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!
2016 |
Gunnar Jacob; Claudia Felser Reanalysis and semantic persistence in native and non-native garden-path recovery Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 69, no. 5, pp. 907–925, 2016. @article{Jacob2016, We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating how native and non-native speakers of English process temporarily ambiguous sentences such as While the gentleman was eating the burgers were still being reheated in the microwave, in which an initially plausible direct-object analysis is first ruled out by a syntactic disambiguation (were) and also later on by semantic information (being reheated). Both participant groups showed garden-path effects at the syntactic disambiguation, with native speakers showing significantly stronger effects of ambiguity than non-native speakers in later eye-movement measures but equally strong effects in first-pass reading times. Ambiguity effects at the semantic disambiguation and in participants' end-of-trial responses revealed that for both participant groups, the incorrect direct-object analysis was frequently maintained beyond the syntactic disambiguation. The non-native group showed weaker reanalysis effects at the syntactic disambiguation and was more likely to misinterpret the experimental sentences than the native group. Our results suggest that native language (L1) and non-native language (L2) parsing are similar with regard to sensitivity to syntactic and semantic error signals, but different with regard to processes of reanalysis. |
Debra Jared; Jane Ashby; Stephen J. Agauas; Betty Ann Levy Phonological activation of word meanings in grade 5 readers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 524–541, 2016. @article{Jared2016, Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling control errors. In Experiments 2 and 3, homophone and spelling control errors were in sentence contexts. Experiment 2 used an online sentence verification task, and found that both good and poor readers were less accurate when sentences contained a homophone error than a spelling control error. Furthermore, a difference between the 2 types of sentences was observed even when participants were concurrently performing an articulation task. In Experiment 3, initial reading times were shorter on homophone errors than on spelling controls, and participants were less likely to make a regression from homophone errors than spelling controls. These experiments provide clear evidence that phonology makes an important contribution to the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 readers. |
Yu-Cin Jian Fourth graders' cognitive processes and learning strategies for reading illustrated biology texts: Eye movement measurements Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 93–109, 2016. @article{Jian2016, Previous research suggests that multiple representations can improve sci- ence reading comprehension. This facilitation effect is premised on the observation that readers can efficiently integrate information in text and diagram formats; however, this effect in young readers is still contested. Using eye- tracking technology and sequential analysis, this study investi- gated students' reading strategies and comprehension of illustrated biology texts in relation to adult readers' performance. The target population was fourth- grade students with high reading ability, and the control group was university students. All participants read a biology article from an elemen- tary school science textbook containing two illustrations, one representa- tional and one decorative. After the reading task, participants answered questions on recognition, textual, and illustration items. Unsurprisingly, the university students outperformed the younger students on all tests; how- ever, more interestingly, eye movement patterns differed across the two groups. The adult readers demonstrated bidirectional reading pathways for both text and illustrations, whereas the fourth graders' eye fixations only went back and forth within paragraphs in the text and between the illustrations, but made fewer references to both text and illustration. This suggests that regardless of their high reading ability, fourth-grade students' visual literacy is not mature enough to perceive connections between corresponding features of different representations crucial to reading comprehension. Despite differences in cognitive processes between adult readers and young readers, high-ability young readers still have certain capabilities in reading comprehension. The results of sequential analysis showed that they looked back to previous paragraphs frequently, indicating that they were monitoring their comprehension. |
Anne Pycha; Delphine Dahan Differences in coda voicing trigger changes in gestural timing: A test case from the American English diphthong /aI/ Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 56, pp. 15–37, 2016. @article{Pycha2016, We investigate the hypothesis that duration and spectral differences in vowels before voiceless versus voiced codas originate from a single source, namely the reorganization of articulatory gestures relative to one another in time. As a test case, we examine the American English diphthong /aI/, in which the acoustic manifestations of the nucleus /a/ and offglide /I/ gestures are relatively easy to identify, and we use the ratio of nucleus-to-offglide duration as an index of the temporal distance between these gestures. Experiment 1 demonstrates that, in production, the ratio is smaller before voiceless codas than before voiced codas; this effect is consistent across speakers as well as changes in speech rate and phrasal position. Experiment 2 demonstrates that, in perception, diphthongs with contextually incongruent ratios delay listeners' identification of target words containing voiceless codas, even when the other durational and spectral correlates of voicing remain intact. This, we argue, is evidence that listeners are sensitive to the gestural origins of voicing differences. Both sets of results support the idea that the voicing contrast triggers changes in timing: gestures are close to one another in time before voiceless codas, but separated from one another before voiced codas. |
Chen Qingrong; Gu Wentao; Christoph Scheepers Effects of text segmentation on silent reading of Chinese regulated poems: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Chinese Linguistics, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 265–286, 2016. @article{Qingrong2016, Interword spaces have been reported to play an important role in silent reading of alphabetic languages. However, it has not yet been clear whether text spacing/segmentation facilitates the cognitive process in silent reading of Chinese, a logographic language, especially in reading Chinese regulated poems which have predefined rhythmic structures. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to monitor eye movements of native participants in reading Chinese regulated poems in four segmenting conditions: normal text, character segmentation, rhythmic segmentation, and syntactic segmentation. By comparing a set of measures of eye movements, both global and local analyses showed that syntactic segmentation boosted reading efficiency, while rhythmic segmentation did not. The findings demonstrate that not rhythmic but syntactic structure plays major roles in the cognitive process in reading Chinese regulated poems, suggesting an intrinsic difference in the information structure between spoken and written languages. |
Anne K. Rau; Kristina Moll; Korbinian Moeller; Stefan Huber; Margaret J. Snowling; Karin Landerl Same same, but different: Word and sentence reading in German and English Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 203–219, 2016. @article{Rau2016, The current study compared eye fixation patterns during word and sentence processing in a consistent and an inconsistent alphabetic orthography. German and English children as well as adults matched on word reading ability read matched sentences while their eye fixation behavior was recorded. Results indicated that German children read in a more small-unit plodder-like style with more diligent first-pass reading and less rereading. In contrast, English children read in a more large-unit explorer-like style with a greater tendency to skip words, and more regressions. It is important that these cross-linguistic processing differences largely persisted in the adult readers. Orthographic consistency thus influences both local word recognition and global sentence processing in developing and skilled readers. |
Eyal M. Reingold; Heather Sheridan; Katie L. Meadmore; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Attention and eye-movement control in reading: The selective reading paradigm Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 2003–2020, 2016. @article{Reingold2016, We introduced a novel paradigm for investigating covert attention and eye-movement control in reading. In 2 experiments, participants read sentence words (shown in blue color) while ignoring interleaved distractor strings (shown in orange color). Each single-line text display contained a target word and a critical distractor. Critical distractors were located just prior to the target in the text and were either words or symbol strings (e.g., @#%&). Target word availability for parafoveal processing (i.e., preview validity) was also manipulated. The results indicated much shallower processing of distractors than targets, and this pattern was more pronounced for symbol than word distractors. The influences of word frequency and fixation location on first-pass fixation durations on distractors were dramatically different than the well-documented pattern obtained in normal reading. Robust preview benefits were demon- strated both when the critical distractors were fixated and when the critical distractors were skipped. Finally, with the exception of larger preview benefits that were obtained in the condition in which the target and critical distractor were identical, the magnitude of the preview effect was largely unaffected by the nature of the critical distractor. Implications of the present paradigm and findings to the study of eye-movement control in reading are discussed. |
Annie Roy-Charland; Melanie Perron; Krystle-Lee Turgeon; Nichola Hoffman; Justin A. Chamberland The link between text difficulty, reading speed and exploration of printed text during shared book reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 731–743, 2016. @article{RoyCharland2016, In the current study the reading speed of the narration and the difficulty of the text was manipulated and links were explored with children's attention to the printed text in shared book reading. Thirty-nine children (24 grade 1 and 15 grade 2) were presented easy and difficult books at slow (syllable by syllable) or fast (adult reading speed) pace while their eye movements were monitored. Results revealed an interaction between speed and difficulty. For the easy and difficult books, children spent more time and made more fixations on the printed text when it was presented at slow speed than at fast speed. However, at fast speed, children spend more time and made more fixations on the text of the easy rather than the difficult books, but at slow speed no difference was observed. In addition, at slow speed positive correlations were observed between attention to print and letter knowledge and word reading skills. Results provide important information for the practice of shared book reading suggesting that to increase attention to print, speed should be reduced. Future research should investigate the role of reading speed on reading related outcomes such as discourse comprehension and children's interest in reading activities. |
Cristina Rubino; Sherryse L. Corrow; Jeffrey C. Corrow; Brad Duchaine; Jason J. S. Barton Word and text processing in developmental prosopagnosia Journal Article In: Cognitive Neuropsychology, vol. 33, no. 5-6, pp. 315–328, 2016. @article{Rubino2016a, The many-to-many hypothesis proposes that visual object processing is supported by distributed circuits that overlap for different object categories. For faces and words the hypothesis posits that both posterior fusiform regions contribute to both face and visual word perception and predicts that unilateral lesions impairing one will affect the other. However, studies testing this hypothesis have produced mixed results. We evaluated visual word processing in subjects with developmental prosopagnosia, a condition linked to right posterior fusiform abnormalities. Ten developmental prosopagnosic subjects performed a word-length effect task and a task evaluating the recognition of word content across variations in text style, and the recognition of style across variations in word content. All subjects had normal word-length effects. One had prolonged sorting time for word recognition in handwritten stimuli. These results suggest that the deficit in developmental prosopagnosia is unlikely to affect visual word processing, contrary to predictions of the many-to-many hypothesis. |
Paula Rubio-Fernández; Chris Cummins; Ye Tian Are single and extended metaphors processed differently? A test of two Relevance-Theoretic accounts Journal Article In: Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 94, pp. 15–28, 2016. @article{RubioFernandez2016, Carston (2010) proposes that metaphors can be processed via two different routes. In line with the standard Relevance-Theoretic account of loose use, single metaphors are interpreted by a local pragmatic process of meaning adjustment, resulting in the construction of an ad hoc concept. In extended metaphorical passages, by contrast, the reader switches to a second processing mode because the various semantic associates in the passage are mutually reinforcing, which makes the literal meaning highly activated relative to possible meaning adjustments. In the second processing mode the literal meaning of the whole passage is metarepresented and entertained as an 'imaginary world' and the intended figurative implications are derived later in processing. The results of three experiments comparing the interpretation of the same target expressions across literal, single-metaphorical and extended-metaphorical contexts, using self-paced reading (Experiment 1), eye-tracking during natural reading (Experiment 2) and cued recall (Experiment 3), offered initial support to Carston's distinction between the processing of single and extended metaphors. We end with a comparison between extended metaphors and allegories, and make a call for further theoretical and experimental work to increase our understanding of the similarities and differences between the interpretation and processing of different figurative uses, single and extended. |
Rachel A. Ryskin; Ranxiao Frances Wang; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Listeners use speaker identity to access representations of spatial perspective during online language comprehension Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 147, pp. 75–84, 2016. @article{Ryskin2016, Little is known about how listeners represent another person's spatial perspective during language processing (e.g., two people looking at a map from different angles). Can listeners use contextual cues such as speaker identity to access a representation of the interlocutor's spatial perspective? In two eye-tracking experiments, participants received auditory instructions to move objects around a screen from two randomly alternating spatial perspectives (45° vs. 315° or 135° vs. 225° rotations from the participant's viewpoint). Instructions were spoken either by one voice, where the speaker's perspective switched at random, or by two voices, where each speaker maintained one perspective. Analysis of participant eye-gaze showed that interpretation of the instructions improved when each viewpoint was associated with a different voice. These findings demonstrate that listeners can learn mappings between individual talkers and viewpoints, and use these mappings to guide online language processing. |
