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 |
Dario Paape; Barbara Hemforth; Shravan Vasishth Processing of ellipsis with garden-path antecedents in French and German: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. e0198620, 2018. @article{Paape2018, In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, Paape (Paape, 2016) found that reading times were shorter at the ellipsis site when the antecedent was a temporarily ambiguous garden-path structure. As a post-hoc explanation of this finding, Paape assumed that the antecedent's memory representation was reactivated during syntactic reanalysis, making it easier to retrieve. In two eye tracking experiments, we subjected the reactivation hypothesis to further empirical scrutiny. Experiment 1, carried out in French, showed no evidence in favor in the reactivation hypothesis. Instead, results for one out of the three types of gardenpath sentences that were tested suggest that subjects sometimes failed to resolve the temporary ambiguity in the antecedent clause, and subsequently failed to resolve the ellipsis. The results of Experiment 2, a conceptual replication of Paape's (Paape, 2016) original study carried out in German, are compatible with the reactivation hypothesis, but leave open the possibility that the observed speedup for ambiguous antecedents may be due to occasional retrievals of an incorrect structure. |
Hyojin Park; Robin A. A. Ince; Philippe G. Schyns; Gregor Thut; Joachim Gross In: PLoS Biology, vol. 16, no. 8, pp. e2006558, 2018. @article{Park2018, Integration of multimodal sensory information is fundamental to many aspects of human behavior, but the neural mechanisms underlying these processes remain mysterious. For example, during face-to-face communication, we know that the brain integrates dynamic auditory and visual inputs, but we do not yet understand where and how such integration mechanisms support speech comprehension. Here, we quantify representational interactions between dynamic audio and visual speech signals and show that different brain regions exhibit different types of representational interaction. With a novel information theoretic measure, we found that theta (3-7 Hz) oscillations in the posterior superior temporal gyrus/sulcus (pSTG/S) represent auditory and visual inputs redundantly (i.e., represent common features of the two), whereas the same oscillations in left motor and inferior temporal cortex represent the inputs synergistically (i.e., the instantaneous relationship between audio and visual inputs is also represented). Importantly, redundant coding in the left pSTG/S and synergistic coding in the left motor cortex predict behavior-i.e., speech comprehension performance. Our findings therefore demonstrate that processes classically described as integration can have different statistical properties and may reflect distinct mechanisms that occur in different brain regions to support audiovisual speech comprehension. |
Giovanni Parodi; Cristóbal Julio; Laura Nadal; Gina Burdiles; Adriana Cruz Always look back: Eye movements as a reflection of anaphoric encapsulation in Spanish while reading the neuter pronoun ello Journal Article In: Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 132, pp. 47–58, 2018. @article{Parodi2018, Eye movements constitute an important cue to understanding how readers connect textual information, particularly when an encapsulator pronoun must be anaphorically resolved in order to construct a coherent mental representation of the text being read. While existing research into anaphoric reference has predominantly focused on the distance between pronouns and referents and on their morphosyntactic features, no previously published studies have addressed the effect in causal contexts of varying extensions of the referent being encapsulated by a neuter pronoun. In the present research, we help fill this gap by studying the effects of online processing of the anaphoric neuter Spanish pronoun ello (‘this' in English) in causally-related texts using two varying referent extensions: short and long antecedent. A one factor repeated measures design was implemented. The results of three eye reading measures showed a fine-grained picture of encapsulation processes for seventy-two Chilean university students as they each read twelve texts. On the one hand, the reading times for processing the neuter pronoun ello AOI did not show statistically significant differences between the short and long conditions. On the other, the findings indicate that, in constructing referential and relational coherence in causally-related texts in Spanish, resolution of the neuter pronoun is in fact influenced by the extension of the referent. |
Kristin M. Pelczarski; Anna Tendera; Matthew Dye; Torrey M. Loucks Delayed phonological encoding in stuttering: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 475–493, 2018. @article{Pelczarski2018, Stuttering is a multifactorial disorder that is characterized by disruptions in the forward flow of speech believed to be caused by differences in the motor and linguistic systems. Several psycholinguistic theories of stuttering suggest that delayed or disrupted phonological encoding contributes to stuttered speech. However, phonological encoding remains difficult to measure without controlling for the involvement of the speech-motor system. Eye-tracking is proposed to be a reliable approach for measuring phonological encoding duration while controlling for the influence of speech production. Eighteen adults who stutter and 18 adults who do not stutter read nonwords under silent and overt conditions. Eye-tracking was used to measure dwell time, number of fixations, and response time. Adults who stutter demonstrated significantly more fixations and longer dwell times during overt reading than adults who do not stutter. In the silent condition, the adults who stutter produced more fixations on the nonwords than adults who do not stutter, but dwell-time differences were not found. Overt production may have resulted in additional requirements at the phonological and phonetic levels of encoding for adults who stutter. Direct measurement of eye-gaze fixation and dwell time suggests that adults who stutter require additional processing that could potentially delay or interfere with phonological-to-motor encoding. |
Manuel Perea; Ana Marcet; Beatriz Uixera; Marta Vergara-Martínez Eye movements when reading sentences with handwritten words Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 20–27, 2018. @article{Perea2018, The examination of how we read handwritten words (i.e., the original form of writing) has typically been disregarded in the literature on reading. Previous research using word recognition tasks has shown that lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) are magnified when reading difficult handwritten words. To examine this issue in a more ecological scenario, we registered the participants' eye movements when reading handwritten sentences that varied in the degree of legibility (i.e., sentences composed of words in easy vs. difficult handwritten style). For comparison purposes, we included a condition with printed sentences. Results showed a larger reading cost for sentences with difficult handwritten words than for sentences with easy handwritten words, which in turn showed a reading cost relative to the sentences with printed words. Critically, the effect of word frequency was greater for difficult handwritten words than for easy handwritten words or printed words in the total times on a target word, but not on first-fixation durations or gaze durations. We examine the implications of these findings for models of eye movement control in reading. |
Ryan E. Peters; Theres Gruter; Arielle Borovsky Vocabulary size and native speaker self-identification influence flexibility in linguistic prediction among adult bilinguals Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1439–1469, 2018. @article{Peters2018, When language users predict upcoming speech, they generate pluralistic expectations, weighted by likelihood (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016). Many variables influence the prediction of highly likely sentential outcomes, but less is known regarding variables affecting the prediction of less-likely outcomes. Here we explore how English vocabulary size and self-identification as a native speaker (NS) of English modulate adult bi-/multilinguals' preactivation of less-likely sentential outcomes in two visual-world experiments. Participants heard transitive sentences containing an agent, action, and theme ( The pirate chases the ship ) while viewing four referents varying in expectancy by relation to the agent and action. In Experiment 1 ( N =70), spoken themes referred to highly expected items (e.g., ship). Results indicate lower skill (smaller vocabulary size) and less confident (not identifying as NS) bi-/multilinguals activate less-likely action-related referents more than their higher skill/confidence peers. In Experiment 2 ( N =65), themes were one of two less-likely items ( The pirate chases the bone / cat ). Results approaching significance indicate an opposite but similar size effect: higher skill/confidence listeners activate less-likely action-related (e.g., bone) referents slightly more than lower skill/confidence listeners. Results across experiments suggest higher skill/confidence participants more flexibly modulate their linguistic predictions per the demands of the task, with similar but not identical patterns emerging when bi-/multilinguals are grouped by self-ascribed NS status versus vocabulary size. |
Mikhail Y. Pokhoday; Christoph Scheepers; Yury Y. Shtyrov; Andriy Myachykov Motor (but not auditory) attention affects syntactic choice Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. e0195547, 2018. @article{Pokhoday2018, Understanding the determinants of syntactic choice in sentence production is a salient topic in psycholinguistics. Existing evidence suggests that syntactic choice results from an interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic factors, and a speaker's attention to the elements of a described event represents one such factor. Whereas multimodal accounts of attention suggest a role for different modalities in this process, existing studies examining attention effects in syntactic choice are primarily based on visual cueing paradigms. Hence, it remains unclear whether attentional effects on syntactic choice are limited to the visual modality or may be subject to cross-modal interaction. The current study addressed this issue. Native English participants viewed and described line drawings of simple transitive events while their attention was directed to the location of the agent or the patient of the depicted event by means of either an auditory (monaural beep) or a motor (unilateral key press) lateral cue. Our results show an effect of cue location, with participants producing more passive-voice descriptions in the patient-cued conditions. Crucially, this cue location effect emerged in the motor-cue but not in the auditory-cue condition, as confirmed by a reliable interaction between cue location (agent vs. patient) and cue type (auditory vs. motor). Our data suggest that attentional effects on the speaker's syntactic choices are modality dependent and appear to be more prominent in the visuomotor domain than in the auditory domain. |
Stephen Politzer-Ahles; E. Matthew Husband Eye movement evidence for context-sensitive derivation of scalar inferences Journal Article In: Collabra: Psychology, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2018. @article{PolitzerAhles2018, A scalar expression like some can optionally have an enriched interpretation (approximately meaning “some, but not all”) depending on the context in which it appears. Numerous experiments using the self-paced reading method have found evidence that context has an online effect on the interpretation of a scalar term, resulting in faster or slower reading times for a later phrase whose comprehension is dependent on the interpretation of some. The present study used eye movements to isolate the time course of this process. We find evidence that the reading time facilitation observed in previous studies was driven by early reading measures, with little reading time evidence for an immediate inference-based processing cost at the scalar expression itself, consistent with previous studies. Our results suggest that comprehenders can rapidly commit to enriched interpretations online without cost and that these enriched interpretations are then used to guide the processing of upcoming sentence material. |
Céline Pozniak; Barbara Hemforth; Christoph Scheepers Cross-domain priming from mathematics to relative-clause attachment: A visual-world study in French Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 2056, 2018. @article{Pozniak2018, Human language processing must rely on a certain degree of abstraction, as we can produce and understand sentences that we have never produced or heard before. One way to establish syntactic abstraction is by investigating structural priming. Structural priming has been shown to be effective within a cognitive domain, in the present case, the linguistic domain. But does priming also work across different domains? In line with previous experiments, we investigated cross-domain structural priming from mathematical expressions to linguistic structures with respect to relative clause attachment in French (e.g., la fille du professeur qui habitait à Paris/the daughter of the teacher who lived in Paris). Testing priming in French is particularly interesting because it will extend earlier results established for English to a language where the baseline for relative clause attachment preferences is different form English: in English, relative clauses (RCs) tend to be attached to the local noun phrase (low attachment) while in French there is a preference for high attachment of relative clauses to the first noun phrase (NP). Moreover, in contrast to earlier studies, we applied an online-technique (visual world eye-tracking). Our results confirm cross-domain priming from mathematics to linguistic structures in French. Most interestingly, different from less mathematically adept participants, we found that in mathematically skilled participants, the effect emerged very early on (at the beginning of the relative clause in the speech stream) and is also present later (at the end of the relative clause). In line with previous findings, our experiment suggests that mathematics and language share aspects of syntactic structure at a very high-level of abstraction. |
Jessica M. Price; Anthony J. Sanford Reading in healthy aging: Selective use of information structuring cues Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 206–217, 2018. @article{Price2018, Previous research has shown that information referring to a named character or to information in the main clause of a sentence is more accessible and facilitates the processing of anaphoric references. We investigated whether the use of such cues are maintained in healthy aging. We present two experiments investigating whether information contained in the main clause of a sentence is more accessible compared with information contained in the subordinate clause. We present two further experiments that explored whether proper names act as controllers of discourse focus. Experiment 1 showed that information contained in the subordinate clause of a sentence decreased the processing efficiency of anaphoric references (more so for older adults), and Experiment 2 found that main clauses facilitated probe recognition. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that named characters increased the processing efficiency of anaphoric references and facilitated probe recognition (younger adults only), whereas older adults displayed a primacy effect. |
Christina Ralph-Nearman; Ruth Filik In: International Journal of Eating Disorders, vol. 51, no. 9, pp. 1070–1079, 2018. @article{RalphNearman2018, OBJECTIVE: Many theories have been put forward suggesting key factors underlying the development and maintenance of eating disorders, such as: unhealthy food-related cognitive biases, negative body attitude, and perfectionism; however, underlying cognitive processes associated with eating disorder symptomatology remain unclear. We used eye-tracking during reading as a novel implicit measure of how these factors may relate to eating disorder symptomatology. METHOD: In two experiments, we monitored women's eye movements while they read texts in which the characters' emotional responses to food-, body image-, and perfectionism-related scenarios were described. Participants' eating disorder symptomatology was then assessed. RESULTS: Both studies suggest that moment-to-moment processing of characters' emotional responses to perfectionism-, and to a lesser extent, body image-related information was associated with participants' eating disorder symptomatology, thus supporting theories in which these factors are key to developing and maintaining eating disorders. Interestingly, the moment-to-moment processing of characters' emotional responses to food-related scenarios was not related to eating disorder symptomatology. DISCUSSION: These findings provide novel insights into cognitive processes underlying eating disorder symptomatology, as well as demonstrating the utility of more natural implicit measures. |
Katerina Eleonora K. Rassia; John S. Pezaris Improvement in reading performance through training with simulated thalamic visual prostheses Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 8, pp. 16310, 2018. @article{Rassia2018, Simulations of artificial vision are used to provide the researcher an opportunity to explore different aspects of visual prosthesis device design by observing subject performance on various tasks viewed through the simulation. Such studies typically use normal, sighted subjects to measure performance at a given point in time. Relatively few studies examine performance changes longitudinally to quantitatively assess the benefits from a training plan that would be akin to post-implantation rehabilitation. Here, we had six normal, sighted subjects use a standard reading task with daily practice over eight weeks to understand the effects of an intensive training schedule on adaptation to artificial sight. Subjects read 40 MNREAD-style sentences per session, with a new set each session, that were presented at five font sizes (logMAR 1.0–1.4) and through three center-weighted phosphene patterns (2,000, 1,000, 500 phosphenes). We found that subjects improved their reading accuracy across sessions, and that the training lead to an increase of reading speed that was equivalent to a doubling of available phosphenes. Most importantly, the hardest condition, while initially illegible, supported functional reading after training. Consistent with experience-driven neuroplastic changes, gaps in the training schedule lead to transient decreases in reading speed, but, surprisingly, not reading accuracy. Our findings contribute to our larger project of developing a thalamic visual prosthesis and to post-implant rehabilitation strategies. |
