results show that cataphoric pronouns trigger an active search in both native and non-native comprehenders. Whilst both participant groups demonstrated awareness of Condition C in an offline task, we found Condition C effects to be restricted to later processing measures during online reading. This indicates that during natural reading, Condition C applies as a relatively late filter on potential coreference assignments. |
Lynn S. Eekhof; Anita Eerland; Roel M. Willems Readers' insensitivity to tense revealed: No differences in mental simulation during reading of present and past tense stories Journal Article In: Collabra: Psychology, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2018. @article{Eekhof2018, While the importance of mental simulation during literary reading has long been recognized, we know little about the factors that determine when, what, and how much readers mentally simulate. Here we investigate the influence of a specific text characteristic, namely verb tense (present vs. past), on mental simulation during literary reading. Verbs usually denote the actions and events that take place in narratives and hence it is hypothesized that verb tense will influence the amount of mental simulation elicited in readers. Although the present tense is traditionally considered to be more “vivid”, this study is one of the first to experimentally assess this claim. We recorded eye-movements while subjects read stories in the past or present tense and collected data regarding self-reported levels of mental simulation, transportation and appreciation. We found no influence of tense on any of the offline measures. The eye-tracking data showed a slightly more complex pattern. Although we did not find a main effect of sensorimotor simulation content on reading times, we were able to link the degree to which subjects slowed down when reading simulation eliciting content to offline measures of attention and transportation, but this effect did not interact with the tense of the story. Unexpectedly, we found a main effect of tense on reading times per word, with past tense stories eliciting longer first fixation durations and gaze durations. However, we were unable to link this effect to any of the offline measures. In sum, this study suggests that tense does not play a substantial role in the process of mental simulation elicited by literary stories. |
Sarah Eilers; Simon P. Tiffin-Richards; Sascha Schroeder In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 173, pp. 250–267, 2018. @article{Eilers2018, In two eye tracking experiments, we tested fourth graders' and adults' sensitivity to gender feature mismatches during reading of pronouns and their susceptibility to interference of feature-matching entities in the sentence. In Experiment 1, we showed children and adults two-phrase sentences such as “Leonm/Lisaf shooed away the sparrowm/the seagullf and then hem ate the tasty sandwich.” Eye tracking measures showed no qualitative differences between children's and adults' processing of the pronouns. Both age groups showed longer gaze durations on subject mismatching than on matching pronouns, and there was no evidence of interference of a gender-matching object. Strikingly, in contrast to the adults, not all fourth graders reported detection of the subject gender mismatch. In Experiment 2, we replicated earlier results with a larger sample of children (N = 75) and found that only half of the fourth graders detected the gender mismatch during reading. The detectors' reading pattern at the pronoun differed from that of the non-detectors. Children who reported detection of the mismatch showed a reading pattern more similar to the adults. Children who did not report detection of the mismatch had comparably slower gaze durations and were less likely to make regressions directly at the pronoun. We conclude that children who read more fluently use their available processing resources to immediately repair grammatical inconsistencies encountered in a text. |
Irina Elgort; Marc Brysbaert; Michaël Stevens; Eva Van Assche Contextual word learning during reading in a second language Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 341–366, 2018. @article{Elgort2018, Reading affords opportunities for L2 vocabulary acquisition. Empirical research into the pace and trajectory of this acquisition has both theoretical and applied value. Charting the development of different aspects of word knowledge can verify and inform theoretical frameworks of word learning and reading comprehension. It can also inform practical decisions about using L2 readings in academic study. Monitoring readers' eye movements provides real-time data on word learning, under the conditions that closely approximate adult L2 vocabulary acquisition from reading. In this study, Dutch-speaking university students read an English expository text, while their eye movements were recorded. Of interest were patterns of change in the eye movements on the target low-frequency words that occurred multiple times in the text, and whether differences in the processing of target and control (known) words decreased overtime. Target word reading outside of the familiar text was examined in a posttest using semantically neutral sentences. The findings show that orthographic processing develops relatively quickly and reliably. However, online retrieval of meaning remains insufficient for fluent word-to-text integration even after multiple contextual encounters. |
Saeideh Ghahghaei; Karina J. Linnell The effect of load on spatial attention depends on preview: Evidence from a reading study Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 149, pp. 115–123, 2018. @article{Ghahghaei2018, The spatio-temporal distribution of covert attention has usually been studied under unfamiliar tasks with static viewing. It is important to extend this work to familiar tasks such as reading where sequential eye movements are made. Our previous work with reading showed that covert spatial attention around the gaze location is affected by the fixated word frequency, or the processing load exerted by the word, as early as 40 ms into the fixation. Here, we hypothesised that this early effect of frequency is only possible when the word is previewed and thus pre-processed before being fixated. We tested this hypothesis by preventing preview. We investigated the dynamics of spatial attention around the gaze location while the observer read strings of random words. The words were either always exposed (normal preview) or only exposed while being fixated (masked preview). We probed spatial attention when a target word with either high or low printed frequency – or low or high load, respectively – was fixated. The results confirmed that, early in a fixation, allocation of spatial attention 6 characters from the gaze was affected by the word's frequency but only when the word was exposed before being fixated, so that processing of the word could start before it was fixated. Our results indicate that the ongoing processing load of a word is modulated by its pre-processing and affects the dynamics of covert spatial attention around the word once it is fixated. |
Aline Godfroid; Jieun Ahn; Ina Choi; Laura Ballard; Yaqiong Cui; Suzanne Johnston; Shinhye Lee; Abdhi Sarkar; Hyung-Jo Yoon Incidental vocabulary learning in a natural reading context: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 563–584, 2018. @article{Godfroid2018, This study responds to the call for more ecologically valid psycholinguistic research (Spivey & Cardon, 2015) by examining how readers incidentally acquire multifaceted vocabulary knowledge while reading a long, authentic text. Using eye tracking, we explore how the processing of unfamiliar words changes with repeated exposure and how the repeated exposure and processing affect word learning. In two sessions, native and non-native English speakers read five chapters of an authentic English novel containing Dari words. After reading, participants received a comprehension test and three surprise vocabulary tests. Growth curve modeling revealed a non-linear decrease in reading times that followed an S shaped curve. Number of exposures was the strongest predictor of vocabulary learning (form and meaning), while total reading time independently contributed to the learning of word meaning. Thus, both quantity and quality of lexical processing aid incremental vocabulary development and may reveal themselves differently in readers' eye movement records. |
