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!
2017 |
Damon Tutunjian; Fredrik Heinat; Eva Klingvall; Anna-Lena Wiklund Processing relative clause extractions in Swedish Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 2118, 2017. @article{Tutunjian2017, Relative clauses are considered strong islands for extraction across languages. Swedish comprises a well-known exception, allegedly allowing extraction from relative clauses (RCE), raising the possibility that island constraints may be subject to "deep variation" between languages. One alternative is that such exceptions are only illusory and represent "surface variation" attributable to independently motivated syntactic properties. Yet, to date, no surface account has proven tenable for Swedish RCEs. The present study uses eyetracking while reading to test whether the apparent acceptability of Swedish RCEs has any processing correlates at the point of filler integration compared to uncontroversial strong island violations. Experiment 1 tests RCE against licit that-clause extraction (TCE), illicit extraction from a non-restrictive RC island (NRCE), and an intransitive control. For this, RCE was found to pattern similarly to TCE at the point of integration in early measures, but between TCE and NRCE in total durations. Experiment 2 uses RCE and extraction from a subject NP island (SRCE) to test the hypothesis that only non-islands will show effects of implausible filler-verb dependencies. RCE showed sensitivity to the plausibility manipulation across measures at the first potential point of filler integration, whereas such effects were limited to late measures for SRCE. In addition, structural facilitation was seen across measures for RCE relative to SRCE. We propose that our results are compatible with RCEs being licit weak island extractions in Swedish, and that the overall picture speaks in favor of a surface rather than a deep variation approach to the lack of island effects in Swedish RCEs. |
Jorge R. Valdés Kroff; Paola E. Dussias; Chip Gerfen; Lauren Perrotti; María Teresa Bajo Experience with code-switching modulates the use of grammatical gender during sentence processing Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 163–198, 2017. @article{ValdesKroff2017, Using code-switching as a tool to illustrate how language experience modulates comprehension, the visual world paradigm was employed to examine the extent to which gender-marked Spanish determiners facilitate upcoming target nouns in a group of Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers. The first experiment tested target Spanish nouns embedded in a carrier phrase (Experiment 1b) and included a control Spanish monolingual group (Experiment 1a). The second set of experiments included critical trials in which participants heard code-switches from Spanish determiners into English nouns (e.g., la house) either in a fixed carrier phrase (Experiment 2a) or in variable and complex sentences (Experiment 2b). Across the experiments, bilinguals revealed an asymmetric gender effect in processing, showing facilitation only for feminine target items. These results reflect the asymmetric use of gender in the production of code-switched speech. The extension of the asymmetric effect into Spanish (Experiment 1b) underscores the permeability between language modes in bilingual code-switchers. |
Maya Yablonski; Uri Polat; Yoram S. Bonneh; Michal Ben-Shachar Microsaccades are sensitive to word structure: A novel approach to study language processing Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 7, pp. 3999, 2017. @article{Yablonski2017, Microsaccades are miniature eye movements that occur involuntarily during fixation. They are typically inhibited following stimulus onset and are released from inhibition about 300 ms post-stimulus. Microsaccade-inhibition is modulated by low level features of visual stimuli, but it is currently unknown whether they are sensitive to higher level, abstract linguistic properties. To address this question, we measured the timing of microsaccades while subjects were presented with written Hebrew words and pronounceable nonwords (pseudowords). We manipulated the underlying structure of pseudowords such that half of them contained real roots while the other half contained invented roots. Importantly, orthographic similarity to real words was equated between the two conditions. Microsaccade onset was significantly slower following real-root compared to invented-root stimuli. Similar results were obtained when considering post-stimulus delay of eye blinks. Moreover, microsaccade-delay was positively and significantly correlated with measures of real-word similarity. These findings demonstrate, for the first time, sensitivity of microsaccades to linguistic structure. Because microsaccades are involuntary and can be measured in the absence of overt response, our results provide initial evidence that they can be used as a novel physiological measure in the study of language processes in healthy and clinical populations. |
Toshiyuki Yamada; Manabu Arai; Yuki Hirose Unforced revision in processing relative clause association ambiguity in Japanese: Evidence against revision as last resort Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 661–714, 2017. @article{Yamada2017, The current study tackles a long standing question of whether comprehenders perform structural revision when it is not forced by grammar or not. Using an eye-tracking reading paradigm, we addressed this issue by making use of global structural ambiguity in Japanese. Our results show that comprehenders initially associate a relative clause with the first potential head noun and that they revise this analysis when the second noun is lexico-semantically possible as the relative clause head, but do not when it is impossible. The results are incompatible with the Revision as Last Resort hypothesis. Instead, they support the parsing with unforced revision that is immediately sensitive to lexical properties. We argue that our results cannot be accounted for by serial modular processing models but that they can be explained by ranked-parallel interactive processing models. Furthermore, we propose that head-finality is a key factor involved in the availability of unforced revision. |
Panpan Yao; Baoguo Chen Cross-linguistic differences affect late Chinese-English learners on-line processing of English tense and aspect Journal Article In: International Journal of Bilingualism, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 268–290, 2017. @article{Yao2017, Aims: The present study aimed to explore how varied cross-linguistic differences affect late Chinese-English learners' on-line processing of tense and aspect in English. Methodology: We used the self-paced reading task (Experiment 1) and the eye-tracking technique (Experiment 2) to test the above question. Data and analysis: Reading times in Experiment 1 and first-fixation duration, and gaze time in Experiment 2 in four interested positions were analysed in R by ANOVAs and t-tests. Findings: Both high-and low-proficiency participants showed their sensitivity to the violation of progressive, which is nearly congruent between English and Chinese. Only high-proficiency participants were sensitive to the violation of past tense, which is similar but not congruent between Chinese and English. With regard to present third person singular, which is incongruent between Chinese and English, high-proficiency participants also showed their sensitivity to its violation; however, this sensitivity is only detected by the eye-tracking method (Experiment 2). These results suggested that cross-linguistic differences affect late second language learners' on-line processing of English tense and aspect. Originality: To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one exploring varied cross-linguistic differences' influence on late Chinese-English learners' on-line processing of tense and aspect in English. Significance: Our results provide new evidence to support the Performance Deficit Account. |
Menahem Yeari; Marja Oudega; Paul W. Broek The effect of highlighting on processing and memory of central and peripheral text information: evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 365–383, 2017. @article{Yeari2017, The present study investigated the effect of text highlighting on online processing and memory of central and peripheral information. We compared processing time (using eye-tracking methodology) and recall of central and peripheral information for three types of highlighting: (a) highlighting of central information, (b) highlighting of pe-ripheral information and (c) no highlighting. Results indicate that highlighting central information decreased the amount of rereading of peripheral information, whereas highlighting peripheral information increased the amount of rereading of peripheral information. Processing and recall of central information did not differ across highlighting conditions but were higher than the processing and recall of peripheral information (i.e., centrality effects). These findings suggest that highlighting influ-ences processing of text but that this influence occurs after initial processing, interacts with centrality and is strongest for text information that is relatively peripheral to the overall coherence and meaning of the text. Proficient readers apparently selectively process and store central information regardless of what is highlighted in the text. |
Miao-Hsuan Yen; Ying-Tien Wu In: Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 75, pp. 14–24, 2017. @article{Yen2017, With an online reading context, this study aimed to investigate whether university students' informal reasoning ability and disposition (indicated by counterargument construction) could reduce or even reverse “myside bias” in reading relevant webpages regarding a controversial issue. Also, the association of students' online reading patterns with their progress in counterargument construction and changes in attitude extremity was examined in this study. The participants were sixty-four university students. They were asked to read eight relevant webpages freely (eye movement recorded) and to express their personal opinions about building nuclear power plants. These webpages were edited from various aspects regarding this controversial issue, with half of them presenting supporting and opposing information respectively. Before and after reading the webpages, the participants' counterargument construction performance and attitude extremity toward the controversial issue were assessed. This study revealed that participants who could construct successful counterarguments in the pre-test tended to pay more attention to other-side than to myside webpages. For their counterparts, it was found that those who spent more time viewing other-side webpages either progressed in counterargument construction or neutralized their attitude in the post-test. With different methodology, this study also provides convergent evidences that myside bias was associated with attitude polarization. |
Wei Yi; Shiyi Lu; Guojie Ma Frequency, contingency and online processing of multiword sequences: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 519–549, 2017. @article{Yi2017, Frequency and contingency are two primary statistical factors that drive the acquisition and processing of language. This study explores the role of phrasal frequency and contingency (the co- occurrence probability/statistical association of the constituent words in multiword sequences) during online processing of multiword sequences. Meanwhile, it also examines language users' sensitivity to the two types of statistical information. Using the eye-tracking paradigm, native and advanced nonnative speakers of Chinese were instructed to read 80 disyllabic two-word Chinese adverbial sequences embedded in sentence contexts. Eye movements of the participants were recorded using both early and late measures. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that both phrasal frequency and contingency influenced the processing of the adverbial sequences; however, they were likely to function in different time windows. In addition, both native and nonnative speakers were sensitive to the phrasal frequency and contingency of the sequences, though their degrees of such sensitivity differed. Our findings suggest that adult language learners retain the statistical learning ability in second language acquisition and they may share a general statistical learning mechanism with native speakers when processing multiword sequences. |
Lili Yu; Qiaoming Zhang; Caspian Priest; Erik D. Reichle; Heather Sheridan Character-complexity effects in Chinese reading and visual search: A comparison and theoretical implications Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 140–151, 2017. @article{Yu2017b, Three eye-movement experiments were conducted to examine how the complexity of characters in Chinese words (i.e., number of strokes per character) influences their processing and eye-movement behaviour. In Experiment 1, English speakers with no significant knowledge of Chinese searched for specific low-, medium-, and high-complexity target characters in a multi-page narrative containing characters of varying complexity (3–16 strokes). Fixation durations and skipping rates were influenced by the visual complexity of both the target characters and the characters being searched even though participants had no knowledge of Chinese. In Experiment 2, native Chinese speakers performed the same character-search task, and a similar pattern of results was observed. Finally, in Experiment 3, a second sample of native Chinese speakers read the same text used in Experiments 1 and 2, with text characters again exhibiting complexity effects. These results collectively suggest that character-complexity effects on eye movements may not be due to lexical processing per se but may instead reflect whatever visual processing is required to know whether or not a character corresponds to an episodically represented target. The theoretical implications of this for our understanding of normal reading are discussed. |
Huixia Zhou; Sonja Rossi; Juan Li; Huanhuan Liu; Ran Chen; Baoguo Chen Effects of working memory capacity in processing wh-extractions: Eye-movement evidence from Chinese–English bilinguals Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 420–438, 2017. @article{Zhou2017a, By using the eye-tracking method, the present study explores whether working memory capacity assessed via the second language (L2) reading span (L2WMC) as well as the operational span task (OSPAN) affects the processing of subject-extraction and object-extraction in Chinese–English bilinguals. Results showed that L2WMC has no effects on the grammatical judgement accuracies, the first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past times and total fixation duration of the critical regions in wh-extractions. In contrast, OSPAN influences the first fixation duration and go-past times of the critical regions in wh-extractions. Specifically, in region 1, (e.g., Who do you think loved the comedian [region 1] with [region 2] all his heart [subject-extraction]? versus Who do you think the comedian loved [region 1] with [region 2] all his heart? [object-extraction] ), participants with high OSPAN were much slower than those with low OSPAN in their first fixation duration in reading subject-extractions, whereas there were no differences between participants with different OSPANs in reading object-extractions. In region 2, participants with high OSPAN were much faster than those with low OSPAN in their go-past times of object-extractions. These results indicated that individual differences in OSPAN rather than in L2WMC more strongly affect processing of wh-extractions. Thus, OSPAN results to be more suitable to explore the influences of working memory while processing L2 sentences with complex syntax, at least for intermediate proficient bilinguals. Results of the study also provide further support for the Capacity Theory of Comprehension. |
Bob McMurray; Ashley Farris-Trimble; Hannah Rigler Waiting for lexical access: Cochlear implants or severely degraded input lead listeners to process speech less incrementally Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 169, pp. 147–164, 2017. @article{McMurray2017, Spoken language unfolds over time. Consequently, there are brief periods of ambiguity, when incomplete input can match many possible words. Typical listeners solve this problem by immediately activating multiple candidates which compete for recognition. In two experiments using the visual world paradigm, we examined real-time lexical competition in prelingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users, and normal hearing (NH) adults listening to severely degraded speech. In Experiment 1, adolescent CI users and NH controls matched spoken words to arrays of pictures including pictures of the target word and phonological competitors. Eye-movements to each referent were monitored as a measure of how strongly that candidate was considered over time. Relative to NH controls, CI users showed a large delay in fixating any object, less competition from onset competitors (e.g., sandwich after hearing sandal), and increased competition from rhyme competitors (e.g., candle after hearing sandal). Experiment 2 observed the same pattern with NH listeners hearing highly degraded speech. These studies suggests that in contrast to all prior studies of word recognition in typical listeners, listeners recognizing words in severely degraded conditions can exhibit a substantively different pattern of dynamics, waiting to begin lexical access until substantial information has accumulated. |
Jinger Pan; Ming Yan; Jochen Laubrock Perceptual span in oral reading: The case of Chinese Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 254–263, 2017. @article{Pan2017, The present study explores the perceptual span, that is, the physical extent of the area from which useful visual information is obtained during a single fixation, during oral reading of Chinese sentences. Characters outside a window of legible text were replaced by visually similar characters. Results show that the influence of window size on the perceptual span was consistent across different fixation and oculomotor measures. To maintain normal reading behavior when reading aloud, it was necessary to have information provided from three characters to the right of the fixation. Together with findings from previous research, our findings suggest that the physical size of the perceptual span is smaller when reading aloud than in silent reading. This is in agreement with previous studies in English, suggesting that the mechanisms causing the reduced span in oral reading have a common base that generalizes across languages and writing systems. |