Theresa Redl; Anita Eerland; Ted J. M. Sanders The processing of the Dutch masculine generic zijn ‘his' across stereotype contexts: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 10, pp. e0205903, 2018. @article{Redl2018, Language users often infer a person's gender when it is not explicitly mentioned. This information is included in the mental model of the described situation, giving rise to expectations regarding the continuation of the discourse. Such gender inferences can be based on two types of information: gender stereotypes (e.g., nurses are female) and masculine generics, which are grammatically masculine word forms that are used to refer to all genders in certain contexts (e.g., Toeach his own). In this eye-tracking experiment (N= 82), which is the first to systematically investigate the online processing of masculine generic pronouns, we tested whether the frequently used Dutch masculine generic zijn ‘his' leads to a male bias. In addition, we tested the effect of context by introducing male, female, and neutral stereotypes. We found no evidence for the hypothesis that the generically-intended masculine pronoun zijn ‘his' results in a male bias. However, we found an effect of stereotype context. After introducing a female stereotype, reading about a man led to an increase in processing time. However, the reverse did not hold, which parallels the finding in social psychology that men are penalized more for gender-nonconforming behavior. This suggests that language processing is not only affected by the strength of stereotype contexts; the associated disapproval of violating these gender stereotypes affects language processing, too. |
Roger W. Remington; Jennifer S. Burt; Stefanie I. Becker The curious case of spillover: Does it tell us much about saccade timing in reading? Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 80, no. 7, pp. 1683–1690, 2018. @article{Remington2018, In completing daily activities, the eyes make a series ofsaccades by gazing at stimuli in succession. The duration of gaze on each stimulus has been used to infer how the initiation ofa saccade is timed relative to the underlying mental processing. In reading, gaze dwells longer on a word that occurs infrequently in English text (low frequency) than on a more frequent word (high frequency), but also on the following word, which is referred to as spillover. Accounts ofspillover attribute it to mechanisms of lexical access. A low-frequency word n is assumed to delay the onset of cognitive processing of word n+1 more than it delays the saccade to n+1, leaving more processing to be done on n+1 once it is fixated. We tested this assumption by having participants perform a series of speeded lexical decisions on a linear array of letter strings spaced 5° apart, using low- and high-frequency words to vary the lexical difficulty. Lexical decision adds a response selection stage that is absent in reading, which should eliminate differential effects on saccades and cognitive processing. Nonetheless, we found the typical pattern of lengthened gaze duration and spillover for low-frequency words, with effects that were consistent in magnitude with those seen in studies of reading. These data challenge existing accounts of spillover and argue against the idea that reading has a unique interaction with oculomotor control. Instead, the similarity of our gaze patterns to those of reading suggests a common pattern of saccade initiation across tasks. |
Johannes Rennig; Michael S. Beauchamp Free viewing of talking faces reveals mouth and eye preferring regions of the human superior temporal sulcus Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 183, pp. 25–36, 2018. @article{Rennig2018, During face-to-face communication, the mouth of the talker is informative about speech content, while the eyes of the talker convey other information, such as gaze location. Viewers most often fixate either the mouth or the eyes of the talker's face, presumably allowing them to sample these different sources of information. To study the neural correlates of this process, healthy humans freely viewed talking faces while brain activity was measured with BOLD fMRI and eye movements were recorded with a video-based eye tracker. Post hoc trial sorting was used to divide the data into trials in which participants fixated the mouth of the talker and trials in which they fixated the eyes. Although the audiovisual stimulus was identical, the two trials types evoked differing responses in subregions of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). The anterior pSTS preferred trials in which participants fixated the mouth of the talker while the posterior pSTS preferred fixations on the eye of the talker. A second fMRI experiment demonstrated that anterior pSTS responded more strongly to auditory and audiovisual speech than posterior pSTS eye-preferring regions. These results provide evidence for functional specialization within the pSTS under more realistic viewing and stimulus conditions than in previous neuroimaging studies. |
Kathleen Pirog Revill; Laura L. Namy; Lynne C. Nygaard Eye movements reveal persistent sensitivity to sound symbolism during word learning Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 680–698, 2018. @article{Revill2018, Although the relationship between sound and meaning in language is assumed to be largely arbitrary, reliable correspondences between sound and meaning in natural language appear to facilitate word learning. Using a set of independently normed pseudoword and shape stimuli, we examined the real-time effects of sound-to-shape correspondences at initial presentation and throughout an extended learning process resulting in high accuracy. In addition to accuracy and response time (RT) measures, we monitored participants' eye movements to investigate the extent to which visual orienting to objects is influenced by the sound symbolic characteristics of novel labels at initial exposure and throughout learning. Over the course of word learning, congruency of sound and shape properties affected both accuracy and RT with higher accuracy and faster responses for congruent than incongruent items. Eye tracking data reveal that congruent targets were fixated faster than incongruent targets throughout learning and that nontargets consistent with the sound symbolic properties of the word remained attractive distracters, even after overt behavioral differences in accuracy disappeared. This demonstrates the sustained influence of sound symbolism and the importance of sensitive, continuous measures of assessing sound symbolic effects in word learning and lexical processing. Arbitrariness resulted in better final individuation performance only when the arbitrary items were more phonologically distinct than the sound symbolic stimuli. These findings suggest that the advantages of sound symbolism may persist beyond early word learning and serve to significantly influence online lexical processing. |
Ioannis Rigas; Lee Friedman; Oleg V. Komogortsev Study of an extensive set of eye movement features: Extraction methods and statistical analysis Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–28, 2018. @article{Rigas2018a, This work presents a study of an extensive set of 101 categories of eye movement features from three types of eye movement events: fixations, saccades, and post-saccadic oscillations. We present a unified framework of methods for the extraction of features that describe the temporal, positional and dynamic characteristics of eye movements. We perform statistical analysis of feature values by employing eye movement data from a normative population of 298 subjects, recorded during a text reading task. We present overall measures for the central tendency and variability of feature values, and we quantify the test-retest reliability of features using either the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (for normally distributed and normalized features) or Kendall's coefficient of concordance (for non-normally distributed features). Finally, for the case of normally distributed and normalized features we additionally perform factor analysis and provide interpretations of the resulting factors. The presented methods and analysis can provide a valuable tool for researchers in various fields that explore eye movements, such as in behavioral studies, attention and cognition research, medical research, biometric recognition, and humancomputer interaction. |
John-Ross Rizzo; Todd E. Hudson; Prin X. Amorapanth; Weiwei Dai; Joel Birkemeier; Rosa Pasculli; Kyle Conti; Charles Feinberg; Jan Verstraete; Katie Dempsey; Ivan Selesnick; Laura J. Balcer; Steven L. Galetta; Janet C. Rucker In: Brain Injury, vol. 32, no. 13-14, pp. 1690–1699, 2018. @article{Rizzo2018, Objective: To determine if native English speakers (NES) perform differently compared to non-native English speakers (NNES) on a sideline-focused rapid number naming task. A secondary aim was to characterize objective differences in eye movement behaviour between cohorts. Background: The King-Devick (KD) test is a rapid number-naming task in which numbers are read from left-to-right. This performance measure adds vision-based assessment to sideline concussion testing. Reading strategies differ by language. Concussion may also impact language and attention. Both factors may affect test performance. Methods: Twenty-seven healthy NNES and healthy NES performed a computerized KD test under high-resolution video-oculography. NNES also performed a Bilingual Dominance Scale (BDS) questionnaire to weight linguistic preferences (i.e., reliance on non-English language(s)). Results: Inter-saccadic intervals were significantly longer in NNES (346.3 ± 78.3 ms vs. 286.1 ± 49.7 ms |
Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos; Katja Münster; Ernesto Guerra; Helene Kreysa; Alba Rodríguez; Julia Kröger; Thomas Kluth; Michele Burigo; Dato Abashidze; Eva M. Nunnemann; Pia Knoeferle Eye tracking during visually situated language comprehension: Flexibility and limitations in uncovering visual context effects Journal Article In: Journal of Visualized Experiments, no. 141, pp. 1–12, 2018. @article{Ronderos2018, The present work is a description and an assessment of a methodology designed to quantify different aspects of the interaction between language processing and the perception of the visual world. The recording of eye-gaze patterns has provided good evidence for the contribution of both the visual context and linguistic/world knowledge to language comprehension. Initial research assessed object-context effects to test theories of modularity in language processing. In the introduction, we describe how subsequent investigations have taken the role of the wider visual context in language processing as a research topic in its own right, asking questions such as how our visual perception of events and of speakers contributes to comprehension informed by comprehenders' experience. Among the examined aspects of the visual context are actions, events, a speaker's gaze, and emotional facial expressions, as well as spatial object configurations. Following an overview of the eye-tracking method and its different applications, we list the key steps of the methodology in the protocol, illustrating how to successfully use it to study visually-situated language comprehension. A final section presents three sets of representative results and illustrates the benefits and limitations of eye tracking for investigating the interplay between the perception of the visual world and language comprehension. |
Nuria Sagarra; Joseph V. Casillas Suprasegmental information cues morphological anticipation during L1/L2 lexical access Journal Article In: Journal of Second Language Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 31 – 59, 2018. @article{Sagarra2018, We use visual-world eye-tracking and gating methods to investigate whether Spanish monolinguals and English late learners of Spanish use prosodic cues (lexical stress) to anticipate morphological information (suffixes) during spoken word recognition, and if they do, whether L2 proficiency and working memory (WM) mediate their anticipatory abilities. Our findings show that the monolinguals used prosodic information to predict word endings in both tasks, regardless of first-syllable stress (stressed, unstressed) and structure (CV, CVC). In contrast, the beginning learners did not use prosodic information to anticipate word suffixes in any task or condition. Importantly, the advanced learners mirrored the monolinguals, except in words with first-syllable CV structure, but were slower than the monolinguals. Finally, WM was not associated with anticipatory eye movements, though results were inconclusive for offline processing. Taken together, the present study shows that suprasegmental information facilitates morphological anticipation during spoken word recognition, and that adult learners can gain anticipatory processing patterns qualitatively, but not quantitatively, similar to monolinguals. |
Raheleh Saryazdi; Craig G. Chambers Mapping language to visual referents: Does the degree of image realism matter? Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 182, pp. 91–99, 2018. @article{Saryazdi2018, Studies of real-time spoken language comprehension have shown that listeners rapidly map unfolding speech to available referents in the immediate visual environment. This has been explored using various kinds of 2-dimensional (2D) stimuli, with convenience or availability typically motivating the choice of a particular image type. However, work in other areas has suggested that certain cognitive processes are sensitive to the level of realism in 2D representations. The present study examined the process of mapping language to depictions of objects that are more or less realistic, namely photographs versus clipart images. A custom stimulus set was first created by generating clipart images directly from photographs of real objects. Two visual world experiments were then conducted, varying whether referent identification was driven by noun or verb information. A modest benefit for clipart stimuli was observed during real-time processing, but only for noun-driving mappings. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for studies of visually situated language processing. |
Naoyuki Sato; Hiroaki Mizuhara Successful encoding during natural reading is associated with fixation-related potentials and large-scale network deactivation Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 1–12, 2018. @article{Sato2018, Reading literature (e.g., an entire book) is an enriching experience that qualitatively differs from reading a single sentence; however, the brain dynamics of such context-dependent memory remains unclear. This study aimed to elucidate mnemonic neural dynamics during natural reading of literature by performing electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Brain activities of human participants recruited on campus were correlated with their subsequent memory, which was quantified by semantic correlation between the read text and reports subsequently written by them based on state of the art natural language processing procedures. The results of the EEG data analysis showed a significant positive relationship between subsequent memory and fixation-related EEG. Sentence-length and paragraph-length mnemonic processes were associated with N1-P2 and P3 fixation-related potential (FRP) components and fixation-related θ-band (4–8 Hz) EEG power, respectively. In contrast, the results of fMRI analysis showed a significant negative relationship between subsequent memory and blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) activation. Sentence-length and paragraph-length mnemonic processes were associated with networks of regions forming part of the salience network and the default mode network (DMN), respectively. Taken together with the EEG results, these memory-related deactivations in the salience network and the DMN were thought to reflect the reading of sentences characterized by low mnemonic load and the suppression of task-irreverent thoughts, respectively. It was suggested that the context-dependent mnemonic process during literature reading requires large-scale network deactivation, which might reflect coordination of a range of voluntary processes during reading. |
Sarah Schimke; Israel Fuente; Barbara Hemforth; Saveria Colonna First language influence on second language offline and online ambiguous pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Language Learning, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 744–779, 2018. @article{Schimke2018, This study examined first language (L1) influence on second language (L2) ambiguous pronoun resolution by investigating (a) whether L1 influence takes place at the level of the pronominal form (form-dependent influence) and/or at the level of the construction in which the form appears (construction-dependent influence) and (b) whether effects differ in online compared to offline data. In Experiment 1, we replicated previously observed construction-dependent crosslinguistic differences between French and German and provided new data for Spanish. In Experiment 2, we assessed offline and online interpretation preferences of intermediate L1 French and L1 Spanish learners of German. Our results provide evidence of form-dependent L1 influence, in that learners transferred a generalized antecedent bias associated with overt pronouns. Moreover, our results extend previous findings by showing that L1 influence on L2 pronoun resolution can occur during online processing. |