Julie Gregg; Stanislav M. Sajin The use of phonological representations in guiding eye movements in the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 10, pp. 1562–1579, 2018. @article{Gregg2018, Across two visual world paradigm (VWP) experiments, Salverda and Tanenhaus (2010) observed an effect of orthographic overlap between targets and competitors in the absence of an effect of phonological overlap when mapping spoken targets onto briefly previewed printed arrays. They concluded that the use of orthographic knowledge can precede use of phonological knowledge during language-mediated mapping in the printed word variant of the VWP. The present experiments aimed to follow up on these studies to examine whether and when phonological and orthographic representations are used during language-mediated mapping. In Experiments 1 and 3, competitors shared high or low phonological overlap with the target but the same degree of orthographic overlap, and in Experiments 2 and 4, orthographic overlap differed between the competitors whereas phonological overlap was held constant. Overlap was manipulated between displays in Experiments 1 and 2 and within display in Experiments 3 and 4. In contrast with Salverda and Tanenhaus' (2010) findings, preferential viewing of the high over the low phonological overlap competitor was observed in Experiment 3, whereas effects of orthographic overlap were unreliable and temporally nondistinct in Experiments 2 and 4. These findings suggest that the use of phonological representations precedes the use of orthographic representations during mapping of spoken targets onto printed arrays in the VWP. |
Ernesto Guerra; Pia Knoeferle Semantic interference and facilitation: Understanding the integration of spatial distance and conceptual similarity during sentence reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 718, 2018. @article{Guerra2018, Existing evidence has shown a processing advantage (or facilitation) when representations derived from a non-linguistic context (spatial proximity depicted by gambling cards moving together) match the semantic content of an ensuing sentence. A match, inspired by conceptual metaphors such as ‘similarity is closeness' would, for instance, involve cards moving closer together and the sentence relates similarity between abstract concepts such as war and battle. However, other studies have reported a disadvantage (or interference) for congruence between the semantic content of a sentence and representations of spatial distance derived from this sort of non- linguistic context. In the present article, we investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying the interaction between the representations of spatial distance and sentence processing. In two eye-tracking experiments, we tested the predictions of a mechanism that considers the competition, activation, and decay of visually and linguistically derived representations as key aspects in determining the qualitative pattern and time course of that interaction. Critical trials presented two playing cards, each showing a written abstract noun; the cards turned around, obscuring the nouns, and moved either farther apart or closer together. Participants then read a sentence expressing either semantic similarity or difference between these two nouns. When instructed to attend to the nouns on the cards (Experiment 1), participants' total reading times revealed interference between spatial distance (e.g., closeness) and semantic relations (similarity) as soon as the sentence explicitly conveyed similarity. But when instructed to attend to the cards (Experiment 2), cards approaching (vs. moving apart) elicited first interference (when similarity was implicit) and then facilitation (when similarity was made explicit) during sentence reading. We discuss these findings in the context of a competition mechanism of interference and facilitation effects. |
Julia Habicht; Mareike Finke; Tobias Neher Auditory acclimatization to bilateral hearing aids: Effects on sentence-in-noise processing times and speech-evoked potentials Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 161–171, 2018. @article{Habicht2018, Objectives: Using a longitudinal design, the present study sought to substantiate indications from two previous cross-sectional studies that hearing aid (HA) experience leads to improved speech processing abilities as quantified using eye-gaze measurements. Another aim was to explore potential concomitant changes in event-related potentials (ERPs) to speech stimuli. Design: Groups of elderly novice (novHA) and experienced (expHA) HA users matched in terms of age and working memory capacity participated. The novHA users were acclimatized to bilateral HA fittings for up to 24 weeks. The expHA users continued to use their own HAs during the same period. The participants' speech processing abilities were assessed after 0 weeks (novHA: N = 16; expHA: N = 14), 12 weeks (novHA: N = 16; expHA: N = 14), and 24 weeks (N = 10 each). To that end, an eye-tracking paradigm was used for estimating how quickly the participants could grasp the meaning of sentences presented against background noise together with two similar pictures that either correctly or incorrectly depicted the meaning conveyed by the sentences (the “processing time”). Additionally, ERPs were measured with an active oddball paradigm requiring the participants to categorize word stimuli as living (targets) or nonliving (nontargets) entities. For all measurements, the stimuli were spectrally shaped according to individual real-ear insertion gains and presented via earphones. Results: Concerning the processing times, no changes across time were found for the expHA group. After 0 weeks of HA use, the novHA group had significantly longer (poorer) processing times than the expHA group, consistent with previous findings. After 24 weeks, a significant mean improvement of ~30% was observed for the novHA users, leading to a performance comparable with that of the expHA group. Concerning the ERPs, no changes across time were found. Conclusions: The results from this exploratory study are consistent with the view that auditory acclimatization to HAs positively impacts speech comprehension in noise. Further research is needed to substantiate them. |
Lauren V. Hadley; Patrick Sturt; Tuomas Eerola; Martin J. Pickering Incremental comprehension of pitch relationships in written music: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 211–219, 2018. @article{Hadley2018, To investigate how proficient pianists comprehend pitch relationships in written music when they first encounter it, we conducted two experiments in which proficient pianists' eyes were tracked while they read and played single-line melodies. In Experiment 1, participants played at their own speed; in Experiment 2, they played with an external metronome. The melodies were either congruent or anomalous, with the anomaly involving one bar being shifted in pitch to alter the implied harmonic structure (e.g. non-resolution of a dominant). In both experiments, anomaly led to rapid disruption in participants' eye movements in terms of regressions from the target bar, indicating that pianists process written pitch relationships online. This is particularly striking because in musical sight-reading, eye movement behaviour is constrained by the concurrent performance. Both experiments also showed that anomaly induced pupil dilation. Together, these results indicate that proficient pianists rapidly integrate the music that they read into the prior context and that anomalies in terms of pitch relationships lead to processing difficulty. These findings parallel those of text reading, suggesting that structural processing involves similar constraints across domains. |
Tuomo Häikiö; Timo T. Heikkilä; Johanna K. Kaakinen The effect of syllable-level hyphenation on reading comprehension: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 110, no. 8, pp. 1149–1159, 2018. @article{Haeikioe2018a, Syllabification by hyphens (e.g., hy-phen-a-tion) is a standard procedure in early Finnish reading instruction. However, recent findings indicate that hyphenation slows down children's reading already during the first grade (Häikiö, Hyönä, & Bertram, 2015, 2016). In the present study, it was examined whether this slowdown is indicative of deeper processing and/or more strategic reading. To this end, 2nd grade children (N = 36) read short expository and narrative stories while their eye movements were registered. The presence of syllable boundary cue (SBC) was manipulated; for half of the stories, each word was hyphenated at syllable boundaries whereas the other half included no hyphenation. After each story, story comprehension (SC) was measured by three types of oral questions, namely free recall, cued recall, and true/false questions. With regard to reading behavior, SBC interacted with independently measured reading comprehension scores for both forward and regressive fixation times during first pass sentence reading. Hyphenation slowed down reading of good comprehenders to a larger extent than weaker comprehenders in comparison to nonhyphenated condition, especially for regressive fixation times. With respect to SC, cued recall scores were lower in the hyphenated than in the nonhyphenated condition. There was no effect of SBC in free recall or true/false questions. Hyphenation seems to promote phonological encoding even when readers might want to access words via orthographic codes, which are obscured by hyphenation, especially at the whole-word level. This more piecemeal reading style then makes it harder to integrate the pieces into a bigger whole, affecting not only reading speed but also reading comprehension. |