Molood S. Safavi; Samar Husain; Shravan Vasishth In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 403, 2016. @article{Safavi2016, Delaying the appearance of a verb in a noun-verb dependency tends to increase processing difficulty at the verb; one explanation for this locality effect is decay and/or interference of the noun in working memory. Surprisal, an expectation-based account, predicts that delaying the appearance of a verb either renders it no more predictable or more predictable, leading respectively to a prediction of no effect of distance or a facilitation. Recently, Husain et al (2014) suggested that when the exact identity of the upcoming verb is predictable (strong predictability), increasing argument-verb distance leads to facilitation effects, which is consistent with surprisal; but when the exact identity of the upcoming verb is not predictable (weak predictability), locality effects are seen. We investigated Husain et al.'s proposal using Persian complex predicates (CPs), which consist of a non-verbal element—a noun in the current study—and a verb. In CPs, once the noun has been read, the exact identity of the verb is highly predictable (strong predictability); this was confirmed using a sentence completion study. In two self-paced reading (SPR) and two eye-tracking (ET) experiments, we delayed the appearance of the verb by interposing a relative clause (Expt. 1 and 3) or a long PP (Expt. 2 and 4). We also included a simple Noun-Verb predicate configuration with the same distance manipulation; here, the exact identity of the verb was not predictable (weak predictability). Thus, the design crossed Predictability Strength and Distance. We found that, consistent with surprisal, the verb in the strong predictability conditions was read faster than in the weak predictability conditions. Furthermore, greater verb-argument distance led to slower reading times; strong predictability did not neutralize or attenuate the locality effects. As regards the effect of distance on dependency resolution difficulty, these four experiments present evidence in favor of working memory accounts of argument-verb dependency resolution, and against the surprisal-based expectation account of Levy (2008). However, another expectation-based measure, entropy, which was computed using the offline sentence completion data, predicts reading times in Experiment 1. We suggest that forgetting due to memory overload leads to greater entropy at the verb. |
Anuenue Kukona; David Braze; Clinton L. Johns; W. Einar Mencl; Julie A. Van Dyke; James S. Magnuson; Kenneth R. Pugh; Donald P. Shankweiler; Whitney Tabor The real-time prediction and inhibition of linguistic outcomes: Effects of language and literacy skill Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 171, pp. 72–84, 2016. @article{Kukona2016, Recent studies have found considerable individual variation in language comprehenders' predictive behaviors, as revealed by their anticipatory eye movements during language comprehension. The current study investigated the relationship between these predictive behaviors and the language and literacy skills of a diverse, community-based sample of young adults. We found that rapid automatized naming (RAN) was a key determinant of comprehenders' prediction ability (e.g., as reflected in predictive eye movements to a WHITE CAKE on hearing “The boy will eat the white…”). Simultaneously, comprehension-based measures predicted participants' ability to inhibit eye movements to objects that shared features with predictable referents but were implausible completions (e.g., as reflected in eye movements to a white but inedible WHITE CAR). These findings suggest that the excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that support prediction during language processing are closely linked with specific cognitive abilities that support literacy. We show that a self-organizing cognitive architecture captures this pattern of results. |
Nayoung Kwon; Patrick Sturt Processing control information in a nominal control construction: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 779–793, 2016. @article{Kwon2016, In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the processing of the nominal control construction. Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they read sentences that included either giver control nominals (e.g. promise in Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph himself) or recipient control nominals (e.g. plea in Luke's plea to Sophia to photograph herself). In order to examine both the initial access of control information, and its later use in on-line processing, we combined a manipulation of nominal control with a gender match/mismatch paradigm. Results showed that there was evidence of processing difficulty for giver control sentences (relative to recipient control sentences) at the point where the control dependency was initially created, suggesting that control information was accessed during the early parsing stages. This effect is attributed to a recency preference in the formation of control dependencies; the parser prefers to assign a recent antecedent to PRO. In addition, readers slowed down after reading a reflexive pronoun that mismatched with the gender of the antecedent indicated by the control nominal (e.g. Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph herself). The mismatch cost suggests that control information of the nominal control construction was used to constrain dependency formation involving a controller, PRO and a reflexive, confirming the use of control information in on-line interpretation. |
Nayoung Kwon; Patrick Sturt Attraction effects in honorific agreement in Korean Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 1302, 2016. @article{Kwon2016a, Previous studies have suggested that sentence processing is mediated by content-addressable direct retrieval processes (McElree, 2000; McElree et al., 2003). However, the memory retrieval processes may differ as a function of the type of dependency. For example, while many studies have reported facilitatory intrusion effects associated with a structurally illicit antecedent during the processing of subject-verb number or person agreement and negative polarity items (Pearlmutter et al., 1999; Xiang et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013), studies investigating reflexives have not found consistent evidence of intrusion effects (Parker et al., 2015; Sturt and Kwon, 2015; cf. Nicol and Swinney, 1989; Sturt, 2003). Similarly, the memory retrieval processes could be also sensitive to cross-linguistic differences (cf. Lago et al., 2015). We report one self-paced reading experiment and one eye-tracking experiment that examine the processing of subject-verb honorific agreement, a dependency that is different from those that have been studied to date, in Korean, a typologically different language from those previously studied. The overall results suggest that the retrieval processes underlying the processing of subject-verb honorific agreement in Korean are susceptible to facilitatory intrusion effects from a structurally illicit but feature-matching subject, with a pattern that is similar to subject-verb agreement in English. In addition, the attraction effect was not limited to the ungrammatical sentences but was also found in grammatical sentences. The clear attraction effect in the grammatical sentences suggest that the attraction effect does not solely arise as the result of an error-driven process (cf. Wagers et al., 2009), but is likely also to result from general mechanisms of retrieval processes of activating of potential items in memory (Vasishth et al., 2008). |
Christelle Lemoine-Lardennois; Nadia Alahyane; Coline Tailhefer; Thérèse Collins; Jacqueline Fagard; Karine Doré-Mazars Saccadic adaptation in 10–41 month-old children Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 10, pp. 241, 2016. @article{LemoineLardennois2016, When saccade amplitude becomes systematically inaccurate, adaptation mechanisms gradually decrease or increase it until accurate saccade targeting is recovered. Adaptive shortening and adaptive lengthening of saccade amplitude rely on separate mechanisms in adults. When these adaptation mechanisms emerge during development is poorly known except that adaptive shortening processes are functional in children above 8 years of age. Yet, saccades in infants are consistently inaccurate (hypometric) as if adaptation mechanisms were not fully functional in early childhood. Here, we tested reactive saccade adaptation in 10–41 month-old children compared to a group of 20–30 year-old adults. A visual target representing a cartoon character appeared at successive and unpredictable locations 10◦ apart on a computer screen. During the eye movement toward the target, it systematically stepped in the direction opposite to the saccade to induce an adaptive shortening of saccade amplitude (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, the target stepped in the same direction as the ongoing saccade to induce an adaptive lengthening of saccade amplitude. In both backward and forward adaptation experiments, saccade adaptation was compared to a control condition where there was no intrasaccadic target step. Analysis of baseline performance revealed both longer saccade reaction times and hypometric saccades in children compared to adults. In both experiments, children on average showed gradual changes in saccade amplitude consistent with the systematic intrasaccadic target steps. Moreover, the amount of amplitude change was similar between children and adults for both backward and forward adaptation. Finally, adaptation abilities in our child group were not related to age. Overall the results suggest that the neural mechanisms underlying reactive saccade adaptation are in place early during development. |
Jifan Zhou; Chia-Lin Lee; Kuei-An Li; Yung-Hsuan Tien; Su-Ling Yeh Does temporal integration occur for unrecognizable words in visual crowding? Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. e0149355, 2016. @article{Zhou2016d, ? 2016 Zhou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Visual crowding - the inability to see an object when it is surrounded by flankers in the periphery - does not block semantic activation: unrecognizable words due to visual crowding still generated robust semantic priming in subsequent lexical decision tasks. Based on the previous finding, the current study further explored whether unrecognizable crowded words can be temporally integrated into a phrase. By showing one word at a time, we presented Chinese four-word idioms with either a congruent or incongruent ending word in order to examine whether the three preceding crowded words can be temporally integrated to form a semantic context so as to affect the processing of the ending word. Results from both behavioral (Experiment 1) and Event-Related Potential (Experiment 2 and 3) measures showed congruency effect in only the non-crowded condition, which does not support the existence of unconscious multi-word integration. Aside from four-word idioms, we also found that two-word (modifier + adjective combination) integration - the simplest kind of temporal semantic integration - did not occur in visual crowding (Experiment 4). Our findings suggest that integration of temporally separated words might require conscious awareness, at least under the timing conditions tested in the current study. |
Peiyun Zhou; Kiel Christianson Auditory perceptual simulation: Simulating speech rates or accents? Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 168, pp. 85–90, 2016. @article{Zhou2016b, When readers engage in Auditory Perceptual Simulation (APS) during silent reading, they mentally simulate characteristics of voices attributed to a particular speaker or a character depicted in the text. Previous research found that auditory perceptual simulation of a faster native English speaker during silent reading led to shorter reading times that auditory perceptual simulation of a slower non-native English speaker. Yet, it was uncertain whether this difference was triggered by the different speech rates of the speakers, or by the difficulty of simulating an unfamiliar accent. The current study investigates this question by comparing faster Indian-English speech and slower American-English speech in the auditory perceptual simulation paradigm. Analyses of reading times of individual words and the full sentence reveal that the auditory perceptual simulation effect again modulated reading rate, and auditory perceptual simulation of the faster Indian-English speech led to faster reading rates compared to auditory perceptual simulation of the slower American-English speech. The comparison between this experiment and the data from Zhou and Christianson (2016) demonstrate further that the "speakers'" speech rates, rather than the difficulty of simulating a non-native accent, is the primary mechanism underlying auditory perceptual simulation effects. |
Zehui Zhan; Lei Zhang; Hu Mei; Patrick S. W. Fong Online learners' reading ability detection based on eye-tracking sensors Journal Article In: Sensors, vol. 16, pp. 1457, 2016. @article{Zhan2016, © 2016 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.The detection of university online learners' reading ability is generally problematic and time-consuming. Thus the eye-tracking sensors have been employed in this study, to record temporal and spatial human eye movements. Learners' pupils, blinks, fixation, saccade, and regression are recognized as primary indicators for detecting reading abilities. A computational model is established according to the empirical eye-tracking data, and applying the multi-feature regularization machine learning mechanism based on a Low-rank Constraint. The model presents good generalization ability with an error of only 4.9% when randomly running 100 times. It has obvious advantages in saving time and improving precision, with only 20 min of testing required for prediction of an individual learner's reading ability. |
Mallory C. Stites; Kara D. Federmeier; Kiel Christianson Do morphemes matter when reading compound words with transposed letters? Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, pp. 1–23, 2016. @article{Stites2016, The current study investigates the online processing consequences of encountering compound words with transposed letters (TLs), to determine if cross-morpheme TLs are more disruptive to reading than those within a single morpheme, as would be predicted by accounts of obligatory morpho-orthopgrahic decomposition. Two measures of online processing, eye movements and event-related potentials (ERPs), were collected in separate experiments. Participants read sentences containing correctly spelled compound words (cupcake), or compounds with TLs occurring either across morphemes (cucpake) or within one morpheme (cupacke). Results showed that between- and within-morpheme transpositions produced equal processing costs in both measures, in the form of longer reading times (Experiment 1) and a late posterior positivity (Experiment 2) that did not differ between conditions. Findings converge to suggest that within- and between-morpheme TLs are equally disruptive to recognition, providing evidence against obligatory morpho-orthographic processing and in favour of whole-word access of English compound words during sentence reading. |
Yao-Ting Sung; Jih-Ho Cha; Jung-Yueh Tu; Ming-Da Wu; Wei-Chun Lin Investigating the processing of relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from eye-movement aata Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 1089–1113, 2016. @article{Sung2016, A number of previous studies on Chinese relative clauses (RC) have reported conflicting results on processing asymmetry. This study aims to revisit the prevalent debate on whether subject-extracted RCs (SRC) or object-extracted RCs (ORC) are easier to process by using the eye-movement technique. In the current study, the data are analyzed in terms of the gaze duration and regression of eye-movement in three critical areas: head noun, embedded verb, and RC-modifying noun phrase as subject. The results show an ORC preference for the processing of RC structures, which supports the word-order account and the Dependency Locality Theory, and a better cross-clausal integration for SRC, which supports the perspective-shift account. The processing asymmetry in Chinese RCs are discussed under relevant theoretical accounts, such as structure-based, memory-based, and perspective shift accounts. We argue that the findings are associated with the syntactic nature of Chinese (a head-initial language with pre-nominal RCs). |
Yao-Ting Sung; Jung-Yueh Tu; Jih-Ho Cha; Ming-Da Wu Processing preference toward object-extracted relative clauses in mandarin chinese by l1 and l2 speakers: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 4, 2016. @article{Sung2016a, The current study employed an eye-movement technique with an attempt to explore the reading patterns for the two types of Chinese relative clauses, subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs), by native speakers (L1), and Japanese learners (L2) of Chinese. The data were analyzed in terms of gaze duration, regression path duration, and regression rate on the two critical regions, head noun, and embedded verb. The results indicated that both the L1 and L2 participants spent less time on the head nouns in ORCs than in SRCs. Also, the L2 participants spent less time on the embedded verbs in ORCs than in SRCs and their regression rate for embedded verbs was generally lower in ORCs than in SRC. The findings showed that the participants experienced less processing difficulty in ORCs than SRCs. These results suggest an ORC preference in L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese, which provides evidence in support of linear distance hypothesis and implies that the syntactic nature of Chinese is at play in the RC processing. |