Daniel Schmidtke; Julie A. Van Dyke; Victor Kuperman Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 421–439, 2018. @article{Schmidtke2018, Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In the present study, we examined the influence of semantic transparency and individual reading experience on eye-movement behavior during sentence reading. Eye-movement data were collected from 138 non–college-bound 16- to 26-year-old speakers of English in a sentence-reading task representing a total of 455 different compound words. Measures of individual differences in reading experience were collected from the same participants and consisted of standardized assessments of exposure to printed materials, vocabulary size, and word recognition skill. Statistical analyses revealed facilitatory effects of both Modifier-Compound and Head-Compound transparency throughout the eye-movement record. Moreover, the study reports interactions between Head-Compound transparency and measures of reading experience. Readers with a small amount exposure to printed materials and a limited vocabulary size exhibited slower processing in late eye- movement measures when reading highly transparent compounds relative to opaque compounds. The opposite effect was observed for readers with a relatively large amount of exposure to printed materials and a relatively larger vocabulary size, such that highly transparent compounds facilitated lexical processing. To account for the results, the authors posit a trade-off between 2 cognitive mechanisms, which is modulated by individual reading experience; that is, the benefit of semantic coactivation of closely related concepts, and the cost of discriminating between those concepts. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Mallorie Leinenger; Titus Malsburg When your mind skips what your eyes fixate: How forced fixations lead to comprehension illusions in reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1884–1890, 2018. @article{Schotter2018, The phenomenon of forced fixations suggests that readers sometimes fixate a word (due to oculomotor constraints) even though they intended to skip it (due to parafoveal cognitive-linguistic processing). We investigate whether this leads readers to look directly at a word but not pay attention to it. We used a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm to dissociate parafoveal and foveal information (e.g., the word phone changed to scarf once the reader's eyes moved to it) and asked questions about the sentence to determine which one the reader encoded. When the word was skipped or fixated only briefly (i.e., up to 100 ms) readers were more likely to report reading the parafoveal than the fixated word, suggesting that there are cases in which readers look directly at a word but their minds ignore it, leading to the illusion of reading something they did not fixate. |
Mirjana Sekicki; Maria Staudte Eye'll help you out! How the gaze cue reduces the cognitive load required for reference processing Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 42, no. 8, pp. 2418–2458, 2018. @article{Sekicki2018, Referential gaze has been shown to benefit language processing in situated communication in terms of shifting visual attention and leading to shorter reaction times on subsequent tasks. The present study simultaneously assessed both visual attention and, importantly, the immediate cognitive load induced at different stages of sentence processing. We aimed to examine the dynamics of combining visual and linguistic information in creating anticipation for a specific object and the effect this has on language processing. We report evidence from three visual-world eye-tracking experiments, showing that referential gaze leads to a shift in visual attention toward the cued object, which consequently lowers the effort required for processing the linguistic reference. Importantly, perceiving and following the gaze cue did not prove costly in terms of cognitive effort, unless the cued object did not fit the verb selectional preferences. |
Sara C. Sereno; Christopher J. Hand; Aisha Shahid; Bo Yao; Patrick J. O'Donnell Testing the limits of contextual constraint: Interactions with word frequency and parafoveal preview during fluent reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 302–313, 2018. @article{Sereno2018, Contextual constraint is a key factor affecting a word's fixation duration and its likelihood of being fixated during reading. Previous research has generally demonstrated additive effects of predictability and frequency in fixation times. Studies examining the role of parafoveal preview have shown that greater preview benefit is obtained from more predictable and higher frequency words versus less predictable and lower frequency words. In two experiments, we investigated effects of target word predictability, frequency, and parafoveal preview. A 3 (Predictability: low, medium, high) × 2 (Frequency: low, high) design was used with Preview (valid, invalid) manipulated between experiments. With valid previews, we found main effects of Predictability and Frequency in both fixation time and probability measures, including an interaction in early fixation measures. With invalid preview, we again found main effects of Predictability and Frequency in fixation times, but no evidence of an interaction. Fixation probability showed a weak Predictability effect and Predictability-Frequency interaction. Predictability interacted with Preview in early fixation time and probability measures. Our findings suggest that high levels of contextual constraint exert an early influence during lexical processing in reading. Results are discussed in terms of models of language processing and eye movement control. |
Wei Shen; Xingshan Li; Alexander Pollatsek The processing of Chinese compound words with ambiguous morphemes in sentence context Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 131–139, 2018. @article{Shen2018, We employed a boundary paradigm to investigate how Chinese two-character compounds (i.e., compound words) are processed during reading. The first character of the compound was an ambiguous morpheme that had a dominant and subordinate meaning. In Experiment 1, there were three previews of the second character: identical to the target character; the preview provided subordinate biasing information (the subordinate condition); the preview provided dominant biasing information (the dominant condition). An invisible boundary was inserted between the two characters. We found that gaze durations and go-past times on the compounds were longer in the subordinate condition than those in the dominant or identical conditions. In Experiment 2, the semantic similarity between target and preview words in the dominant condition was manipulated to determine whether the differences in fixation durations in Experiment 1 resulted from the semantic similarity between the preview and target words. There were significant fixation duration differences on the target word between the dominant and subordinate conditions only when the preview and target words were semantically related. This finding indicated that the whole-word meaning plays an important role in processing Chinese compounds and that the whole-word access route is the principal processing route in reading two-character compounds in Chinese. |
Wei Shen; Zhao Li; Xiuhong Tong Time course of the second morpheme processing during spoken disyllabic compound word recognition in Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 61, no. 11, pp. 2796–2803, 2018. @article{Shen2018b, Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the time course of meaning activation of the 2nd morpheme processing of compound words during Chinese spoken word recognition using eye tracking technique with the printed-word paradigm. Method: In the printed-word paradigm, participants were instructed to listen to a spoken target word (e.g., “大方”, /da4fang1/, generous) while presented with a visual display composed of 3 words: a morphemic competitor (e.g., “圆形”, /yuan2xing2/, circle), which was semantically related to the 2nd morpheme (e.g., “方”, /fang1/, square) of the spoken target word; a whole-word competitor (e.g., “吝啬”, /lin4se4/, stingy), which was semantically related to the spoken target word at the whole-word level; and a distractor, which was semantically related to neither the morpheme or the whole target word. Participants were asked to respond whether the spoken target word was on the visual display or not, and their eye movements were recorded. Results: The logit mixed-model analysis showed both the morphemic competitor and the whole-word competitor effects. Both the morphemic and whole-word competitors attracted more fixations than the distractor. More importantly, the 2nd-morphemic competitor effect occurred at a relatively later time window (i.e., 1000–1500 ms) compared with the whole-word competitor effect (i.e., 200–1000 ms). Conclusion: Findings in this study suggest that semantic information of both the 2nd morpheme and the whole word of a compound was activated in spoken word recognition and that the meaning activation of the 2nd morpheme followed the activation of the whole word. |
Wei Shen; Qingqing Qu; Xiuhong Tong Visual attention shift to printed words during spoken word recognition in Chinese: The role of phonological information Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 642–654, 2018. @article{Shen2018a, The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which phonological information mediates the visual attention shift to printed Chinese words in spoken word recognition by using an eye-movement technique with a printed-word paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are visually presented with four printed words on a computer screen, which include a target word, a phonological competitor, and two distractors. Participants are then required to select the target word using a computer mouse, and the eye movements are recorded. In Experiment 1, phonological information was manipulated at the full-phonological overlap; in Experiment 2, phonological information at the partial-phonological overlap was manipulated; and in Experiment 3, the phonological competitors were manipulated to share either fulloverlap or partial-overlap with targets directly. Results of the three experiments showed that the phonological competitor effects were observed at both the full-phonological overlap and partial-phonological overlap conditions. That is, phonological competitors attracted more fixations than distractors, which suggested that phonological information mediates the visual attention shift during spoken word recognition. More importantly, we found that the mediating role of phonological information varies as a function of the phonological similarity between target words and phonological competitors. |
Timothy J. Slattery; Mark Yates Word skipping: Effects of word length, predictability, spelling and reading skill Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 250–259, 2018. @article{Slattery2018, Readers eyes often skip over words as they read. Skipping rates are largely determined by word length; short words are skipped more than long words. However, the predictability of a word in context also impacts skipping rates. Rayner, Slattery, Drieghe and Liversedge (2011) reported an effect of predictability on word skipping for even long words (10-13 characters) that extend beyond the word identification span. Recent research suggests that better readers and spellers have an enhanced perceptual span (Veldre & Andrews, 2014). We explored whether reading and spelling skill interact with word length and predictability to impact word skipping rates in a large sample (N=92) of average and poor adult readers. Participants read the items from Rayner et al. (2011) while their eye movements were recorded. Spelling skill (zSpell) was assessed using the dictation and recognition tasks developed by Sally Andrews and colleagues. Reading skill (zRead) was assessed from reading speed (words per minute) and accuracy of three 120 word passages each with 10 comprehension questions. We fit linear mixed models to the target gaze duration data and generalized linear mixed models to the target word skipping data. Target word gaze durations were significantly predicted by zRead while, the skipping likelihoods were significantly predicted by zSpell. Additionally, for gaze durations, zRead significantly interacted with word predictability as better readers relied less on context to support word processing. These effects are discussed in relation to the lexical quality hypothesis and eye movement models of reading. |
Joshua Snell; Mathieu Declerck; Jonathan Grainger Parallel semantic processing in reading revisited: Effects of translation equivalents in bilingual readers Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 563–574, 2018. @article{Snell2018a, Previous research has failed to establish semantic parafoveal-on-foveal effects during reading. As an explanation, we theorise that sentence reading engages a sentence-level representation that prevents semantic parafoveal-foveal integration. Putting this account to the test, we examined parafoveal-foveal influences both in- and outside a sentence reading setting. Optimising chances of establishing parafoveal-on-foveal effects, we used translation-equivalent word pairs with French-English bilingual participants. Experiment 1 provided no evidence for semantic parafoveal-on-foveal integration during sentence reading, but some evidence that semantic information had been extracted in parallel from multiple words. Experiments 2 and 3 employed a flanker paradigm in which participants semantically categorised English foveal target words, while these were flanked by the French translation or an unrelated French word (stimulus on-time 170 ms). Performance was drastically better with translation flankers, suggesting that readers can integrate semantic information across multiple words when the task does not require a strict separation of higher-order information. |
Joshua Snell; Jonathan Grainger; Mathieu Declerck A word on words in words: How do embedded words affect reading? Journal Article In: Journal of Cognition, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2018. @article{Snell2018, A surprisingly small portion of reading research has been dedicated to investigating how the visual word recognition process is influenced by embedded words (e.g., ‘arm' in ‘charm'), and no research has yet investigated embedded words in a natural reading setting. Covering this issue, the present work reports analyses of eye-tracking data from the GECO bilingual book reading corpus. Word viewing times were analyzed as a function of the number, frequency and proportional length of embedded words. We anticipated two scenarios: embedded words would either facilitate processing due to increased word-letter feedback, or inhibit processing due to increased lexical competition. A main facilitatory effect of embedded words on the recognition process was established, with an increasing number of embedded words resulting in shorter word viewing times and fewer fixations. This pattern was depicted by readers of Dutch as well as readers of English. Long, high-frequency embedded words formed an exception however, as these led to inhibition (Dutch participants) or a null-effect (English participants). The present results indicate that both scenarios outlined above are at play, but with a theoretical con- straint on the role of word-to-word inhibitory connections. Specifically, such connections may predominantly exist among words of similar length. Hence, embedded words generally facilitate processing through word-letter feedback, but this facilitatory effect is countered by word-to- word inhibition if the embedded word's length approximates that of its superset. |
Joshua Snell; Sebastiaan Mathôt; Jonathan Mirault; Jonathan Grainger Parallel graded attention in reading: A pupillometric study Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 8, pp. 3743, 2018. @article{Snell2018b, There are roughly two lines of theory to account for recent evidence that word processing is influenced by adjacent orthographic information. One line assumes that multiple words can be processed simultaneously through a parallel graded distribution of visuo-spatial attention. The other line assumes that attention is strictly directed to single words, but that letter detectors are connected to both foveal and parafoveal feature detectors, as such driving parafoveal-foveal integrative effects. Putting these two accounts to the test, we build on recent research showing that the pupil responds to the brightness of covertly attended (i.e., without looking) locations in the visual field. Experiment 1 showed that foveal target word processing was facilitated by related parafoveal flanking words when these were positioned to the left and right of the target, but not when these were positioned above and below the target. Perfectly in line with this asymmetry, in Experiment 2 we found that the pupil size was contingent with the brightness of the locations of horizontally but not vertically aligned flankers, indicating that attentional resources were allocated to those words involved in the parafoveal-on-foveal effect. We conclude that orthographic parafoveal-on-foveal effects are driven by parallel graded attention. |
Nora Hollenstein; Jonathan Rotsztejn; Marius Troendle; Andreas Pedroni; Ce Zhang; Nicolas Langer Data descriptor: ZuCo, a simultaneous EEG and eye-tracking resource for natural sentence reading Journal Article In: Scientific Data, vol. 5, pp. 180291, 2018. @article{Hollenstein2018, We present the Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus (ZuCo), a dataset combining electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking recordings from subjects reading natural sentences. ZuCo includes high-density EEG and eye-tracking data of 12 healthy adult native English speakers, each reading natural English text for 4–6 hours. The recordings span two normal reading tasks and one task-specific reading task, resulting in a dataset that encompasses EEG and eye-tracking data of 21,629 words in 1107 sentences and 154,173 fixations. We believe that this dataset represents a valuable resource for natural language processing (NLP). The EEG and eye-tracking signals lend themselves to train improved machine- learning models for various tasks, in particular for information extraction tasks such as entity and relation extraction and sentiment analysis. Moreover, this dataset is useful for advancing research into the human reading and language understanding process at the level of brain activity and eye-movement. |
Hideyuki Hoshi; Winfried Menninghaus The eye tracks the aesthetic appeal of sentences Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 1–22, 2018. @article{Hoshi2018, Eye-tracking parameters (fixation and pupillary responses) have been shown to be modulated by the aesthetic perception and evaluation of visual and auditory artworks (e.g., paintings, music). The present study investigated whether similar effects can be found in visual text processing. Participants read four groups of short sentences in which a key predictor of aesthetic liking, i.e., familiarity, was systematically modified to four degrees. Across all four groups, the sentences moreover varied with regard to featuring or not featuring meter. During reading, pupil sizes and eye movements were recorded. Aesthetic ratings of all sentences were collected afterwards, and the relationships between the ratings, levels of familiarity, meter, and eye-tracking datasets were tested. The results showed that the rating scores were interactively modulated by both familiarity-driven and meter-driven fluency. Using factor analysis, we extracted two key factors of the aesthetic appeal of the texts: an affective and a cognitive factor. The cognitive factor comprised the rating items “succinctness” and “familiarity,” whereas the affective factor reflected the ratings for “beauty” and “liking.” A higher cognitive factor predicted shorter dwelling time. Moreover, the two factors modulated the pupillary data antagonistically: A higher affective factor predicted larger pupil dilations, whereas a higher cognitive factor predicted smaller pupil dilations. The study shows a possible application of the eye-tracking method for capturing aesthetically evaluative dimensions of processing sentences. |