Adam J. Parker; Julie A. Kirkby; Timothy J. Slattery Predictability effects during reading in the absence of parafoveal preview Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 29, no. 8, pp. 902–911, 2017. @article{Parker2017, The predictability of upcoming words facilitates both spoken and written language comprehension. One interesting difference between these language modalities is that readers' routinely have access to upcoming words in parafoveal vision while listeners must wait for each fleeting word from a speaker. Despite readers' potential glimpse into the future, it is not clear if and how this bottom-up information aids top-down prediction. The current study manipulated the predictability of target words and their location on a line of text. Targets were located in the middle of the line (preview available) or as the first word on a new line (preview unavailable). This represents an innovative method for manipulating parafoveal preview which utilises return sweeps to deny access to parafoveal preview of target words without the use of invalid previews. The study is the first to demonstrate gaze duration word predictability effects in the absence of parafoveal preview. |
Dan Parker; Colin Phillips Reflexive attraction in comprehension is selective Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 94, pp. 272–290, 2017. @article{Parker2017a, Many studies have shown that attraction effects are consistently found for linguistic dependencies like subject-verb agreement, e.g., The key to the cabinets are on the table. However, not all dependencies are equally susceptible to attraction. A parade case involves reflexive-antecedent dependencies, which rarely show attraction effects. The contrast between agreement and reflexives with respect to attraction has motivated various proposals regarding the memory architecture for the parser, including the use of qualitatively different access mechanisms or the selective use of morphological features as retrieval cues for different dependencies. In this paper, we show how to systematically induce attraction effects for reflexives in three eye-tracking experiments. Furthermore, we show based on computational simulations that it is possible to derive both the presence and absence of reflexive attraction from the same retrieval mechanism, based on the ACT-R architecture. We then propose an account of why agreement and reflexives are differentially susceptible to attraction, based on the predictability of the dependency. |
Manuel Perea; Eva Rosa; Ana Marcet Where is the locus of the lowercase advantage during sentence reading? Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 177, pp. 30–35, 2017. @article{Perea2017, While most models of visual word identification and reading posit that a word's visual codes are rapidly transformed onto case-invariant representations (i.e., table and TABLE would equally activate the word unit corresponding to “table”), a number of experiments have shown a lowercase advantage in various word identification and reading tasks. In the present experiment, we examined the locus of this lowercase advantage by comparing the pattern of eye movements when reading sentences in lowercase vs. uppercase. Each sentence contained a target word that was high or low in word-frequency. Overall, results showed faster reading times for lowercase than for uppercase sentences. More important, while the word-frequency effect was sizeable in the first-fixation durations on the target word, the lowercase advantage only arose in the gaze durations (i.e., the sum of durations of first-pass fixations on the target word, including refixations). Furthermore, we found an effect of word-frequency, but not of letter case, in the first-fixation duration on target words with multiple first-pass fixations. Taken together, these findings suggest that the lowercase advantage reflects operations that do not occur in the initial contact with the lexical entries. |
Pilar Piñar; Matthew T. Carlson; Jill P. Morford; Paola E. Dussias Bilingual deaf readers' use of semantic and syntactic cues in the processing of English relative clauses Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 980–998, 2017. @article{Pinar2017, Eye fixation measures were used to examine English relative clause processing by adult ASL-English bilingual deaf readers. Participants processed subject relative clauses faster than object relative clauses, but expected animacy cues eliminated processing difficulty in object relative clauses. This brings into question previous claims that deaf readers' sentence processing strategies are qualitatively different from those of hearing English native speakers. Measures of English comprehension predicted reading speed, but not differences in syntactic processing. However, a trend for ASL self-ratings to predict the ability to handle syntactic complexity approached significance. Results suggest a need to explore how objective ASL proficiency measures might provide insights into deaf readers' ability to exploit syntactic cues in English. |
Joshua D. Pratt; Scott B. Stevenson; Harold E. Bedell Scotoma visibility and reading rate with bilateral central scotomas Journal Article In: Optometry and Vision Science, vol. 94, no. 3, pp. 279–284, 2017. @article{Pratt2017, PURPOSE: In this experiment, we tested whether perceptually delineating the scotoma location and border with a gaze contingent polygon overlay improves reading speed and reading eye movements in patients with bilateral central scotomas. METHODS: Eight patients with age-related macular degeneration and bilateral central scotomas read aloud MNRead style sentences with their preferred eye. Eye movement signals from an EyeLink II eyetracker were used to create a gaze contingent display in which a polygon overlay delineating the area of the patient's scotoma was superimposed on the text during 18 of the 42 trials. Blocks of six trials with the superimposed polygon were alternated with blocks of six trials without the polygon. Reading speed and reading eye movements were assessed before and after the subjects practiced reading with the polygon overlay. RESULTS: All of the subjects but one showed an increase in reading speed. A paired-samples t-test for the group as a whole revealed a statistically significant increase in reading speed of 0.075 ± 0.060 (SD) log wpm after reading with the superimposed polygon. Individual subjects demonstrated significant changes in reading eye movements, with the greatest number of subjects demonstrating a shift in the average vertical fixation locus. Across subjects, there was no significant difference between the initial and final reading eye movements in terms of saccades per second, average fixation duration, average amplitude of saccades, or proportion of non-horizontal saccades. CONCLUSIONS: The improvement in reading speed (0.075 log wpm or 19%) over the short experimental session for the majority of subjects indicates that making the scotoma location more visible is potentially beneficial for improving reading speed in patients with bilateral central scotomas. Additional research to examine the efficacy of more extended training with this paradigm is warranted. |
Timothy R. Jordan; Victoria A. McGowan; Stoyan Kurtev; Kevin B. Paterson In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 807, 2017. @article{Jordan2017, Printed words are complex visual stimuli containing a range of different spatial frequencies, and several studies have suggested that various spatial frequencies are effective for skilled adult reading. But while it is well known that the area of text from which information is acquired during reading extends to the left and right of each fixation, the effectiveness of spatial frequencies falling each side of fixation has yet to be determined. To investigate this issue, we used a spatial frequency adaptation of the gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm in which sentences were shown to skilled adult readers either entirely as normal or filtered to contain only low, medium, or high spatial frequencies except for a window of normal text around each point of fixation. Windows replaced filtered text either symmetrically 1 character to the left and right of each fixated character, or asymmetrically, 1 character to the left and 7 or 13 to the right, or 1 character to the right and 7 or 13 to the left. Reading times and eye-movement measures showed that reading performance for sentences presented entirely as normal generally changed very little with filtered displays when windows extended to the right but was often disrupted when windows extended to the left. However, asymmetrical windows affected performance on both sides of fixation. Indeed, increasing the leftward extent of windows from 7 to 13 characters produced decreases in both reading times and fixation durations, suggesting that reading was influenced by the spatial frequency content of leftward areas of text some considerable distance from fixation. Overall, the findings show that while a range of different spatial frequencies can be used by skilled adult readers, the effectiveness of spatial frequencies differs for text on each side of central vision, and may reflect different roles played by these two areas of text during reading. |
Barbara J. Juhasz; Rebecca L. Johnson; Jennifer Brewer An investigation into the processing of lexicalized English blend words: Evidence from lexical decisions and eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 281–294, 2017. @article{Juhasz2017, New words enter the language through several word formation processes [see Simonini (Engl J 55:752-757, 1966)]. One such process, blending, occurs when two source words are combined to represent a new concept (e.g., SMOG, BRUNCH, BLOG, and INFOMERCIAL). While there have been examinations of the structure of blends [see Gries (Linguistics 42:639-667, 2004) and Lehrer (Am Speech 73:3-28, 1998)], relatively little attention has been given to how lexicalized blends are recognized and if this process differs from other types of words. In the present study, blend words were matched to non-blend control words on length, familiarity, and frequency. Two tasks were used to examine blend processing: lexical decision and sentence reading. The results demonstrated that blend words were processed differently than non-blend control words. However, the nature of the effect varied as a function of task demands. Blends were recognized slower than control words in the lexical decision task but received shorter fixation durations when embedded in sentences. |
Krista R. Kelly; Reed M. Jost; Angie De La Cruz; Lori Dao; Cynthia L. Beauchamp; David R. Stager; Eileen E. Birch Slow reading in children with anisometropic amblyopia is associated with fixation instability and increased saccades Journal Article In: Journal of AAPOS, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 447–451, 2017. @article{Kelly2017, Background: Previous studies show slow reading in strabismic amblyopia. We recently identified amblyopia, not strabismus, as the key factor in slow reading in children. No studies have focused on reading in amblyopic children without strabismus. We examined reading in anisometropic children and evaluated whether slow reading was associated with ocular motor dysfunction in children with amblyopia. Methods: Anisometropic children (7-12 years) with or without amblyopia were compared to age-similar normal controls. Children silently read a grade-appropriate paragraph during binocular viewing. Reading rate (words/min), number of forward and regressive saccades (per 100 words) and fixation duration were recorded with the ReadAlyzer. Binocular fixation instability was also evaluated (EyeLink 1000). Results: Amblyopic anisometropic children read more slowly (n = 25; mean with standard deviation, 149 ± 42 words/min) than nonamblyopic anisometropic children (n = 15; 196 ± 80 words/min; P = 0.024) and controls (n = 25; 191 ± 65 words/min; P = 0.020). Nonamblyopic anisometropic children read at a comparable rate to controls (P = 0.81). Slow reading in amblyopic anisometropic children was correlated with increased forward saccades (r = −0.84, P < 0.001), increased regressive saccades (r = −0.85, P < 0.001), and fellow eye instability during binocular viewing (r = −0.52 |
Azizuddin Khan; Otto Loberg; Jarkko Hautala On the eye movement control of changing reading direction for a single word: The case of reading numerals in Urdu Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 1273–1283, 2017. @article{Khan2017, Typically orthographies are consistent in terms of reading direction, i.e. from left-to-right or right-to-left. However, some are bidirectional, i.e., certain parts of the text, (such as numerals in Urdu), are read against the default reading direction. Such sudden changes in reading direction may challenge the reader in many ways, at the level of planning of saccadic eye movements, changing the direction of attention, word recognition processes and cognitive reading strategies. The present study attempts to understand how readers achieve such sudden changes in reading direction at the level of eye movements and conscious cognitive reading strategies. Urdu readers reported employing a two-stage strategy for reading numerals by first counting the number of digits during right-to-left fixations, and only then forming numeric representation during left-to-right fixations. Eye movement findings were aligned with this strategy usage, as long numerals were often read with deliberate forward-and-backward fixation sequences. In these sequences fixations preceding saccades to default reading direction were shorter than against it, suggesting that different cognitive processes such as counting and formation of numeric representation were involved in fixations preceding left- and right-directed saccades. Finally, the change against the default reading direction was preceded by highly inflated fixation duration, pinpointing the oculomotor, attentional and cognitive demands in executing sudden changes in reading direction. |
Ying-Yee Kong; Alexandra Jesse Low-frequency fine-structure cues allow for the online use of lexical stress during spoken-word recognition in spectrally degraded speech Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 141, no. 1, pp. 373–382, 2017. @article{Kong2017, English listeners use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress during spoken-word recognition. Prosodic cues are, however, less salient in spectrally degraded speech, as provided by cochlear implants. The present study examined how spectral degradation with and without low-frequency fine-structure information affects normal-hearing listeners' ability to benefit from suprasegmental cues to lexical stress in online spoken-word recognition. To simulate electric hearing, an eight-channel vocoder spectrally degraded the stimuli while preserving temporal envelope information. Additional lowpass-filtered speech was presented to the opposite ear to simulate bimodal hearing. Using a visual world paradigm, listeners' eye fixations to four printed words (target, competitor, two distractors) were tracked, while hearing a word. The target and competitor overlapped segmentally in their first two syllables but mismatched suprasegmentally in their first syllables, as the initial syllable received primary stress in one word and secondary stress in the other (e.g., "'admiral," "'admi'ration"). In the vocoder-only condition, listeners were unable to use lexical stress to recognize targets before segmental information disambiguated them from competitors. With additional lowpass-filtered speech, however, listeners efficiently processed prosodic information to speed up online word recognition. Low-frequency fine-structure cues in simulated bimodal hearing allowed listeners to benefit from suprasegmental cues to lexical stress during word recognition. |
Arnout W. Koornneef; Iris Mulders Can we ‘read' the eye-movement patterns of readers? Unraveling the relationship between reading profiles and processing strategies Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 39–56, 2017. @article{Koornneef2017, In an eye-tracking experiment we examined the risky reading hypothesis, in which long saccades and many regressions are considered to be indicative of a proactive reading style (Rayner et al. in Psychol Aging 21(3):448, 2006; Psychol Aging 24(3):755, 2009). We did so by presenting short texts-that confirmed or disconfirmed verb-based implicit causality expectations-to two types of readers: proactive readers (long saccades, many regressions) and conservative readers (short saccades, few regressions). Whereas proactive readers used implicit causality information to predict upcoming referents, and slowed down immediately when they encountered a pronoun that was inconsistent with these verb-based expectations, the conservative readers slowed down much later in the sentence. These findings were consistent with the predictions of the risky reading hypothesis and as such presented novel evidence for the general idea that the eye-movement profile of readers reveals valuable information about their processing strategy. |
Daniel Schmidtke; Kazunaga Matsuki; Victor Kuperman Surviving blind decomposition: A distributional analysis of the time-course of complex word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 11, pp. 1793–1820, 2017. @article{Schmidtke2017, The current study addresses a discrepancy in the psycholinguistic literature about the chronology of information processing during the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. Form-then-meaning accounts of complex word recognition claim that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings, whereas form-and-meaning models posit that recognition of complex word forms involves the simultaneous access of morphological and semantic information. The study reported here addresses this theoretical discrepancy by applying a nonparametric distributional technique of survival analysis (Reingold & Sheridan, 2014) to 2 behavioral measures of complex word processing. Across 7 experiments reported here, this technique is employed to estimate the point in time at which orthographic, morphological, and semantic variables exert their earliest discernible influence on lexical decision RTs and eye movement fixation durations. Contrary to form-then-meaning predictions, Experiments 1–4 reveal that surface frequency is the earliest lexical variable to exert a demonstrable influence on lexical decision RTs for English and Dutch derived words (e.g., badness; bad ⫹ ness), English pseudoderived words (e.g., wander; wand ⫹ er) and morphologically simple control words (e.g., ballad; ball ⫹ ad). Furthermore, for derived word processing across lexical decision and eye-tracking paradigms (Experiments 1–2; 5–7), semantic effects emerge early in the time-course of word recognition, and their effects either precede or emerge simultaneously with morphological effects. These results are not consistent with the premises of the form-then-meaning view of complex word recognition, but are convergent with a form-and-meaning account of complex word recognition. |
Merel C. J. Scholman; Hannah Rohde; Vera Demberg “On the one hand” as a cue to anticipate upcoming discourse structure Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 97, pp. 47–60, 2017. @article{Scholman2017, Research has shown that people anticipate upcoming linguistic content, but most work to date has focused on relatively short-range expectation-driven processes within the current sentence or between adjacent sentences. We use the discourse marker On the one hand to test whether comprehenders maintain expectations regarding upcoming content in discourse representations that span multiple sentences. Three experiments show that comprehenders anticipate more than just On the other hand; rather, they keep track of embedded constituents and establish non-local dependencies. Our results show that comprehenders disprefer a subsequent contrast marked with On the other hand when a passage has already provided intervening content that establishes an appropriate contrast with On the one hand. Furthermore, comprehenders maintain their expectation for an upcoming contrast across intervening material, even if the embedded constituent itself contains contrast. The results are taken to support expectation-driven models of processing in which comprehenders posit and maintain structural representations of discourse structure. |