Tuomo Häikiö; Seppo Vainio Syllables and inflectional morphemes in early Finnish readers: Evidence from eye-movements Journal Article In: Journal of Child Language, vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 1227–1245, 2018. @article{Haeikioe2018, Finnish is a language with simple syllable structure but rich morphology. It was investigated whether syllables or morphemes are preferred processing units in early reading. To this end, Finnish first- and second-grade children read sentences with embedded inflected target words while their eye-movements were registered. The target words were either in essive or inessive/adessive (i.e., locative) case. The target words were either non-hyphenated, or had syllable-congruent or syllable-incongruent hyphenation. For the locatives, the syllable-incongruent hyphenation coincided with the morpheme boundary, but this was not the case for the essives. It was shown that the second-graders were slowed down by hyphenation to a larger extent than first-graders. However, there was no slowdown in gaze duration for either age group when the syllable-incongruent hyphen was morpheme-congruent. These findings suggest that Finnish readers already utilize morpheme-level information during the first grade. |
Lauren Halberstadt; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff; Paola E. Dussias Grammatical gender processing in L2 speakers of Spanish Journal Article In: Journal of Second Language Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5–30, 2018. @article{Halberstadt2018, Recent findings indicate that native speakers (L1) use grammatical gender marking on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007 ; Dussias, Valdés Kroff, Guzzardo Tamargo, & Gerfen, 2013 ). Conversely, adult second language (L2) learners for whom grammatical gender is absent in their first language appear to need near-native proficiency to behave like native speakers ( Dussias et al., 2013 ; Hopp, 2013 ). The question addressed here is whether sensitivity to grammatical gender in L2 learners of Spanish is modulated by the cognate status of nouns due to their heightened parallel orthographic, phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic activation. Additionally, the role of transparent and non-transparent word-final gender marking cues was examined because past studies have shown that native speakers of Spanish are sensitive to differences in gender transparency (Caffarra, Janssen, & Barber, 2014). Participants were English learners of Spanish and Spanish monolingual speakers. Data were collected using the visual world paradigm. Participants saw 2-picture visual scenes in which objects either matched in gender (same-gender trials) or mismatched (different-gender trials). Targets were embedded in the preamble Encuentra el/la ___ ‘Find the ___'. The monolingual group displayed an anticipatory effect on different gender trials, replicating past studies that show that native speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in prenominal modifiers predictively. The learners were able to use gender information on the articles to facilitate processing, but only when the nouns had gender endings that were transparent. Cognate status did not confer an advantage during grammatical gender processing. |
Matthias Hartmann; Jochen Laubrock; Martin H. Fischer The visual number world: A dynamic approach to study the mathematical mind Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 28–36, 2018. @article{Hartmann2018, In the domain of language research, the simultaneous presentation of a visual scene and its auditory description (i.e., the visual world paradigm) has been used to reveal the timing of mental mechanisms. Here we apply this rationale to the domain of numerical cognition in order to explore the differences between fast and slow arithmetic performance, and to further study the role of spatial-numerical associations during mental arithmetic. We presented 30 healthy adults simultaneously with visual displays containing four numbers and with auditory addition and subtraction problems. Analysis of eye movements revealed that participants look spontaneously at the numbers they currently process (operands, solution). Faster performance was characterized by shorter latencies prior to fixating the relevant numbers and fewer revisits to the first operand while computing the solution. These signatures of superior task performance were more pronounced for addition and visual numbers arranged in ascending order, and for subtraction and numbers arranged in descending order (compared to the opposite pairings). Our results show that the “visual number world”-paradigm provides on-line access to the mind during mental arithmetic, is able to capture variability in arithmetic performance, and is sensitive to visual layout manipulations that are otherwise not reflected in response time measurements. |
Jarkko Hautala; Carita Kiili; Yvonne Kammerer; Otto Loberg; Sanna Hokkanen; Paavo H. T. Leppänen Sixth graders' evaluation strategies when reading Internet search results: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Behaviour & Information Technology, vol. 37, no. 8, pp. 761–773, 2018. @article{Hautala2018, Eye-tracking technology was used to examine Internet search result evaluation strategies adopted by sixth-grade students (N=36) during ten experimental information search tasks. The relevancy of the search result's title, URL, and snippet components was manipulated and selection of search results as well as looking into probabilities on the search result components was analysed. The results revealed that during first-pass inspection, students read the search engine page by first looking at the title of a search result. If the title was relevant, the probability of looking at the snippet of the search result increased. During second-pass inspection, there was a high probability of students focusing on the most promising search result by inspecting all of its components before making their selection. A cluster analysis revealed three viewing strategies: half of the students looked mainly at the titles and snippets; one-third with high probability examined all components; and one-sixth mainly focused on titles, leading to more frequent errors in search result selection. The results indicate that students generally made a flexible use of both eliminative and confirmatory evaluation strategies when reading Internet search results, while some seemed to not pay attention to snippet and URL components of the search results. |
Kara Hawthorne; Juhani Järvikivi; Benjamin V. Tucker Finding word boundaries in Indian English-accented speech Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 66, pp. 145–160, 2018. @article{Hawthorne2018, The majority of English nouns, verbs, and adjectives begin with a stressed syllable, and listeners exploit this tendency to help parse the continuous stream of speech into individual words. However, the acoustic manifestation of stress depends on the variety of English being spoken. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we tested if Indian English-accented speech causes Canadian English listeners to make stress-based segmentation errors. Participants heard Canadian- or Indian-accented trisyllabic sequences that could be segmented in two ways, depending on the perceived location of stress. For example, [hæ.pi.tsə] could be segmented as happy/[tsə] if it is perceived to have stress on the first syllable or as [hæ]/pizza if it is perceived to have stress on the second syllable. Results suggest that Indian English-accented speech impairs segmentation in Canadian listeners, and that both accented pitch and other features of the Indian English accent contribute to segmentation difficulties. Findings are interpreted with respect to models of how similarity between two languages impacts the listener's ability to segment words from the speech stream. |