Yi-ting Hsiao; Richard C. Shillcock; Mateo Obregón; Hamutal Kreiner; Matthew A. J. Roberts; Scott A. McDonald In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 324–332, 2018. @article{Hsiao2018, We explore two aspects of exovergence: we test whether smaller binocular fixation disparities accompany the shorter saccades and longer fixations observed in reading Chinese, and we test whether potentially advantageous psychophysical effects of exovergence transfer to text reading. We report differential exovergence in reading Chinese and English: Chinese readers begin fixations with more binocular disparity, but end fixations with a disparity closely similar to that of the English readers. We conclude that greater fixation-initial binocular disparity can be adaptive in the reading of visually and cognitively denser text. |
Yi Ting Huang Real-time coordination of visual and linguistic processes in novice readers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 173, pp. 388–396, 2018. @article{Huang2018a, Skilled reading requires coordinating real-time visual fixations, orthographic analyses, and phonological encoding across multiple words in sentences. These procedures are well studied in experienced readers, but less is known about their status during development. To investigate how visual properties influence the origins of coordinated processing, the current study combined rapid automatized naming (RAN) with an eye-tracking paradigm and compared the timing of fixations and vocalizations in typically developing adults and 6-year-old children. Within RAN displays, sequences varied visual features of items (i.e., similar such as p–q vs. dissimilar such as p–t) and their locations in rows (i.e., row-initial vs. row-medial positions). Adults and children accessed parafoveal preview of subsequent items when fixating on current items, leading to longer latency to speak for similar items compared with dissimilar ones. Both groups also vocalized previous items while fixating on current items, leading to longer eye–voice overlap for row-medial items compared with row-initial ones. Yet, relative to adults, children exhibited exaggerated delays in latency to speak from parafoveal preview and reduced eye–voice overlap due to row transitions. Together, this suggests that coordinated processing is present at the earliest points of development but that greater inexperience increases susceptibility to momentary visual hurdles. Relationships to previous work on real-time RAN performance in dyslexic adults and children are discussed. |
Jukka Hyönä; Ming Yan; Seppo Vainio Morphological structure influences the initial landing position in words during reading Finnish Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 122–130, 2018. @article{Hyoenae2018, The preferred viewing location in words [Rayner, K. (1979). Eye guidance in reading: Fixation locations within words. Perception, 8, 21–30] during reading is near the word centre. Parafoveal word length information is utilized to guide the eyes toward it. A recent study by Yan and colleagues [Yan, M., Zhou, W., Shu, H., Yusupu, R., Miao, D., Krügel, A., & Kliegl, R. (2014). Eye movements guided by morphological structure: Evidence from the Uighur language. Cognition, 132, 181–215] demonstrated that the word's morphological structure may also be used in saccadic targeting. The study was conducted in a morphologically rich language, Uighur. The present study aimed at replicating their main findings in another morphologically rich language, Finnish. Similarly to Yan et al., it was found that the initial fixation landed closer to the word beginning for morphologically complex than for monomorphemic words. Word frequency, saccade launch site, and word length were also found to influence the initial landing position. It is concluded that in addition to low-level factors (word length and saccade launch site), also higher level factors related to the word's morphological structure and frequency may be utilized in saccade programming during reading. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Julie Gregg; Ralph Radach Eye movement programming and reading accuracy Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 3–10, 2018. @article{Inhoff2018, Eye movements were measured during the silent reading of sentences to extract several oculomotor measures. Rather than examining each measure independently, oculomotor responses were grouped into two types, the assumption being that the grouping would project onto underlying constructs. Properties of forward-directed movements were assumed to reflect the success with which linguistic information was acquired (Acquisition) and corrective responses were assumed to reveal readers' responding to difficulties (Correction). These two types of oculomotor responses were linked to indexes of reading accuracy (Accuracy) which were obtained from separate materials so that eye movements with one set of materials could be used to predict reading accuracy for another set of materials. Path analyses indicated that Correction, but not Acquisition, was linked to Accuracy. The additional clustering of Acquisition, Correction, and Accuracy scores identified a group of readers with relatively low Accuracy scores. These readers were typical in their acquisition of linguistic information but under-used corrective responding. |
Aine Ito; Martin Corley; Martin J. Pickering A cognitive load delays predictive eye movements similarly during L1 and L2 comprehension Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 251–264, 2018. @article{Ito2018, We used the visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate the effects of cognitive load on predictive eye movements in L1 (Experiment 1) and L2 (Experiment 2) speakers. Participants listened to sentences whose verb was predictive or non-predictive towards one of four objects they were viewing. They then clicked on a mentioned object. Half the participants additionally performed a working memory task of remembering words. Both L1 and L2 speakers looked more at the target object predictively in predictable- than in non-predictable sentences when they performed the listen-and-click task only. However, this predictability effect was delayed in those who performed the concurrent memory task. This pattern of results was similar in L1 and L2 speakers. L1 and L2 speakers make predictions, but cognitive resources are required for making predictive eye movements. The findings are compatible with the claim that L2 speakers use the same mechanisms as L1 speakers to make predictions. |
Aine Ito; Martin J. Pickering; Martin Corley Investigating the time-course of phonological prediction in native and non-native speakers of English: A visual world eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 98, pp. 1–11, 2018. @article{Ito2018a, We report a study using the “visual-world” paradigm that investigated (1) the time-course of phonological prediction in English by native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers whose native language was Japanese, and (2) whether the Japanese participants predicted phonological form in Japanese. Participants heard sentences which contained a highly predictable word (e.g., cloud, following The tourists expected rain when the sun went behind the …), and viewed an array of objects containing a target object which corresponded to the predictable word [cloud; Japanese: kumo], an English competitor object whose English name was phonologically related to the predictable word [clown; piero], a Japanese competitor object whose Japanese name was phonologically related to the Japanese translation of the predictable word [bear; kuma], or an object that was unrelated to the predictable word [globe; tikyuugi]. Both L1 and L2 speakers looked predictively at the target object, but L2 speakers were slower than L1 speakers. L1 speakers looked predictively at the English competitor object, but L2 speakers did not do so predictively. Neither group looked at the Japanese competitor object more than the unrelated object. Thus, people can predict phonological information in their native language but may not do so in non-native languages. |
Pingping Liu; Qin Lu The effects of spaces on word segmentation in Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 329–349, 2018. @article{Liu2018a, This paper studies the mechanisms behind the differential effects of inserting a space either before or after a two-character unit on information processing through the examination of eye movements in Chinese, a language where there is no word delimiters. A two-character unit in this study is either a word-preserving stimulus or a word-disrupting stimulus (i.e., nonword). The study aims for a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms for lexical processing that may underlie observed facilitory or inhibitory effects of the spacing conditions in sentence context. Results show that inserting a space after a word facilitates lexical processing, but inserting a space before a word does not. Inserting a space before and after a nonword, however, does not show these effects. These results indicate that the effects of spaces before and after words are mainly influenced by word segmentation mechanisms rather than landing position effects or other factors. |
Weilin Liu; Bernhard Angele; Chunming Luo; Xingshan Li Beyond the leftward limit of the perceptual span: Parafoveal processing to the left of fixation in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 80, no. 8, pp. 1873–1878, 2018. @article{Liu2018b, During reading, Chinese readers have been found to obtain useful visual information from one character to the left to three characters to the right offixation. The perceptual span is asymmetrical, and its leftward extent seems to be limited compared with the rightward extent. We conducted an experiment to investigate whether Chinese readers could process written information beyond the leftward extent ofthe perceptual span.We did this by using a variation ofthe gaze-contingent display change paradigm (Rayner, Cognitive Psychology, 81,65–81, 1975) in order to manipulate the parafoveal “postview” that was available to the left of where readers were fixating. Each sentence contained an invisible boundary. Once the readers' eyes crossed the boundary, all of the characters to the left ofthe boundary except for one, two, or three characters directly to the left ofthe boundary were replaced with visually similar characters. The change lasted for only one single fixation, resulting in four different “postview” conditions including a control condition (n − 1, n − 2, n − 3, control). The results showed that, compared with the control condition, there were more regressions to the display change area immediately after readers' eyes crossed the boundary in the n − 1, n − 2, and n − 3 conditions, demonstrating that readers can acquire information from the three characters to the left of fixation at least. |
Yanping Liu; Siyuan Guo; Lei Yu; Erik D. Reichle Word predictability affects saccade length in Chinese reading: An evaluation of the dynamic-adjustment model Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1891–1899, 2018. @article{Liu2018, How does a word's within-sentence predictability influence saccade length during reading? An eye-movement experiment manipulating the predictability of target words in- dicates that, relative to low-predictability target words, high- predictability targets elicit longer saccades to themselves. Simulations using computational models that respectively in- stantiate the targeting of saccades to default locations (Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu in Journal ofExperimental Psychology, 63,705–725, 2010) versus the dynamic adjust- ment of saccade length (Liu, Reichle, & Li in Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition, 41, 1229–1236, 2015, Journal ofExperimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 1008–1025, 2016) indicate that the latter model provides a more accurate and parsimonious account of saccade-targeting behavior in Chinese reading. The implications of these conclusions are discussed with respect to current models ofeye-movement control during reading and the necessity to explain eye movements in languages as different as Chinese versus English. |
Yanping Liu; Erik D. Reichle Using eye movements to understand the leakage of information during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 2323–2329, 2018. @article{Liu2018e, How is attention allocated during reading? The present eye-movement experiment used a paradigm developed by Liu and Reichle (Psychological Science, 29, 278–287, 2018) to examine object-based attention during reading: Participants were instructed to read one oftwo spatially overlapping sentences containing colocated target/distractor words of varying frequency. Although target-word frequency modulated fixation-duration measures on the target word, the distractor-word frequency also had a smaller, independent effect. Survival analyses indicate that the distractor-word effect occurred later than the target-word effect, suggesting that subtle orthographic cues were noticed either later or occasionally, thereby modulating decisions about when to move the eyes. The theoretical ramifications of this "leakage" of information are discussed with respect to the general question of attention allocation during reading and possible differences between the reading of Chinese versus English. |
Yanping Liu; Erik D. Reichle Eye-movement evidence for object-based attention in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 278–287, 2018. @article{Liu2018f, Is attention allocated to only one word or to multiple words at any given time during reading? The experiments reported here addressed this question using a novel paradigm inspired by classic findings on object-based attention. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 18) made lexical decisions about one of two spatially colocated Chinese words or nonwords. Our main finding was that only the attended word's frequency influenced response times and accuracy. In Experiment 2, participants (N = 30) read target words embedded in two spatially colocated Chinese sentences. Our key finding here was that only target-word frequencies influenced looking times and fixation positions. These results support the hypothesis that words are attended in a strictly serial (and perhaps object-based) manner during reading. The theoretical implications of this conclusion are discussed in relation to models of eye-movement control during reading and the conceptualization of words as visual objects. |
Otto Loberg; Jarkko Hautala; Jarmo A. Hämäläinen; Paavo H. T. Leppänen Semantic anomaly detection in school-aged children during natural sentence reading - A study of fixation-related brain potentials Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 12, pp. e0209741, 2018. @article{Loberg2018, In this study, we investigated the effects of context-related semantic anomalies on the fixation-related brain potentials of 12–13-year-old Finnish children in grade 6 during sentence reading. The detection of such anomalies is typically reflected in the N400 event-related potential. We also examined whether the representation invoked by the sentence context extends to the orthographic representation level by replacing the final words of the sentence with an anomalous word neighbour of a plausible word. The eye-movement results show that the anomalous word neighbours of plausible words cause similar first-fixation and gaze duration reactions, as do other anomalous words. Similarly, we observed frontal negativity in the fixation-related potential of the unrelated anomalous words and in the anomalous word neighbours. This frontal negativity was larger in both anomalous conditions than in the response elicited by the plausible condition. We thus show that the brain successfully uses context to separate anomalous words from plausible words on a single letter level during free reading. From the P600 response of the scalp waveform, we observed that the P600 was delayed in the anomalous word neighbour condition. We performed group-level decomposition on the data with ICA (independent component analysis) and analysed the time course and source structure of the decomposed data. This analysis of decomposed brain signals not only confirmed the delay of the P600 response but also revealed that the frontal negativity concealed s more typical and separate N400 response, which was similarly delayed in the anomalous word neighbour condition, as was the P600 response. Source analysis of these independent components implicated the right frontal eye field as the cortical source for the frontal negativity and the middle temporal and parietal regions as cortical sources for the components resembling the N400 and P600 responses. We interpret the delays present in N400 and P600 responses to anomalous word neighbours to reflect competition with the representation of the plausible word just one letter different. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Fernanda Ferreira I see what you meant to say: Anticipating speech errors during online sentence processing Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, pp. 1–11, 2018. @article{Lowder2018, Everyday speech is rife with errors and disfluencies, yet processing what we hear usually feels effortless. How does the language comprehension system accomplish such an impressive feat? The current experiment tests the hypothesis that listeners draw on relevant contextual and linguistic cues to anticipate speech errors and mentally correct them, even before receiving an explicit correction from the speaker. In the current visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we monitored participants' eye movements to objects in a display while they listened to utterances containing reparandum-repair speech errors (e.g.,... his cat, uh I mean his dog . . .). The contextual plausibility of the misspoken word and the certainty with which the speaker uttered this word were systematically manipulated. Results showed that listeners immediately exploited these cues to generate top-down expectations regarding the speaker's communi- cative intention. Crucially, listeners used these expectations to constrain the bottom-up speech input and mentally correct perceived speech errors, even before the speaker initiated the correction. The results provide powerful evidence regarding the joint process of correcting speech errors that involves both the speaker and the listener. |