Petra B. Schumacher; Leah Roberts; Juhani Järvikivi Agentivity drives real-time pronoun resolution: Evidence from German er and der Journal Article In: Lingua, vol. 185, pp. 25–41, 2017. @article{Schumacher2017, We report two experiments on the referential resolution of the German subject pronoun er and the demonstrative der (‘he'). Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the effects of grammatical role, thematic role and the information status of potential referents in the antecedent clause operationalized by word-order (canonical/non-canonical), in the context of active–accusative verbs (Exp. 1) and dative-experiencer verbs (Exp. 2). In information-structurally neutral contexts, er prefers the proto-agent and der the proto-patient. This suggests that agentivity is a better predictor for pronoun resolution than subjecthood or sentence topic as previously proposed. It further supports the claim that agentivity is a core property of language processing and it more generally substantiates the proposal from cognitive sciences that agentivity represents core knowledge of the human attentional system. With non-canonical antecedent clauses, because they lack alignment of prominence features, interpretive preferences become less stable, indicating that multiple cues are involved in pronoun resolution. The data further suggest that the demonstrative pronoun elicits more reliable interpretive biases than the personal pronoun. |
Florian Schwarz; Sonja Tiemann Presupposition projection in online processing Journal Article In: Journal of Semantics, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 61–106, 2017. @article{Schwarz2017, A central aspect of language comprehension is that hearers integrate incoming lin- guistic content both with the rest of the current sentence and the larger discourse con- text. Presuppositions crucially interact with both intra- and inter-sentential context in intricate ways, which makes their study especially useful in this regard. We present a series of experiments investigating the time-course of interpreting presuppositions in online comprehension and the impact that so-called presupposition projection has on this in cases where presuppositions appear in embedded environments. We find im- mediate delays in eye tracking reading times when the presupposition of German wieder (‘again') is not supported by the context, but only for unembedded occur- rences of wieder . Further evidence from a rating experiment and a stops-making- sense study supports our interpretation of this result to the effect that global presup- positions of embedded presupposition triggers are not immediately available in pro- cessing. A second reading time experiment explores the effects of embedding further by providing presuppositional support in different locations in contexts with a more complex structure involving conditionals. We find longer reading times when the sup- port is more distant, measured in terms of the number of projection steps posited by Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Altogether, the results suggest that presup- position projection is a cognitively effortful process, and are thus consistent with the- oretical accounts that reflect this in terms of the complexity of the representations involved in the different types of contexts, while other accounts that are more neutral in this regard need to be supplemented by additional assumptions or alternative ex- planations for the observed effects. On the more general level of discourse processing models, these results suggest that there is even more structure relevant to cognitive processes at a level between the surface representation and the purely semantic level (e.g. the commonly assumed level of a text-base) than previously assumed. |
Wei Shen; Qingqing Qu; Aiping Ni; Junyi Zhou; Xingshan Li The time course of morphological processing during spoken word recognition in Chinese Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1957–1963, 2017. @article{Shen2017, We investigated the time course of morphological processing during spoken word recognition using the printed-word paradigm. Chinese participants were asked to listen to a spoken disyllabic compound word while simultaneously viewing a printed-word display. Each visual display consisted of three printed words: a semantic associate of the first constituent of the compound word (morphemic competitor), a semantic associate of the whole compound word (whole-word competitor), and an unrelated word (distractor). Participants were directed to detect whether the spoken target word was on the visual display. Results indicated that both the morphemic and whole-word competitors attracted more fixations than the distractor. More importantly, the morphemic competitor began to diverge from the distractor immediately at the acoustic offset of the first constituent, which was earlier than the whole-word competitor. These results suggest that lexical access to the auditory word is incremental and morphological processing (i.e., semantic access to the first constituent) that occurs at an early processing stage before access to the representation of the whole word in Chinese. |
Susana Silva; Filomena Inácio; Vasiliki Folia; Karl Magnus Petersson Eye movements in implicit artificial grammar learning Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 9, pp. 1387–1402, 2017. @article{Silva2017, Artificial grammar learning (AGL) has been probed with forced-choice behavioral tests (active tests). Recent attempts to probe the outcomes of learning (implicitly acquired knowledge) with eye-movement responses (passive tests) have shown null results. However, these latter studies have not tested for sensitivity effects, for example, increased eye movements on a printed violation. In this study, we tested for sensitivity effects in AGL tests with (Experiment 1) and without (Experiment 2) concurrent active tests (preference- and grammaticality classification) in an eye-tracking experiment. Eye movements discriminated between sequence types in passive tests and more so in active tests. The eye-movement profile did not differ between preference and grammaticality classification, and it resembled sensitivity effects commonly observed in natural syntax processing. Our findings show that the outcomes of implicit structured sequence learning can be characterized in eye tracking. More specifically, whole trial measures (dwell time, number of fixations) showed robust AGL effects, whereas first-pass measures (first-fixation duration) did not. Furthermore, our findings strengthen the link between artificial and natural syntax processing, and they shed light on the factors that determine performance differences in preference and grammaticality classification tests. |
Alastair C. Smith; Padraic Monaghan; Falk Huettig The multimodal nature of spoken word processing in the visual world: Testing the predictions of alternative models of multimodal integration Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 93, pp. 276–303, 2017. @article{Smith2017, Ambiguity in natural language is ubiquitous, yet spoken communication is effective due to integration of information carried in the speech signal with information available in the surrounding multimodal landscape. Language mediated visual attention requires visual and linguistic information integration and has thus been used to examine properties of the architecture supporting multimodal processing during spoken language comprehension. In this paper we test predictions generated by alternative models of this multimodal system. A model (TRACE) in which multimodal information is combined at the point of the lexical representations of words generated predictions of a stronger effect of phonological rhyme relative to semantic and visual information on gaze behaviour, whereas a model in which sub-lexical information can interact across modalities (MIM) predicted a greater influence of visual and semantic information, compared to phonological rhyme. Two visual world experiments designed to test these predictions offer support for sub-lexical multimodal interaction during online language processing. |
Joshua Snell; Martijn Meeter; Jonathan Grainger Evidence for simultaneous syntactic processing of multiple words during reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. e0173720, 2017. @article{Snell2017, A hotly debated issue in reading research concerns the extent to which readers process parafoveal words, and how parafoveal information might influence foveal word recognition. We investigated syntactic word processing both in sentence reading and in reading isolated foveal words when these were flanked by parafoveal words. In Experiment 1 we found a syntactic parafoveal preview benefit in sentence reading, meaning that fixation durations on target words were decreased when there was a syntactically congruent preview word at the target location (n) during the fixation on the pre-target (n-1). In Experiment 2 we used a flanker paradigm in which participants had to classify foveal target words as either noun or verb, when those targets were flanked by syntactically congruent or incongruent words (stimulus on-time 170 ms). Lower response times and error rates in the congruent condition suggested that higher-order (syntactic) information can be integrated across foveal and parafoveal words. Although higher-order parafoveal-on-foveal effects have been elusive in sentence reading, results from our flanker paradigm show that the reading system can extract higher-order information from multiple words in a single glance. We propose a model of reading to account for the present findings. |
Joshua Snell; Françoise Vitu; Jonathan Grainger Integration of parafoveal orthographic information during foveal word reading: Beyond the sub-lexical level? Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 70, no. 10, pp. 1984–1996, 2017. @article{Snell2017a, Prior research has shown that processing of a given target word is facilitated by the simultaneous presentation of orthographically related stimuli in the parafovea. Here we investigate the nature of such spatial integration processes by presenting orthographic neighbours of target words in the parafovea, considering that neighbours have been shown to inhibit, rather than facilitate, recognition of target words in foveal masked priming research. In Experiment 1, we used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm to manipulate the parafoveal information subjects received while they fixated a target word within a sentence. In Experiment 2, we used the Flanking Letters Lexical Decision paradigm to manipulate parafoveal information while subjects read isolated words. Parafoveal words were either a higher-frequency orthographic neighbour of targets words (e.g., blue-blur) or a high-frequency unrelated word (e.g., hand-blur). We found that parafoveal orthographic neighbours facilitated, rather than inhibited, processing of the target. Thus, the present findings provide further evidence that orthographic information is integrated across multiple words and suggest that either the integration process does not enable simultaneous access to those words' lexical representations, or that lexical representations activated by spatially distinct stimuli do not compete for recognition. |
Iya Khelm Price; Jeffrey Witzel Sources of relative clause processing difficulty: Evidence from Russian Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 97, pp. 208–244, 2017. @article{Price2017a, This study investigates the sources of processing difficulty in complex sentences involving relative clauses (RCs). Self-paced reading and eye tracking were used to test the comprehension of Russian subject-and object-extracted RCs (SRCs and ORCs) that had the same word-order configuration, but different noun phrase (NP) types (full NPs vs. pronouns) in the embedded clause. In both SRCs and ORCs, this NP intervened between the modified noun and the RC verb. A corpus analysis and acceptability rating experiment indicated different frequency/preference profiles for this word order depending on RC type and embedded NP type. In line with these profiles, processing difficulty was revealed early in the embedded clause for less frequent/dispreferred constructions. Later in the embedded clause, the processing of the RC verb was comparable for both SRCs and ORCs when the same number of NP arguments was available for integration. While there were no indications of an ORC penalty at or after this verb, late-stage comprehension difficulty was found for full-NP ORCs, but not for their pronominal counterparts, suggesting that similarity-based interference in combination with ORC structure influences the overall comprehension of these sentences. Taken together, these findings support a hybrid model under which independent sources of processing difficulty affect different stages of RC comprehension. |
Silvia Primativo; Jamie Reilly; Sebastian J. Crutch Abstract conceptual feature ratings predict gaze within written word arrays: Evidence from a visual wor(l)d paradigm Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 659–685, 2017. @article{Primativo2017a, The Abstract Conceptual Feature (ACF) framework predicts that word meaning is represented within a high-dimensional semantic space bounded by weighted contributions of perceptual, affective, and encyclopedic information. The ACF, like latent semantic analysis, is amenable to distance metrics between any two words. We applied predictions of the ACF framework to abstract words using eyetracking via an adaptation of the classical "visual word paradigm" (VWP). Healthy adults (n = 20) selected the lexical item most related to a probe word in a 4-item written word array comprising the target and three distractors. The relation between the probe and each of the four words was determined using the semantic distance metrics derived from ACF ratings. Eye movement data indicated that the word that was most semantically related to the probe received more and longer fixations relative to distractors. Importantly, in sets where participants did not provide an overt behavioral response, the fixation rates were nonetheless significantly higher for targets than distractors, closely resembling trials where an expected response was given. Furthermore, ACF ratings which are based on individual words predicted eye fixation metrics of probe-target similarity at least as well as latent semantic analysis ratings which are based on word co-occurrence. The results provide further validation of Euclidean distance metrics derived from ACF ratings as a measure of one facet of the semantic relatedness of abstract words and suggest that they represent a reasonable approximation of the organization of abstract conceptual space. The data are also compatible with the broad notion that multiple sources of information (not restricted to sensorimotor and emotion information) shape the organization of abstract concepts. While the adapted "VWP" is potentially a more metacognitive task than the classical visual world paradigm, we argue that it offers potential utility for studying abstract word comprehension. |
Carolyn Quam; Sarah C. Creel Tone attrition in Mandarin speakers of varying English proficiency Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 60, pp. 293–305, 2017. @article{Quam2017, Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the degree of dominance of Mandarin–English bilinguals' languages affects phonetic processing of tone content in their native language, Mandarin. Method: We tested 72 Mandarin–English bilingual college students with a range of language-dominance profiles in the 2 languages and ages of acquisition of English. Participants viewed 2 photographs at a time while hearing a familiar Mandarin word referring to 1 photograph. The names of the 2 photographs diverged in tone, vowels, or both. Word recognition was evaluated using clicking accuracy, reaction times, and an online recognition measure (gaze) and was compared in the 3conditions. Results: Relative proficiency in English was correlated with reduced word recognition success in tone-disambiguated trials, but not in vowel-disambiguated trials, across all 3 dependent measures. This selective attrition for tone content emerged even though all bilinguals had learned Mandarin from birth. Lengthy experience with English thus weakened tone use. Conclusions: This finding has implications for the question of the extent to which bilinguals' 2 phonetic systems interact. It suggests that bilinguals may not process pitch information language-specifically and that processing strategies from the dominant language may affect phonetic processing in the nondominant language—even when the latter was learned natively. |
Carolyn Quam; Sarah C. Creel Mandarin-English bilinguals process lexical tones in newly learned words in accordance with the language context Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. e0169001, 2017. @article{Quam2017a, Previous research has mainly considered the impact of tone-language experience on ability to discriminate linguistic pitch, but proficient bilingual listening requires differential processing of sound variation in each language context. Here, we ask whether Mandarin-English bilinguals, for whom pitch indicates word distinctions in one language but not the other, can process pitch differently in a Mandarin context vs. an English context. Across three eye-tracked word-learning experiments, results indicated that tone-intonation bilinguals process tone in accordance with the language context. In Experiment 1, 51 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 26 English speakers without tone experience were taught Mandarin-compatible novel words with tones. Mandarin-English bilinguals out-performed English speakers, and, for bilinguals, overall accuracy was correlated with Mandarin dominance. Experiment 2 taught 24 Mandarin-English bilinguals and 25 English speakers novel words with Mandarin-like tones, but English-like phonemes and phonotactics. The Mandarin-dominance advantages observed in Experiment 1 disappeared when words were English-like. Experiment 3 contrasted Mandarin-like vs. English-like words in a within-subjects design, providing even stronger evidence that bilinguals can process tone language-specifically. Bilinguals (N = 58), regardless of language dominance, attended more to tone than English speakers without Mandarin experience (N = 28), but only when words were Mandarin-like—not when they were English-like. Mandarin-English bilinguals thus tailor tone processing to the within-word language context. |