Jenni Heikkilä; Kaisa Tiippana; Otto Loberg; Paavo H. T. Leppänen Neural processing of congruent and incongruent audiovisual speech in school-age children and adults Journal Article In: Language Learning, vol. 68, pp. 58–79, 2018. @article{Heikkilae2018, Seeing articulatory gestures enhances speech perception. Perception ofauditory speech can even be changed by incongruent visual gestures, which is known as the McGurk effect (e.g., dubbing a voice saying /mi/ onto a face articulating /ni/, observers often hear /ni/). In children, the McGurk effect is weaker than in adults, but no previous knowledge exists about the neural-level correlates of the McGurk effect in school-age children. Using brain event-related potentials, we investigated change detection responses to congruent and incongruent audiovisual speech in school-age children and adults. We used an oddball paradigm with a congruent audiovisual /mi/ as the standard stimulus and a congruent audiovisual /ni/ or McGurk A/mi/V/ni/ as the deviant stimulus. In adults, a similar change detection response was elicited by both deviant stimuli. In children, change detection responses differed between the congruent and the McGurk stimulus. This reflects a maturational difference in the influence of visual stimuli on auditory processing. |
Victoria S. Henbest; Kenn Apel Orthographic fast-mapping across time in 5- and 6-year-old children Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 61, no. 8, pp. 2015–2027, 2018. @article{Henbest2018, Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the orthographic fast-mapping abilities of 5- and 6-year-old children across time to determine (a) growth in the ability to quickly acquire mental images of written words, (b) the effect of words' statistical regularities on the learning of written word images across time, (c) whether the statistical regularities of words impact children's eye movements during an orthographic fast-mapping task, and (d) the relation among written word learning and future literacy skills. Method: Twenty-eight 5- and 6-year-old children viewed and listened to 12 short stories while their eye movements were recorded across 2 time points (approximately 3 months apart). At each time point, objects in the stories represented 12 novel pseudowords differing in their phonotactic and orthotactic probabilities. After viewing each story, the children were asked to spell and identify the target pseudowords; they also completed a battery of literacy measures. Results: The children were able to quickly acquire mental orthographic representations of the novel written pseudowords as evidenced by their ability to identify and spell the target pseudowords after viewing the stories. This ability was related to future literacy performance and significantly improved over time. Performance on the orthographic fast- mapping tasks and the children's eye movements at Time 2 were influenced by the words' linguistic properties. Conclusions: This study adds to accumulating evidence that orthographic fast-mapping is largely influenced by the orthotactic probabilities of words. These findings, taken together with those from previous investigations, provide a rich amount of evidence indicating that children are statistical learners when developing their orthographic knowledge. |
John M. Henderson; Wonil Choi; Steven G. Luke; Joseph Schmidt Neural correlates of individual differences in fixation duration during natural reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 314–323, 2018. @article{Henderson2018, Reading requires integration of language and cognitive processes with attention and eye movement control. Individuals differ in their reading ability, but little is known about the neurocognitive processes associated with these individual differences. To investigate this issue, we combined eyetracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), simultaneously recording eye movements and blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) activity while subjects read text passages. We found that the variability and skew of fixation duration distributions across individuals, as assessed by ex-Gaussian analyses, decreased with increasing neural activity in regions associated with the cortical eye movement control network (left frontal eye fields [FEF], left intraparietal sulcus [IPS] , left inferior frontal gyrus [IFG] and right IFG). The results suggest that individual differences in fixation duration during reading are related to underlying neurocognitive processes associated with the eye movement control system and its relationship to language processing. The results also show that eye movements and fMRI can be combined to investigate the neural correlates of individual differences in natural reading. |
Olga Mishulina; Olga Skripko; Anastasia Korosteleva Some features of eye movements during reading and retelling the text by people with stuttering Journal Article In: Procedia Computer Science, vol. 123, pp. 328–333, 2018. @article{Mishulina2018, The connection between cognitive processes and the movement of the human eye during the reading and retelling the text is investigated. A series of experiments were performed, in which people with normal speech, people with stuttering and in the treatment stage of stuttering took part. The results of the experiment were fixed by the eye tracker and the functional magnetic resonance tomograph. The statistical processing of the tracking data was performed, which discovered stable differences of fixation duration in groups of participants when performing test tasks. |
Sanako Mitsugi Proficiency influences orthographic activations during L2 spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: International Journal of Bilingualism, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 199–214, 2018. @article{Mitsugi2018, Aims and objectives: Previous research has demonstrated that literate adults activate orthographic representations to map spoken words onto printed referents as they hear a word. This study examined the time course of orthographic activation during spoken-word recognition in L2 context, taking into account of L2 proficiency. Methodology: We used the printed-word visual-world paradigm, in which participants saw four words on a computer screen and clicked on the word that matched spoken input. Twenty-one native Japanese speakers and 55 learners of Japanese with the L1 English background took part in this study. Data and analysis: The eye-movement data were analyzed using time-dependent mixed-effect logistic regression models. Our models included time and proficiency as fixed effects and participants and item as random effects. Findings: The pattern of the results identified the activation of orthography during speech processing by native Japanese speakers. The results from the L2 learner group showed that L2 proficiency was attributed to word recognition efficacy. |
Ayman A. Mohamed Exposure frequency in L2 reading: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 269–293, 2018. @article{Mohamed2018, The present study brings together methods of extensive reading studies and eye-movement research to track the cognitive effects of exposure frequency on vocabulary processing and learning. Forty-two advanced second language learners of English read a stage 1 graded reader, Goodbye Mr. Hollywood, on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. The eye-tracking task was followed by comprehension questions and vocabulary posttests. Target vocabulary consisted of 20 pseudo words and 20 known words with a range of repetition from 1 to 30. Eye-movement data showed that readers spent more time on pseudo words than on familiar words and that fixation times decreased across encounters with more attention given to target words on early encounters. Repeated exposure supported form recognition but was not as significant for meaning recall and recognition. Total times spent on each encounter was positively associated with learning success in all vocabulary measures. The amount of attention, as reflected in total reading times on each pseudo word, positively predicted learning outcomes above and beyond the number of encounters. Results of the study add a cognitive dimension to the concept of engagement in lexical learning in the process of incidental learning from second language reading. |
Patrick Murphy I'm done my homework: Complement coercion and aspectual adjectives in Canadian English Journal Article In: Studies in Language, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 29–45, 2018. @article{Murphy2018, Self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies have generally found that combining aspectual verbs (like begin and finish) with entity nouns (like the book or the coffee) is associated with increased reading times on and around the noun (McElree et al. 2001; Traxler et al. 2002; Pickering et al. 2005). This processing cost is widely interpreted as evidence of complement coercion— aspectual verbs semantically select for an event (like dancing or the dance) and can take entity objects only if they are coerced into an event through a computationally costly process oftype-shifting (Pustejovsky 1995; Jackendoff 1997). This paper presents an eye-tracking study of the Canadian English be done NP construction, e.g., I am done/finished my homework (not to be confused with the dialect-neutral I am done/finished with my homework) to mean I have finished my homework. Results suggest a processing penalty for entity-denoting nouns like the script (compared to event description nouns like the audition) in this construction, which supports Fruehwald & Myler's (2015) proposal that done and finished in this construction are aspectual adjectives that behave like aspectual verbs in requiring complement coercion and type-shifting for entity-denoting nouns. |