Steven G. Luke Influences on and consequences of parafoveal preview in reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 80, no. 7, pp. 1675–1682, 2018. @article{Luke2018a, During reading, information is extracted from upcoming words to the right of the currently fixated word, which facilitates recognition of those words when they are later fixated. According to the foveal load hypothesis (Henderson & Ferreira, 1990), this parafoveal preview benefit depends on how difficult the currently fixated word is to recognize. Furthermore, there is evidence that the influence of lexical variables (frequency and predictability) on word processing changes when no preview of that word is available. The present study reports two moving-window experiments in which the upcoming word to the right of fixation was either included in or excluded from the window. Through this manipulation, accurate parafoveal information was either available or not for each word in the paragraph. Two critical interactions between preview condition and lexical variables were observed. First, the word frequency at word N was found to be the primary influence on the amount of preview benefit obtained at word N+ 1, consistent with the foveal load hypothesis. Second, denial of preview eliminated the word predictability effect. These findings have implications for models of eye movement control in reading. |
Steven G. Luke; Anna Asplund Prereaders' eye movements during shared storybook reading are language-mediated but not predictive Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 351–365, 2018. @article{Luke2018c, When viewing a visual scene, eye movements are often language-mediated: people look at objects as those objects are named. Eye movements can even reflect predictive language processing, moving to an object before it is named. Children are also capable of making language-mediated eye movements, even predictive ones, and prediction may be involved in language learning. The present study explored whether eye movements are language-mediated in a more naturalistic task – shared storybook reading. Research has shown that children fixate illustrations during shared storybook reading, ignoring text. The present study used high-precision eye-tracking to replicate this finding. Further, prereader participants showed increased likelihood of fixating relevant storybook illustrations as words were read aloud, indicating that their eye movements were language mediated like the adult participants. Language-mediated eye movements to illustrations were reactive, not predictive, in both participant groups. |
Steven G. Luke; Kiel Christianson The Provo Corpus: A large eye-tracking corpus with predictability norms Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 826–833, 2018. @article{Luke2018, This article presents the Provo Corpus, a corpus of eye-tracking data with accompanying predictability norms. The predictability norms for the Provo Corpus differ from those of other corpora. In addition to traditional cloze scores that estimate the predictability of the full orthographic form of each word, the Provo Corpus also includes measures of the predictability of the morpho-syntactic and semantic information for each word. This makes the Provo Corpus ideal for studying predictive processes in reading. Some analyses using these data have previously been reported elsewhere (Luke & Christianson, 2016). The Provo Corpus is available for download on the Open Science Framework, at https://osf.io/sjefs. |
Jiefei Luo; Yan Wu; Runkai Jiao Parafoveal processing in Chinese sentence reading: Early extraction of radical level phonology Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 1605, 2018. @article{Luo2018, The present study separated radical level phonology from character level phonology to explore the reliance on phonology during Chinese sentence reading with eye movement recording in a boundary paradigm. Participants viewed sentences with either regular, irregular, orthographically dissimilar homophone, or orthographically dissimilar non- homophone previews for the targets. Both regular and irregular characters contained the target character as the phonetic radical, with the regular character sharing the identical sound with its target phonetic radical. In Experiment 1, the irregular previews were different from the target phonetic radicals both in the first consonant and final compound vowels. In Experiment 2, the irregular characters would be replaced by the semi-regular previews, which shared the same final compound vowels but not the first consonant with the target characters. The radical level phonological preview benefit was obtained by the comparison between regular and irregular characters, while the character level phonological preview benefit was shown by the visually dissimilar homophones compared with the unrelated control condition. The preview benefit from parafoveal regular characters compared with irregular characters was observed in the first fixation duration, suggesting the early activation of phonological codes at radical levels. However, this preview benefit depends on phonological overlapping between the phonetic radicals and their host characters; it could be activated only when the pronunciation of the phonogram was totally consistent with that of its phonetic radical. Furthermore, the null preview effect of visually dissimilar homophones indicates no activation of phonological codes at the character level during Chinese sentence reading. |
Guojie Ma; Xiangling Zhuang Distributional analyses of word frequency effects in Chinese sentence reading and lexical decision tasks Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 41, pp. S183–S196, 2018. @article{Ma2018, Previous studies used the ex-Gaussian fitting technique to examine the distribution of word frequency effects in English sentence reading and lexical decision tasks. It was found that word frequency influences reaction times and eye fixation durations by both shifting the distribution to the right and increasing the skew for the low- frequency target words. We used the same method to examine the distributional effects of word frequency through a Chinese sentence reading task in Experiment 1 and a lexical decision task in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 showed that word frequency only significantly influenced rightward skew for first fixation duration, while Experi- ment 2 showed that word frequency influenced reaction times by both shifting the distribution to the right and increasing the skew. Our data reveal both similarities and differences between Chinese and English word recognition on the distributional level, which has certain theoretical implications for modelling Chinese reading. |
Johanna Maier; Tobias Richter; M. Anne Britt Cognitive processes underlying the text-belief consistency effect: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 171–185, 2018. @article{Maier2018, Readers' memory for belief‐consistent texts is often stronger than for belief‐inconsistent texts (text‐belief consistency effect). However, presenting belief‐consistent and belief‐inconsistent texts alternatingly reduces the discrepancy between the memory strengths of belief‐consistent and belief‐inconsistent texts. The present study used eye tracking to examine the cognitive processes underlying the text‐belief consistency effect and how it is moderated by the mode of presentation. At 2 points of measurement, 41 university students read 2 belief‐consistent and 2 belief‐inconsistent texts on 2 scientific issues blocked or alternatingly. Comprehension outcomes were assessed with an essay task. First‐pass rereading times were longer for belief‐inconsistent information for participants with strong beliefs. A blocked presentation increased this effect and yielded longer first‐pass rereading times for belief‐inconsistent claims and a text‐belief consistency effect in the essay task. An alternating presentation increased immediate and delayed processing of belief‐inconsistent information and reduced the text‐belief consistency effect, especially in readers making more lookbacks. |
Ana Marcet; Manuel Perea Visual letter similarity effects during sentence reading: Evidence from the boundary technique Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 190, pp. 142–149, 2018. @article{Marcet2018, The study of how the cognitive system encodes letter identities from the visual input has received much attention in models of visual word recognition but it has typically been overlooked in models of eye movement control in reading. Here we examined how visual letter similarity affects early word processing during reading using Rayner's (1975) boundary change technique in which the parafoveal preview of the target word was either identical (e.g., frito-frito [fried]) or a one-letter-different nonword (e.g., frjto-frito vs. frgto-frito). Critically, the substituted letter in the nonword was visually similar (based on letter confusability norms) or visually dissimilar. Results showed shorter viewing times on the target word when the parafoveal preview was visually similar than when it was visually dissimilar. Thus, visual letter similarity modulates the integration of parafoveal and foveal information during sentence reading. Future implementations of models of eye movement control in reading should incorporate a more developed orthographic-lexical module to capture these effects. |
María Teresa Martínez García Language bias and proficiency effects on cross-language activation Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, vol. 6, pp. 873–901, 2018. @article{MartinezGarcia2018, Recent research proposes that language bias and proficiency modulate cross-language activation in comprehension and production, but it is unclear how they operate and whether they interact. This study investigates whether stress differences between Spanish-English cognates ( material , final-syllable stress in Spanish) affect how native-English second-language-Spanish bilinguals recognize Spanish words ( materia “subject/matter,” second-syllable stress in Spanish). In a Spanish-English eye-tracking experiment (and parallel production task), participants heard/produced trisyllabic Spanish targets with second-syllable stress ( materia ) and saw four orthographic words, including the target and a Spanish-English cognate competitor. Cross-language activation was examined by manipulating the stress of the cognate in English. In comprehension, English cognates with the same stress as the Spanish target ( materia vs material ) were predicted to cause more cross-language interference than English cognates with a different stress ( litera “bunk bed,” vs literal ), but the reverse pattern was expected in production. Participants were assigned to a Spanish-bias condition (20% of English (filler) items), or an English-bias condition (65% of English (filler) items). Results indicate that English cognates with the same stress as the Spanish target interfered with the recognition of the Spanish target only in the English-bias condition (but facilitated its production), while increasing Spanish proficiency helped reduce this cross-linguistic interference. |
Daniel R. McCloy; Eric D. Larson; Adrian K. C. Lee Auditory attention switching with listening difficulty: Behavioral and pupillometric measures Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 144, no. 5, pp. 2764–2771, 2018. @article{McCloy2018, Pupillometry has emerged as a useful tool for studying listening effort. Past work involving listeners with normal audiological thresholds has shown that switching attention between competing talker streams evokes pupil dilation indicative of listening effort [McCloy, Lau, Larson, Pratt, and Lee (2017). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 141(4), 2440–2451]. The current experiment examines behavioral and pupillometric data from a two-stream target detection task requiring attention-switching between auditory streams, in two participant groups: audiometrically normal listeners who self-report difficulty localizing sound sources and/or understanding speech in reverberant or acoustically crowded environments, and their age-matched controls who do not report such problems. Three experimental conditions varied the number and type of stream segregation cues available. Participants who reported listening difficulty showed both behavioral and pupillometric signs of increased effort compared to controls, especially in trials where only a single stream segregation cue was available |
Helene Kreysa; Eva M. Nunnemann; Pia Knoeferle Distinct effects of different visual cues on sentence comprehension and later recall: The case of speaker gaze versus depicted actions Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 188, pp. 220–229, 2018. @article{Kreysa2018, Language-processing accounts are beginning to accommodate different visual context effects, but they remain underspecified regarding differences between cues, both during sentence comprehension and subsequent recall. We monitored participants' eye movements to mentioned characters while they listened to transitive sentences. We varied whether speaker gaze, a depicted action, neither, or both of these visual cues were available, as well as whether both cues were deictic (Experiment 1) or only speaker gaze (Experiment 2). Speaker gaze affected eye movements during comprehension similarly early to a single deictic action depiction, but significantly earlier than non-deictic action depictions; conversely, depicted actions but not speaker gaze positively affected later recall of sentence content. Thus, cue type and cue-language relations must be accommodated in characterising real-time situated language comprehension and subsequent recall of sentence content. |
Breanna I. Krueger; Holly L. Storkel; Utako Minai The influence of misarticulations on children's word identification and processing Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 820–836, 2018. @article{Krueger2018, Purpose: The purpose of the present studies was to determine how children's identification and processing of misarticulated words was influenced by substitution commonness. Method: Sixty-one typically developing preschoolers across 3 experiments heard accurate productions of words (e.g., “leaf”), words containing common substitutions (e.g., “weaf”), and words containing uncommon substitutions (e.g., “yeaf”). On each trial, preschoolers chose between a real object picture (e.g., a leaf) and a nonobject (e.g., an anomalous line drawing). Accuracy and processing were measured using MouseTracker and eye tracking. Results: Overall, children chose real objects significantly more when presented with accurate productions (e.g., “leaf”) than misarticulated productions (e.g., “weaf” or “yeaf”). Within misarticulation conditions, children chose real objects significantly more when hearing common misarticulations (e.g., “weaf”) than uncommon misarticulations (e.g., “yeaf”). Preschoolers identified words significantly faster and with greater certainty in accurate conditions than misarticulated conditions. Conclusions: The results of the present studies indicate that the commonness of substitutions influences children's identification of misarticulated words. Children hear common substitutions more frequently and therefore were supported in their identification of these words as real objects. The presence of substitutions, however, slowed reaction time when compared with accurate productions. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5965510 |
Victor Kuperman; Kazunaga Matsuki; Julie A. Van Dyke Contributions of reader- and text-level characteristics to eye-movement patterns during passage reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 44, no. 11, pp. 1687–1713, 2018. @article{Kuperman2018, The present research presents a novel method for investigating how characteristics of texts (words, sentences, and passages) and individuals (verbal and general cognitive skills) jointly influence eye- movement patterns over the time-course of reading, as well as comprehension accuracy. Fifty-one proficient readers read passages of varying complexity from the Gray Oral Reading Test, while their eye-movements were recorded. Participants also completed a large battery of tests assessing various components of reading comprehension ability (vocabulary size, decoding, phonological awareness, and experience with print), as well as general cognitive and executive skills. We used the Random Forests nonparametric regression technique to simultaneously estimate relative importance of all predictors. This method enabled us to trace the temporal engagement of individual predictors and entire predictor groups on eye-movements during reading, while avoiding the problems of model overfitting and collinearity, typical of parametric regression methods. Our findings both confirmed well-established results of prior research and pointed to a space of hypotheses that is as yet unexplored. |
Elke B. Lange; A. Pieczykolan; Hans A. Trukenbrod; Lynn Huestegge The rhythm of cognition – Effects of an auditory beat on oculomotor control in reading and sequential scanning Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 1–17, 2018. @article{Lange2018, Eye-movement behavior is inherently rhythmic. Even without cognitive input, the eyes never rest, as saccades are generated 3 to 4 times per second. Based on an embodied view of cognition, we asked whether mental processing in visual cognitive tasks is also rhythmic in nature by studying the effects of an external auditory beat (rhythmic background music) on saccade generation in exemplary cognitive tasks (reading and sequential scanning). While in applied settings background music has been demonstrated to impair reading comprehension, the effect of musical tempo on eye-movement control during reading or scanning has not been investigated so far. We implemented a tempo manipulation in four steps as well as a silent baseline condition, while participants completed a text reading or a sequential scanning task that differed from each other in terms of underlying cognitive processing requirements. The results revealed that increased tempo of the musical beat sped up fixations in text reading, while the presence (vs. absence) of the auditory stimulus generally reduced overall reading time. In contrast, sequential scanning was unaffected by the auditory pacemaker. These results were supported by additionally applying Bayesian inference statistics. Our study provides evidence against a cognitive load account (i.e., that spare resources during low-demand sequential scanning allow for enhanced processing of the external beat). Instead, the data suggest an interpretation in favor of a modulation of the oculomotor saccade timer by irrelevant background music in cases involving highly au- tomatized oculomotor control routines (here: in text reading). |