Benjamin Swets; Christopher A. Kurby Eye movements reveal the influence of event structure on reading behavior Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 466–480, 2016. @article{Swets2016, When we read narrative texts such as novels and newspaper articles, we segment information presented in such texts into discrete events, with distinct boundaries between those events. But do our eyes reflect this event structure while reading? This study examines whether eye movements during the reading of discourse reveal how readers respond online to event structure. Participants read narrative passages as we monitored their eye movements. Several measures revealed that event structure predicted eye movements. In two experiments, we found that both early and overall reading times were longer for event boundaries. We also found that regressive saccades were more likely to land on event boundaries, but that readers were less likely to regress out of an event boundary. Experiment 2 also demonstrated that tracking event structure carries a working memory load. Eye movements provide a rich set of online data to test the cognitive reality of event segmentation during reading. |
Jessica Nelson Taylor; Charles A. Perfetti Eye movements reveal readers' lexical quality and reading experience Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 1069–1103, 2016. @article{Taylor2016, Two experiments demonstrate that individual differences among normal adult readers, including lexical quality, are expressed in silent reading at the word level. In the first of two studies we identified major dimensions of variability among college readers and among words using factor analysis. We then examined the effects of these dimensions of variability on eye movements during paragraph reading. More experienced readers (who also were higher in reading speed) read words more quickly, especially less frequent words, while readers with higher lexical knowledge showed shorter early fixations, especially for more frequent words. These results suggest that individual differences in reading may reflect differences in the quality of lexical representations and in reading experience, which is a source of lexical quality. In a second study, we controlled the lexical knowledge readers obtained from new words through a training paradigm that varied exposure to a word's orthographic, phonological, and meaning constituents. Training exposure to orthographic and phonological constituents affected first pass reading measures, and phonological and meaning training affected second pass measures. Incomplete knowledge of word components slowed first pass reading times, com- pared to both more complete knowledge and no knowledge. Training effects were mediated by individual differences, pointing to lexical quality and reading experi- ence—which, combined reflect reading expertise—as important in word reading as part of text reading. |
Mark Torrance; Roger Johansson; Victoria Johansson; Åsa Wengelin Reading during the composition of multi-sentence texts: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 80, no. 5, pp. 729–743, 2016. @article{Torrance2016, Writers composing multi-sentence texts have immediate access to a visual representation of what they have written. Little is known about the detail of writers' eye movements within this text during production. We describe two experiments in which competent adult writ- ers' eye movements were tracked while performing short expository writing tasks. These are contrasted with condi- tions in which participants read and evaluated researcher- provided texts. Writers spent a mean of around 13 % of their time looking back into their text. Initiation of these look-back sequences was strongly predicted by linguisti- cally important boundaries in their ongoing production (e.g., writers were much more likely to look back imme- diately prior to starting a new sentence). 36 %of look-back sequences were associated with sustained reading and the remainder with less patterned forward and backward sac- cades between words (‘‘hopping''). Fixation and gaze durations and the presence of word-length effects sug- gested lexical processing of fixated words in both reading and hopping sequences. Word frequency effects were not present when writers read their own text. Findings demonstrate the technical possibility and potential value of examining writers' fixations within their just-written text. We suggest that these fixations do not serve solely, or even primarily, in monitoring for error, but play an important role in planning ongoing production. |
Annie Tremblay; Mirjam Broersma; Caitlin E. Coughlin; Jiyoun Choi Effects of the native language on the learning of fundamental frequency in second-language speech segmentation Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 985, 2016. @article{Tremblay2016, This study investigates whether the learning of prosodic cues to word boundaries in speech segmentation is more difficult if the native and second/foreign languages (L1 and L2) have similar (though non-identical) prosodies than if they have markedly different prosodies (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis). It does so by comparing French, Korean, and English listeners' use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. F0 rise signals phrase-final boundaries in French and Korean but word-initial boundaries in English. Korean-speaking and English-speaking L2 learners of French, who were matched in their French proficiency and French experience, and native French listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which they recognized words whose final boundary was or was not cued by an increase in F0. The results showed that Korean listeners had greater difficulty using F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French than French and English listeners. This suggests that L1-L2 prosodic similarity can make the learning of an L2 segmentation cue difficult, in line with the proposed Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis. We consider mechanisms that may underlie this difficulty and discuss the implications of our findings for understanding listeners' phonological encoding of L2 words. |
Johanne Tromp; Peter Hagoort; Antje S. Meyer Pupillometry reveals increased pupil size during indirect request comprehension Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 69, no. 6, pp. 1093–1108, 2016. @article{Tromp2016, Fluctuations in pupil size have been shown to reflect variations in processing demands during lexical and syntactic processing in language comprehension. An issue that has not received attention is whether pupil size also varies due to pragmatic manipulations. In two pupillometry experiments, we investigated whether pupil diameter was sensitive to increased processing demands as a result of comprehending an indirect request versus a direct statement. Adult participants were presented with 120 picture-sentence combinations that could be interpreted either as an indirect request (a picture of a window with the sentence "it's very hot here") or as a statement (a picture of a window with the sentence "it's very nice here"). Based on the hypothesis that understanding indirect utterances requires additional inferences to be made on the part of the listener, we predicted a larger pupil diameter for indirect requests than statements. The results of both experiments are consistent with this expectation. We suggest that the increase in pupil size reflects additional processing demands for the comprehension of indirect requests as compared to statements. This research demonstrates the usefulness of pupillometry as a tool for experimental research in pragmatics. |
Alexandra Ţurcan; Ruth Filik An eye-tracking investigation of written sarcasm comprehension: The roles of familiarity and context Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 1867–1893, 2016. @article{Turcan2016, This article addresses a current theoretical debate between the standard pragmatic model, the graded salience hypothesis, and the implicit display theory, by investigating the roles of the context and of the properties of the sarcastic utterance itself in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted where we manipulated the speaker's expectation in the context and the familiarity of the sarcastic remark. The results of the first eye-tracking study showed that literal comments were read faster than unfamiliar sarcastic comments, regardless of whether an explicit expectation was present in the context. The results of the second eye-tracking study indicated an early processing difficulty for unfamiliar sarcastic comments, but not for familiar sarcastic comments. Later reading time measures indicated a general difficulty for sarcastic comments. Overall, results seem to suggest that the familiarity of the utterance does indeed affect the time course of sarcasm processing (supporting the graded salience hypothesis), although there is no evidence that making the speaker's expectation explicit in the context affects it as well (thus failing to support the implicit display theory). (PsycINFO Database Record |
Seppo Vainio; Anneli Pajunen; Jukka Hyönä Processing modifier–head agreement in L1 and L2 Finnish: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 3–24, 2016. @article{Vainio2016, This study investigated the effect of first language (L1) on the reading of modifier-head case agreement in second language (L2) Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. Russian is similar to Finnish in that both languages use case endings to mark grammatical roles, whereas such markings are absent in Chinese. The critical nouns were embedded in sentences, where the head noun was either preceded by an agreeing modifier or the modifier was absent. Readers' eye fixation patterns were used as indices of online processing. Both natives and non-natives showed a facilitatory effect of agreement; reading head nouns was easier when they were preceded by an agreeing modifier. Typological distance in terms of the structural complexity of words between L1 and L2 did not influence the processing. |
Emiel Hoven; Franziska Hartung; Michael Burke; Roel M. Willems Individual differences in sensitivity to style during literary reading: Insights from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Collabra, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2016. @article{Hoven2016, Style is an important aspect of literature, and stylistic deviations are sometimes labeled foregrounded, since their manner of expression deviates from the stylistic default. Russian Formalists have claimed that foregrounding increases processing demands and therefore causes slower reading – an effect called retardation. We tested this claim experimentally by having participants read short literary stories while measuring their eye movements. Our results confirm that readers indeed read slower and make more regressions towards foregrounded passages as compared to passages that are not foregrounded. A closer look, however, reveals significant individual differences in sensitivity to foregrounding. Some readers in fact do not slow down at all when reading foregrounded passages. The slowing down effect for literariness was related to a slowing down effect for high perplexity (unexpected) words: those readers who slowed down more during literary passages also slowed down more during high perplexity words, even though no correlation between literariness and perplexity existed in the stories. We conclude that individual differences play a major role in processing of literary texts and argue for accounts of literary reading that focus on the interplay between reader and text. |
Flora Vanlangendonck; Roel M. Willems; Laura Menenti; Peter Hagoort An early influence of common ground during speech planning Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 741–750, 2016. @article{Vanlangendonck2016, In order to communicate successfully, speakers have to take into account which information they share with their addressee, i.e. common ground. In the current experiment we investigated how and when common ground affects speech planning by tracking speakers' eye movements while they played a referential communication game. We found evidence that common ground exerts an early, but incomplete effect on speech planning. In addition, we did not find longer planning times when speakers had to take common ground into account, suggesting that taking common ground into account is not necessarily an effortful process. Common ground information thus appears to act as a partial constraint on language production that is integrated flexibly and efficiently in the speech planning process. |
Outi Veivo; Juhani Järvikivi; Vincent Porretta; Jukka Hyönä Orthographic activation in L2 spoken word recognition depends on proficiency: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 1120, 2016. @article{Veivo2016, The use of orthographic and phonological information in spoken word recognition was studied in a visual world task where L1 Finnish learners of L2 French (n = 64) and L1 French native speakers (n = 24) were asked to match spoken word forms with printed words while their eye movements were recorded. In Experiment 1, French target words were contrasted with competitors having a longer (<base> vs. <bague>) or a shorter word initial phonological overlap (<base> vs. <bain>) and an identical orthographic overlap. In Experiment 2, target words were contrasted with competitors of either longer (<mince> vs. <mite>) or shorter word initial orthographic overlap (<mince> vs. <mythe>) and of an identical phonological overlap. A general phonological effect was observed in the L2 listener group but not in the L1 control group. No general orthographic effects were observed in the L2 or L1 groups, but a significant effect of proficiency was observed for orthographic overlap over time: higher proficiency L2 listeners used also orthographic information in the matching task in a time-window from 400 to 700 ms, whereas no such effect was observed for lower proficiency listeners. These results suggest that the activation of orthographic information in L2 spoken word recognition depends on proficiency in L2. |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Semantic preview benefit in English: Individual differences in the extraction and use of parafoveal semantic information Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 837–854, 2016. @article{Veldre2016a, Although there is robust evidence that skilled readers of English extract and use orthographic and phonological information from the parafovea to facilitate word identification, semantic preview benefits have been elusive. We sought to establish whether individual differences in the extraction and/or use of parafoveal semantic information could account for this discrepancy. Ninety-nine adult readers who were assessed on measures of reading and spelling ability read sentences while their eye movements were recorded. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to manipulate the availability of relevant semantic and orthographic information in the parafovea. On average, readers showed a benefit from previews high in semantic feature overlap with the target. However, reading and spelling ability yielded opposite effects on semantic preview benefit. High reading ability was associated with a semantic preview benefit that was equivalent to an identical preview on first-pass reading. High spelling ability was associated with a reduced semantic preview benefit despite an overall higher rate of skipping. These results suggest that differences in the magnitude of semantic preview benefits in English reflect constraints on extracting semantic information from the parafovea and competition between the orthographic features of the preview and the target. |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Is semantic preview benefit due to relatedness or plausibility? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 7, pp. 939–952, 2016. @article{Veldre2016, There is increasing evidence that skilled readers of English benefit from processing a parafoveal preview of a semantically related word. However, in previous investigations of semantic preview benefit using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm the semantic relatedness between the preview and target has been confounded with the plausibility of the preview word in the sentence. In the present study, preview relatedness and plausibility were independently manipulated in neutral sentences read by a large sample of skilled adult readers. Participants were assessed on measures of reading and spelling ability to identify possible sources of individual differences in preview effects. The results showed that readers benefited from a preview of a plausible word, regardless of the semantic relatedness of the preview and the target. However, there was limited evidence of a semantic relatedness benefit when the plausibility of the preview was controlled. The plausibility preview benefit was strongest for low proficiency readers, suggesting that poorer readers were more likely to program a forward saccade based on information extracted from the preview. High proficiency readers showed equivalent disruption from all nonidentical previews suggesting that they were more likely to suffer interference from the orthographic mismatch between preview and target. |