Hugh Rabagliati; Alexander Robertson How do children learn to avoid referential ambiguity? Insights from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 94, pp. 15–27, 2017. @article{Rabagliati2017, Children have considerable difficulty producing informative and unambiguous referring expressions, a fact that still lacks a full explanation. Potential insight can come from psycholinguistic models of ambiguity avoidance in adults, which suggest that, before describing any scene, speakers pro-actively monitor for some — but not all — types of potential ambiguity, and then subsequently monitor whether their just-produced expression provides an ambiguous description. Our experiments used eye tracking to assess the developing roles of these skills in children's referential communication. Experiment 1 shows that adults' eye movements can index the processes of both pro-active and self-monitoring. Experiments 2 and 3 show that children (n = 110) typically do not pro-actively monitor for potential ambiguity, although they do show evidence of pro-active monitoring on the occasions when they produce informative expressions. However, we do find evidence that children consistently monitor their own descriptions for ambiguity, even though they rarely correct their utterances. We propose that the process of self-monitoring might act as a learning signal, that guides children as they acquire the ability to monitor pro-actively. |
Ileana Ratiu; Tamiko Azuma Language control in bilingual adults with and without history of mild traumatic brain injury Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 166, pp. 29–39, 2017. @article{Ratiu2017a, Adults with a history of traumatic brain injury often show deficits in executive functioning (EF), including the ability to inhibit, switch, and attend to tasks. These abilities are critical for language processing in bilinguals. This study examined the effect of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) on EF and language processing in bilinguals using behavioral and eye-tracking measures. Twenty-two bilinguals with a history of mTBI and twenty healthy control bilinguals were administered executive function and language processing tasks. Bilinguals with a history of mTBI showed deficits in specific EFs and had higher rates of language processing errors than healthy control bilinguals. Additionally, individuals with a history of mTBI have different patterns of eye movements during reading than healthy control bilinguals. These data suggest that language processing deficits are related to underlying EF abilities. The findings provide important information regarding specific EF and language control deficits in bilinguals with a history mTBI. |
Rachel A. Ryskin; Zhenghan Qi; Melissa C. Duff; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Verb biases are shaped through lifelong learning Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 781–794, 2017. @article{Ryskin2017, Verbs often participate in more than 1 syntactic structure, but individual verbs can be biased in terms of whether they are used more often with 1 structure or the other. For instance, in a sentence such as "Bop the bunny with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate an instrument with which to "bop," rather than which "bunny" to bop. Conversely, in a sentence such as "Choose the cow with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate which "cow" to choose. An open question is where these biases come from and whether they continue to be shaped in adulthood in a way that has lasting consequences for real-time processing of language. In Experiment 1 we replicated previous findings that these language-wide biases guide online syntactic processing in a computer-based visual-world paradigm. In Experiment 2, we tested the malleability of these biases by exposing adults to initially unbiased verbs situated in unambiguous contexts that led to either instrument or modifier interpretations. During test, participants interpreted sentences containing either modifier- or instrument-trained verbs in ambiguous contexts. Eye-movement and action data show that participants' considerations of the candidate interpretations of the ambiguous with-phrases were guided by the newly learned verb biases. These results suggest that co-occurrence information about specific verbs and syntactic structures embedded in language experiences plays a role in forming, and continuously shaping, the verb biases that constitute a part of the broader representation of the language. |
Alix Kowalski; Yi Ting Huang Predicting and priming thematic roles: Flexible use of verbal and nonverbal cues during relative clause comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 9, pp. 1341–1351, 2017. @article{Kowalski2017, Relative-clause sentences (RCs) have been a key test case for psycholinguistic models of comprehension. While object-relative clauses (e.g., ORCs: "The bear that 'the horse' . . .") are distinguished from subject-relative clauses (SRCs) after the second noun phrase (NP2; e.g., SRCs: "The bear that 'pushed' . . ."), role assignments are often delayed until the embedded verb (e.g., ". . . 'pushed' ate the sandwich"). This contrasts with overwhelming evidence of incremental role assignment in other garden-path sentences. The current study investigates how contextual factors modulate reliance on verbal and nonverbal cues. Using a visual-world paradigm, participants saw preceding discourse contexts that highlighted relevant roles within events (e.g., pusher, pushee). Nevertheless, role assignment for ORCs remained delayed until the embedded verb (Experiment 1). However, role assignment for ORCs occurred before the embedded verb when additional linguistic input was provided by an adverb (Experiment 2). Finally, when the likelihood of encountering RCs increased within the experimental context, role immediate assignment for ORCs was observed after NP2 (Experiment 3). Together, these findings suggest that real-time role assignment often prefers verbal cues, but can also flexibly adapt to the statistical properties of the local context. |
Edmundo Kronmüller; Ira Noveck; Natalia Rivera; Francisco Jaume-Guazzini; Dale Barr The positive side of a negative reference: The delay between linguistic processing and common ground Journal Article In: Royal Society Open Science, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1–14, 2017. @article{Kronmueller2017, Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a novel looking object as the jellyfish and, once identified, the listener will too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is a subject of debate. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, i.e. without needing to keep track of the speaker. To test predictions from each account, we used visual-world eyetracking, which allows observations in real time, during a standard referential communication task. Participants had to select objects based on instructions from two speakers. In the critical condition, listeners sought an object with a negative reference such as not the jellyfish. We aimed to determine the extent to which listeners rely on the linguistic input, common ground or both. We found that initial interpretations were based on linguistic processing only and that common ground considerations do emerge but only after 1000 ms. Our findings support the idea that-at least temporally-linguistic processing can be isolated from common ground. |
Sol Lago; Shayne Sloggett; Zoe Schlueter; Wing Yee Chow; Alexander Williams; Ellen Lau; Colin Phillips Coreference and antecedent representation across languages Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 795–817, 2017. @article{Lago2017, Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their antecedent noun. In contrast, in languages without syntactic gender such as English, lexical retrieval might be unnecessary. We used eye-tracking while reading to examine whether antecedent retrieval involves rapid semantic and phonological reactivation. We compared German and English. In German, we found early sensitivity to the semantic but not to the phonological features of the pronoun's antecedent. In English, readers did not immediately show either semantic or phonological effects specific to coreference. We propose that early semantic facilitation arises due to syntactic gender reactivation, and that antecedent retrieval varies cross-linguistically depending on the type of information relevant to the grammar of each language. |
Jiyeon Lee Time course of lexicalization during sentence production in Parkinson's Disease: Eye-tracking while speaking Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 60, no. 4, pp. 924–936, 2017. @article{Lee2017b, Purpose: Growing evidence suggests that sentence formulation is affected in Parkinson's disease (PD); however, how speakers with PD coordinate sentence planning and speaking remains unclear. Within 2 competing models of sentence production, this study examined whether speakers with PD show advanced buffering of words to minimize disfluencies and increased demands during speech or whether they plan one word at a time, compromising accuracy and fluency of speech. Method: Participants described 3 computer-displayed pictures using the sentence "the A and the B are above the C." Name agreement (codability) was varied to be high (clock) or low (sofa/couch) for each object position (A, B, C), affecting difficulty of lexical selection. Participants' gaze durations to each object were recorded. Results: Speakers with PD showed incremental word-by-word planning, retrieving only the first lexical item (A) before speech onset, similar to controls. However, they produced greater word-finding errors and disfluencies compared to controls for the low-codable pictures, but not for high-codable pictures. Conclusions: These findings suggest that by following word-by-word incremental production, speakers with PD compromise fluency and accuracy of speech to a greater extent than healthy older speakers and that PD is associated with impaired inhibitory control during lexical selection. |
Miseon Lee Incremental processing of negation: Evidence from Korean Journal Article In: Linguistic Research, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 205–224, 2017. @article{Lee2017c, The present study seeks to investigate whether negation is incrementally comprehended in Korean. Many of previous behavioral and neurological studies have found delays and errors in the comprehension of English negation. However, more recent studies have reported that negative sentences are incrementally processed as fast and accurately as affirmative sentences, given a pragmatically felicitous context. This discrepancy suggests that the poor comprehension of negation is mainly due to the absence of a felicitous context. In line with this, our hypothesis was that pragmatic felicity could help negation processing by establishing expectancies for using negation. In an eye-tracking task, we found that twenty-four Korean-speaking participants were equally fast and accurate in comprehending both affirmatives and negatives within a discourse context. Fixation analyses further showed that shortly after hearing the verb in a scrambled sentence, participants distinguished between negative and affirmative interpretations. These findings support the hypothesis that given a felicitous context, negation is incrementally processed by rapidly using the polarity information of the verb. |
Mallorie Leinenger; Mark Myslín; Keith Rayner; Roger P. Levy Do resource constraints affect lexical processing? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 93, pp. 82–103, 2017. @article{Leinenger2017, Human language is massively ambiguous, yet we are generally able to identify the intended meanings of the sentences we hear and read quickly and accurately. How we manage and resolve ambiguity incrementally during real-time language comprehension given our cognitive resources and constraints is a major question in human cognition. Previous research investigating resource constraints on lexical ambiguity resolution has yielded conflicting results. Here we present results from two experiments in which we recorded eye movements to test for evidence of resource constraints during lexical ambiguity resolution. We embedded moderately biased homographs in sentences with neutral prior context and either long or short regions of text before disambiguation to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. The length of intervening material had no effect on ease of disambiguation. Instead, we found only a main effect of meaning at disambiguation, such that disambiguating to the subordinate meaning of the homograph was more difficult—results consistent with the reordered access model and contemporary probabilistic models, but inconsistent with the capacity-constrained model. |
Alexander Leube; Katharina Rifai; Siegfried Wahl Sampling rate influences saccade detection in mobile eye tracking of a reading task Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 3, 2017. @article{Leube2017, The purpose of this study was to compare saccade detection characteristics in two mobile eye trackers with different sampling rates in a natural task. Gaze data of 11 participants were recorded in one 60 Hz and one 120 Hz mobile eye tracker and compared directly to the saccades detected by a 1000 HZ stationary tracker while a reading task was performed. Saccades and fixations were detected using a velocity based algorithm and their properties analyzed. Results showed that there was no significant difference in the number of detect- ed fixations but mean fixation durations differed between the 60 Hz mobile and the sta- tionary eye tracker. The 120 Hz mobile eye tracker showed a significant increase in the detection rate of saccades and an improved estimation of the mean saccade duration, com- pared to the 60 Hz eye tracker. To conclude, for the detection and analysis of fast eye movements, such as saccades, it is better to use a 120 Hz mobile eye tracker. |
Fang Li; Willem M. Mak; Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul; Ted J. M. Sanders On the online effects of subjectivity encoded in causal connectives Journal Article In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 34–57, 2017. @article{Li2017d, Causal relations between sentences differ in terms of subjectivity: They can be objective (based on facts) or subjective (based on reasoning). Subjective relations lead to longer reading times than objective relations. Causal connectives differ in the degree to which they encode this subjectivity. The Chinese connectives kejian 'so' and yin'er 'so' specify a high and low degree of subjectivity, respectively, whereas suoyi 'so' is underspecified for subjectivity. In an eye-tracking experiment we compare the effect of the specificity of these connectives in subjective and objective relations. In objective relations, the specificity of the connective has no effect on reading times. In subjective relations, reading times are shorter in sentences with the specified connective kejian than in sentences with the underspecified connective suoyi. These results suggest that readers prefer to interpret a relation as objective. Computing subjective relations requires extra processing time, which is diminished when the connective encodes the subjectivity. |
Lin Li; Sha Li; Jingxin Wang; Victoria A. McGowan; Pingping Liu; Timothy R. Jordan; Kevin B. Paterson Aging and the optimal viewing position effect in visual word recognition: Evidence from English Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 367–376, 2017. @article{Li2017c, Words are recognized most efficiently by young adults when fixated at an optimal viewing position (OVP), which for English is between a word's beginning and middle letters. How this OVP effect changes with age is unknown but may differ for older adults due to visual declines in later life. Accordingly, a lexical decision experiment was conducted in which short (5-letter) and long (9-letter) words were fixated at various letter positions. The older adults produced slower responses. But, crucially, effects of fixation location for each word-length did not differ substantially across age groups, indicating that OVP effects are preserved in older age. |
Feifei Liang; Hazel I. Blythe; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Xin Li; Chuanli Zang; Simon P. Liversedge The role of character positional frequency on Chinese word learning during natural reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 11, pp. e0187656, 2017. @article{Liang2017a, Readers' eye movements were recorded to examine the role of character positional frequency on Chinese lexical acquisition during reading and its possible modulation by word spacing. In Experiment 1, three types of pseudowords were constructed based on each character's positional frequency, providing congruent, incongruent, and no positional word segmentation information. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences, for the learning and the test phases. In the learning phase, half the participants read sentences in word-spaced format, and half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read sentences in unspaced format. The results showed an inhibitory effect of character positional frequency upon the efficiency of word learning when processing incongruent pseudowords both in the learning and test phase, and also showed facilitatory effect of word spacing in the learning phase, but not at test. Most importantly, these two characteristics exerted independent influences on word segmentation. In Experiment 2, three analogous types of pseudowords were created whilst controlling for orthographic neighborhood size. The results of the two experiments were consistent, except that the effect of character positional frequency was absent in the test phase in Experiment 2. We argue that the positional frequency of a word's constituent characters may influence the character-to-word assignment in a process that likely incorporates both lexical segmentation and identification. |
Renske S. Hoedemaker; Jessica Ernst; Antje S. Meyer; Eva Belke Language production in a shared task: Cumulative Semantic Interference from self- and other-produced context words Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 172, pp. 55–63, 2017. @article{Hoedemaker2017, This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this paradigm, naming latencies have been found to increase for successive presentations of exemplars from the same category, a phenomenon known as Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI). As expected, the joint-naming task showed a within-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies increased as a function of the number of category exemplars named previously by the participant (self-produced items). Crucially, we also observed an across-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies slowed as a function of the number of category members named by the participant's task partner (other-produced items). The magnitude of the across-speaker CSI effect did not vary as a function of whether or not the listening participant could see the pictures their partner was naming. The observation of across-speaker CSI suggests that the effect originates at the conceptual level of the language system, as proposed by Belke's (2013) Conceptual Accumulation account. Whereas self-produced and other-produced words both resulted in a CSI effect on naming latencies, post-experiment free recall rates were higher for self-produced than other-produced items. Together, these results suggest that both speaking and listening result in implicit learning at the conceptual level of the language system but that these effects are independent of explicit learning as indicated by item recall. |