Andriy Myachykov; Simon Garrod; Christoph Scheepers Attention and memory play different roles in syntactic choice during sentence production Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 218–229, 2018. @article{Myachykov2018, Attentional control of referential information is an important contributor to the structure of discourse. We investigated how attention and memory interplay during visually situated sentence production. We manipulated speakers' attention to the agent or the patient of a described event by means of a referential or a dot visual cue. We also manipulated whether the cue was implicit or explicit by varying its duration (70 ms vs. 700 ms). Participants used passive voice more often when their attention was directed to the patient's location, regardless of whether the cue duration. This effect was stronger when the cue was explicit rather than implicit, especially for passive-voice sentences. Analysis of sentence onset latencies showed a divergent pattern: Latencies were shorter (1) when the agent was cued, (2) when the cue was explicit, and (3) when the (explicit) cue was referential. (1) and (2) indicate facilitated sentence planning when the cue supports a canonical (active voice) sentence frame and when speakers had more time to plan their sentences, whereas (3) suggests that sentence planning was sensitive to whether the cue was informative with regard to the cued referent. We propose that differences between production likelihoods and production latencies indicate distinct contributions from attentional focus and memorial activation to sentence planning: Although the former partly predicts syntactic choice, the latter facilitates syntactic assembly (i.e., initiating overt sentence generation). |
Si On Yoon; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Influence of the historical discourse record on language processing in dialogue Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 31–46, 2018. @article{OnYoon2018, Speakers typically design definite referring expressions to uniquely identify the intended referent with respect to the alternatives in the referential context, and addressees interpret these expressions with respect to the contextual alternatives. Although it is clear that the relevant context includes entities in the immediate context, less clear is how the historical discourse context affects language interpretation in the moment. This article presents the results of two experiments that examine interpretation of definite referring expressions in cases where the local context has recently changed. In Experiment 1 eye-tracked participants followed an experimenter's instructions to click on objects multiple times each. When expressions were over-modified for the immediate context (e.g., the striped shirt, when the shirt would suffice), referential interpretation was significantly facilitated when that expression had been previously used in a supporting context. By contrast, interpretation of nonmodified expressions that were appropriate for the local context (e.g., the shirt) was somewhat impaired when a modified term had been used previously. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a more sensitive, cohort-competitor design. These findings demonstrate that both the local and the historical context influence the online interpretation of referring expressions. |
Markus Ostarek; Adil Ishag; Dennis Joosen; Falk Huettig Saccade trajectories reveal dynamic interactions of semantic and spatial information during the processing of implicitly spatial words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 10, pp. 1658–1670, 2018. @article{Ostarek2018, Implicit up/down words, such as bird and foot, systematically influence performance on visual tasks involving immediately following targets in compatible versus incompatible locations. Recent studies have observed that the semantic relation between prime words and target pictures can strongly influence the size and even the direction of the effect: Semantically related targets are processed faster in congruent versus incongruent locations (location-specific priming), whereas unrelated targets are processed slower in congruent locations. Here, we used eye-tracking to investigate the moment-to-moment processes underlying this pattern. Our reaction time (RT) results for related targets replicated the location-specific priming effect and showed a trend toward interference for unrelated targets. We then used growth curve analysis to test how up/down words and their match versus mismatch with immediately following targets in terms of semantics and vertical location influence concurrent saccadic eye movements. There was a strong main effect of spatial association on linear growth, with up words biasing changes in y-coordinates over time upward relative to down words (and vice versa). Similar to the case with the RT data, this effect was strongest for semantically related targets and reversed for unrelated targets. It is intriguing that all conditions showed a bias in the congruent direction in the initial stage of the saccade. Then, at around halfway into the saccade the effect kept increasing in the semantically related condition and reversed in the unrelated condition. These results suggest that online processing of up/down words triggers direction- specific oculomotor processes that are dynamically modulated by the semantic relation between prime words and targets. |
Zaeinab Afsari; Ashima Keshava; José P. Ossandón; Peter König Interindividual differences among native right-to-left readers and native left-to-right readers during free viewing task Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 430–441, 2018. @article{Afsari2018, Human visual exploration is not homogeneous but displays spatial biases. Specifically, early after the onset of a visual stimulus, the majority of eye movements target the left visual space. This horizontal asymmetry of image exploration is rather robust with respect to multiple image manipulations, yet can be dynamically modulated by preceding text primes. This characteristic points to an involvement of reading habits in the deployment of visual attention. Here, we report data of native right-to-left (RTL) readers with a larger variation and stronger modulation of horizontal spatial bias in comparison to native left-to-right (LTR) readers after preceding text primes. To investigate the influences of biological and cultural factors, we measure the correlation of the modulation of the horizontal spatial bias for native RTL readers and native LTR readers with multiple factors: age, gender, second language proficiency, and age at which the second language was acquired. The results demonstrate only weak or no correlations between the magnitude of the horizontal bias and the previously mentioned factors. We conclude that the spatial bias of viewing behaviour for native RTL readers is more variable than for native LTR readers, and this variance could not be demonstrated to be associated with interindividual differences. We speculate the role of strength of habit and/or the interindividual differences in the structural and functional brain regions as a cause of the RTL spatial bias among RTL native readers. |
Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder; Andrea M. Zawoyski; Tori E. Foster Examining the maintenance and generalization effects of repeated practice: A comparison of three interventions Journal Article In: Journal of School Psychology, vol. 68, pp. 1–18, 2018. @article{Ardoin2018, Repeated reading (RR) procedures are consistent with the procedures recommended by Haring and Eaton's (1978) Instructional Hierarchy (IH) for promoting students' fluent responding to newly learned stimuli. It is therefore not surprising that an extensive body of literature exists, which supports RR as an effective practice for promoting students' reading fluency of practiced passages. Less clear, however, is the extent to which RR helps students read the words practiced in an intervention passage when those same words are presented in a new passage. The current study employed randomized control design procedures to examine the maintenance and generalization effects of three interventions that were designed based upon Haring and Eaton's (1978) IH. Across four days, students either practiced reading (a) the same passage seven times (RR+RR), (b) one passage four times and three passages each once (RR+Guided Wide Reading [GWR]), or (c) seven passages each once (GWR+GWR). Students participated in the study across 2 weeks, with intervention being provided on a different passage set each week. All passages practiced within a week, regardless of condition, contained four target low frequency and four high frequency words. Across the 130 students for whom data were analyzed, results indicated that increased opportunities to practice words led to greater maintenance effects when passages were read seven days later but revealed minimal differences across conditions in students' reading of target words presented within a generalization passage. |
Emily Atkinson; Matthew W. Wagers; Jeffrey Lidz; Colin Phillips; Akira Omaki Developing incrementality in filler-gap dependency processing Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 179, pp. 132–149, 2018. @article{Atkinson2018, Much work has demonstrated that children are able to use bottom-up linguistic cues to incrementally interpret sentences, but there is little understanding of the extent to which children's comprehension mechanisms are guided by top-down linguistic information that can be learned from distributional regularities in the input. Using a visual world eye tracking experiment and a corpus analysis, the current study investigates whether 5- and 6-year-old children incrementally assign interpretations to temporarily ambiguous wh-questions like What was Emily eating the cake with __? In the visual world eye-tracking experiment, adults demonstrated evidence for active dependency formation at the earliest region (i.e., the verb region), while 6-year-old children demonstrated a spill-over effect of this bias in the subsequent NP region. No evidence for this bias was found in 5-year-olds, although the speed of arrival at the ultimately correct instrument interpretation appears to be modulated by the vocabulary size. These results suggest that adult-like active formation of filler-gap dependencies begins to emerge around age 6. The corpus analysis of filler-gap dependency structures in adult corpora and child corpora demonstrate that the distributional regularities in either corpora are equally in favor of early, incremental completion of filler-gap dependencies, suggesting that the distributional information in the input is either not relevant to this incremental bias, or that 5-year-old children are somehow unable to recruit this information in real-time comprehension. Taken together, these findings shed light on the origin of the incremental processing bias in filler-gap dependency processing, as well as on the role of language experience and cognitive constraints in the development of incremental sentence processing mechanisms. |
Emma L. Axelsson; Rachelle L. Dawson; Sharon Y. Yim; Tashfia Quddus Mine, mine, mine: Self-reference and children's retention of novel words Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 958, 2018. @article{Axelsson2018, Adults demonstrate enhanced memory for words encoded as belonging to themselves compared to those belonging to another. Known as the self-reference effect, there is evidence for the effect in children as young as three. Toddlers are efficient in linking novel words to novel objects, but have difficulties retaining multiple word-object associations. The aim here was to investigate the self-reference ownership paradigm on 3-year-old children's retention of novel words. Following exposure to each of four novel word-object pairings, children were told that objects either belonged to them or another character. Children demonstrated significantly higher immediate retention of self-referenced compared to other-referenced items. Retention was also tested 4 h later and the following morning. Retention for self- and other-referenced words was significantly higher than chance at both delayed time points, but the difference between the self- and other-referenced words was no longer significant. The findings suggest that when it comes to toddlers' retention of multiple novel words there is an initial memory enhancing effect for self- compared to other-referenced items, but the difference diminishes over time. Children's looking times during the self-reference presentations were positively associated with retention of self-referenced words 4 h later. Looking times during the other-reference presentations were positively associated with proportional looking at other-referenced items during immediate retention testing. The findings have implications for children's memory for novel words and future studies could test children's explicit memories for the ownership manipulation itself and whether the effect is superior to other forms of memory supports such as ostensive naming. |
Nicolai D. Ayasse; Arthur Wingfield A tipping point in listening effort: Effects of linguistic complexity and age-related hearing loss on sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 22, 2018. @article{Ayasse2018, In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relationship between effort and performance. Early formulations implied that, as the challenge of a task increases, individuals will exert more effort, with resultant maintenance of stable performance. We report an experiment in which normal-hearing young adults, normal-hearing older adults, and older adults with age-related mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested for comprehension of recorded sentences that varied the comprehension challenge in two ways. First, sentences were constructed that expressed their meaning either with a simpler subject-relative syntactic structure or a more computationally demanding object-relative structure. Second, for each sentence type, an adjectival phrase was inserted that created either a short or long gap in the sentence between the agent performing an action and the action being performed. The measurement of pupil dilation as an index of processing effort showed effort to increase with task difficulty until a difficulty tipping point was reached. Beyond this point, the measurement of pupil size revealed a commitment of effort by the two groups of older adults who failed to keep pace with task demands as evidenced by reduced comprehension accuracy. We take these pupillometry data as revealing a complex relationship between task difficulty, effort, and performance that might not otherwise appear from task performance alone. |
Iske Bakker-Marshall; Atsuko Takashima; Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen; Janet G. Hell; Gabriele Janzen; James M. McQueen Theta-band oscillations in the middle temporal gyrus reflect novel word consolidation Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 621–633, 2018. @article{BakkerMarshall2018, Like many other types of memory formation, novel word learning benefits from an offline consolidation period after the initial encoding phase. A previous EEG study has shown that retrieval of novel words elicited more word-like-induced electrophysiological brain activity in the theta band after consolidation [Bakker, I., Takashima, A., van Hell, J. G., Janzen, G., & McQueen, J. M. Changes in theta and beta oscillations as signatures of novel word consolidation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27, 1286–1297, 2015]. This suggests that theta-band oscillations play a role in lexicalization, but it has not been demonstrated that this effect is directly caused by the formation of lexical representations. This study used magnetoencephalography to localize the theta consolidation effect to the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG), a region known to be involved in lexical storage. Both untrained novel words and words learned immediately before test elicited lower theta power during retrieval than existing words in this region. After a 24-hr consolidation period, the difference between novel and existing words decreased significantly, most strongly in the left pMTG. The magnitude of the decrease after consolidation correlated with an increase in behavioral competition effects between novel words and existing words with similar spelling, reflecting functional integration into the mental lexicon. These results thus provide new evidence that consolidation aids the development of lexical representations mediated by the left pMTG. Theta synchronizationmay enable lexical access by facilitating the simultaneous activation of distributed semantic, phonological, and orthographic representations that are bound together in the pMTG. |