Lorenzo Vignali; Nicole A. Himmelstoss; Stefan Hawelka; Fabio Richlan; Florian Hutzler Oscillatory brain dynamics during sentence reading: A fixation-related spectral perturbation analysis Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 10, pp. 191, 2016. @article{Vignali2016, The present study investigated oscillatory brain dynamics during self-paced sentence-level processing. Participants read fully correct sentences, sentences containing a semantic violation and "sentences" in which the order of the words was randomized. At the target word level, fixations on semantically unrelated words elicited a lower-beta band (13-18 Hz) desynchronization. At the sentence level, gamma power (31-55 Hz) increased linearly for syntactically correct sentences, but not when the order of the words was randomized. In the 300-900 ms time window after sentence onsets, theta power (4-7 Hz) was greater for syntactically correct sentences as compared to sentences where no syntactic structure was preserved (random words condition). We interpret our results as conforming with a recently formulated predictive-coding framework for oscillatory neural dynamics during sentence-level language comprehension. Additionally, we discuss how our results relate to previous findings with serial visual presentation vs. self-paced reading. |
Laura Vilkaitem Are nonadjacent collocations processed faster? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 10, pp. 1632–1642, 2016. @article{Vilkaitem2016, Numerous studies have shown processing advantages for collocations, but they only investigated processing of adjacent collocations (e.g., provide information). However, in naturally occurring language, nonadjacent collocations (provide some of the information) are equally, if not more frequent. This raises the question whether the same kind of processing advantage holds for nonadjacent collocations as for adjacent ones. This paper reports on an eye-tracking experiment in which participants read sentences containing either adjacent or nonadjacent collocations or matched control phrases. The results replicated the finding that collocations are processed faster than control phrases, and extended this finding to nonadjacent collocations. However, the results also suggest that the facilitative effect might be larger for adjacent collocations than for nonadjacent ones. |
Margreet Vogelzang; Petra Hendriks; Hedderik Rijn Pupillary responses reflect ambiguity resolution in pronoun processing Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 31, no. 7, pp. 876–885, 2016. @article{Vogelzang2016, ABSTRACTThe resolution of ambiguous pronouns is influenced by the preceding linguistic discourse. This raises the question whether the processing of an object pronoun is also influenced by the preceding sentential subject. In an experiment with Dutch adults, we recorded pupil dilation as a measure of the cognitive effort involved in resolving pronominal versus full noun phrase (NP) subjects and pronominal versus reflexive objects. Our results indicate that more effort is needed to resolve a pronominal subject or object compared to a less ambiguous full NP subject or reflexive object. These results support the hypothesis that the ambiguity of a referring expression influences processing. Contrary to our expectations, no evidence was found that the form of the subject influences the processing of a subsequent pronominal object. We conclude that pupillary responses reflect ambiguity resolution in pronoun processing, and that the process to resolve pronouns commences as soon as the pronoun is encountered. |
Anita E. Wagner; Paolo Toffanin; Deniz Baskent The timing and effort of lexical access in natural and degraded speech Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 398, 2016. @article{Wagner2016, Understanding speech is effortless in ideal situations, and although adverse conditions, such as caused by hearing impairment, often render it an effortful task, they do not necessarily suspend speech comprehension. A prime example of this is speech perception by cochlear implant users, whose hearing prostheses transmit speech as a significantly degraded signal. It is yet unknown how mechanisms of speech processing deal with such degraded signals, and whether they are affected by effortful processing of speech. This paper compares the automatic process of lexical competition between natural and degraded speech, and combines gaze fixations, which capture the course of lexical disambiguation, with pupillometry, which quantifies the mental effort involved in processing speech. Listeners' ocular responses were recorded during disambiguation of lexical embeddings with matching and mismatching durational cues. Durational cues were selected due to their substantial role in listeners' quick limitation of the number of lexical candidates for lexical access in natural speech. Results showed that lexical competition increased mental effort in processing natural stimuli in particular in presence of mismatching cues. Signal degradation reduced listeners' ability to quickly integrate durational cues in lexical selection, and delayed and prolonged lexical competition. The effort of processing degraded speech was increased overall, and because it had its sources at the pre-lexical level this effect can be attributed to listening to degraded speech rather than to lexical disambiguation. In sum, the course of lexical competition was largely comparable for natural and degraded speech, but showed crucial shifts in timing, and different sources of increased mental effort. We argue that well-timed progress of information from sensory to pre-lexical and lexical stages of processing, which is the result of perceptual adaptation during speech development, is the reason why in ideal situations speech is perceived as an undemanding task. Degradation of the signal or the receiver channel can quickly bring this well-adjusted timing out of balance and lead to increase in mental effort. Incomplete and effortful processing at the early pre-lexical stages has its consequences on lexical processing as it adds uncertainty to the forming and revising of lexical hypotheses. |
Aiping Wang; Junmo Yeon; Wei Zhou; Hua Shu; Ming Yan Cross-language parafoveal semantic processing: Evidence from Korean-Chinese bilinguals Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 285–290, 2016. @article{Wang2016, In the present study, we aimed at testing cross- language cognate and semantic preview effects. We tested how native Korean readers who learned Chinese as a second language make use of the parafoveal information during the reading of Chinese sentences. There were 3 types of Korean preview words: cognate translations of the Chinese target words, semantically related noncognate words, and unrelated words. Together with a highly significant cognate preview effect, more critically, we also observed reliable facilitation in processing of the target word from the semantically related previews in all fixation measures. Results from the present study provide first evidence for semantic processing from parafoveally presented Korean words and for cross-language parafoveal semantic processing. |
David E. Warren; Daniel Tranel; Melissa C. Duff Impaired acquisition of new words after left temporal lobectomy despite normal fast-mapping behavior Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 80, pp. 165–175, 2016. @article{Warren2016a, Word learning has been proposed to rely on unique brain regions including the temporal lobes, and the left temporal lobe appears to be especially important. In order to investigate the role of the left temporal lobe in word learning under different conditions, we tested whether patients with left temporal lobectomies (N=6) could learn novel words using two distinct formats. Previous research has shown that word learning in contrastive fast mapping conditions may rely on different neural substrates than explicit encoding conditions (Sharon et al., 2011). In the current investigation, we used a previously reported word learning task that implemented two distinct study formats (Warren and Duff, 2014): a contrastive fast mapping condition in which a picture of a novel item was displayed beside a picture of a familiar item while the novel item's name was presented aurally ("Click on the numbat."); and an explicit encoding (i.e., control) condition in which a picture of a novel item was displayed while its name was presented aurally ("This is a numbat."). After a delay, learning of the novel words was evaluated with memory tests including three-alternative forced-choice recognition, free recall, cued recall, and familiarity ratings. During the fast-mapping study condition both the left temporal lobectomy and healthy comparison groups performed well, but at test only the comparison group showed evidence of novel word learning. Our findings indicate that unilateral resection of the left temporal lobe including the hippocampus and temporal pole can severely impair word learning, and that fast-mapping study conditions do not promote subsequent word learning in temporal lobectomy populations. |
Dorothea Wendt; Torsten Dau; Jens Hjortkjær Impact of background noise and sentence complexity on processing demands during sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 345, 2016. @article{Wendt2016, Speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions can be effortful even when speech is fully intelligible. Acoustical distortions typically make speech comprehension more effortful, but effort also depends on linguistic aspects of the speech signal, such as its syntactic complexity. In the present study, pupil dilations, and subjective effort ratings were recorded in 20 normal-hearing participants while performing a sentence comprehension task. The sentences were either syntactically simple (subject-first sentence structure) or complex (object-first sentence structure) and were presented in two levels of background noise both corresponding to high intelligibility. A digit span and a reading span test were used to assess individual differences in the participants' working memory capacity (WMC). The results showed that the subjectively rated effort was mostly affected by the noise level and less by syntactic complexity. Conversely, pupil dilations increased with syntactic complexity but only showed a small effect of the noise level. Participants with higher WMC showed increased pupil responses in the higher-level noise condition but rated sentence comprehension as being less effortful compared to participants with lower WMC. Overall, the results demonstrate that pupil dilations and subjectively rated effort represent different aspects of effort. Furthermore, the results indicate that effort can vary in situations with high speech intelligibility. |
Sarah J. White; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge; Adrian Staub The word frequency effect during sentence reading: A linear or nonlinear effect of log frequency? Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 46–55, 2016. @article{White2016a, The effect of word frequency on eye movement behaviour during reading has been reported in many experimental studies. However, the vast majority of these studies compared only two levels of word frequency (high and low). Here we assess whether the effect of log word frequency on eye movement measures is linear, in an experiment in which a critical target word in each sentence was at one of three approximately equally spaced log frequency levels. Separate analyses treated log frequency as a categorical or a continuous predictor. Both analyses showed only a linear effect of log frequency on the likelihood of skipping a word, and on first fixation duration. Ex-Gaussian analyses of first fixation duration showed similar effects on distributional parameters in comparing high- and medium-frequency words, and medium- and low-frequency words. Analyses of gaze duration and the probability of a refixation suggested a nonlinear pattern, with a larger effect at the lower end of the log frequency scale. However, the nonlinear effects were small, and Bayes Factor analyses favoured the simpler linear models for all measures. The possible roles of lexical and post-lexical factors in producing nonlinear effects of log word frequency during sentence reading are discussed. |
Veronica Whitford; Debra Titone Eye movements and the perceptual span during first- and second-language sentence reading in bilingual older adults Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 58–70, 2016. @article{Whitford2016, This study addressed a central yet previously unexplored issue in the psychological science of aging, namely, whether the advantages of healthy aging (e.g., greater lifelong experience with language) or disadvantages (e.g., decreases in cognitive and sensory processing) drive L1 and L2 reading performance in bilingual older adults. To this end, we used a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to examine both global aspects of reading fluency (e.g., reading rates, number of regressions) and the perceptual span (i.e., allocation of visual attention into the parafovea) in bilingual older adults during L1 and L2 sentence reading, as a function of individual differences in current L2 experience. Across the L1 and L2, older adults exhibited reduced reading fluency (e.g., slower reading rates, more regressions), but a similar perceptual span compared with matched younger adults. Also similar to matched younger adults, older adults' reading fluency was lower for L2 reading than for L1 reading as a function of current L2 experience. Specifically, greater current L2 experience increased L2 reading fluency, but decreased L1 reading fluency (for global reading measures only). Taken together, the dissociation between intact perceptual span and impaired global reading measures suggests that older adults may prioritize parafoveal processing despite age-related encoding difficulties. Consistent with this interpretation, post hoc analyses revealed that older adults with higher versus lower executive control were more likely to adopt this strategy. |
Bogusława Whyatt; Katarzyna Stachowiak; Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny Similar and different: Cognitive rhythm and effort in translation and paraphrasing Journal Article In: Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 175–208, 2016. @article{Whyatt2016, Although Jakobson's (1959) seminal classification of translation into three kinds: interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic has been widely accepted in Translation Studies, so far most research interest has focused on interlingual translation, defined as “translation proper”. Intralingual translation, more often understood as rewording, paraphrasing or reformulation within the same language, is a less prototypical kind of translation, yet we believe that the underlying mental operations needed to perform both tasks include similar processing stages. Bearing in mind the lack of research comparing inter-and intralingual translation we designed the ParaTrans project in which we investigate how translators make decisions in both tasks. In this article we present the results of a comparative analysis of processing effort and cognitive rhythm demonstrated by professional translators who were asked to translate and paraphrase similar texts. Having collected three streams of translation process data with such tools as key-logging, eye-tracking and screen-capture software, we are able to draw some tentative conclusions concerning the similarities and differences between language processing for interlingual translation and intralingual paraphrasing. The results confirm a higher processing effort in interlingual translation most likely due to the need to switch between languages. |