Renske S. Hoedemaker; Peter C. Gordon The onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid recognition of visual words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 881–902, 2017. @article{Hoedemaker2017a, In 2 experiments, we assessed the effects of response latency and task-induced goals on the onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid processing of visual words as revealed by ocular response tasks. In Experiment 1 (ocular lexical decision task), participants performed a lexical decision task using eye movement responses on a sequence of 4 words. In Experiment 2, the same words were encoded for an episodic recognition memory task that did not require a metalinguistic judgment. For both tasks, survival analyses showed that the earliest observable effect (divergence point [DP]) of semantic priming on target-word reading times occurred at approximately 260 ms, and ex-Gaussian distribution fits revealed that the magnitude of the priming effect increased as a function of response time. Together, these distributional effects of semantic priming suggest that the influence of the prime increases when target processing is more effortful. This effect does not require that the task include a metalinguistic judgment; manipulation of the task goals across experiments affected the overall response speed but not the location of the DP or the overall distributional pattern of the priming effect. These results are more readily explained as the result of a retrospective, rather than a prospective, priming mechanism and are consistent with compound-cue models of semantic priming. |
Sven Hohenstein; Hannes Matuschek; Reinhold Kliegl Linked linear mixed models: A joint analysis of fixation locations and fixation durations in natural reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 637–651, 2017. @article{Hohenstein2017, The complexity of eye-movement control during reading allows measurement of many dependent variables, the most prominent ones being fixation durations and their locations in words. In current practice, either variable may serve as dependent variable or covariate for the other in linear mixed models (LMMs) featuring also psycholinguistic covariates of word recognition and sentence comprehension. Rather than analyzing fixation location and duration with separate LMMs, we propose linking the two according to their sequential dependency. Specifically, we include predicted fixation location (estimated in the first LMM from psycholinguistic covariates) and its associated residual fixation location as covariates in the second, fixation-duration LMM. This linked LMM affords a distinction between direct and indirect effects (mediated through fixation location) of psycholinguistic covariates on fixation durations. Results confirm the robustness of distributed processing in the perceptual span. They also offer a resolution of the paradox of the inverted optimal viewing position (IOVP) effect (i.e., longer fixation durations in the center than at the beginning and end of words) although the opposite (i.e., an OVP effect) is predicted from default assumptions of psycholinguistic processing efficiency: The IOVP effect in fixation durations is due to the residual fixation-location covariate, presumably driven primarily by saccadic error, and the OVP effect (at least the left part of it) is uncovered with the predicted fixation-location covariate, capturing the indirect effects of psycholinguistic covariates. We expect that linked LMMs will be useful for the analysis of other dynamically related multiple outcomes, a conundrum of most psychonomic research. |
Philippa L. Howard; Simon P. Liversedge; Valerie Benson Processing of co-reference in autism spectrum disorder Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 1968–1980, 2017. @article{Howard2017, Accuracy for reading comprehension and inferencing tasks has previously been reported as reduced for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), relative to typically developing (TD) controls. In this study, we used an eye movements and reading paradigm to examine whether this difference in performance accuracy is underpinned by differences in the inferential work required to compute a co-referential link. Participants read two sentences that contained a category noun (e.g., bird) that was preceded by and co-referred to an exemplar that was either typical (e.g., pigeon) or atypical (e.g., penguin). Both TD and ASD participants showed an effect of typicality for gaze durations upon the category noun, with longer times being observed when the exemplar was atypical, in comparison to typical. No group differences or interactions were detected for target processing, and verbal language proficiency was found to predict general reading and inferential skill. The only difference between groups was that individuals with ASD engaged in more re-reading than TD participants. These data suggest that readers with ASD do not differ in the efficiency with which they compute anaphoric links on-line during reading. |
Philippa L. Howard; Simon P. Liversedge; Valerie Benson Investigating the use of world knowledge during on-line comprehension in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 2039–2053, 2017. @article{Howard2017a, The on-line use of world knowledge during reading was examined in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Both ASD and typically developed adults read sentences that included plausible, implausible and anomalous thematic relations, as their eye movements were monitored. No group differences in the speed of detection of the anomalous violations were found, but the ASD group showed a delay in detection of implausible thematic relations. These findings suggest that there are subtle differences in the speed of world knowledge processing during reading in ASD. |
Philippa L. Howard; Simon P. Liversedge; Valerie Benson Benchmark eye movement effects during natural reading in autism spectrum disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 109–127, 2017. @article{Howard2017b, In 2 experiments, eye tracking methodology was used to assess on-line lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In Experiment 1, lexical identification was examined by manipulating the frequency of target words. Both typically developed (TD) and ASD readers showed normal frequency effects, suggesting that the processes TD and ASD readers engage in to identify words are comparable. In Experiment 2, syntactic parsing and semantic interpretation requiring the on-line use of world knowledge were examined, by having participants read garden path sentences containing an ambiguous prepositional phrase. Both groups showed normal garden path effects when reading low-attached sentences and the time course of reading disruption was comparable between groups. This suggests that not only do ASD readers hold similar syntactic preferences to TD readers, but also that they use world knowledge on-line during reading. Together, these experiments demonstrate that the initial construction of sentence interpretation appears to be intact in ASD. However, the finding that ASD readers skip target words less often in Experiment 2, and take longer to read sentences during second pass for both experiments, suggests that they adopt a more cautious reading strategy and take longer to evaluate their sentence interpretation prior to making a manual response. |
Anneline Huck; Robin L. Thompson; Madeline Cruice; Jane Marshall The influence of sense-contingent argument structure frequencies on ambiguity resolution in aphasia Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 100, pp. 171–194, 2017. @article{Huck2017a, Verbs with multiple senses can show varying argument structure frequencies, depending on the underlying sense. When acknowledge is used to mean ‘recognise', it takes a direct object (DO), but when it is used to mean ‘admit' it prefers a sentence complement (SC). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether people with aphasia (PWA) can exploit such meaning-structure probabilities during the reading of temporarily ambiguous sentences, as demonstrated for neurologically healthy individuals (NHI) in a self-paced reading study (Hare et al., 2003). Eleven people with mild or moderate aphasia and eleven neurologically healthy control participants read sentences while their eyes were tracked. Using adapted materials from the study by Hare et al. target sentences containing an SC structure (e.g. He acknowledged (that) his friends would probably help him a lot) were presented following a context prime that biased either a direct object (DO-bias) or sentence complement (SC-bias) reading of the verbs. Half of the stimuli sentences did not contain that so made the post verbal noun phrase (his friends) structurally ambiguous. Both groups of participants were influenced by structural ambiguity as well as by the context bias, indicating that PWA can, like NHI, use their knowledge of a verb's sense-based argument structure frequency during online sentence reading. However, the individuals with aphasia showed delayed reading patterns and some individual differences in their sensitivity to context and ambiguity cues. These differences compared to the NHI may contribute to difficulties in sentence comprehension in aphasia. |
Anneline Huck; Robin L. Thompson; Madeline Cruice; Jane Marshall Effects of word frequency and contextual predictability on sentence reading in aphasia: An eye movement analysis Journal Article In: Aphasiology, vol. 31, no. 11, pp. 1307–1332, 2017. @article{Huck2017, Background: Mild reading difficulties are a pervasive symptom of aphasia. While much research in aphasia has been devoted to the study of single word reading, little is known about the process of (silent) sentence reading. Reading research in the non-brain-damaged population has benefited from the use of eye-tracking methodology, allowing inferences on cognitive processing without participants making an articulatory response. This body of research identified two factors, which strongly influence reading at the sentence level: word frequency and contextual predictability (influence of context).Aims: The main aim of this study was to investigate whether word frequency and contextual predictability influence sentence reading by people with aphasia (PWA), in parallel to that of neurologically healthy individuals (NHI). A second aim was to examine whether readers with aphasia show individual differences in the effects, and whether these are related to their underlying language profile. Methods & Procedures: Seventeen PWA and associated mild reading difficulties and 20 NHI took part in this study. Individuals with aphasia completed a range of language assessments. For the eye-tracking experiment, participants silently read sentences that included target words varying in word frequency and predictability while their eye movements were recorded. Comprehension accuracy, fixation durations, and the probability of first-pass fixations and first-pass regressions were measured. Outcomes & Results: Eye movements by both groups were significantly influenced by word frequency and predictability, but the predictability effect was stronger for the PWA than the neurologically healthy participants. Additionally, effects of word frequency and predictability were independent for the NHI, but the individuals with aphasia showed a more interactive pattern. Correlational analyses revealed (i) a significant relationship between lexical-semantic impairments and the word frequency effect score and (ii) a marginally significant association between the sentence comprehension skills and the predictability effect score. Conclusions: Consistent with compensatory processing theories, these findings indicate that decreased reading efficiency may trigger a more interactive reading strategy that aims to compensate for poorer reading by putting more emphasis on a sentence context, particularly for low-frequency words. For those individuals who have difficulties applying the strategy automatically, using a sentence context could be a beneficial strategy to focus on in reading intervention. |
Sara Iacozza; Albert Costa; Jon Andoni Duñabeitia What do your eyes reveal about your foreign language? Reading emotional sentences in a native and foreign language Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 10, pp. e0186027, 2017. @article{Iacozza2017, Foreign languages are often learned in emotionally neutral academic environments which differ greatly from the familiar context where native languages are acquired. This difference in learning contexts has been argued to lead to reduced emotional resonance when confronted with a foreign language. In the current study, we investigated whether the reactivity of the sympathetic nervous system in response to emotionally-charged stimuli is reduced in a foreign language. To this end, pupil sizes were recorded while reading aloud emotional sentences in the native or foreign language. Additionally, subjective ratings of emotional impact were provided after reading each sentence, allowing us to further investigate foreign language effects on explicit emotional understanding. Pupillary responses showed a larger effect of emotion in the native than in the foreign language. However, such a difference was not present for explicit ratings of emotionality. These results reveal that the sympathetic nervous system reacts differently depending on the language context, which in turns suggests a deeper emotional processing when reading in a native compared to a foreign language. |
Stephanie Jainta; Mirela Nikolova; Simon P. Liversedge Does text contrast mediate binocular advantages in reading? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 55–68, 2017. @article{Jainta2017, Humans typically make use of both of their eyes in reading and efficient processes of binocular vision provide a stable, single percept of the text. Binocular reading also comes with an advantage: reading speed is high and word frequency effects (i.e., faster lexical processing of words that are more often encountered in a language) emerge during fixations, which is not the case for monocular reading (Jainta, Blythe, & Liversedge, 2014). A potential contributor to this benefit is the reduced contrast in monocular reading: reduced text contrasts in binocular reading are known to slow down reading and word identification (Reingold & Rayner, 2006). To investigate whether contrast reduction mediates the binocular advantage, we first replicated increased reading time and nullified frequency effects for monocular reading (Experiment 1). Next, we reduced the contrast for binocular but whole sentences to 70% (Weber-contrast); this reading condition resembled monocular reading, but found no effect on reading speed and word identification (Experiment 2). A reasonable conclusion, therefore, was that a reduction in contrast is not the (primary) factor that mediates less efficient lexical processing under monocular reading. In a third experiment (Experiment 3) we reduced the sentence contrast to 40% and the pattern of results showed that, globally, reading was slowed down but clear word frequency effects were present in the data. Thus, word identification processes during reading (i.e., the word frequency effect) were qualitatively different in monocular reading compared with effects observed when text was read with substantially reduced contrast. |
Debra Jared; Sarah Bainbridge Reading homophone puns: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 2–13, 2017. @article{Jared2017, We investigated how readers make sense of homophone puns (e.g., The butcher was very glad we could meat up) by tracking their eye movements as they read. Comparison sentences included homophone-error sentences in which the presented homophone was also not correct (e.g., The lawyer was very glad we could meat up) and sentences in which the homophone was correct for the context (e.g., The butcher was very glad to chop meat up for the stew). An effect of the frequency of the unpresented homophone mate (e.g., meet) was found on first-pass reading times for homophones, indicating that participants activated the meaning of the homophone mate through shared phonology. First-fixation and gaze durations on the homophones were longer in puns than in correct-context sentences, indicating that participants imme- diately noticed that the homophone was incongruous with the adjacent context (e.g., glad we could meat) in puns, but total reading times did not differ, suggesting that the incongruity was quickly resolved. Immediate reading times on homophone in puns and homophone-error sentences did not differ, but total reading times did, suggesting that the impact of the critical context word (e.g., butcher) is delayed. Further analyses examined the resolution process in more detail. Ratings of the funniness of the puns were most strongly related to the strength of the association between the homophone and the critical context word (e.g., butcher). |
Debra Jared; Katrina O'Donnell Skilled adult readers activate the meanings of high-frequency words using phonology: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 334–346, 2017. @article{Jared2017a, We examined whether highly skilled adult readers activate the meanings of high-frequency words using phonology when reading sentences for meaning. A homophone-error paradigm was used. Sentences were written to fit 1 member of a homophone pair, and then 2 other versions were created in which the homophone was replaced by its mate or a spelling-control word. The error words were all high-frequency words, and the correct homophones were either higher-frequency words or low-frequency words—that is, the homophone errors were either the subordinate or dominant member of the pair. Participants read sentences as their eye movements were tracked. When the high-frequency homophone error words were the subordinate member of the homophone pair, participants had shorter immediate eye-fixation latencies on these words than on matched spelling-control words. In contrast, when the high-frequency homophone error words were the dominant member of the homophone pair, a difference between these words and spelling controls was delayed. These findings provide clear evidence that the meanings of high-frequency words are activated by phonological representations when skilled readers read sentences for meaning. Explanations of the differing patterns of results depending on homophone dominance are discussed. |