Chiara Banfi; Ferenc Kemény; Melanie Gangl; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Kristina Moll; Karin Landerl Visual attention span performance in German-speaking children with differential reading and spelling profiles: No evidence of group differences Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. e0198903, 2018. @article{Banfi2018, An impairment in the visual attention span (VAS) has been suggested to hamper reading performance of individuals with dyslexia. It is not clear, however, if the very nature of the deficit is visual or verbal and, importantly, if it affects spelling skills as well. The current study investigated VAS by means of forced choice tasks with letters and symbols in a sample of third and fourth graders with age-adequate reading and spelling skills (n= 43), a typical dyslexia profile with combined reading and spelling deficits (n= 26) and isolated spelling deficits (n= 32). The task was devised to contain low phonological short-term memory load and to overcome the limitations of oral reports. Notably, eye-movements were monitored to control that children fixated the center of the display when stimuli were presented. Results yielded no main effect of group as well as no group-related interactions, thus showing that children with dyslexia and isolated spelling deficits did not manifest a VAS deficit for letters or symbols once certain methodological aspects were controlled for. The present results could not replicate previous evidence for the involvement of VAS in reading and dyslexia. |
Wesley R. Barnhart; Samuel Rivera; Christopher W. Robinson Effects of linguistic labels on visual attention in children and young adults Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 358, 2018. @article{Barnhart2018, Effects of linguistic labels on learning outcomes are well-established; however, developmental research examining possible mechanisms underlying these effects have provided mixed results. We used a novel paradigm where 8-year-olds and adults were simultaneously trained on three sparse categories (categories with many irrelevant or unique features and a single rule defining feature). Category members were either associated with the same label, different labels, or no labels (silent baseline). Similar to infant paradigms, participants passively viewed individual exemplars and we examined fixations to category relevant features across training. While it is well established that adults can optimize their attention in forced-choice categorization tasks without linguistic input, the present findings provide support for label induced attention optimization: simply hearing the same label associated with different exemplars was associated with increased attention to category relevant features over time, and participants continued to focus on these features on a subsequent recognition task. Participants also viewed images longer and made more fixations when images were paired with unique labels. These findings provide support for the claim that labels may facilitate categorization by directing attention to category relevant features. |
Wesley R. Barnhart; Samuel Rivera; Christopher W. Robinson Different patterns of modality dominance across development Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 182, pp. 154–165, 2018. @article{Barnhart2018a, The present study sought to better understand how children, young adults, and older adults attend and respond to multisensory information. In Experiment 1, young adults were presented with two spoken words, two pictures, or two word-picture pairings and they had to determine if the two stimuli/pairings were exactly the same or different. Pairing the words and pictures together slowed down visual but not auditory response times and delayed the latency of first fixations, both of which are consistent with a proposed mechanism underlying auditory dominance. Experiment 2 examined the development of modality dominance in children, young adults, and older adults. Cross-modal presentation attenuated visual accuracy and slowed down visual response times in children, whereas older adults showed the opposite pattern, with cross-modal presentation attenuating auditory accuracy and slowing down auditory response times. Cross-modal presentation also delayed first fixations in children and young adults. Mechanisms underlying modality dominance and multisensory processing are discussed. |
James Bartolotti; Viorica Marian Learning and processing of orthography-to-phonology mappings in a third language Journal Article In: International Journal of Multilingualism, pp. 1–21, 2018. @article{Bartolotti2018, Bilinguals' two languages are both active in parallel, and controlling co-activation is one of bilinguals' principle challenges. Trilingualism multiplies this challenge. To investigate how third language (L3) learners manage interference between languages, Spanish-English bilinguals were taught an artificial language that conflicted with English and Spanish letter-sound mappings. Interference from existing languages was higher for L3 words that were similar to L1 or L2 words, but this interference decreased over time. After mastering the L3, learners continued to experience competition from their other languages. Notably, spoken L3 words activated orthography in all three languages, causing participants to experience cross-linguistic orthographic competition in the absence of phonological overlap. Results indicate that L3 learners are able to control between-language interference from the L1 and L2. We conclude that while the transition from two languages to three presents additional challenges, bilinguals are able to successfully manage competition between languages in this new context. |
Benjamin T. Carter; Steven G. Luke; Benjamin T. Carter; Steven G. Luke Individuals' eye movements in reading are highly consistent across time and trial Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 482–492, 2018. @article{Carter2018, Eye movements are used to study a variety of cognitive phenomena, including attention, perception, memory, language, reading, decision making, and many others, as well as cognitive impairments and individual differences in cognition. These studies assume, with little evidence, that eye movements are stable across time and trials. Eye movement stability must be better characterized to understand the full theoretical and clinical implications of individual differences in eye movement behavior. The present study examined eye movement reliability in normal individuals during reading. Thirty-nine participants completed 2 sessions of a reading task separated by 1 month. Means and standard deviations of fixation duration, saccade amplitude, first fixation duration, gaze duration, total time, go-past time, skipping, refixation and regression probabilities were compared both between sessions and across trials within sessions. All correlations were highly significant, indicating that eye movement behaviors are stable within individuals across several weeks and highly stable across trials within each individual. The different components of the ex-Gaussian distribution of fixation durations were also highly stable over time. Differences in sensitivity to lexical variables (frequency, predictability, length) were also com-pared, and were also observed to be highly stable across time. Eye movements in reading are therefore suitable for studying cognition and its neural underpinnings, as well as cognitive development and longitudinal change. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed. |
Xuqian Chen; Wei Yang; Lijun Ma; Jiaxin Li In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 211, 2018. @article{Chen2018, Recent findings have shown that information about changes in an object's environmental location in the context of discourse is stored in working memory during sentence comprehension. However, in these studies, changes in the object's location were always consistent with world knowledge (e.g., in “The writer picked up the pen from the floor and moved it to the desk,” the floor and the desk are both common locations for a pen). How do people accomplish comprehension when the object-location information in working memory is inconsistent with world knowledge (e.g., a pen being moved from the floor to the bathtub)? In two visual world experiments, with a “look-and-listen” task, we used eye-tracking data to investigate comprehension of sentences that described location changes under different conditions of appropriateness (i.e., the object and its location were typically vs. unusually coexistent, based on world knowledge) and antecedent context (i.e., contextual information that did vs. did not temporarily normalize unusual coexistence between object and location). Results showed that listeners' retrieval of the critical location was affected by both world knowledge and working memory, and the effect of world knowledge was reducedwhen the antecedent context normalized unusual coexistence of object and location. More importantly, activation of world knowledge and working memory seemed to change during the comprehension process. These results are important because they demonstrate that interference between world knowledge and information in working memory, appears to be activated dynamically during sentence comprehension. |