Amanda H. Wilson; Agnès Alsius; Martin Paré; Kevin G. Munhall Spatial frequency requirements and gaze strategy in visual-only and audiovisual speech perception Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 59, pp. 601–615, 2016. @article{Wilson2016, Purpose: Understanding speech in background noise is difficult for many individuals; however, time constraints have limited its inclusion in the clinical audiology assessment battery. Phoneme scoring of words has been suggested as a method of reducing test time and variability. The purposes of this study were to establish a phoneme scoring rubric and use it in testing phoneme and word perception in noise in older individuals and individuals with hearing impairment. Method: Words were presented to 3 participant groups at 80 dB in speech-shaped noise at 7 signal-to-noise ratios (−10 to 35 dB). Responses were scored for words and phonemes correct. Results: It was not surprising to find that phoneme scores were up to about 30% better than word scores. Word scoring resulted in larger hearing loss effect sizes than phoneme scoring, whereas scoring method did not significantly modify age effect sizes. There were significant effects of hearing loss and some limited effects of age; age effect sizes of about 3 dB and hearing loss effect sizes of more than 10 dB were found. Conclusion: Hearing loss is the major factor affecting word and phoneme recognition with a subtle contribution of age. Phoneme scoring may provide several advantages over word scoring. A set of recommended phoneme scoring guidelines is provided. |
Matthew B. Winn Rapid release from listening effort resulting from semantic context, and effects of spectral degradation and cochlear implants Journal Article In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 20, 2016. @article{Winn2016, People with hearing impairment are thought to rely heavily on context to compensate for reduced audibility. Here, we explore the resulting cost of this compensatory behavior, in terms of effort and the efficiency of ongoing predictive language processing. The listening task featured predictable or unpredictable sentences, and participants included people with cochlear implants as well as people with normal hearing who heard full-spectrum/unprocessed or vocoded speech. The crucial metric was the growth of the pupillary response and the reduction of this response for predictable versus unpredictable sentences, which would suggest reduced cognitive load resulting from predictive processing. Semantic context led to rapid reduction of listening effort for people with normal hearing; the reductions were observed well before the offset of the stimuli. Effort reduction was slightly delayed for people with cochlear implants and considerably more delayed for normal-hearing listeners exposed to spectrally degraded noise-vocoded signals; this pattern of results was maintained even when intelligibility was perfect. Results suggest that speed of sentence processing can still be disrupted, and exertion of effort can be elevated, even when intelligibility remains high. We discuss implications for experimental and clinical assessment of speech recognition, in which good performance can arise because of cognitive processes that occur after a stimulus, during a period of silence. Because silent gaps are not common in continuous flowing speech, the cognitive/linguistic restorative processes observed after sentences in such studies might not be available to listeners in everyday conversations, meaning that speech recognition in conventional tests might overestimate sentence-processing capability. |
Elizabeth Wonnacott; Holly S. S. L. Joseph; James S. Adelman; Kate Nation Is children's reading “good enough”? Links between online processing and comprehension as children read syntactically ambiguous sentences Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 69, no. 5, pp. 855–879, 2016. @article{Wonnacott2016, We monitored 8- and 10-year-old children's eye movements as they read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity to obtain a detailed record of their online processing. Children showed the classic garden-path effect in online processing. Their reading was disrupted following disambiguation, relative to control sentences containing a comma to block the ambiguity, although the disruption occurred somewhat later than would be expected for mature readers. We also asked children questions to probe their comprehension of the syntactic ambiguity offline. They made more errors following ambiguous sentences than following control sentences, demonstrating that the initial incorrect parse of the garden-path sentence influenced offline comprehension. These findings are consistent with "good enough" processing effects seen in adults. While faster reading times and more regressions were generally associated with better comprehension, spending longer reading the question predicted comprehension success specifically in the ambiguous condition. This suggests that reading the question prompted children to reconstruct the sentence and engage in some form of processing, which in turn increased the likelihood of comprehension success. Older children were more sensitive to the syntactic function of commas, and, overall, they were faster and more accurate than younger children. |
Jeffrey S. Wood; Matthew Haigh; Andrew J. Stewart “This Isn't a Promise, It's a Threat” Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 89–97, 2016. @article{Wood2016, Participants had their eye movements recorded as they read vignettes containing implied promises and threats. We observed a reading time penalty when participants read the word “threat” when it anaphorically referred to an implied promise. There was no such penalty when the word “promise” was used to refer to an implied threat. On a later measure of processing we again found a reading time penalty when the word “threat” was used to refer to a promise, but also when the word “promise” was used to refer to a threat. These results suggest that anaphoric processing of such expressions is driven initially by sensitivity to the semantic scope differences of “threats” versus “promises.” A threat can be understood as a type of promise, but a promise cannot be understood as a type of threat. However, this effect was short lived; readers were ultimately sensitive to mismatched meaning, regardless of speech act performed. |
Helen Wray; Jeffrey S. Wood; Matthew Haigh; Andrew J. Stewart Threats may be negative promises (but warnings are more than negative tips) Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 593–600, 2016. @article{Wray2016, In everyday situations conditional promises, threats, tips, and warnings are commonplace. Previous research has reported disruption to eye movements during reading when conditional promises are produced by someone who does not have control over the conditional outcome event, but no such disruption for the processing of conditional tips. In the present paper, we examine how readers process conditional threats and warnings. We compare one account which views conditional threats and warnings simply as promises and tips with negative outcomes, with an alternative account which highlights their broader pragmatic differences. In an eye-tracking experiment we find evidence suggesting that, in processing terms, while threats operate like negative promises, warnings are more than negative tips. |
Yingying Wu; Xiaohong Yang; Yufang Yang Eye movement evidence for hierarchy effects on memory representation of discourses Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. e0147313, 2016. @article{Wu2016b, In this study, we applied the text-change paradigm to investigate whether and how discourse hierarchy affected the memory representation of a discourse. Three kinds of three-sentence discourses were constructed. In the hierarchy-high condition and the hierarchy-low condition, the three sentences of the discourses were hierarchically organized and the last sentence of each discourse was located at the high level and the low level of the discourse hierarchy, respectively. In the linear condition, the three sentences of the discourses were linearly organized. Critical words were always located at the last sentence of the discourses. These discourses were successively presented twice and the critical words were changed to semantically related words in the second presentation. The results showed that during the early processing stage, the critical words were read for longer times when they were changed in the hierarchy-high and the linear conditions, but not in the hierarchy-low condition. During the late processing stage, the changed-critical words were again found to induce longer reading times only when they were in the hierarchy-high condition. These results suggest that words in a discourse have better memory representation when they are located at the higher rather than at the lower level of the discourse hierarchy. Global discourse hierarchy is established as an important factor in constructing the mental representation of a discourse. |
Ming Yan; Reinhold Kliegl CarPrice versus CarpRice : Word Boundary Ambiguity Influences Saccade Target Selection During the Reading of Chinese Sentences Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 11, pp. 1832–1838, 2016. @article{Yan2016, As a contribution to a theoretical debate about the degree of high-level influences on saccade targeting during sentence reading, we investigated eye movements during the reading of structurally ambiguous Chinese character strings and examined whether parafoveal word segmentation could influence saccade- target selection. As expected, ambiguous strings took longer to process. More critically there were theoretically relevant interactions between ambiguity and launch site when first-fixation location and saccade amplitude served as dependent variables: Ambiguous strings in the parafovea triggered longer saccades and more rightward fixations for close launch sites than unambiguous ones; the reverse result was obtained for far launch sites. These crossover interactions indicate that parafoveal word segmentation influences saccade generation in Chinese and provide support of the hypothesis that high-level infor- mation can be involved in the decision about where to fixate next. |
Lili Yu; Michael G. Cutter; Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Yu Fu; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Word n + 2 preview effects in three-character Chinese idioms and phrases Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 31, no. 9, pp. 1130–1149, 2016. @article{Yu2016c, Prior research using the boundary paradigm suggests that Chinese readers only process word n +2 in the parafovea when word n + 1 is a single character, high-frequency word. We attempted to replicate these findings (Experiment 1), and investigated whether greater n + 2 preview effects are observed when word n + 1 and n + 2 form an idiom rather than a phrase (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 replicated prior findings, although additional analyses of word n + 1 and n + 2 as a single region revealed significant preview effects regardless of word n + 1 frequency. In Experiment 2 there was a main effect of phrase type, such that idioms were read more quickly than phrases, and significant n + 2 preview effects. There was no interaction between these variables, suggesting that idioms are not parafoveally processed to a greater extent than phrases. These results suggest that n + 2 preview effects in Chinese occur under several circumstances. Factors influencing the observation of these effects are discussed. |
Wan-Yun Yu; Jie-Li Tsai Modulation of scene consistency and task demand on language-driven eye movements for audio-visual integration Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 171, pp. 1–16, 2016. @article{Yu2016, Previous psycholinguistic studies have demonstrated that people tend to direct fixations toward the visual object to which spoken input refers during language comprehension. However, it is still unclear how the visual scene, especially the semantic consistency between object and background, affects the word-object mapping process during comprehension. Two visual world paradigm experiments were conducted to investigate how the scene consistency dynamically influenced the language-driven eye movements in a speech comprehension and a scene comprehension task. In each trial, participants listened to a spoken sentence while viewing a picture with two critical objects: one is the mentioned target object (e.g., tiger), which was embedded in either a consistent (e.g., field), inconsistent (e.g., sky) or blank background; the other is an unmentioned non-target object (e.g., eagle), which was always consistent with its background. The results showed that the fixation proportion of the inconsistent target was higher than the consistent target, and the task demand can affect the strength and the direction of the inconsistency effect before and after the target had been mentioned. In summary, the spoken language, scene-based knowledge and task demand were intertwined to determine eye movements during audio-visual integration for comprehension. |
Tania S. Zamuner; Charlotte Moore; Félix Desmeules-Trudel Toddlers' sensitivity to within-word coarticulation during spoken word recognition: Developmental differences in lexical competition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 152, pp. 136–148, 2016. @article{Zamuner2016, To understand speech, listeners need to be able to decode the speech stream into meaningful units. However, coarticulation causes phonemes to differ based on their context. Because coarticulation is an ever-present component of the speech stream, it follows that listeners may exploit this source of information for cues to the identity of the words being spoken. This research investigates the development of listeners' sensitivity to coarticulation cues below the level of the phoneme in spoken word recognition. Using a looking-while-listening paradigm, adults and 2- and 3-year-old children were tested on coarticulation cues that either matched or mismatched the target. Both adults and children predicted upcoming phonemes based on anticipatory coarticulation to make decisions about word identity. The overall results demonstrate that coarticulation cues are a fundamental component of children's spoken word recognition system. However, children did not show the same resolution as adults of the mismatching coarticulation cues and competitor inhibition, indicating that children's processing systems are still developing. |
Tania S. Zamuner; Elizabeth Morin-Lessard; Stephanie Strahm; Michael P. A. Page Spoken word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 89, pp. 55–67, 2016. @article{Zamuner2016a, Psycholinguistic models of spoken word production differ in how they conceptualize the relationship between lexical, phonological and output representations, making different predictions for the role of production in language acquisition and language processing. This work examines the impact of production on spoken word recognition of newly learned non-words. In Experiment 1, adults were trained on non-words with visual referents; during training, they produced half of the non-words, with the other half being heard-only. Using a visual world paradigm at test, eye tracking results indicated faster recognition of non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. In Experiment 2, non-words were correctly pronounced or mispronounced at test. Participants showed a different pattern of recognition for mispronunciation on non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. Together these results indicate that production affects the representations of newly learned words. |
Chuanli Zang; Yongsheng Wang; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge The use of probabilistic lexicality cues for word segmentation in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 548–560, 2016. @article{Zang2016, In an eye-tracking experiment we examined whether Chinese readers were sensitive to information concerning how often a Chinese character appears as a single-character word versus the first character in a two-character word, and whether readers use this information to segment words and adjust the amount of parafoveal processing of subsequent characters during reading. Participants read sentences containing a two-character target word with its first character more or less likely to be a single-character word. The boundary paradigm was used. The boundary appeared between the first character and the second character of the target word, and we manipulated whether readers saw an identity or a pseudocharacter preview of the second character of the target. Linear mixed-effects models revealed reduced preview benefit from the second character when the first character was more likely to be a single-character word. This suggests that Chinese readers use probabilistic combinatorial information about the likelihood of a Chinese character being single-character word or a two-character word online to modulate the extent of parafoveal processing. |