Juhani Järvikivi; Roger P. G. Gompel; Jukka Hyönä The interplay of implicit causality, structural heuristics, and anaphor type in ambiguous pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 525–550, 2017. @article{Jaervikivi2017, Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we counterbalanced the semantic roles of the verbs, we found no effect of grammatical role, suggesting the standard observed subject preference has a large semantic component. Experiment 2 showed that both the personal pronoun "hän" and the demonstrative "tämä" preferred the antecedent consistent with the implicit causality bias; "tämä" was not interpreted as referring to the semantically non-prominent entity. In contrast, structural prominence affected "hän" and "tämä" differently: we found a first-mention preference for "hän," but a second-mention preference for "tämä." The results suggest that semantic implicit causality information has an immediate effect on pronoun resolution and its use is not delayed relative to order-of-mention information. Furthermore, they show that order-of-mention differentially affects different types of anaphoric expressions, but semantic information has the same effect. |
Alexandra Jesse; Katja Poellmann; Ying-Yee Kong English listeners use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress early during spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 60, pp. 190–198, 2017. @article{Jesse2017, Purpose: We used an eye-tracking technique to investigate whether English listeners use suprasegmental information about lexical stress to speed up the recognition of spoken words in English. Method: In a visual world paradigm, 24 young English listeners followed spoken instructions to choose 1 of 4 printed referents on a computer screen (e.g., “Click on the word admiral”). Displays contained a critical pair of words (e.g., ˈadmiral–ˌadmiˈration) that were segmentally identical for their first 2 syllables but differed suprasegmentally in their 1st syllable: One word began with primary lexical stress, and the other began with secondary lexical stress. All words had phrase-level prominence. Listeners' relative proportion of eye fixations on these words indicated their ability to differentiate them over time. Results: Before critical word pairs became segmentally distinguishable in their 3rd syllables, participants fixated target words more than their stress competitors, but only if targets had initial primary lexical stress. The degree to which stress competitors were fixated was independent of their stress pattern. Conclusions: Suprasegmental information about lexical stress modulates the time course of spoken-word recognition. Specifically, suprasegmental information on the primary- stressed syllable of words with phrase-level prominence helps in distinguishing the word from phonological competitors with secondary lexical stress. |
Yu-Cin Jian Eye-movement patterns and reader characteristics of students with good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 1447–1472, 2017. @article{Jian2017a, This study investigated the cognitive processes and reader characteristics of sixth graders who had good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams. We first measured the reading ability and reading self-efficacy of sixth-grade participants, and then recorded their eye movements while they were reading an illustrated scientific text and scored their answers to content-related questions. Finally, the participants evaluated the difficulty of the article, the attractiveness of the content and diagram, and their learning performance. The participants were then classified into groups based on how many correct responses they gave to questions related to reading. The results showed that readers with good performance had better character recognition ability and reading self-efficacy, were more attracted to the diagrams, and had higher self-evaluated learning levels than the readers with poor performance did. Eye-movement data indicated that readers with good performance spent significantly more reading time on the whole article, the text section, and the diagram section than the readers with poor performance did. Interestingly, readers with good performance had significantly longer mean fixation duration on the diagrams than readers with poor performance did; further, readers with good performance made more saccades between the text and the diagrams. Additionally, sequential analysis of eye movements showed that readers with good performance preferred to observe the diagram rather than the text after reading the title, but this tendency was not present in readers with poor performance. In sum, using eye-tracking technology and several reading tests and questionnaires, we found that various cognitive aspects (reading strategy, diagram utilization) and affective aspects (reading self-efficacy, article likeness, diagram attraction, and self-evaluation of learning) affected sixth graders' reading performance in this study. |
Yu-Cin Jian; Hwa-Wei Ko Influences of text difficulty and reading ability on learning illustrated science texts for children: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Computers and Education, vol. 113, pp. 263–279, 2017. @article{Jian2017, In this study, eye movement recordings and comprehension tests were used to investigate children's cognitive processes and comprehension when reading illustrated science texts. Ten-year-old children (N = 42) who were beginning to read to learn, with high and low reading ability read two illustrated science texts in Chinese (one medium-difficult article, one difficult article), and then answered questions that measured comprehension of textual and pictorial information as well as text-and-picture integration. The high-ability group outperformed the low-ability group on all questions. Eye movement analyses showed that both group of students spent roughly the same amount of time reading both articles, but had different methods of reading them. The low-ability group was inclined to read what seemed easier to them and read the text more. The high-ability group attended more to the difficult article and made an effort to integrate the textual and pictorial information. During a first-pass reading of the difficult article, high- but not low-ability readers returned to the previous paragraph. The low-ability readers spent more time reading the less difficult article and not the difficult one that required teachers' attention. Suggestions for classroom instruction are proposed accordingly. |
Yanping Liu; Ren Huang; Dingguo Gao; Erik D. Reichle Further tests of a dynamic-adjustment account of saccade targeting during the reading of Chinese Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 41, pp. 1264–1287, 2017. @article{Liu2017a, There are two accounts of how readers of unspaced writing systems (e.g., Chinese) know where to move their eyes: (a) saccades are directed toward default targets (e.g., centers of words that have been segmented in the parafovea); or (b) saccade lengths are adjusted dynamically, as a function of ongoing parafoveal processing. This article reports an eye-movement experiment supporting the latter hypothesis by demonstrating that the slope of the relationship between the saccade launch site on word "N" and the subsequent fixation landing site on word "N" + 1 is > 1, suggesting that saccades are lengthened from launch sites that afford more parafoveal processing. This conclusion is then evaluated and confirmed via simulations using implementations of both hypotheses (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016), with a discussion of these results for our understanding of saccadic targeting during reading and existing models of eye-movement control. |
Yanping Liu; Ren Huang; Yugang Li; Dingguo Gao The word frequency effect on saccade targeting during Chinese reading: Evidence from a survival analysis of saccade length Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 116, 2017. @article{Liu2017b, Our study employs distributional analysis (i.e., survival analysis) to examine how the frequency of target words influences saccade lengths into and out of these target words in Chinese reading. The results of survival analysis indicate the survival curves in the high- and low-frequency conditions diverge for a short saccade length, with more than 80% of the lengths of incoming and outgoing saccades being larger than the divergence points. These results as well as simulations using the novel Dynamic-adjustment Model of saccadic targeting (Liu et al., 2016) are consistent with previous mean-based results and provide more precise information to support this novel model. The implications for saccade target selection during the reading of Chinese are discussed. |
Zhifang Liu; Yun Pan; Wen Tong; Nina Liu Effects of adults aging on word encoding in reading Chinese: Evidence from disappearing text Journal Article In: peerJ, pp. 1–22, 2017. @article{Liu2017e, The effect of aging on the process of word encoding for fixated words and words presented to the right of the fixation point during the reading of sentences in Chinese was investigated with two disappearing text experiments. The results of Experiment 1 showed that only the 40-ms onset disappearance of word n disrupted young adults' reading performance. However, for old readers, the disappearance of word n caused disruptions until the onset time was 120 ms. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the disappearance of word n+1 did not cause disruptions to young adults, but these conditions made old readers spend more time reading a sentence compared to the normal display condition. These results indicated a reliable aging effect on the process of word encoding when reading Chinese, and that the encoding process in the preview frame was more susceptible to normal aging compared to that in the fixation frame. We propose that sensory, cognitive, and specific factors related to the Chinese language are important contributors to these age-related differences. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon Print exposure modulates the effects of repetition priming during sentence reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1935–1942, 2017. @article{Lowder2017, Individual readers vary greatly in the quality of their lexical representations, and consequently in how quickly and efficiently they can access orthographic and lexical knowledge. This variability may be explained, at least in part, by individual differences in exposure to printed language, because practice at reading promotes the development of stronger reading skills. In the present eyetracking experiment, we tested the hypothesis that the efficiency of word recognition during reading improves with increases in print exposure, by determining whether the magnitude of the repetition-priming effect is modulated by individual differences in scores on the author recognition test (ART). Lexical repetition of target words was manipulated across pairs of unrelated sentences that were presented on consecutive trials. The magnitude of the repetition effect was modulated by print exposure in early measures of processing, such that the magnitude of the effect was inversely related to scores on the ART. The results showed that low levels of print exposure, and thus lower-quality lexical representations, are associated with high levels of difficulty recognizing words, and thus with the greatest room to benefit from repetition. Furthermore, the interaction between scores on the ART and repetition suggests that print exposure is not simply an index of general reading speed, but rather that higher levels of print exposure are associated with an enhanced ability to access lexical knowledge and recognize words during reading. |
Jia E. Loy; Hannah Rohde; Martin Corley Effects of disfluency in online interpretation of deception Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 41, pp. 1434–1456, 2017. @article{Loy2017, A speaker's manner of delivery of an utterance can affect a listener's pragmatic interpretation of the message. Disfluencies (such as filled pauses) influence a listener's off-line assessment of whether the speaker is truthful or deceptive. Do listeners also form this assessment during the moment-by-moment processing of the linguistic message? Here we present two experiments that examined listeners' judgments of whether a speaker was indicating the true location of the prize in a game during fluent and disfluent utterances. Participants' eye and mouse movements were biased toward the location named by the speaker during fluent utterances, whereas the opposite bias was observed during disfluent utterances. This difference emerged rapidly after the onset of the critical noun. Participants were similarly sensitive to disfluencies at the start of the utterance (Experiment 1) and in the middle (Experiment 2). Our findings support recent research showing that listeners integrate pragmatic information alongside semantic content during the earliest moments of language processing. Unlike prior work which has focused on pragmatic effects in the interpretation of the literal message, here we highlight disfluency's role in guiding a listener to an alternative non-literal message. |
Guojie Ma Does interword spacing influence lexical processing in Chinese reading? Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 25, no. 7-8, pp. 815–824, 2017. @article{Ma2017c, This study investigated how inserting spaces between Chinese words affected word recognition in Chinese reading. Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded in a sentence reading task where high- and low-frequency target words were presented in both the spaced and normally unspaced texts. We found that fixation durations on target words were shorter in the high- than low-frequency conditions, and shorter in the spaced than unspaced conditions. The survival analysis revealed that interword spacing advanced the temporal onset of word frequency effects relative to the normally unspaced condition. However, inconsistent with the findings in English reading, there was no interaction between word frequency and interword spacing on all fixation duration measures, and the Bayes factor analyses also favoured the hypothesis of null interaction. These data suggest that interword spacing facilitates visual rather than lexical processing in Chinese reading, and thus improves our understanding on the roles of interword spacing across different writing systems. |
Guojie Ma; Alexander Pollatsek; Yugang Li; Xingshan Li Chinese readers can perceive a word even when it's composed of noncontiguous characters Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 158–166, 2017. @article{Ma2017a, This study explored whether readers could recognize a word composed of noncontiguous characters (a "cross-character word") in Chinese reading. All 3 experiments employed Chinese 4-character strings ABCD, where both AB and CD were 2-character words. In the cross-character word condition, AC was a word but in the control condition, AC was not a word. A character identification task was employed in Experiment 1 and sentence reading tasks were employed in Experiments 2 and 3. In all 3 experiments, an AC word produced inhibition effects. In Experiment 1, an AC word decreased the accuracy of character B identification, but increased the accuracy of character C identification. In Experiments 2 and 3, an AC word slowed reading on CD, indicating that the cross-character words were activated. These results imply that Chinese character encoding leading to word recognition does not proceed in a strictly serial way from left to right, or is strictly constrained by invisible word boundaries. |
Michael P. Mansbridge; Sunju Park; Katsuo Tamaoka Disambiguation and integration in Korean relative clause processing Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 827–845, 2017. @article{Mansbridge2017a, Previous studies on Korean relative clauses (RC) show that, with respect to processing, object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) are more difficult to process at the head noun than subject-extracted relative clauses within temporarily ambiguous contexts. ORCs, however, are predicted by experience-based processing models to incur a greater processing cost during early processing stages at the RC verb, since it is a likely locus of disambiguation for RCs in Korean, and because ORCs are a less frequent structure. Consequently, the current study investigates whether processing difficulty for ORCs manifests itself at the RC verb using eye-tracking methods, a simple sentence structure and a sentential-decision task. The results revealed significantly increased go-past reading times for ORCs at the RC verb. We believe this is a result of a less frequent structure being more difficult to parse during disambiguation. Accordingly, experience-based models of processing can accurately predict difficulty for ORCs in Korean. |
Michael P. Mansbridge; Katsuo Tamaoka; Kexin Xiong; Rinus G. Verdonschot Ambiguity in the processing of Mandarin Chinese relative clauses: One factor cannot explain it all Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. e0178369, 2017. @article{Mansbridge2017, This study addresses the question of whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers process and comprehend subject-extracted relative clauses (SRC) more readily than object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) in Mandarin Chinese. Presently, this has been a hotly debated issue, with various studies producing contrasting results. Using two eye-tracking experiments with ambiguous and unambiguous RCs, this study shows that both ORCs and SRCs have different processing requirements depending on the locus and time course during reading. The results reveal that ORC reading was possibly facilitated by linear/temporal integration and canonicity. On the other hand, similarity-based interference made ORCs more difficult, and expectation-based processing was more prominent for unambiguous ORCs. Overall, RC processing in Mandarin should not be broken down to a single ORC (dis)advantage, but understood as multiple interdependent factors influencing whether ORCs are either more difficult or easier to parse depending on the task and context at hand. |
Christina Marx; Stefan Hawelka; Sarah Schuster; Florian Hutzler Foveal processing difficulty does not affect parafoveal preprocessing in young readers Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 7, pp. 41602, 2017. @article{Marx2017, Recent evidence suggested that parafoveal preprocessing develops early during reading acquisition, that is, young readers profit from valid parafoveal information and exhibit a resultant preview benefit. For young readers, however, it is unknown whether the processing demands of the currently fixated word modulate the extent to which the upcoming word is parafoveally preprocessed - as it has been postulated (for adult readers) by the foveal load hypothesis. The present study used the novel incremental boundary technique to assess whether 4 th and 6 th Graders exhibit an effect of foveal load. Furthermore, we attempted to distinguish the foveal load effect from the spillover effect. These effects are hard to differentiate with respect to the expected pattern of results, but are conceptually different. The foveal load effect is supposed to reflect modulations of the extent of parafoveal preprocessing, whereas the spillover effect reflects the ongoing processing of the previous word whilst the reader's fixation is already on the next word. The findings revealed that the young readers did not exhibit an effect of foveal load, but a substantial spillover effect. The implications for previous studies with adult readers and for models of eye movement control in reading are discussed. |