Tak Hyung Lee; Taekwan Kim; Yoo Bin Kwak; Wu Jeong Hwang; Minah Kim; Jung-Seok Choi; Jun Soo Kwon Altered eye-movement patterns during text reading in obsessive–compulsive disorder and internet gaming disorder Journal Article In: Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 12, pp. 248, 2018. @article{Lee2018a, Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and internet gaming disorder (IGD), which are similar in that both involve repetitive behaviors and related with cognitive dysfunctions, frequently begin in early adolescence, which is a critical period for learning. Although the deterioration in cognitive functioning caused by these conditions may have adverse effects on information processing, such as text reading, there has been no comprehensive research on the objective indicators of altered reading patterns in these patients. Therefore, we evaluated eye-movement patterns during text reading in patients with OCD or IGD. In total, 20 patients with OCD, 28 patients with IGD, and 24 healthy controls (HCs) participated in the reading task using an eye tracker. We compared the fixation durations, saccade amplitudes, and eye-movement regressions of the three groups during reading. We explored relationships between the parameters reflecting altered reading patterns and those reflecting the severity of clinical symptoms. The average fixation durations and forward saccade amplitudes did not differ significantly among the groups. There were more eye-movement regressions in patients with OCD than in patients with IGD and HCs. No correlation was found between altered eye-movement patterns during reading and the severity of clinical symptoms in any of the patient groups. The significantly increased number of regressions in the OCD group during reading may reflect these patients' difficulties with inferential information processing, whereas the reading pattern in the IGD group is relatively intact. These findings suggest that patients with OCD and patients with IGD have different eye-movement patterns during reading reflecting distinct cognitive impairments in the two patient groups. |
Wei-Kuang Lee; Chao-Jung Wu Eye movements in integrating geometric text and figure: Scanpaths and given-new effects Journal Article In: International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 699–714, 2018. @article{Lee2018, This study explored the processes in which adult readers integrate text-figure information when reading geometric descriptions. Because geometry conveys rich spatial information, we investigated the reading scanpaths as text- or figure-directed and the given-new effects. Eye movement data from 65 college student participants showed that approximately 1% inspected the figure-first, while the other displayed the text-first which included 86% displayed the text-directed. Although the descriptions that violated the given-new ordering did not affect the accuracy of the test, they did increase reaction time, figure-fixation duration, and the number of saccades from text to figure. The transition paths showed that the participants shifted their fixations to the figure to refer to corresponding elements when they encountered new geometric elements in the text. The descriptions that violated the given-new ordering influenced the reading processes and efficiency. These findings indicate that although the readers spent 40% fixation duration on figure, their reading pattern was text-directed, and the word ordering of description affects integration of geometric text and figure. |
Kristin Lemhöfer; Lynn Huestegge; Kimberley Mulder Another cup of TEE? The processing of second language near-cognates in first language reading Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 8, pp. 968–991, 2018. @article{Lemhoefer2018, A still unresolved issue is in how far native language (L1) processing in bilinguals is influenced by the second language (L2). We investigated this in two word recognition experiments in L1, using homophonic near-cognates that are spelled in L2. In a German lexical decision task (Experiment 1), German-Dutch bilinguals had more difficulties to reject these Dutch-spelled near-cognates than other misspellings, while this was not the case for non-Dutch speaking Germans. In Experiment 2, the same materials were embedded in German sentences. Analyses of eye movements during reading showed that only non-Dutch speaking Germans, but not Dutch-speaking participants were slowed down by the Dutch cognate misspellings. Additionally, in both experiments, bilinguals with larger vocabulary sizes in Dutch tended to show larger near-cognate effects. Thus, Dutch word knowledge influenced word recognition in L1 German in both task contexts, suggesting that L1 word recognition in bilinguals is non-selective with respect to L2. |
Rui Li; Zhiyi Zhang; Chuanbin Ni; Wei Xiao; Junyan Wei; Haoyun Dai Examining the functional category in Chinese–English code-switching: Evidence from the eye-movements Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 1–29, 2018. @article{Li2018, To investigate the grammatical constraints of code-switching (CS hereafter) under the disputes of "the constraint-based account" versus "the constraint-free account," the effects of functional category on CS have long been investigated in the existing studies. Thus, the present study, by asking 47 participants to take part in an eye-movement experiment, examined the potential effects of functional category on Chinese-English CS. We found that differential switch costs at varying code-switched conditions as well as robust switch effects that last from the early to the late stage. The findings could tentatively give rise to the theoretical predictions of "the minimalist program," a representative of "the constraint-free account" rather than "the functional head constraint," a typical representative of "the constraint-based account." Moreover, such switch effects might initiate from the early to the very late stage in terms of "time-course of CS processing." |
Sha Li; Lin Li; Jingxin Wang; Victoria A. McGowan; Kevin B. Paterson Effects of word length on eye guidance differ for young and older Chinese Readers Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 685–692, 2018. @article{Li2018b, Effects of word length on where and for how long readers fixate within text are preserved in older age for alphabetic languages like English that use spaces to demarcate word boundaries. However, word length effects for older readers of naturally unspaced, character-based languages like Chinese are unknown. Accordingly, we examined age differences in eye movements for short (2-character) and long (4-character) words during Chinese reading. Word length effects on eye-fixation times were greater for older than younger adults. We suggest this age difference is due to older adults' saccades landing more rarely at optimal intraword locations, especially in longer words. |
Amy M. Lieberman; Arielle Borovsky; Rachel I. Mayberry Prediction in a visual language: Real-time sentence processing in American Sign Language across development Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 387–401, 2018. @article{Lieberman2018, Prediction during sign language comprehension may enable signers to integrate linguistic and non-linguistic information within the visual modality. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated American Sign language (ASL) semantic prediction in deaf adults and children (aged 4–8 years). Participants viewed ASL sentences in a visual world paradigm in which the sentence-initial verb was either neutral or constrained relative to the sentence-final target noun. Adults and children made anticipatory looks to the target picture before the onset of the target noun in the constrained condition only, showing evidence for semantic prediction. Crucially, signers alternated gaze between the stimulus sign and the target picture only when the sentential object could be predicted from the verb. Signers therefore engage in prediction by optimising visual attention between divided linguistic and referential signals. These patterns suggest that prediction is a modality-independent process, and theoretical implications are discussed. |
Dan Lin; Guangyao Chen; Yingyi Liu; Jiaxin Liu; Jue Pan; Lei Mo Tracking the eye movement of four years old children learning Chinese words Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 79–93, 2018. @article{Lin2018, Storybook reading is the major source of literacy exposure for beginning readers. The present study tracked 4-year-old Chinese children's eye movements while they were reading simulated storybook pages. Their eye-movement patterns were examined in relation to their word learning gains. The same reading list, consisting of 20 two-character Chinese words, was used in the pretest, 5-min eye-tracking learning session, and posttest. Additionally, visual spatial skill and phonological awareness were assessed in the pretest as cognitive controls. The results showed that the children's attention was attracted quickly by pictures, on which their attention was focused most, with only 13% of the time looking at words. Moreover, significant learning gains in word reading were observed, from the pretest to posttest, from 5-min exposure to simulated storybook pages with words, picture and pronunciation of two-character words present. Furthermore, the children's attention to words significantly predicted posttest reading beyond socioeconomic status, age, visual spatial skill, phonological awareness and pretest reading performance. This eye-movement evidence of storybook reading by children as young as four years, reading a non-alphabetic script (i.e., Chinese), has demonstrated exciting findings that children can learn words effectively with minimal exposure and little instruction; these findings suggest that learning to read requires attention to the basic words itself. The study contributes to our understanding of early reading acquisition with eye-movement evidence from beginning readers. |
Nan Lin; Bernhard Angele; Huimin Hua; Wei Shen; Junyi Zhou; Xingshan Li Skipping of Chinese characters does not rely on word-based processing Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 80, no. 2, pp. 600–607, 2018. @article{Lin2018a, Previous eye-movement studies have indicated that people tend to skip extremely high-frequency words in sentence reading, such as "the" in English and "的/de" in Chinese. Two alternative hypotheses have been proposed to explain how this frequent skipping happens in Chinese reading: one assumes that skipping happens when the preview has been fully identified at the word level (word-based skipping); the other assumes that skipping happens whenever the preview character is easy to identify regardless ofwhether lexical processing has been completed or not (character-based skipping). Using the gaze-contingent display change paradigm, we examined the two hypotheses by substituting the preview of the third character of a four-character Chinese word with the high-frequency Chinese character B的/de^, which should disrupt the ongoing word-level processing. The character- based skipping hypothesis predicts that this manipulation will enhance the skipping probability of the target character (i.e., the third character of the target word), because the character "/de" has much higher character frequency than the original character. The word-based skipping hypothesis instead predicts a reduction ofthe skipping probability ofthe target char- acter because the presence ofthe character "的/de" is lexically infelicitous at word level. The results supported the character-based skipping hypothesis, indicating that in Chinese reading the decision of skipping a character can be made before integrating it into a word. |
Peiqing Jin; Jiajie Zou; Tao Zhou; Nai Ding Eye activity tracks task-relevant structures during speech and auditory sequence perception Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 9, pp. 5374, 2018. @article{Jin2018a, The sensory and motor systems jointly contribute to complex behaviors, but whether motor systems are involved in high-order perceptual tasks such as speech and auditory comprehension remain debated. Here, we show that ocular muscle activity is synchronized to mentally constructed sentences during speech listening, in the absence of any sentence-related visual or prosodic cue. Ocular tracking of sentences is observed in the vertical electrooculogram (EOG), whether the eyes are open or closed, and in eye blinks measured by eyetracking. Critically, the phase of sentence-tracking ocular activity is strongly modulated by temporal attention, i.e., which word in a sentence is attended. Ocular activity also tracks high-level structures in non-linguistic auditory and visual sequences, and captures rapid fluctuations in temporal attention. Ocular tracking of non-visual rhythms possibly reflects global neural entrainment to task-relevant temporal structures across sensory and motor areas, which could serve to implement temporal attention and coordinate cortical networks. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Becky Bui; Lindsay L. Schmitt Are two spaces better than one? The effect of spacing following periods and commas during reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 80, no. 6, pp. 1504–1511, 2018. @article{Johnson2018b, The most recent edition of the American Psychological Association (APA) Manual states that two spaces should follow the punctuation at the end of a sentence. This is in contrast to the one-space requirement from previous editions. However, to date, there has been no empirical support for either convention. In the current study, participants performed (1) a typing task to assess spacing usage and (2) an eye-tracking experiment to assess the effect that punctuation spacing has on reading performance. Although comprehension was not affected by punctuation spacing, the eye movement record suggested that initial processing of the text was facilitated when periods were followed by two spaces, supporting the change made to the APA Manual. Individuals' typing usage also influenced these effects such that those who use two spaces following a period showed the greatest overall facilitation from reading with two spaces. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Elizabeth C. Oehrlein; William L. Roche Predictability and parafoveal preview effects in the developing reader: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 44, no. 7, pp. 973–991, 2018. @article{Johnson2018a, The current study utilized the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to examine the effects of predictability and parafoveal preview on reading behavior of developing readers. Participants ranging in age from 6- to 12-years-old read target words placed in a predictable or neutral context. Target words were manipulated to give either a valid identity preview, a visually similar preview that provided partial letter identity information, or a visually dissimilar preview where all of the letters were substituted. Developing readers fixated for a shorter duration on words in a predictable context. Furthermore, they showed significant preview effects and gained the most preview benefit from a full valid preview of the target word, especially within a predictable context. More skilled readers received more parafoveal information and relied less on context than less skilled readers. Implications for models of eye-movement control are discussed. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Emma L. Starr The preferred viewing location in top-to-bottom sentence reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 220–228, 2018. @article{Johnson2018, The preferred viewing location (PVL) is a robust finding in research on reading that when fixating on a word during normal sentence reading, readers tend to land slightly to the left of the center of the word. This is in contrast to the optimal viewing location in single word recognition, which falls at the center of the word. This study outlines the history of the PVL in eye tracking since Rayner's 1979 original study, documenting the origins of the conflicting theoretical explanations. In addition, a new study is reported examining whether the PVL can be attributed solely to oculomotor error or a processing advantage by using an experimental manipulation that separates tracking direction (left-to-right reading) and landing position (left-to-right within a word). Sentences were presented to participants from the top to the bottom of a computer screen with one word per line while eye movements were recorded. In this presentation format, readers continued to land to the left of center, suggesting that the PVL in normal reading is not solely due to oculomotor error. |
Holly S. S. L. Joseph; Kate Nation Examining incidental word learning during reading in children: The role of context Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 166, pp. 190–211, 2018. @article{Joseph2018, From mid-childhood onward, children learn hundreds of new words every year incidentally through reading. Yet little is known about this process and the circumstances in which vocabulary acquisition is maximized. We examined whether encountering novel words in semantically diverse, rather than semantically uniform, contexts led to better learning. Children aged 10 and 11 years read sentences containing novel words while their eye movements were monitored. Results showed a reduction in reading times over exposure for all children, but especially for those with good reading comprehension. There was no difference in reading times or in offline post-test performance for words encountered in semantically diverse and uniform contexts, but diversity did interact with reading comprehension skill. Contextual informativeness also affected reading behavior. We conclude that children acquire word knowledge from incidental reading, that children with better comprehension skills are more efficient and competent learners, and that although varying the semantic diversity of the reading episodes did not improve learning per se in our laboratory manipulation of diversity, diversity does affect reading behavior in less direct ways. |