Chuanli Zang; Manman Zhang; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Kevin B. Paterson; Simon P. Liversedge Effects of word frequency and visual complexity on eye movements of young and older Chinese readers Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 69, no. 7, pp. 1409–1425, 2016. @article{Zang2016a, Research using alphabetic languages shows that, compared to young adults, older adults employ a risky reading strategy in which they are more likely to guess word identities and skip words to compensate for their slower processing of text. However, little is known about how ageing affects reading behaviour for naturally unspaced, logographic languages like Chinese. Accordingly, to assess the generality of age-related changes in reading strategy across different writing systems we undertook an eye movement investigation of adult age differences in Chinese reading. Participants read sentences containing a target word (a single Chinese character) that had a high or low frequency of usage and was constructed from either few or many character strokes, and so either visually simple or complex. Frequency and complexity produced similar patterns of influence for both age groups on skipping rates and fixation times for target words. Both groups therefore demonstrated sensitivity to these manipulations. But compared to the young adults, the older adults made more and longer fixations and more forward and backward eye movements overall. They also fixated the target words for longer, especially when these were visually complex. Crucially, the older adults skipped words less and made shorter progressive saccades. Therefore, in contrast with findings for alphabetic languages, older Chinese readers appear to use a careful reading strategy according to which they move their eyes cautiously along lines of text and skip words infrequently. We propose they use this more careful reading strategy to compensate for increased difficulty processing word boundaries in Chinese. |
Sandra A. Zerkle; Jennifer E. Arnold Discourse attention during utterance planning a昀fects referential form choice Journal Article In: Linguistics Vanguard, vol. 2, pp. 1–16, 2016. @article{Zerkle2016, An unstudied source of linguistic variation is the use of discourse-appropriate language. Sometimes individuals use linguistic devices (anaphors, connectors) to connect utterances to the discourse context, and sometimes not. We asked how this variation is related to utterance planning, using eyetracking with a narrative production task. Participants saw picture pairs depicting two events. They heard a description of the first event (Context picture), then added to the story by describing the second event (Target picture). We found that one group of participants produced utterances that connected with the discourse context (Context-Users), using pronouns/zeros and connectors ( and / then ) as appropriate, while another group consistently used definite NP descriptions and virtually no connectors (Context-Ignorers). Eyetracking measures reflected utterance planning within a discourse context: all participants shifted their attention from the Context picture to the Target picture throughout a trial. We also observed group differences: Context-Users directed their attention in a more systematic way than Context-Ignorers. At trial onset, Context-Users looked more at the Context picture than Context-Ignorers. Right before speaking, they looked more at the Target picture than Context-Ignorers. The Context-Users also had shorter latency to begin speaking. This study provides a first step toward characterizing individual differences in terms of utterance planning. |
Arielle Borovsky; Erica M. Ellis; Julia L. Evans; Jeffrey L. Elman Semantic structure in vocabulary knowledge interacts with lexical and sentence processing in infancy Journal Article In: Child Development, vol. 87, no. 6, pp. 1893–1908, 2016. @article{Borovsky2016, Although the size of a child's vocabulary associates with language-processing skills, little is understoodregarding how this relation emerges. This investigation asks whether and how the structure of vocabularyknowledge affects language processing in English-learning 24-month-old children (N = 32; 18 F, 14 M). Paren-tal vocabulary report was used to calculate semantic density in several early-acquired semantic categories.Performance on two language-processing tasks (lexical recognition and sentence processing) was compared asa function of semantic density. In both tasks, real-time comprehension was facilitated for higher density items,whereas lower density items experienced more interference. The findings indicate that language-processingskills develop heterogeneously and are influenced by the semantic network surrounding a known word. |
Andreas Brocher; Stephani Foraker; Jean Pierre Koenig Processing of irregular polysemes in sentence reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 11, pp. 1798–1813, 2016. @article{Brocher2016a, The degree to which meanings are related in memory affects ambiguous word processing. We examined irregular polysemes, which have related senses based on similar or shared features rather than a relational rule, like regular polysemy. We tested to what degree the related meanings of irregular polysemes ("wire") are represented with shared semantic information versus unshared information represented separately, like homonyms ("bank"). Monitoring eye fixations, we found that later context supporting the less frequent meaning of an irregular polyseme did not slow down reading compared with control conditions, whereas for homonyms it did. This indicates that in the absence of preceding biasing context, readers access a shared component of an irregular polyseme's representation. Additionally, when the same context words preceded the ambiguous word, both irregular polysemes and homonyms initially elicited longer reading times, but the observed reading slow-down was weaker and less persistent for irregular polysemes than homonyms, indicating less competition between meaning components. We interpret these results as evidence of a shared features representation for irregular polysemes, which additionally incorporates unshared portions of meaning that can compete. When preceding, biasing context is available, readers activate shared and unshared components of the senses, producing a more fully instantiated meaning. |
Trevor Brothers; Matthew J. Traxler Anticipating syntax during reading: Evidence from the boundary change paradigm Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 1894–1906, 2016. @article{Brothers2016, Previous evidence suggests that grammatical constraints have a rapid influence during language com- prehension, particularly at the level of word categories (noun, verb, preposition). These findings are in conflict with a recent study from Angele, Laishley, Rayner, and Liversedge (2014), in which sentential fit had no early influence on word skipping rates during reading. In the present study, we used a gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm to manipulate the syntactic congruity of an upcoming noun or verb outside of participants' awareness. Across 3 experiments (total N ⫽ 148), we observed higher skipping rates for syntactically valid previews (The admiral would not confess . . .), when compared with violation previews (The admiral would not surgeon . . .). Readers were less likely to skip an ungram- matical continuation, even when that word was repeated within the same sentence (The admiral would not admiral . . .), suggesting that word-class constraints can take precedence over lexical repetition effects. To our knowledge, these results provide the first evidence for an influence of syntactic context during parafoveal word recognition. On the basis of the early time-course of this effect, we argue that readers can use grammatical constraints to generate syntactic expectations for upcoming words. |
Susanne Brouwer; Ann R. Bradlow The temporal dynamics of spoken word recognition in adverse listening conditions Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 1151–1160, 2016. @article{Brouwer2016, This study examined the temporal dynamics of spoken word recognition in noise and background speech. In two visual-world experiments, English participants listened to target words while looking at four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. candle), an onset competitor (e.g. candy), a rhyme competitor (e.g. sandal), and an unrelated distractor (e.g. lemon). Target words were presented in quiet, mixed with broadband noise, or mixed with background speech. Results showed that lexical competition changes throughout the observation window as a function of what is presented in the background. These findings suggest that, rather than being strictly sequential, stream segregation and lexical competition interact during spoken word recognition. |
Aurélie Calabrèse; Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Géraldine Faure; Louis Hoffart; Eric Castet Clustering of eye fixations: A new oculomotor determinant of reading speed in maculopathy Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 57, no. 7, pp. 3192–3202, 2016. @article{Calabrese2016, Purpose: To describe and quantify a largely unnoticed oculomotor pattern that often occurs when patients with central field loss (CFL) read continuous text: Horizontal distribution of eye fixations dramatically varies across sentences and often reveals clusters. Also to statistically analyze the effect of this new factor on reading speed while controlling for the effect of saccadic amplitude (measured in letters per forward saccade, L/FS), an established oculomotor effect. Methods: Quantification of nonuniformity of eye fixations (NUF factor) was based on statistical analysis of the curvature of fixation distributions. Linear mixed-effects analyses were performed to predict reading speed from oculomotor factors based on eye movements of 34 AMD and 4 Stargardt patients (better eye decimal acuity from 0.08 to 0.3). Single-line French sentences were read aloud by these patients, who all had a dense scotoma covering the fovea as assessed with MP1 microperimetry. Results: Nonuniformity of fixations is a strong determinant of reading speed (−0.76 log units; 95% confidence interval [CI] [−0.86, −0.66]). This effect is not confounded with the effect of L/FS. The per sentence proportion of trials with clustering is predicted by the frequency of occurrence of the lowest-frequency word in each sentence. Conclusions: The NUF factor is a new oculomotor predictor of reading speed. This effect is independent of the effect of L/FS. Reading performance, as well as motivation to read, might be enhanced if new visual aids or automatic text simplification were used to reduce the occurrence of fixation clustering. © |
Julie Mercier; Irina Pivneva; Debra Titone The role of prior language context on bilingual spoken word processing: Evidence from the visual world task Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 376–399, 2016. @article{Mercier2016, We investigated whether speaking in one language affects cross- and within-language activation when subsequently switching to a task performed in the same or different language. English-French bilinguals (L1 English |
Audrey L. Michal; David Uttal; Priti Shah; Steven L. Franconeri Visual routines for extracting magnitude relations Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 1802–1809, 2016. @article{Michal2016, Linking relations described in text with relations in visualizations is often difficult. We used eye tracking to measure the optimal way to extract such relations in graphs, college students, and young children (6- and 8-year-olds). Participants compared relational statements ("Are there more blueberries than oranges?") with simple graphs, and two systematic patterns emerged: eye movements that followed the verbal order of the question (inspecting the "blueberry" value first) versus those that followed a left-first bias (regardless of the left value's identity). Question-order patterns led substantially to faster responses and increased in prevalence with age, whereas the left-first pattern led to far slower responses and was the dominant strategy for younger children. We argue that the optimal way to verify a verbally expressed relation'scon- sistency with visualization is for the eyes to mimic the verbal ordering but that this strategy requires executive control and coordination with language. |
Evelyn Milburn; Tessa Warren; Michael Walsh Dickey World knowledge affects prediction as quickly as selectional restrictions: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 536–548, 2016. @article{Milburn2016, There has been considerable debate regarding the question of whether linguistic knowledge and world knowledge are separable and used differently during processing or not (Hagoort et al, 2004). Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension (Matsuki et al, 2011). Event-based plausibility immediately influences on-line language comprehension (Paczynski et al, 2012). Multiple influences of semantic memory on sentence processing: Distinct effects of semantic relatedness on violations of real-world event/state knowledge and animacy selection restrictions (Warren et al, 2007). Investigating effects of selectional restriction violations and plausibility violation severity on eye movements in reading. Previous investigations into this question have provided mixed evidence as to whether violations of selectional restrictions are detected earlier than violations of world knowledge. We report a visual world eye-tracking study comparing the timing of facilitation contributed by selectional restrictions vs. world knowledge. College-aged adults (n = 36) viewed photographs of natural scenes while listening to sentences. Participants anticipated upcoming direct objects similarly regardless of whether facilitation was provided by only world knowledge or a combination of selectional restrictions and world knowledge. These results suggest that selectional restrictions are not available earlier in comprehension than world knowledge. |
Luis Morales; Daniela Paolieri; Paola E. Dussias; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff; Chip Gerfen; María Teresa Bajo The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 294–310, 2016. @article{Morales2016, We investigate the 'gender-congruency' effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian-Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / 'find the scarf') and clicked on the object named in the instruction. Grammatical gender of the objects' name was manipulated so that pairs of objects had the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender in Italian, but gender in Spanish was always congruent. Results showed that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, looked at target objects less when they were incongruent in gender, suggesting a between-language gender competition effect. In addition, bilinguals looked at target objects more when the definite article in the spoken instructions provided a valid cue to anticipate its selection (different-gender condition). The temporal dynamics of gender processing and cross-language activation in bilinguals are discussed. |
Iris Mulders; Kriszta Szendroi Early association of prosodic focus with alleen 'only': Evidence from eye movements in the visual-world paradigm Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 150, 2016. @article{Mulders2016, In three visual-world eye tracking studies, we investigated the processing of sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator alleen 'only' and different pitch accents, such as the Dutch Ik heb alleen SELDERIJ aan de brandweerman gegeven 'I only gave CELERY to the fireman' versus Ik heb alleen selderij aan de BRANDWEERMAN gegeven 'I only gave celery to the FIREMAN'. Dutch, like English, allows accent shift to express different focus possibilities. Participants judged whether these utterances match different pictures: in Experiment 1 the Early Stress utterance matched the picture, in Experiment 2 both the Early and Late Stress utterance did, and in Experiment 3 neither did. We found that eye-gaze patterns start to diverge across the conditions already as the indirect object is being heard. Our data also indicate that participants perform anticipatory eye-movements based on the presence of prosodic focus during auditory sentence processing. Our investigation is the first to report the effect of varied prosodic accent placement on different arguments in sentences with a semantic operator, alleen 'only', on the time course of looks in the visual world paradigm. Using an operator in the visual world paradigm allowed us to confirm that prosodic focus information immediately gets integrated into the semantic parse of the proposition. Our study thus provides further evidence for fast, incremental prosodic focus processing in natural language. |