Eliana Mastrantuono; David Saldaña; Isabel R. Rodríguez-Ortiz An eye tracking study on the perception and comprehension of unimodal and bimodal linguistic inputs by deaf adolescents Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 1044, 2017. @article{Mastrantuono2017, An eye tracking experiment explored the gaze behaviour of deaf individuals when perceiving language in spoken and sign language only, and in sign-supported speech. Participants were deaf (n = 25) and hearing (n = 25) Spanish adolescents. Deaf students were prelingually profoundly deaf individuals with cochlear implants used by age 5 or earlier, or prelingually profoundly deaf native signers with deaf parents. The effectiveness of sign-supported speech has rarely been tested within the same group of children at discourse-level comprehension. Here, video-recorded texts, including spatial descriptions, were alternately transmitted in spoken language, sign language and sign-supported speech. The capacity of these communicative systems to equalise comprehension in deaf participants with that of spoken language in hearing participants was tested. Within-group analyses of deaf participants tested if the bimodal linguistic input of sign-supported speech favoured discourse comprehension compared to unimodal languages. Deaf participants with cochlear implants achieved equal comprehension to hearing controls in all communicative systems while deaf native signers with no cochlear implants achieved equal comprehension to hearing participants if tested in their native sign language. Comprehension of sign-supported speech was not increased compared to spoken language, even when spatial information was communicated. Eye movements of deaf and hearing participants were tracked and data of dwell times spent looking at the face or body area of the sign model were analysed. Within-group analyses focused on differences between native and non-native signers. Dwell times of hearing participants were equally distributed across upper and lower areas of the face while deaf participants mainly looked at the mouth area; this could enable information to be obtained from mouthings in sign language and from lipreading in sign-supported speech and spoken language. Few fixations were directed towards the signs, although these were more frequent when spatial language was transmitted. Both native and non-native signers looked mainly at the face when perceiving sign language, although non-native signers looked significantly more at the body than native signers. This distribution of gaze fixations suggested that deaf individuals – particularly native signers – mainly perceived signs through peripheral vision. |
Sebastiaan Mathôt; Jonathan Grainger; Kristof Strijkers Pupillary responses to words that convey a sense of brightness or darkness Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1116–1124, 2017. @article{Mathot2017, Theories about embodiment of language hold that when you process a word's meaning, you automatically simulate associated sensory input (e.g., perception of brightness when you process lamp) and prepare associated actions (e.g., finger movements when you process typing). To test this latter prediction, we measured pupillary responses to single words that conveyed a sense of brightness (e.g., day) or darkness (e.g., night) or were neutral (e.g., house). We found that pupils were largest for words conveying darkness, of intermediate size for neutral words, and smallest for words conveying brightness. This pattern was found for both visually presented and spoken words, which suggests that it was due to the words' meanings, rather than to visual or auditory properties of the stimuli. Our findings suggest that word meaning is sufficient to trigger a pupillary response, even when this response is not imposed by the experimental task, and even when this response is beyond voluntary control. |
Daniel R. McCloy; Bonnie K. Lau; Eric D. Larson; Katherine A. I. Pratt; Adrian K. C. Lee Pupillometry shows the effort of auditory attention switching Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 141, no. 4, pp. 2440–2451, 2017. @article{McCloy2017, © 2017 Acoustical Society of America. Successful speech communication often requires selective attention to a target stream amidst competing sounds, as well as the ability to switch attention among multiple interlocutors. However, auditory attention switching negatively affects both target detection accuracy and reaction time, suggesting that attention switches carry a cognitive cost. Pupillometry is one method of assessing mental effort or cognitive load. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the effort associated with attention switches is detectable in the pupillary response. In both experiments, pupil dilation, target detection sensitivity, and reaction time were measured; the task required listeners to either maintain or switch attention between two concurrent speech streams. Secondary manipulations explored whether switch-related effort would increase when auditory streaming was harder. In experiment 1, spatially distinct stimuli were degraded by simulating reverberation (compromising across-time streaming cues), and target-masker talker gender match was also varied. In experiment 2, diotic streams separable by talker voice quality and pitch were degraded by noise vocoding, and the time alloted for mid-trial attention switching was varied. All trial manipulations had some effect on target detection sensitivity and/or reaction time; however, only the attention-switching manipulation affected the pupillary response: greater dilation was observed in trials requiring switching attention between talkers. |
Ronan McGarrigle; Piers Dawes; Andrew J. Stewart; Stefanie E. Kuchinsky; Kevin J. Munro Measuring listening-related effort and fatigue in school-aged children using pupillometry Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 161, pp. 95–112, 2017. @article{McGarrigle2017, Stress and fatigue from effortful listening may compromise well-being, learning, and academic achievement in school-aged children. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) typical of those in school classrooms on listening effort (behavioral and pupillometric) and listening-related fatigue (self-report and pupillometric) in a group of school-aged children. A sample of 41 normal-hearing children aged 8–11 years performed a narrative speech–picture verification task in a condition with recommended levels of background noise (“ideal”: +15 dB SNR) and a condition with typical classroom background noise levels (“typical”: −2 dB SNR). Participants showed increased task-evoked pupil dilation in the typical listening condition compared with the ideal listening condition, consistent with an increase in listening effort. No differences were found between listening conditions in terms of performance accuracy and response time on the behavioral task. Similarly, no differences were found between listening conditions in self-report and pupillometric markers of listening-related fatigue. This is the first study to (a) examine listening-related fatigue in children using pupillometry and (b) demonstrate physiological evidence consistent with increased listening effort while listening to spoken narratives despite ceiling-level task performance accuracy. Understanding the physiological mechanisms that underpin listening-related effort and fatigue could inform intervention strategies and ultimately mitigate listening difficulties in children. |
Ronan McGarrigle; Piers Dawes; Andrew J. Stewart; Stefanie E. Kuchinsky; Kevin J. Munro Pupillometry reveals changes in physiological arousal during a sustained listening task Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 193–203, 2017. @article{McGarrigle2017a, Hearing loss is associated with anecdotal reports of fatigue during periods of sustained listening. However, few studies have attempted to measure changes in arousal, as a potential marker of fatigue, over the course of a sustained listening task. The present study aimed to examine subjective, behavioral, and physiological indices of listening-related fatigue. Twenty-four normal-hearing young adults performed a speech-picture verification task in different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) while their pupil size was monitored and response times recorded. Growth curve analysis revealed a significantly steeper linear decrease in pupil size in the more challenging SNR, but only in the second half of the trial block. Changes in pupil dynamics over the course of the more challenging listening condition block suggest a reduction in physiological arousal. Behavioral and self-report measures did not reveal any differences between listening conditions. This is the first study to show reduced physiological arousal during a sustained listening task, with changes over time consistent with the onset of fatigue. |
Gareth Carrol; Kathy Conklin Cross language lexical priming extends to formulaic units: Evidence from eye-tracking suggests that this idea 'has legs' Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 299–317, 2017. @article{Carrol2017, Idiom priming effects (faster processing compared to novel phrases) are generally robust in native speakers but not non-native speakers. This leads to the question of how idioms and other multiword units are represented and accessed in a first (L1) and second language (L2). We address this by investigating the processing of translated Chinese idioms to determine whether known L1 combinations show idiom priming effects in non-native speakers when encountered in the L2. In two eye-tracking experiments we compared reading times for idioms vs. control phrases (Experiment 1) and for figurative vs. literal uses of idioms (Experiment 2). Native speakers of Chinese showed recognition of the L1 form in the L2, but figurative meanings were read more slowly than literal meanings, suggesting that the non-compositional nature of idioms makes them problematic in a non-native language. We discuss the results as they relate to crosslinguistic priming at the multiword level. |
Eric Castet; Marine Descamps; Ambre Denis-Noël; Pascale Colé Letter and symbol identification: No evidence for letter-specific crowding mechanisms Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 17, no. 11, pp. 1–19, 2017. @article{Castet2017, It has been proposed that letters, as opposed to symbols, trigger specialized crowding processes, boosting identification of the first and last letters of words. This hypothesis is based on evidence that single-letter accuracy as a function of within-string position has a W shape (the classic serial position function [SPF] in psycholinguistics) whereas an inverted V shape is obtained when measured with symbols. Our main goal was to test the robustness of the latter result. Our hypothesis was that any letter/symbol difference might result from short-term visual memory processes (due to the partial report [PR] procedures used in SPF studies) rather than from crowding. We therefore removed the involvement of short-term memory by precueing target- item position and compared SPFs with precueing and postcueing. Perimetric complexity was stringently matched between letters and symbols. In postcueing conditions similar to previous studies, we did not reproduce the inverted V shape for symbols: Clear-cut W shapes were observed with an overall smaller accuracy for symbols compared to letters. This letter/symbol difference was dramatically reduced in precueing conditions in keeping with our prediction. Our results are not consistent with the claim that letter strings trigger specialized crowding processes. We argue that PR procedures are not fit to isolate crowding processes. |
Fuguo Chen; Jie Liu; Shuanghong Chen; Hong Chen; Xiao Gao Eye movement study on attention bias to body height stimuli in height dissatisfied males Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 2209, 2017. @article{Chen2017, The present study investigated attention bias in response to height-related words among young men in China. 47 [26 high height dissatisfied (HHD) and 21 low height dissatisfied (LHD)] men performed a dot-probe task. Eye movement (EM) recordings showed that compared to LHD men, HHD men had an avoidance bias in response to height-related words, which was revealed by less frequent first fixations on both tall-related and short-related words, and showed significantly shorter first fixations on short-related words. There was no other significant difference in EM indices (i.e., first fixation latency and gaze duration) between two groups. In addition, HHD participants were significantly slower than LHD participants when responding to probes preceded by short-related words, while there was no difference when probes were preceded by tall-related or neutral words. In sum, the present results indicate that HHD men selectively avoid cues related to short height. |
Qingrong Chen; Xin Huang; Le Bai; Xiaodong Xu; Yiming Yang; Michael K. Tanenhaus The effect of contextual diversity on eye movements in Chinese sentence reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 510–518, 2017. @article{Chen2017f, Recent studies have demonstrated that when contextual diversity is controlled token word frequency has minimal effects on visual word recognition. With the exception of a single experiment by Plummer, Perea, & Rayner (2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 275-283), those studies have examined words in isolation. The current studies address two potential limitations of the Plummer et al. experiment. First, because Plummer et al. used different sentence frames for words in different conditions, the effects might be due to uncontrolled differences on the sentences. Second, the absence of a frequency effect might be attributed to comparing higher and lower frequency words within a limited range. Three eye-tracking experiments examined effects of contextual diversity and frequency on Mandarin Chinese, a logographic language, for words embedded in the normal sentences. In Experiment 1, yoked words were rotated through the same sentence frame. Experiments 2a and 2b used a design similar to Plummer et al., which allows use of a larger sample of words to compare results between experiments with a smaller and larger difference in log frequency (0.41 and 1.06, respectively). In all three experiments, first-pass and later eye movement measures were significantly shorter for targets with higher contextual diversity than for targets with lower contextual diversity, with no effects of frequency. |
Wonil Choi; Matthew W. Lowder; Fernanda Ferreira; Tamara Y. Swaab; John M. Henderson Effects of word predictability and preview lexicality on eye movements during reading: A comparison between young and older adults Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 232–242, 2017. @article{Choi2017, Previous eye-tracking research has characterized older adults' reading patterns as "risky," arguing that compared to young adults, older adults skip more words, have longer saccades, and are more likely to regress to previous portions of the text. In the present eye-tracking study, we reexamined the claim that older adults adopt a risky reading strategy, utilizing the boundary paradigm to manipulate parafoveal preview and contextual predictability of a target word. Results showed that older adults had longer fixation durations compared to young adults; however, there were no age differences in skipping rates, saccade length, or proportion of regressions. In addition, readers showed higher skipping rates of the target word if the preview string was a word than if it was a nonword, regardless of age. Finally, the effect of predictability in reading times on the target word was larger for older adults than for young adults. These results suggest that older adults' reading strategies are not as risky as was previously claimed. Instead, we propose that older adults can effectively combine top-down information from the sentence context with bottom-up information from the parafovea to optimize their reading strategies. |
Michael Christen; Mathias Abegg The effect of magnification and contrast on reading performance in different types of simulated low vision Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 1–9, 2017. @article{Christen2017, Low vision therapy, such as magnifiers or contrast enhancement, is widely used. Scientific evidence proving its efficacy is scarce however. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the benefits of magnification and contrast enhancement depended on the origin of low vision. For this purpose we measured reading speed with artificially induced low vision in 12 healthy subjects in conditions of a simulated central scotoma, blurred vision and oscillopsia. Texts were either blurred, set in motion or blanked at the gaze position by using eye tracking and gaze contingent display. The simulated visual impairment was calibrated such that all types of low vision caused equal reading impairment. We then tested the effect of magnification and contrast enhancement among the different types of low vision. We found that reading speed improved with increasing magnification and with higher contrast in all conditions. The effect of magnification was significantly different in the three low vision conditions: The gain from magnification was highest in simulated blur and least in central scotoma. Magnification eventually led to near normal reading speed in all conditions. High contrast was less effective than high magnification and the effect of contrast enhancement was similar in all low vision conditions. From these results we conclude that the type of low vision determines the benefit that can be expected from magnification. Contrast enhancement leads to similar improved reading speed in all low vision types. We provide evidence that supports the use of low vision aids. |
Kiel Christianson; Steven G. Luke; Erika K. Hussey; Kacey L. Wochna Why reread? Evidence from garden-path and local coherence structures Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 70, no. 7, pp. 1380–1405, 2017. @article{Christianson2017a, Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to compare the online reading and offline comprehension of main verb/reduced relative garden-path sentences and local coherence sentences. Rereading of early material in garden-path reduced relatives should be revisionary, aimed at reanalysing an earlier misparse; however, rereading of early material in a local coherence reduced relative need only be confirmatory, as the original parse of the earlier portion of these sentences is ultimately correct. Results of online and offline measures showed that local coherence structures elicited signals of reading disruption that arose earlier and lasted longer, and local coherence comprehension was also better than garden path comprehension. Few rereading measures in either sentence type were predicted by structural features of these sentences, nor was rereading related to comprehension accuracy, which was extremely low overall. Results are discussed with respect to selective reanalysis and good-enough processing. |