Olessia Jouravlev; Debra Jared Cross-script orthographic and phonological preview benefits Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 11–19, 2018. @article{Jouravlev2018, The present experiment examined the use of parafoveally presented first-language (L1) orthographic and phonological codes during reading of second-language (L2) sentences in proficient Russian–English bilinguals. Participants read English sentences containing a Russian preview word that was replaced by the English target word when the participant's eyes crossed an invisible boundary located before the preview word. The use of English and Russian allowed us to manipulate orthographic and phonological preview effects independently of one another. The Russian preview words overlapped with English target words in (a) orthography (ВЕЛЮР [vʲɪˈlʲʉr]–BERRY), (b) phonology (БЛАНК [blank]–BLOOD), or (c) had no orthographic or phonological overlap (КАЛАЧ [kɐˈlat͡ɕ]–BERRY; ГЖЕЛЬ [ɡʐɛlʲ]–BLOOD). The results of this study showed a clear and strong benefit of the parafoveal preview of Russian words that shared either orthography or phonology with English target words. This study is the first demonstration of cross-script orthographic and phonological parafoveal preview benefit effects. Bilinguals integrate orthographic and phonological information across eye fixations in reading, even when this information comes from different languages |
Rebecca Jürgens; Julia Fischer; Annekathrin Schacht Hot speech and exploding bombs: Autonomic arousal during emotion classification of prosodic utterances and affective sounds Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, pp. 228, 2018. @article{Juergens2018, Emotional expressions provide strong signals in social interactions and can function as emotion inducers in a perceiver. Although speech provides one of the most important channels for human communication, its physiological correlates, such as activations of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) while listening to spoken utterances, have received far less attention than in other domains of emotion processing. Our study aimed at filling this gap by investigating autonomic activation in response to spoken utterances that were embedded into larger semantic contexts. Emotional salience was manipulated by providing information on alleged speaker similarity. We compared these autonomic responses to activations triggered by affective sounds, such as exploding bombs, and applause. These sounds had been rated and validated as being either positive, negative, or neutral. As physiological markers of ANS activity, we recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) and changes of pupil size while participants classified both prosodic and sound stimuli according to their hedonic valence. As expected, affective sounds elicited increased arousal in the receiver, as reflected in increased SCR and pupil size. In contrast, SCRs to angry and joyful prosodic expressions did not differ from responses to neutral ones. Pupil size, however, was modulated by affective prosodic utterances, with increased dilations for angry and joyful compared to neutral prosody, although the similarity manipulation had no effect. These results indicate that cues provided by emotional prosody in spoken semantically neutral utterances might be too subtle to trigger SCR, although variation in pupil size indicated the salience of stimulus variation. Our findings further demonstrate a functional dissociation between pupil dilation and skin conductance that presumably origins from their differential innervation. |
Yuki Kamide; Anuenue Kukona In: Cognitive Science, vol. 42, no. 8, pp. 2976–2998, 2018. @article{Kamide2018, We investigated the influence of globally ungrammatical local syntactic constraints on sentence comprehension, as well as the corresponding activation of global and local representations. In Experiment 1, participants viewed visual scenes with objects like a CAROUSEL and MOTORBIKE while hearing sentences with noun phrase (NP) or verb phrase (VP) modifiers like "The girl who likes the man (from London/very much) will ride the carousel." In both cases, "girl" and "ride" predicted CAROUSEL as the direct object; however, the locally coherent combination "the man from London will ride.. ." in NP cases alternatively predicted MOTORBIKE. During "ride," local constraints , although ruled out by the global constraints, influenced prediction as strongly as global constraints: While MOTORBIKE was fixated less than CAROUSEL in VP cases, it was fixated as much as CAROUSEL in NP cases. In Experiment 2, these local constraints likewise slowed reading times. We discuss implications for theories of sentence processing. |
Juan E. Kamienkowski; M. Julia Carbajal; Bruno Bianchi; Mariano Sigman; Diego E. Shalom Cumulative repetition effects across multiple readings of a word: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 256–271, 2018. @article{Kamienkowski2018, When a word is read more than once, reading time generally decreases in the successive occurrences. This Repetition Effect has been used to study word encoding and memory processes in a variety of experimental measures. We studied naturally occurring repetitions of words within normal texts (stories of around 3,000 words). Using linear mixed models to analyze the evolution of fixations over successive repetitions, we observed an interaction between corpus word frequency and repetition. Specifically, we found a decrease in fixation durations in words with low frequency but not with high frequency, and both values converged after five or six repetitions. Furthermore, we showed that repetition of a lemma is not enough to evoke this effect. Our results are in agreement with predictions formulated by the context-dependent representation model, and this adds new arguments to the discussion of the sources of the repetition effect. |
Keerthana Kapiley; Ramesh Kumar Mishra Iconic culture-specific images influence language non-selective translation activation in bilinguals Journal Article In: Translation, Cognition and Behavior, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 221–250, 2018. @article{Kapiley2018, Two experiments using the visual-world paradigm examined whether culture-specific images influence the activation of translation equivalents during spoken-word recognition in bilinguals. In Experiment 1, the participants performed a visual-world task during which they were asked to click on the target after the spoken word (L1 or L2). In Experiment 2, the participants were presented with culture-specific images (faces representing L1, L2 and Neutral) during the visual world task. Time-course analysis of Experiment 1 revealed that there were a significantly higher number of looks to TE-cohort member compared to distractors only when participants heard to L2 words. In Experiment 2, when the cultural-specific images were congruent with the spoken word's language, participants deployed higher number of looks to TE-cohort member compared to distractors. This effect was seen in both the language directions but not when the culture-specific images were incongruent with the spoken word. The eyetracking data suggest that culture-specific images influence cross-linguistic activation of semantics during bilingual audio-visual language processing. |
Lap Ching Keung; Adrian Staub Variable agreement with coordinate subjects is not a form of agreement attraction Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 103, pp. 1–18, 2018. @article{Keung2018, Agreement attraction (e.g., ∗The key to the cabinets are rusty) is not attributable to the linear proximity between the local noun and verb (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002). However, agreement with a disjoined subject (e.g., The horses or the clock is red) is specifically sensitive to the number of the nearer noun (Haskell & MacDonald, 2005). The present study highlights other differences between the influence on agreement of a local noun in the classic attraction configuration and the nearer noun in a coordinate subject. Experiments using a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm and eyetracking during reading show, first, that a singular second conjunct tends to elicit a singular verb; this influence of a singular noun contrasts with the lack of effect from a singular attractor. Second, in comprehension a singular second conjunct both facilitates processing of an ungrammatical singular verb and inhibits processing of a grammatical plural verb. This symmetrical effect contrasts with the lack of an agreement attraction effect in comprehension of grammatical sentences. It is proposed that variable agreement with coordinate subjects should be given distinct theoretical treatment, relating these phenomena to the cross-linguistic phenomenon of closest conjunct agreement. |
Sahyang Kim; Holger Mitterer; Taehong Cho A time course of prosodic modulation in phonological inferencing: The case of Korean post-obstruent tensing Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 8, pp. e0202912, 2018. @article{Kim2018a, Application of a phonological rule is often conditioned by prosodic structure, which may create a potential perceptual ambiguity, calling for phonological inferencing. Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted to examine how spoken word recognition may be modulated by the interaction between the prosodically-conditioned rule application and phonological inferencing. The rule examined was post-obstruent tensing (POT) in Korean, which changes a lax consonant into a tense after an obstruent only within a prosodic domain of Accentual Phrase (AP). Results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that, upon hearing a derived tense form, listeners indeed recovered its underlying (lax) form. The phonological inferencing effect, however, was observed only in the absence of its tense competitor which was acoustically matched with the auditory input. In Experiment 3, a prosodic cue to an AP boundary (which blocks POT) was created before the target using an F0 cue alone (i.e., without any temporal cues), and the phonological inferencing effect disappeared. This supports the view that phonological inferencing is modulated by listeners' online computation of prosodic structure (rather than through a low-level temporal normalization). Further analyses of the time course of eye movement suggested that the prosodic modulation effect occurred relatively later in the lexical processing. This implies that speech processing involves segmental processing in conjunction with prosodic structural analysis, and calls for further research on how prosodic information is processed along with segmental information in language-specific vs. universally applicable ways. |
Josiah P. J. King; Jia E. Loy; Martin Corley Contextual effects on online pragmatic inferences of deception Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 123–135, 2018. @article{King2018, Where the veracity of a statement is in question, listeners tend to interpret disfluency as signaling dishonesty. Previous research in deception suggests that this results from a speaker model, linking lying to cognitive effort and effort to disfluency. However, the disfluency-lying bias occurs very quickly: Might listeners instead simply heuristically associate disfluency with lying? To investigate this, we look at whether listeners' disfluency-lying biases are sensitive to context. Participants listened to a potentially dishonest speaker describe treasure as being behind a named object while viewing scenes comprising the referent (the named object) and a distractor. Their task was to click on the treasure's suspected true location. In line with previous work, participants clicked on the distractor more following disfluent descriptions, and this effect corresponded to an early fixation bias, demonstrating the online nature of the pragmatic judgment. The present study, however, also manipulated the presence of an alternative, local cause of speaker disfluency: the speaker momentarily distracted by a car horn. When disfluency could be attributed to speaker distraction, participants initially fixated more on the referent, only later fixating on and selecting the distractor. These findings support the speaker modeling view, showing that listeners can take momentary contextual causes of disfluency into account. |
Agnieszka E. Konopka; Antje S. Meyer; Tess A. Forest Planning to speak in L1 and L2 Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 102, pp. 72–104, 2018. @article{Konopka2018, The leading theories of sentence planning – Hierarchical Incrementality and Linear Incrementality – differ in their assumptions about the coordination of processes that map preverbal information onto language. Previous studies showed that, in native (L1) speakers, this coordination can vary with the ease of executing the message-level and sentence-level processes necessary to plan and produce an utterance. We report the first series of experiments to systematically examine how linguistic experience influences sentence planning in native (L1) speakers (i.e., speakers with life-long experience using the target language) and non-native (L2) speakers (i.e., speakers with less experience using the target language). In all experiments, speakers spontaneously generated one-sentence descriptions of simple events in Dutch (L1) and English (L2). Analyses of eye-movements across early and late time windows (pre- and post-400 ms) compared the extent of early message-level encoding and the onset of linguistic encoding. In Experiment 1, speakers were more likely to engage in extensive message-level encoding and to delay sentence-level encoding when using their L2. Experiments 2–4 selectively facilitated encoding of the preverbal message, encoding of the agent character (i.e., the first content word in active sentences), and encoding of the sentence verb (i.e., the second content word in active sentences) respectively. Experiment 2 showed that there is no delay in the onset of L2 linguistic encoding when speakers are familiar with the events. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the delay in the onset of L2 linguistic encoding is not due to speakers delaying encoding of the agent, but due to a preference to encode information needed to select a suitable verb early in the formulation process. Overall, speakers prefer to temporally separate message-level from sentence-level encoding and to prioritize encoding of relational information when planning L2 sentences, consistent with Hierarchical Incrementality. |
Loes Koring; Hans Van De Koot Processing delays: The late reactivation of the argument of unaccusative verbs Journal Article In: Linguistics in the Netherlands, vol. 35, pp. 65–78, 2018. @article{Koring2018, An eye-tracking experiment using the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) shows that in on-line sentence processing in English the argument of an unaccusative verb reactivates late after verb offset. In contrast to previous studies, this VWP experiment establishes the exact time course of this effect, which matches the time course previously found for Dutch, despite differences in word order between the two languages. Furthermore, it uncovers an early reactivation of the argument of unergative verbs that has previously gone unnoticed. Such an effect has previously been observed for Dutch, but not for English. Moreover, the effect seems to occur earlier in English than in Dutch. We suggest that this difference may be due to the more rigid word order of English, which provides the parser with more informative cues. |
2017 |
Carolyn McGettigan; Kyle Jasmin; Frank Eisner; Zarinah K. Agnew; Oliver J. Josephs; Andrew J. Calder; Rosemary Jessop; Rebecca P. Lawson; Mona Spielmann; Sophie K. Scott You talkin' to me? Communicative talker gaze activates left-lateralized superior temporal cortex during perception of degraded speech Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 100, pp. 51–63, 2017. @article{McGettigan2017, Neuroimaging studies of speech perception have consistently indicated a left-hemisphere dominance in the temporal lobes' responses to intelligible auditory speech signals (McGettigan and Scott, 2012). However, there are important communicative cues that cannot be extracted from auditory signals alone, including the direction of the talker's gaze. Previous work has implicated the superior temporal cortices in processing gaze direction, with evidence for predominantly right-lateralized responses (Carlin & Calder, 2013). The aim of the current study was to investigate whether the lateralization of responses to talker gaze differs in an auditory communicative context. Participants in a functional MRI experiment watched and listened to videos of spoken sentences in which the auditory intelligibility and talker gaze direction were manipulated factorially. We observed a left-dominant temporal lobe sensitivity to the talker's gaze direction, in which the left anterior superior temporal sulcus/gyrus and temporal pole showed an enhanced response to direct gaze – further investigation revealed that this pattern of lateralization was modulated by auditory intelligibility. Our results suggest flexibility in the distribution of neural responses to social cues in the face within the context of a challenging speech perception task. |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Parafoveal preview benefit in sentence reading: Independent effects of plausibility and orthographic relatedness Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 519–528, 2017. @article{Veldre2017a, Recent evidence from studies using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm has suggested that parafoveal preview benefit is contingent on the fit between a preview word and the sentence context. We investigated whether this plausibility preview benefit is modulated by preview–target orthographic relatedness. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which the parafoveal preview of a target word was manipulated. The nonidentical previews were plausible or implausible continuations of the sentence and were either orthographic neighbors of the target or unrelated to the target. All first-pass reading measures showed strong plausibility preview benefits. There was also a benefit from preview–target orthographic relatedness across the reading measures. These two preview effects did not interact for any fixation measure. We also found no evidence that the relatedness effect was caused by misperception of an orthographically similar preview as the target word. These data highlight the existence of two independent mechanisms underlying preview effects: a benefit from the contextual fit of the preview word in the sentence, and a benefit from the sublexical overlap between the preview and target words. |