Jana Annina Müller; Dorothea Wendt; Birger Kollmeier; Thomas Brand Comparing eye tracking with electrooculography for measuring individual sentence comprehension duration Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 10, pp. e0164627, 2016. @article{Mueller2016b, The aim of this study was to validate a procedure for performing the audio-visual paradigm introduced by Wendt et al. (2015) with reduced practical challenges. The original paradigm records eye fixations using an eye tracker and calculates the duration of sentence comprehension based on a bootstrap procedure. In order to reduce practical challenges, we first reduced the measurement time by evaluating a smaller measurement set with fewer trials. The results of 16 listeners showed effects comparable to those obtained when testing the original full measurement set on a different collective of listeners. Secondly, we introduced electrooculography as an alternative technique for recording eye movements. The correlation between the results of the two recording techniques (eye tracker and electrooculography) was r = 0.97, indicating that both methods are suitable for estimating the processing duration of individual participants. Similar changes in processing duration arising from sentence complexity were found using the eye tracker and the electrooculography procedure. Thirdly, the time course of eye fixations was estimated with an alternative procedure, growth curve analysis, which is more commonly used in recent studies analyzing eye tracking data. The results of the growth curve analysis were compared with the results of the bootstrap procedure. Both analysis methods show similar processing durations. |
Chie Nakamura; Manabu Arai Persistence of initial misanalysis with no referential ambiguity Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 909–940, 2016. @article{Nakamura2016, Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make inferences about the initial interpretation using pragmatic information, suggesting the possibility that the initial analysis persisted due to comprehenders' pragmatic inference but not to their failure to perform complete reanalysis of the initial misanalysis. Our study investigated this by testing locally ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese, in which the initial misinterpretation contradicts the correct interpretation. Our study using a self-paced reading technique demonstrated evidence for the persistence of the initial analysis with this structure. The results from an eye-tracking study further suggested that the phenomenon directly reflected the amount of support given to the initial incorrect analysis prior to disambiguating information: The more supported the incorrect main clause analysis was, the more likely comprehenders were to preserve the analysis even after the analysis was falsified. Our results thus demonstrated that the preservation of the initial analysis occurs not due to referential ambiguities but to comprehenders' difficulty to fully revise the highly supported initial interpretation. |
Jessie S. Nixon; Jacolien Rij; Peggy Mok; R. Harald Baayen; Yiya Chen The temporal dynamics of perceptual uncertainty: Eye movement evidence from Cantonese segment and tone perception Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 90, pp. 103–125, 2016. @article{Nixon2016, Two visual world eyetracking experiments investigated how acoustic cue value and statistical variance affect perceptual uncertainty during Cantonese consonant (Experiment 1) and tone perception (Experiment 2). Participants heard low- or high-variance acoustic stimuli. Euclidean distance of fixations from target and competitor pictures over time was analysed using Generalised Additive Mixed Modelling. Distance of fixations from target and competitor pictures varied as a function of acoustic cue, providing evidence for gradient, nonlinear sensitivity to cue values. Moreover, cue value effects significantly interacted with statistical variance, indicating that the cue distribution directly affects perceptual uncertainty. Interestingly, the time course of effects differed between target distance and competitor distance models. The pattern of effects over time suggests a global strategy in response to the level of uncertainty: as uncertainty increases, verification looks increase accordingly. Low variance generally creates less uncertainty, but can lead to greater uncertainty in the face of unexpected speech tokens. |
Nazbanou Nozari; Daniel Mirman; Sharon L. Thompson-Schill The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex facilitates processing of sentential context to locate referents Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 157-158, pp. 1–13, 2016. @article{Nozari2016, Left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) has been implicated in both integration and conflict resolution in sentence comprehension. Most evidence in favor of the integration account comes from processing ambiguous or anomalous sentences, which also poses a demand for conflict resolution. In two eye-tracking experiments we studied the role of VLPFC in integration when demands for conflict resolution were minimal. Two closely-matched groups of individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia were tested: the Anterior group had damage to left VLPFC, whereas the Posterior group had left temporo-parietal damage. In Experiment 1 a semantic cue (e.g., "She will eat the apple") uniquely marked the target (apple) among three distractors that were incompatible with the verb. In Experiment 2 phonological cues (e.g., "She will see an eagle."/"She will see a bear.") uniquely marked the target among three distractors whose onsets were incompatible with the cue (e.g., all consonants when the target started with a vowel). In both experiments, control conditions had a similar format, but contained no semantic or phonological contextual information useful for target integration (e.g., the verb "see", and the determiner "the"). All individuals in the Anterior group were slower in using both types of contextual information to locate the target than were individuals in the Posterior group. These results suggest a role for VLPFC in integration beyond conflict resolution. We discuss a framework that accommodates both integration and conflict resolution. |
Nazbanou Nozari; John C. Trueswell; Sharon L. Thompson-Schill In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 1942–1953, 2016. @article{Nozari2016a, During sentence comprehension, real-time identification of a referent is driven both by local, context-independent lexical information and by more global sentential information related to the meaning of the utterance as a whole. This paper investigates the cognitive factors that limit the consideration of referents that are supported by local lexical information but not supported by more global sentential information. In an eye-tracking paradigm, participants heard sentences like "She will eat the red pear" while viewing four black-and-white (colorless) line-drawings. In the experimental condition, the display contained a "local attractor" (e.g., a heart), which was locally compatible with the adjective but incompatible with the context ("eat"). In the control condition, the local attractor was replaced by a picture which was incompatible with the adjective (e.g., "igloo"). A second factor manipulated contextual constraint, by using either a constraining verb (e.g., "eat"), or a non-constraining one (e.g., "see"). Results showed consideration of the local attractor, the magnitude of which was modulated by verb constraint, but also by each subject's cognitive control abilities, as measured in a separate Flanker task run on the same subjects. The findings are compatible with a processing model in which the interplay between local attraction, context, and domain-general control mechanisms determines the consideration of possible referents. |
Henri Olkoniemi; Henri Ranta; Johanna K. Kaakinen Individual differences in the processing of written sarcasm and metaphor: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 433–450, 2016. @article{Olkoniemi2016, The present study examined individual differences in the processing of different forms of figurative language. Sixty participants read sarcastic, metaphorical, and literal sentences embedded in story contexts while their eye movements were recorded, and responded to a text memory and an inference question after each story. Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC), need for cognition (NFC), and cognitive-affective processing were measured. The results showed that the processing of metaphors was characterized by slow-down during first-pass reading of the utterances, whereas sarcasm produced mainly delayed effects in the eye movement records. Sarcastic utterances were also harder to comprehend than literal or metaphorical utterances as indicated by poorer performance in responses to inference questions. Individual differences in general cognitive factors (WMC and NFC) were related to the processing of metaphors, whereas individual differences in both general cognitive factors (WMC) as well as processing of emotional information were related to the processing of sarcasm. The results indicate that different forms of figurative language pose different cognitive demands to the reader, and show that reader characteristics play a prominent role in figurative language comprehension. |
Gareth Carrol; Kathy Conklin; Henrik Gyllstad Found in translation: The Influence of the L1 on the Reading of Idioms in a L2 Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 38, pp. 403–443, 2016. @article{Carrol2016, Formulaic language represents a challenge to even the most proficient of language learners. Evidence is mixed as to whether native and nonnative speakers process it in a fundamentally different way, whether exposure can lead to more nativelike processing for nonnatives, and how L1 knowledge is used to aid comprehension. In this study we investigated how advanced nonnative speakers process idioms encountered in their L2. We used eye-tracking to see whether a highly proficient group of L1 Swedes showed any evidence of a formulaic processing advantage for English idioms. We also compared translations of Swedish idioms and congruent idioms (items that exist in both languages) to see how L1 knowledge is utilized during online processing. Results support the view that L1 knowledge is automatically used from the earliest stages of processing, regardless of whether sequences are congruent, and that exposure and advanced proficiency can lead to nativelike formulaic processing in the L2. |
Gloria Chamorro; Antonella Sorace; Patrick Sturt What is the source of L1 attrition? the effect of recent L1 re-exposure on Spanish speakers under L1 attrition Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 520–532, 2016. @article{Chamorro2016, The recent hypothesis that L1 attrition affects the ability to process interface structures but not knowledge representations (Sorace, 2011) is tested by investigating the effects of recent L1 re-exposure on antecedent preferences for Spanish pronominal subjects, using offline judgements and online eye-tracking measures. Participants included a group of native Spanish speakers experiencing L1 attrition ('attriters'), a second group of attriters exposed exclusively to Spanish before they were tested ('re-exposed'), and a control group of Spanish monolinguals. The judgement data shows no significant differences between the groups. Moreover, the monolingual and re-exposed groups are not significantly different from each other in the eye-tracking data. The results of this novel manipulation indicate that attrition effects decrease due to L1 re-exposure, and that bilinguals are sensitive to input changes. Taken together, the findings suggest that attrition affects online sensitivity with interface structures rather than causing a permanent change in speakers' L1 knowledge representations. |
Gloria Chamorro; Patrick Sturt; Antonella Sorace Selectivity in L1 attrition: Differential object marking in Spanish near-native speakers of English Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 697–715, 2016. @article{Chamorro2016a, Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ('Interface Hypothesis', Sorace and Filiaci in Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Lang Res 22: 339-368, 2006). The present study tested possible L1 attrition effects on a syntax-semantics interface structure [Differential Object Marking (DOM) using the Spanish personal preposition] as well as the effects of recent L1 re-exposure on the potential attrition of these structures, using offline and eye-tracking measures. Participants included a group of native Spanish speakers experiencing attrition ('attriters'), a second group of attriters exposed exclusively to Spanish before they were tested, and a control group of Spanish monolinguals. The eye-tracking results showed very early sensitivity to DOM violations, which was of an equal magnitude across all groups. The off-line results also showed an equal sensitivity across groups. These results reveal that structures involving 'internal' interfaces like the DOM do not undergo attrition either at the processing or representational level. |
Charles Clifton; Lyn Frazier Accommodation to an unlikely episodic state Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 86, pp. 20–34, 2016. @article{Clifton2016, Mini-discourses like (ia) seem slightly odd compared to their counterparts containing a conjunction (ib).(i)a.Speaker A:John or Bill left.Speaker B:Sam did too.b.Speaker A:John and Bill left.Speaker B:Sam did too.One possibility is that or in Speaker A's utterance in (ia) raises the potential Question Under Discussion (QUD) whether it was John or Bill who left and Speaker B's reply fails to address this QUD. A different possibility is that the epistemic state of the speaker of (ia) is somewhat unlikely or uneven: the speaker knows that someone left, and that it was John or Bill, but doesn't know which one. The results of four acceptability judgment studies confirmed that (ia) is less good or coherent than (ib) (Experiment 1), but not due to failure to address the QUD implicitly introduced by the disjunction because the penalty for disjunction persisted even in the presence of a different overt QUD (Experiment 2) and even when there was no reply to Speaker A (Experiment 3). The hypothesis that accommodating an unusual epistemic state might underlie the lower acceptability of disjunction was supported by the fact that the disjunction penalty is larger in past tense discourses than in future discourses, where partial knowledge of events is the norm (Experiment 4). The results of an eye tracking study revealed a penalty for disjunction relative to conjunction that was significantly smaller when a lead in (. I wonder if it was. . .) explicitly introduced the disjunction. This interaction (connective X lead in) appeared in early measures on the disjunctive phrase itself, suggesting that the input is related to an inferred epistemic state of the speaker in a rapid and ongoing fashion. |
Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller; George L. Malcolm Anticipation in real-world scenes: The role of visual context and visual memory Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 40, no. 8, pp. 1995–2024, 2016. @article{Coco2016, The human sentence processor is able to make rapid predictions about upcoming linguistic input. For example, upon hearing the verb eat, anticipatory eye-movements are launched toward edible objects in a visual scene (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). However, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie anticipation remain to be elucidated in ecologically valid contexts. Previous research has, in fact, mainly used clip-art scenes and object arrays, raising the possibility that anticipatory eye-movements are limited to displays containing a small number of objects in a visually impoverished context. In Experiment 1, we confirm that anticipation effects occur in real-world scenes and investigate the mechanisms that underlie such anticipation. In particular, we demonstrate that real-world scenes provide contextual information that anticipation can draw on: When the target object is not present in the scene, participants infer and fixate regions that are contextually appropriate (e.g., a table upon hearing eat). Experiment 2 investigates whether such contextual inference requires the co-presence of the scene, or whether memory representations can be utilized instead. The same real-world scenes as in Experiment 1 are presented to participants, but the scene disappears before the sentence is heard. We find that anticipation occurs even when the screen is blank, including when contextual inference is required. We conclude that anticipatory language processing is able to draw upon global scene representations (such as scene type) to make contextual inferences. These findings are compatible with theories assuming contextual guidance, but posit a challenge for theories assuming object-based visual indices. |