Kiel Christianson; Peiyun Zhou; Cassie Palmer; Adina Raizen Effects of context and individual differences on the processing of taboo words Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 178, pp. 73–86, 2017. @article{Christianson2017, Previous studies suggest that taboo words are special in regards to language processing. Findings from the studies have led to the formation of two theories, global resource theory and binding theory, of taboo word processing. The current study investigates how readers process taboo words embedded in sentences during silent reading. In two experiments, measures collected include eye movement data, accuracy and reaction time measures for recalling probe words within the sentences, and individual differences in likelihood of being offended by taboo words. Although certain aspects of the results support both theories, as the likelihood of a person being offended by a taboo word influenced some measures, neither theory sufficiently predicts or describes the effects observed. The results are interpreted as evidence that processing effects ascribed to taboo words are largely, but not completely, attributable to the context in which they are used and the individual attitudes of the people who hear/read them. The results also demonstrate the importance of investigating taboo words in naturalistic language processing paradigms. A revised theory of taboo word processing is proposed that incorporates both global resource theory and binding theory along with the sociolinguistic factors and individual differences that largely drive the effects observed here. |
Tim Chuk; Antoni B. Chan; Janet H. Hsiao In: Vision Research, vol. 141, pp. 204–216, 2017. @article{Chuk2017a, The hidden Markov model (HMM)-based approach for eye movement analysis is able to reflect individual differences in both spatial and temporal aspects of eye movements. Here we used this approach to understand the relationship between eye movements during face learning and recognition, and its association with recognition performance. We discovered holistic (i.e., mainly looking at the face center) and analytic (i.e., specifically looking at the two eyes in addition to the face center) patterns during both learning and recognition. Although for both learning and recognition, participants who adopted analytic patterns had better recognition performance than those with holistic patterns, a significant positive correlation between the likelihood of participants' patterns being classified as analytic and their recognition performance was only observed during recognition. Significantly more participants adopted holistic patterns during learning than recognition. Interestingly, about 40% of the participants used different patterns between learning and recognition, and among them 90% switched their patterns from holistic at learning to analytic at recognition. In contrast to the scan path theory, which posits that eye movements during learning have to be recapitulated during recognition for the recognition to be successful, participants who used the same or different patterns during learning and recognition did not differ in recognition performance. The similarity between their learning and recognition eye movement patterns also did not correlate with their recognition performance. These findings suggested that perceptuomotor memory elicited by eye movement patterns during learning does not play an important role in recognition. In contrast, the retrieval of diagnostic information for recognition, such as the eyes for face recognition, is a better predictor for recognition performance. |
Anna B. Cieślicka; Roberto R. Heredia How to "save your skin" when processing L2 idioms: An eye movement analysis of idiom transparency and cross-language similarity among bilinguals Journal Article In: Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 81–107, 2017. @article{Cieslicka2017, The current study looks at whether bilinguals varying in language dominance show a processing advantage for idiomatic over non-idiomatic phrases and to what extent this effect is modulated by idiom transparency (i.e., the degree to which the idiom's figurative meaning can be inferred from its literal analysis) and cross-language similarity (i.e., the extent to which an idiom has an identical translation equivalent in another language). An eye tracking experiment was conducted in which Spanish-English bilinguals were presented with literally plausible (i.e., idioms that can be interpreted both figuratively and literally) transparent (e.g., break the ice, where the figurative meaning can be deduced from analyzing the idiom literally) and opaque idioms (e.g., hit the sack, where the meaning cannot be inferred from idiom constituents). Idioms varied along the dimension of cross-language similarity, with half the idioms having word for word translation equivalents in English and Spanish and another half being different, that is, having no similar counterpart in another language. Each idiom was used either in its literal (e.g., get cold feet: become cold) or figurative meaning (e.g., get cold feet: become afraid). In control phrases the last word of the idiom was replaced by a carefully matched control (e.g., get cold hands). Reading measures (fixation count, first pass/gaze reading time and total reading time) revealed that cross-language similarity interacts in an important way with idiom transparency, such that opaque idioms were more difficult to process than transparent ones, and different transparent idioms took faster to process than similar transparent idioms. Results are discussed with regard to the holistic vs. compositional views of idiom storage and the role of activated L1 (first language) knowledge in the course of L2 (second language) figurative processing. |
Uschi Cop; Nicolas Dirix; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck Presenting GECO: An eyetracking corpus of monolingual and bilingual sentence reading Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 602–615, 2017. @article{Cop2017, This article introduces GECO, the Ghent Eye-Tracking Corpus, a monolingual and bilingual corpus of the eyetracking data of participants reading a complete novel. English monolinguals and Dutch–English bilinguals read an entire novel, which was presented in paragraphs on the screen. The bilinguals read half of the novel in their first language, and the other half in their second language. In this article, we describe the distributions and descriptive statistics ofthe most important reading time measures for the two groups of participants. This large eyetracking corpus is perfectly suited for both exploratory purposes and more directed hypothesis test- ing, and it can guide the formulation of ideas and theories about naturalistic reading processes in a meaningful context. Most importantly, this corpus has the potential to evaluate the generalizability of monolingual and bilingual language theories and models to the reading oflong texts and narratives. The corpus is freely available at http://expsy.ugent.be/downloads/ geco. |
Uschi Cop; Nicolas Dirix; Eva Van Assche; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck Reading a book in one or two languages? An eye movement study of cognate facilitation in L1 and L2 reading Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 747–769, 2017. @article{Cop2017a, This study examined how noun reading by bilinguals is influenced by orthographic similarity with their translation equivalents in another language. Eye movements of Dutch-English bilinguals reading an entire novel in L1 and L2 were analyzed. In L2, we found a facilitatory effect of orthographic overlap. Additional facilitation for identical cognates was found for later eye movement measures. This shows that the complex, semantic context of a novel does not eliminate cross-lingual activation in natural reading. In L1 we detected non-identical cognate facilitation for first fixation durations of longer nouns. Identical cognate facilitation was found on total reading times for high frequent nouns. This study is the first to show cognate facilitation in L1 reading of narrative text. This shows that even when reading a novel in the mother tongue, lexical access is not restricted to the target language. |
Michael G. Cutter; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Reading sentences of uniform word length: Evidence for the adaptation of the preferred saccade length during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 11, pp. 1895–1911, 2017. @article{Cutter2017a, In the current study, the effect of removing word length variability within sentences on spatial aspects of eye movements during reading was investigated. Participants read sentences that were uniform in terms of word length, with each sentence consisting entirely of three-, four-, or five-letter words, or a combination of these word lengths. Several interesting findings emerged. Adaptation of the preferred saccade length occurred for sentences with different uniform word length; participants would be more accurate at making short saccades while reading uniform sentences of three-letter words, while they would be more accurate at making long saccades while reading uniform sentences of five-letter words. Furthermore, word skipping was affected such that three- and four-letter words were more likely, and five-letter words less likely, to be directly fixated in uniform compared to non-uniform sentences. It is argued that saccadic targeting during reading is highly adaptable and flexible toward the characteristics of the text currently being read, as opposed to the idea implemented in most current models of eye movement control during reading that readers develop a preference for making saccades of a certain length across a lifetime of experience with a given language. |
Michael G. Cutter; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Is orthographic information from multiple parafoveal words processed in parallel: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 43, no. 8, pp. 1550–1567, 2017. @article{Cutter2017, In the current study we investigated whether orthographic information available from 1 upcoming parafoveal word influences the processing of another parafoveal word. Across 2 experiments we used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to present participants with an identity preview of the 2 words after the boundary (e.g.,hot pan), a preview in which 2 letters were transposed between these words ( e.g., hop tan), or a preview in which the same 2 letters were substituted (e.g., hob fan). We hypothesized that if these 2 words were processed in parallel in the parafovea then we may observe significant preview benefits for the condition in which the letters were transposed between words relative to the condition in which the letters were substituted. However, no such effect was observed, with participants fixating the words for the same amount of time in both conditions. This was the case both when the transposition was made between the final and first letter of the 2 words (e.g., hop tan as a preview of hot pan; Experiment 1) and when the transposition maintained within word letter position (e.g., pit hop as a preview of hit pop; Experiment 2). The implications of these findings are considered in relation to serial and parallel lexical processing during reading. |
Alex Carvalho; Isabelle Dautriche; Isabelle Lin; Anne Christophe Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 163, pp. 67–79, 2017. @article{Carvalho2017, This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébé souris] [a bien mangé] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourit à sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words. |
Christopher A. Dean; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff Cross-linguistic orthographic effects in late spanish/english bilinguals Journal Article In: Languages, vol. 2, pp. 24, 2017. @article{Dean2017, Through the use of the visual world paradigm and eye tracking, we investigate how orthographic–phonological mappings in bilinguals promote interference during spoken language comprehension. Eighteen English-dominant bilinguals and 13 Spanish-dominant bilinguals viewed 4-picture visual displays while listening to Spanish-only auditory sentences (e.g., El detective busca su banco ‘The detective is looking for his bench') in order to select a target image. Stimuli included two types of trials that represent potential conflict in bilinguals: b-v trials, e.g., banco-vaso ‘bench-glass', representing homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations in Spanish, and j-h trials, e.g., juego-huevo ‘game-egg', representing interlingual homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations. Data were collected on accuracy, reaction time (RT), and mean proportion of target fixation. Reaction Time results indicate that Spanish-dominant speakers were slower when the competitor was present in b-v trials, though no effects were observed for English-dominant speakers. Eye-tracking results indicate a lack of competition effects in either set of trials for English-dominant speakers, but lower proportional target fixations for Spanish-dominant speakers in both sets of trials when an orthographic/phonological distractor was present. These results suggest that Spanish-dominant bilinguals may be influenced by the orthographic mappings of their less-dominant L2 English, providing new insight into the nature of the interaction between the orthography and phonology in bilingual speakers. |
Gayle DeDe Effects of lexical variables on silent reading comprehension in individuals with aphasia: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 60, pp. 2589–2620, 2017. @article{DeDe2017, Purpose: Previous eye-tracking research has suggested that individuals with aphasia (IWA) do not assign syntactic structure on their first pass through a sentence during silent reading comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the time course with which lexical variables affect silent reading comprehension in IWA. Three lexical variables were investigated: word frequency, word class, and word length. Methods: IWA and control participants without brain damage participated in the experiment. Participants read sentences while a camera tracked their eye movements. Results: IWA showed effects of word class, word length, and word frequency that were similar to or greater than those observed in controls. Conclusions: IWA showed sensitivity to lexical variables on the first pass through the sentence. The results are consistent with the view that IWA focus on lexical access on their first pass through a sentence and then work to build syntactic structure on subsequent passes. In addition, IWA showed very long rereading times and low skipping rates overall, which may contribute to some of the group differences in reading comprehension. |
Francesca Delogu; Matthew W. Crocker; Heiner Drenhaus Teasing apart coercion and surprisal: Evidence from eye-movements and ERPs Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 161, pp. 46–59, 2017. @article{Delogu2017, Previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have presented evidence suggesting that coercion expressions (e.g., began the book) are more difficult to process than control expressions like read the book. While this processing cost has been attributed to a specific coercion operation for recovering an event-sense of the complement (e.g., began reading the book), an alternative view based on the Surprisal Theory of language processing would attribute the cost to the relative unpredictability of the complement noun in the coercion compared to the control condition, with no need to postulate coercion-specific mechanisms. In two experiments, monitoring eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs), respectively, we sought to determine whether there is any evidence for coercion-specific processing cost above-and-beyond the difficulty predicted by surprisal, by contrasting coercing and control expressions with a further control condition in which the predictability of the complement noun was similar to that in the coercion condition (e.g., bought the book). While the eye-tracking study showed significant effects of surprisal and a marginal effect of coercion on late reading measures, the ERP study clearly supported the surprisal account. Overall, our findings suggest that the coercion cost largely reflects the surprisal of the complement noun with coercion specific operations possibly influencing later processing stages. |
Aster Dijkgraaf; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Wouter Duyck Predicting upcoming information in native-language and non-native-language auditory word recognition Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 917–930, 2017. @article{Dijkgraaf2017, Monolingual listeners continuously predict upcoming information. Here, we tested whether predictive language processing occurs to the same extent when bilinguals listen to their native language vs. a non-native language. Additionally, we tested whether bilinguals use prediction to the same extent as monolinguals. Dutch-English bilinguals and English monolinguals listened to constraining and neutral sentences in Dutch (bilinguals only) and in English, and viewed target and distractor pictures on a display while their eye movements were measured. There was a bias of fixations towards the target object in the constraining condition, relative to the neutral condition, before information from the target word could affect fixations. This prediction effect occurred to the same extent in native processing by bilinguals and monolinguals, but also in non-native processing. This indicates that unbalanced, proficient bilinguals can quickly use semantic information during listening to predict upcoming referents to the same extent in both of their languages. |
Brian W. Dillon; Charles Clifton; Shayne Sloggett; Lyn Frazier Appositives and their aftermath: Interference depends on at-issue vs. not-at-issue status Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 96, pp. 93–109, 2017. @article{Dillon2017, Much research has explored the degree to which not-at-issue content is interpreted independently of at-issue content, or the main assertion of a sentence (AnderBois, Brasoveanu, & Henderson, 2011; Harris & Potts, 2009; Potts, 2005; Schlenker, 2010; Tonhauser, 2011; a.o.). Building on this work, psycholinguistic research has explored the hypothesis that not-at-issue content, such as appositive relative clauses, is treated distinctly from at-issue content in online processing (Dillon, Clifton, & Frazier, 2014; Syrett & Koev, 2015). In the present paper, we explore the way in which appositive relative clauses interact with their host sentences in the course of incremental sentence comprehension. In an offline acceptability judgment, we find that appositive relative clauses contribute significantly less processing difficulty when they intervene between a filler and its gap than do superficially similar restrictive relative clauses. Results from two eye-tracking-while-reading studies suggests that recently processed restrictive relative clauses interfere to a greater degree with processes of integrating the filler at its gap site than do appositive relative clauses. Our findings suggest that the degree of interference observed during sentence processing may depend on the discourse status of potentially interfering constituents. We propose that this arises because the syntactic form of not-at-issue content is rendered relatively unavailable once it has been processed. |