Harry K. S. Chung; Jacklyn C. Y. Leung; Vienne M. Y. Wong; Janet H. Hsiao When is the right hemisphere holistic and when is it not? The case of Chinese character recognition Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 178, pp. 50–56, 2018. @article{Chung2018, Holistic processing (HP) has long been considered a characteristic of right hemisphere (RH) processing. Indeed, holistic face processing is typically associated with left visual field (LVF)/RH processing advantages. Nevertheless, expert Chinese character recognition involves reduced HP and increased RH lateralization, presenting a counterexample. Recent modeling research suggests that RH processing may be associated with an increase or decrease in HP, depending on whether spacing or component information was used respectively. Since expert Chinese character recognition involves increasing sensitivity to components while deemphasizing spacing information, RH processing in experts may be associated with weaker HP than novices. Consistent with this hypothesis, in a divided visual field paradigm, novices exhibited HP only in the LVF/RH, whereas experts showed no HP in either visual field. This result suggests that the RH may flexibly switch between part-based and holistic representations, consistent with recent fMRI findings. The RH's advantage in global/low spatial frequency processing is suggested to be relative to the task relevant frequency range. Thus, its use of holistic and part-based representations may depend on how attention is allocated for task relevant information. This study provides the first behavioral evidence showing how type of information used for processing modulates perceptual representations in the RH. |
Derya Çokal; Patrick Sturt Effect of referring expression on antecedent-grouping choice in plural reference resolution Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 157–165, 2018. @article{Cokal2018, This article reports one eye-tracking and one sentence-completion experiment , examining the antecedent preferences for plural anaphora they and demonstrative these. Our results show that the antecedent-grouping preference depends on type of referring expressions: specifically, the preference for they is to refer to a smaller paired group within the context, whereas the preference for these is to refer to a larger (maximal) grouping. This points to limitations regarding the application of the Closure Strategy (Koh & Clifton, 2002), which would have predicted a more general maximal-grouping preference for the contexts investigated here. Previous findings comparing singular pronouns with demonstratives (it and this) show that, relative to pronouns, demonstratives prefer more inferentially complex antecedents. With this in mind, the current results could be explained if the preference for the demonstrative was to refer to a more complex referent than that of the pronoun. |
Derya Çokal; Patrick Sturt; Fernanda Ferreira Processing of It and This in written narrative discourse Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 272–289, 2018. @article{Cokal2018a, Two experiments explored the hypothesis that anaphors and demonstratives signal different procedural instructions: Whereas the anaphor it brings a concrete entity into a reader's focus, the demonstrative this directs the focus to a predicate proposition in a discourse representation. The findings from an online eye-tracking reading experiment confirm that preferences for it and this differ as predicted. Moreover, a sentence-completion experiment revealed converging evidence for this difference, with clear differences in antecedent preferences for it and this. Overall, findings show that the processing and use of anaphoric expressions is affected by the interaction between the lexical characteristics of referential forms and different types of referent. |
Katrina Connel; Simone Huls; Maria Teresa Martinez-Garcia; Zhen Qin; Seulgi Shin; Hanbo Yan; Annie Tremblay English learners' use of segmental and suprasegmental cues to stress in lexical access: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Language Learning, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 635–668, 2018. @article{Connel2018, This study investigated the use of segmental and suprasegmental cues to lexical stress in word recognition by Mandarin-speaking English learners, Korean-speaking English learners, and native English listeners. Unlike English and Mandarin, Korean does not have lexical stress. Participants completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment that examined whether listeners' word recognition is constrained by suprasegmental cues to stress alone or by a combination of segmental and suprasegmental cues. Results showed that English listeners used both suprasegmental cues alone and segmental and suprasegmental cues together to recognize English words, with the effect ofstress being greater for combined cues. Conversely, Mandarin listeners used stress in lexical access only when stress was signaled by suprasegmental cues alone, and Korean listeners did so only when stress was signaled by segmental and suprasegmental cues together. These results highlight the importance of a cue-based approach to the study of stress in word recognition. |
Kenny R. Coventry; Elena Andonova; Thora Tenbrink; Harmen B. Gudde; Paul E. Engelhardt Cued by what we see and hear: Spatial reference frame use in language Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 1287, 2018. @article{Coventry2018, To what extent is the choice of what to say driven by seemingly irrelevant cues in the visual world being described? Among such cues, how does prior description affect how we process spatial scenes? When people describe where objects are located their use of spatial language is often associated with a choice of reference frame. Two experiments employing between-participants designs (N = 490) examined the effects of visual cueing and previous description on reference frame choice as reflected in spatial prepositions (in front of, to the left of, etc.) to describe pictures of object pairs. Experiment 1 examined the effects of visual and linguistic cues on spatial description choice through movement of object(s) in spatial scenes, showing sizeable effects of visual cueing on reference frame choice. Experiment 2 monitored eye movements of participants following a linguistic example description, revealing two findings: eye movement “signatures” associated with distinct reference frames as expressed in language, and transfer of these eye movement patterns just prior to spatial description for different (later) picture descriptions. Both verbal description and visual cueing similarly influence language production choice through manipulation of visual attention, suggesting a unified theory of constraints affecting spatial language choice. |
Bob McMurray; Ani Danelz; Hannah Rigler; Michael Seedorff Speech categorization develops slowly through adolescence Journal Article In: Developmental Psychology, vol. 54, no. 8, pp. 1472–1491, 2018. @article{McMurray2018, The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be responsible for such development using a visual world paradigm experiment based on (McMurray, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2002). Children from 3 age groups (7- 8, 12-13, and 17-18 years) heard a token from either a b/p or s/f continua spanning 2 words (beach/peach, ship/sip) and selected its referent from a screen containing 4 pictures of potential lexical candidates. Eye movements to each object were monitored as a measure of how strongly children were committing to each candidate as perception unfolds in real-time. Results showed an ongoing sharpening of speech categories through 18, which was particularly apparent during the early stages of real-time perception. When analysis targeted to specifically within-category sensitivity to continuous detail, children exhibited increasingly gradient categories over development, suggesting that increasing sensitivity to fine-grained detail in the signal enables these more discrete categorizations. Together these suggest that speech development is a protracted process in which children's increasing sensitivity to within-category detail in the signal enables increasingly sharp phonetic categories. |