Aaron Veldre; Denis Drieghe; Sally Andrews Spelling ability selectively predicts the magnitude of disruption in unspaced text reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 9, pp. 1612–1628, 2017. @article{Veldre2017, We examined the effect of individual differences in written language proficiency on unspaced text reading in a large sample of skilled adult readers who were assessed on reading comprehension and spelling ability. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a low or high frequency target word, presented with standard interword spacing, or in one of three unsegmented text conditions that either preserved or eliminated word boundary information. The average data replicated previous studies: unspaced text reading was associated with increased fixation durations, a higher number of fixations, more regressions, reduced saccade length, and an inflation of the word frequency effect. The individual differences results provided insight into the mechanisms contributing to these effects. Higher reading ability was associated with greater overall reading speed and fluency in all conditions. In contrast, spelling ability selectively modulated the effect of interword spacing with poorer spelling ability predicting greater difficulty across the majority of sentence- and word-level measures. These results suggest that high quality lexical representations allowed better spellers to extract lexical units from unfamiliar text forms, inoculating them against the disruptive effects of being deprived of spacing information. |
Laura Vilkaitė; Norbert Schmitt Reading collocations in an L2: Do collocation processing benefits extend to non-adjacent collocations? Journal Article In: Applied Linguistics, no. 2013, pp. 1–27, 2017. @article{Vilkaite2017, Various studies have consistently shown that collocations are processed faster than matched control phrases, both in L1 and in L2. Most of these studies focused on adjacent collocations (e.g. provide information). However, research in corpus linguistics normally uses a span to identify collocations (e.g. plus or minus four words), and these non-adjacent collocations (e.g. provide some of the information) occur very frequently in language. Nevertheless, how they are processed is less established. A recent study on reading non-adjacent collocations seems to suggest similar processing advantages as for adjacent collocations (Vilkaite 2016), but this study was limited to the performance of native speakers (NSs). The present study addresses the question of whether advanced non-native speakers (NNSs) also show processing advantages for non-adjacent collocations as NSs do. Forty advanced NNSs of English read collocations in either adjacent or non-adjacent conditions, and their eye movements were recorded. Mixed-effects analysis of their eye movements was carried out. The results suggest that NNSs read adjacent collocations faster than non-formulaic controls, but this facilitation almost disappears for non-adjacent collocations. |
Xin Wang; Juan Wang; Jeffrey G. Malins In: Cognition, vol. 169, pp. 15–24, 2017. @article{Wang2017b, Although lexical tone is a highly prevalent phonetic cue in human languages, its role in bilingual spoken word recognition is not well understood. The present study investigates whether and how adult bilinguals, who use pitch contours to disambiguate lexical items in one language but not the other, access a tonal L1 when exclusively processing a non-tonal L2. Using the visual world paradigm, we show that Mandarin-English listeners automatically activated Mandarin translation equivalents of English target words such as ‘rain' (Mandarin ‘yu3'), and consequently were distracted by competitors whose segments and tones overlapped with the translations of English target words (‘feather', also ‘yu3' in Mandarin). Importantly, listeners were not distracted by competitors that overlapped with the translations of target words in all segments but not tone (‘fish'; Mandarin ‘yu2'), nor were they distracted by competitors that overlapped with the translations of target words in rime and tone (‘wheat', Mandarin ‘gu3'). These novel results demonstrate implicit access to L1 lexical representations through automatic/unconscious translation, as a result of cross-language top-down and/or lateral influence, and highlight the critical role of lexical tone activation in bilingual lexical access. |
Sarah J. White; Laura M. T. Lantz; Kevin B. Paterson Spontaneous rereading within sentences: Eye movement control and visual sampling Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 395–413, 2017. @article{White2017, Three experiments examine the role of previously read text in sentence comprehension and the control of eye movements during spontaneous rereading. Spontaneous rereading begins with a regressive saccade and involves reinspection of previously read text. All 3 experiments employed the gaze-contingent change technique to modulate the availability of previously read text. In Experiment 1, previously read text was permanently masked either immediately to the left of the fixated word (beyond wordn) or more than 1 word to the left (beyond wordn-1). The results of Experiment 1 indicate that the availability of the word immediately to the left (wordn-1) is important for comprehension. Experiments 2 and 3 further explored the role of previously read text beyond wordn-1. In these studies, text beyond wordn-1 was replaced, retaining only word length information, or word length and shape information. Following a regression back within a sentence, meaningful text either reappeared or remained unavailable during rereading. The experiments show that the visual format of text beyond wordn-1 (the parafoveal postview) is important for triggering regressions. The results also indicate that, as least for more complex sentences, the availability of meaningful text is important in driving eye movement control during rereading. |
Veronica Whitford; Debra Titone The effects of word frequency and word predictability during first- and second-language paragraph reading in bilingual older and younger adults Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 158–177, 2017. @article{Whitford2017, We used eye movement measures of paragraph reading; varying in amount of current L2 experience. Our ke; across both early- and late-stage reading; word frequency effects were generally larger in ol; whereas word predictability effects were generally; across both age groups and both reading stages; word frequency effects were larger in the L2 than ; whereas word predictability effects were language-; graded differences in current L2 experience modula; but had no impact in older adults. Specifically; greater current L2 experience facilitated L2 word ; but impeded L1 word processing among younger adult; we draw 2 main conclusions. First; bilingual older adults experience changes in word-; potentially because lexical accessibility decrease; bilingual older adults experience changes in word-; potentially because lexical representations reach a functional ceiling over time. |
Adrian Staub; Brian W. Dillon; Charles Clifton The matrix verb as a source of comprehension difficulty in object relative sentences Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 41, pp. 1353–1376, 2017. @article{Staub2017, Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is entirely eliminated if additional material intervenes between the object gap and the matrix verb. An explanation in terms of spillover processing is ruled out, suggesting that it is the gap-matrix verb sequence that is itself responsible for the difficulty. We consider two accounts of this difficulty, one emphasizing the potential difficulty of rapidly switching between the sentential subject's thematic or syntactic role in the embedded clause and its role in the matrix clause, and one emphasizing the potential difficulty of performing two demanding memory retrievals in rapid succession. The present experiments also closely replicate the previous findings from eyetracking that the noun phrase and the verb within an object relative are both loci of processing difficulty, but that the former induces substantially greater difficulty. |
Allison A. Steen-Baker; Shukhan Ng; Brennan R. Payne; Carolyn J. Anderson; Kara D. Federmeier; Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow The effects of context on processing words during sentence reading among adults varying in age and literacy skill Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 460–472, 2017. @article{SteenBaker2017, The facilitation of word processing by sentence context reflects the interaction between the build-up of message-level semantics and lexical processing. Yet, little is known about how this effect varies through adulthood as a function of reading skill. In this study, Participants 18-64 years old with a range of literacy competence read simple sentences as their eye movements were monitored. We manipulated the predictability of a sentence-final target word, operationalized as cloze probability. First fixation durations showed an interaction between age and literacy skill, decreasing with age among more skilled readers but increasing among less skilled readers. This pattern suggests that age-related slowing may impact reading when not buffered by skill, but with continued practice, automatization of reading can continue to develop in adulthood. In absolute terms, readers were sensitive to predictability, regardless of age or literacy, in both early and later measures. Older readers showed differential contextual sensitivity in regression patterns, effects not moderated by literacy skill. Finally, comprehension performance increased with age and literacy skill, but performance among less skilled readers was especially reduced when predictability was low, suggesting that low-literacy adults (regardless of age) struggle when creating mental representations under weaker semantic constraints. Collectively, these findings suggest that aging readers (regardless of reading skill) are more sensitive to context for meaning-integration processes; that less skilled adult readers (regardless of age) depend more on a constrained semantic representation for comprehension; and that the capacity for literacy engagement enables continued development of efficient lexical processing in adult reading development. |
Anastasia Stoops; Kiel Christianson Parafoveal processing of inflectional morphology on Russian nouns Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 653–669, 2017. @article{Stoops2017, The present study investigated whether inflectional morphology on Russian nouns is processed parafoveally during silent reading. The boundary-change paradigm [Rayner, K. (1975). The perceptual span and peripheral cues in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 65–81] was used to examine parafoveal processing of nominal case markings of Russian nouns. The results yielded preview cost for morphologically related preview in gaze duration (vs. an identical baseline) and in total time (TT) (vs. a non-word baseline) and preview benefit in regressions out of the target word. The contribution of the study is two-fold. First this is the first demonstration that bound nominal inflectional morphemes are processed parafoveally in a language with linear concatenated morphology (Russian). Second the observed preview effects suggest that parafoveal preview of a morphologically related word was processed fully in the parafovea and interfered with the integration of the target word into the syntactic structure of the sentence. |
Yuichi Suzuki Validity of new measures of implicit knowledge: Distinguishing implicit knowledge from automatized explicit knowledge Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 1229–1261, 2017. @article{Suzuki2017, <p>Accumulating evidence suggests that time-pressured form-focused tasks like grammaticality judgment tests (GJTs) can measure second language (L2) implicit knowledge. The current paper, however, proposes that these tasks draw on automatized explicit knowledge. A battery of six grammar tests was designed to distinguish automatized explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge. While three time-pressured form-focused tasks (an auditory GJT, a visual GJT, and a fill in the blank test) were hypothesized to measure automatized explicit knowledge, three real-time comprehension tasks (a visual-world task, a word-monitoring task, and a self-paced reading task) were hypothesized to measure implicit knowledge. One hundred advanced L2 Japanese learners with first language Chinese residing in Japan took all six tests. Confirmatory factor analysis and multitrait-multimethod analysis provided an array of evidence supporting that these tests assessed two types of linguistic knowledge separately with little influence from the method effects. The results analyzed separately by length of residence in Japan (a proxy for the amount of naturalistic L2 exposure) showed that learners with longer residence in Japan can draw on implicit knowledge in the real-time comprehension tasks with more stability than those with shorter residence. These findings indicate the potential of finely tuned real-time comprehension tasks as measures of implicit knowledge.</p> |
Yuichi Suzuki; Robert DeKeyser The interface of explicit and implicit knowledge in a second language: Insights from individual differences in cognitive aptitudes Journal Article In: Language Learning, vol. 67, no. 4, pp. 747–790, 2017. @article{Suzuki2017a, Recent research has called for the use offine-grained measures that distinguish implicit knowledge from automatized explicit knowledge. In the current study, such measures were used to determine how the two systems interact in a naturalistic second language (L2) acquisition context. One hundred advanced L2 speakers ofJapanese living in Japan were assessed using tests of automatized explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge, along with tests of phonological short-term memory and aptitude tests for explicit and implicit learning. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that aptitude for explicit learning significantly predicted acquisition of automatized explicit knowledge, and automatized explicit knowledge significantly predicted acquisition of implicit knowledge. The effects of implicit learning aptitude and phonological short-term memory on This acquisition of automatized explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge were limited. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that automatized explicit knowledge, which develops through explicit learning mechanisms, may impact the acquisition of implicit knowledge. |
Malathi Thothathiri; Daniel G. Evans; Sonali Poudel Verb bias and verb-specific competition effects on sentence production Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 7, pp. e0180580, 2017. @article{Thothathiri2017, How do speakers choose between structural options for expressing a given meaning? Overall preference for some structures over others as well as prior statistical association between specific verbs and sentence structures (“verb bias”) are known to broadly influence language use. However, the effects of prior statistical experience on the planning and execution of utterances and the mechanisms that facilitate structural choice for verbs with different biases have not been fully explored. In this study, we manipulated verb bias for English double-object (DO) and prepositional-object (PO) dative structures: some verbs appeared solely in the DO structure (DO-only), others solely in PO (PO-only) and yet others equally in both (Equi). Structural choices during subsequent free-choice sentence production revealed the expected dispreference for DO overall but critically also a reliable linear trend in DO production that was consistent with verb bias (DO-only > Equi > PO-only). Going beyond the general verb bias effect, three results suggested that Equi verbs, which were associated equally with the two structures, engendered verb-specific competition and required additional resources for choosing the dispreferred DO structure. First, DO production with Equi verbs but not the other verbs correlated with participants' inhibition ability. Second, utterance duration prior to the choice of a DO structure showed a quadratic trend (DO-only < Equi > PO-only) with the longest durations for Equi verbs. Third, eye movements consistent with reimagining the event also showed a quadratic trend (DO-only < Equi > PO-only) prior to choosing DO, suggesting that participants used such recall particularly for Equi verbs. Together, these analyses of structural choices, utterance durations, eye movements and individual differences in executive functions shed light on the effects of verb bias and verb-specific competition on sentence production and the role of different executive functions in choosing between sentence structures. |
Melissa Troyer; Arielle Borovsky Maternal socioeconomic status influences the range of expectations during language comprehension in adulthood Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1405–1433, 2017. @article{Troyer2017, In infancy, maternal socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with real-time language processing skills, but whether or not (and if so, how) this relationship carries into adulthood is unknown. We explored the effects of maternal SES in college-aged adults on eye-tracked, spoken sentence comprehension tasks using the visual world paradigm. When sentences ended in highly plausible, expected target nouns (Exp. 1), higher SES was associated with a greater likelihood of considering alternative endings related to the action of the sentence. Moreover, for unexpected sentence endings (Exp. 2), individuals from higher SES backgrounds were sensitive to whether the ending was action-related (plausible) or unrelated (implausible), showing a benefit for plausible endings. Individuals from lower SES backgrounds did not show this advantage. This suggests maternal SES can influence the dynamics of sentence processing even in adulthood, with consequences for processing unexpected content. These findings highlight the importance of early lexical experience for adult language skills. |
Cara Tsang; Craig G. Chambers; Mindaugas Mozuraitis Compounds, competition, and incremental word identification in spoken Cantonese Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 69–81, 2017. @article{Tsang2017, The majority of words in Cantonese are compounds, which seems likely to burden the process of identifying words in running speech. Cantonese is also a stress-timed language, which reduces the potential for durational contrasts to distinguish embedded constituents from self-standing words. The current study demonstrates the challenge of identifying words in spoken Cantonese. As a compound unfolds, listeners are more likely to consider an onset-embedded constituent as the intended word than the actual word they are hearing – a result that seems poorly adapted to the prevalence of compounds. However, the results also show these challenges are offset by sentence-based cues, such as those provided by noun classifiers. This occurs despite variability in classifier-noun pairings and the fact that adult speakers often show incomplete mastery of these pairings. Together the results demonstrate how even highly biased cases of lexical competition are overcome by sentence-level constraints that may be only moderate in strength. |