Kathy Conklin; Ana Pellicer-Sánchez Using eye-tracking in applied linguistics and second language research Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 453–467, 2016. @article{Conklin2016, With eye-tracking technology the eye is thought to give researchers a window into the mind. Importantly, eye-tracking has significant advantages over traditional online processing measures: chiefly that it allows for more ‘natural' processing as it does not require a secondary task, and that it provides a very rich moment-to-moment data source. In recognition of the technology's benefits, an ever increasing number of researchers in applied linguistics and second language research are beginning to use it. As eye-tracking gains traction in the field, it is important to ensure that it is established in an empirically sound fashion. To do this it is important for the field to come to an understanding about what eye-tracking is, what eye-tracking measures tell us, what it can be used for, and what different eye-tracking systems can and cannot do. Further, it is important to establish guidelines for designing sound research studies using the technology. The goal of the current review is to begin to address these issues. |
Sarah C. Creel; Dolly P. Rojo; Angelica Nicolle Paullada Effects of contextual support on preschoolers' accented speech comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 146, pp. 156–180, 2016. @article{Creel2016, Young children often hear speech in unfamiliar accents, but relatively little research characterizes their comprehension capacity. The current study tested preschoolers' comprehension of familiar-accented versus unfamiliar-accented speech with varying levels of contextual support from sentence frames (full sentences vs. isolated words) and from visual context (four salient pictured alternatives vs. the absence of salient visual referents). The familiar accent advantage was more robust when visual context was absent, suggesting that previous findings of good accent comprehension in infants and young children may result from ceiling effects in easier tasks (e.g., picture fixation, picture selection) relative to the more difficult tasks often used with older children and adults. In contrast to prior work on mispronunciations, where most errors were novel object responses, children in the current study did not select novel object referents above chance levels. This suggests that some property of accented speech may dissuade children from inferring that an unrecognized familiar-but-accented word has a novel referent. Finally, children showed detectable accent processing difficulty despite presumed incidental community exposure. Results suggest that preschoolers' accented speech comprehension is still developing, consistent with theories of protracted development of speech processing. Copyright ©2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
Alex Carvalho; Isabelle Dautriche; Anne Christophe Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 235–250, 2016. @article{Carvalho2016, Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est tr? es jolie] ‘the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fen^ etre] ‘the little girl closes the window' – brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the criticalwordwhen it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5-year-olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye- tracker (3.5-year-olds and 4.5-year-olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings. |
Floor Groot; Falk Huettig; Christian N. L. Olivers When meaning matters: The temporal dynamics of semantic influences on visual attention Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 180–196, 2016. @article{Groot2016, An important question is, to what extent is visual attention driven by the semantics of individual objects, rather than by their visual appearance? This study investigates the hypothesis that timing is a crucial factor in the occurrence and strength of semantic influences on visual orienting. To assess the dynamics of such influences, the authors presented the target instruction either before or after visual stimulus onset, while eye movements were continuously recorded throughout the search. The results show a substantial but delayed bias in orienting toward semantically related objects compared with visually related objects when target instruction is presented before visual stimulus onset. However, this delay can be completely undone by presenting the visual information before the target instruction (Experiment 1). Moreover, the absence or presence of visual competition does not change the temporal dynamics of the semantic bias (Experiment 2). Visual orienting is thus driven by priority settings that dynamically shift between visual and semantic representations, with each of these types of bias operating largely independently. The findings bridge the divide between the visual attention and the psycholinguistic literature. |
Judith Degen; Michael K. Tanenhaus Availability of alternatives and the processing of scalar implicatures: A visual world eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 172–201, 2016. @article{Degen2016, Two visual world experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with some using a “gumball paradigm.” On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with orange and blue gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs dropped to the lower chamber, creating a contrast between a partitioned set of gumballs of one color and an unpartitioned set of the other. Participants then evaluated spoken statements, such as “You got some of the blue gumballs.” Experiment 1 investigated the time course of the pragmatic enrichment from some to not all when the only utterance alternatives available to refer to the dif- ferent sets were some and all. In Experiment 2, the number terms two, three, four, and five were also included in the set of alternatives. Scalar implicatures were delayed relative to the interpreta- tion of literal statements with all only when number terms were available. The results are inter- preted as evidence for a constraint-based account of scalar implicature processing. |
Rutvik H. Desai; Wonil Choi; Vicky T. Lai; John M. Henderson Toward semantics in the wild: Activation to manipulable nouns in naturalistic reading Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 14, pp. 4050–4055, 2016. @article{Desai2016, The neural basis of language processing, in the context of naturalistic reading of connected text, is a crucial but largely unexplored area. Here we combined functional MRI and eye tracking to examine the reading of text presented as whole paragraphs in two experiments with human subjects. We registered high-temporal resolution eye-tracking data to a low-temporal resolution BOLD signal to extract responses to single words during naturalistic reading where two to four words are typically processed per second. As a test case of a lexical variable, we examined the response to noun manipulability. In both experiments, signal in the left anterior inferior parietal lobule and posterior inferior temporal gyrus and sulcus was positively correlated with noun manipulability. These regions are associated with both action performance and action semantics, and their activation is consistent with a number of previous studies involving tool words and physical tool use. The results show that even during rapid reading of connected text, where semantics of words may be activated only partially, the meaning of manipulable nouns is grounded in action performance systems. This supports the grounded cognition view of semantics, which posits a close link between sensory-motor and conceptual systems of the brain. On the methodological front, these results demonstrate that BOLD responses to lexical variables during naturalistic reading can be extracted by simultaneous use of eye tracking. This opens up new avenues for the study of language and reading in the context of connected text. |
Yun Ding; Jing Zhao; Tao He; Yufei Tan; Lingshuang Zheng; Zhiguo Wang Selective impairments in covert shifts of attention in Chinese dyslexic children Journal Article In: Dyslexia, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 362–378, 2016. @article{Ding2016a, Reading depends heavily on the efficient shift of attention. Mounting evidence has suggested that dyslexics have deficits in covert attentional shift. However, it remains unclear whether dyslexics also have deficits in overt attentional shift. With the majority of relevant studies carried out in alphabetic writing systems, it is also unknown whether the attentional deficits observed in dyslexics are restricted to a particular writing system. The present study examined inhibition of return (IOR)-a major driving force of attentional shifts-in dyslexic children learning to read a logographic script (i.e., Chinese). Robust IOR effects were observed in both covert and overt attentional tasks in two groups of typically developing children, who were age- or reading ability-matched to the dyslexic children. In contrast, the dyslexic children showed IOR in the overt but not in the covert attentional task. We conclude that covert attentional shift is selectively impaired in dyslexic children. This impairment is not restricted to alphabetic writing systems, and it could be a significant contributor to the difficulties encountered by children learning to read. |
Muriel Dysli; Mathias Abegg Nystagmus does not limit reading ability in albinism Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 7, pp. e0158815, 2016. @article{Dysli2016, PURPOSE: Subjects with albinism usually suffer from nystagmus and reduced visual acuity, which may impair reading performance. The contribution of nystagmus to decreased reading ability is not known. Low vision and nystagmus may have an additive effect. We aimed to address this question by motion compensation of the nystagmus in affected subjects and by simulating nystagmus in healthy controls. METHODS: Reading speed and eye movements were assessed in 9 subjects with nystagmus associated with albinism and in 12 healthy controls. We compared the reading ability with steady word presentation and with words presented on a gaze contingent display where words move in parallel to the nystagmus and thus correct for the nystagmus. As the control, healthy subjects were asked to read words and texts in steady reading conditions as well as text passages that moved in a pattern similar to nystagmus. RESULTS: Correcting nystagmus with a gaze contingent display neither improved nor reduced the reading speed for single words. Subjects with nystagmus and healthy participants achieved comparable reading speed when reading steady texts. However, movement of text in healthy controls caused a significantly reduced reading speed and more regressive saccades. CONCLUSIONS: Our results argue against nystagmus as the rate limiting factor for reading speed when words were presented in high enough magnification and support the notion that other sensory visual impairments associated with albinism (for example reduced visual acuity) might be the primary causes for reading impairment. |
Peter C. Gordon; Renske S. Hoedemaker Effective scheduling of looking and talking during rapid automatized naming Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 742–760, 2016. @article{Gordon2016, Rapid automatized naming (RAN) is strongly related to literacy gains in developing readers, reading disabilities, and reading ability in children and adults. Because successful RAN performance depends on the close coordination of a number of abilities, it is unclear what specific skills drive this RAN-reading relationship. The current study used concurrent recordings of young adult participants' vocalizations and eye movements during the RAN task to assess how individual variation in RAN performance depends on the coordination of visual and vocal processes. Results showed that fast RAN times are facilitated by having the eyes 1 or more items ahead of the current vocalization, as long as the eyes do not get so far ahead of the voice as to require a regressive eye movement to an earlier item. These data suggest that optimizing RAN performance is a problem of scheduling eye movements and vocalization given memory constraints and the efficiency of encoding and articulatory control. Both RAN completion time (con- ventionally used to indicate RAN performance) and eye-voice relations predicted some aspects of participants' eye movements on a separate sentence reading task. However, eye-voice relations predicted additional features of first-pass reading that were not predicted by RAN completion time. This shows that measurement of eye-voice patterns can identify important aspects of individual variation in reading that are not identified by the standard measure of RAN performance. We argue that RAN performance predicts reading ability because both tasks entail challenges of scheduling cognitive and linguistic processes that operate simultaneously on multiple linguistic inputs. |
Julie Gregg; Albrecht W. Inhoff Misperception of orthographic neighbors during silent and oral reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 799–820, 2016. @article{Gregg2016, The study examined whether words are misperceived during natural fluent reading and the extent to which contextual and lexical properties bias perception. Target words were pairs of orthographic neighbors that differed in frequency. Pretarget context was neutral (Experiment 1) or biased toward the higher frequency member of the pair (Experiments 2 and 3), and posttarget context was neutral, congruent, or incongruent. Critically, incongruent context was constructed so that it was congruent with the target's neighbor. First-pass viewing showed only effects of target frequency. During silent reading (Experiments 1 and 2), rereading measures showed that the target frequency effect was smaller in the incongruent posttarget context condition than in the neutral and congruent conditions, and this occurred irrespective of prior context. Presumably, lower frequency words were less impeded by incongruent context because they were often misperceived as a congruent higher frequency neighbor. An oral reading task (Experiment 3) showed that the lower frequency target was more often misread than the higher frequency neighbor, and this proneness to error was influenced by posttarget context. Although target frequency influenced proneness to error, biased prior sentence context appeared to influence the construal of sentence meaning to accommodate incongruent targets and posttarget context. |
Ann Kathrin Grohe; Andrea Weber The penefit of salience: Salient accented, but not unaccented words reveal accent adaptation effects Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 864, 2016. @article{Grohe2016, In two eye-tracking experiments, the effects of salience in accent training and speech accentedness on spoken-word recognition were investigated. Salience was expected to increase a stimulus' prominence and therefore promote learning. A training-test paradigm was used on native German participants utilizing an artificial German accent. Salience was elicited by two different criteria: Production and listening training as a subjective criterion and accented (Experiment 1) and canonical test words (Experiment 2) as an objective criterion. During training in Experiment 1, participants either read single German words out loud and deliberately devoiced initial voiced stop consonants (e.g., Balken-"beam" pronounced as *Palken), or they listened to pre-recorded words with the same accent. In a subsequent eye-tracking experiment, looks to auditorily presented target words with the accent were analyzed. Participants from both training conditions fixated accented target words more often than a control group without training. Training was identical in Experiment 2, but during test, canonical German words that overlapped in onset with the accented words from training were presented as target words (e.g., Palme-"palm tree" overlapped in onset with the training word *Palken) rather than accented words. This time, no training effect was observed; recognition of canonical word forms was not affected by having learned the accent. Therefore, accent learning was only visible when the accented test tokens in Experiment 1, which were not included in the test of Experiment 2, possessed sufficient salience based on the objective criterion "accent." These effects were not modified by the subjective criterion of salience from the training modality. |
Qian Guo; Young-Suk Grace Kim; Li Yang; Lihui Liu Does previewing answer choice options improve performance on reading tests? Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 745–760, 2016. @article{Guo2016, Previewing answer-choice options before finishing reading the text is a widely employed test-taking behavior. In the present study we examined whether previewing is related to item response accuracy and response time, using data from Chinese learners of varying English proficiency levels and English native speakers. We examined eye movement patterns of participants who completed online multiple-choice sentence completion tasks, and how previewing was related to reading performance and whether the relation varied as a function of English proficiency level. The results showed that, relative to no previewing, previewing was associated with a significantly lower probability of answering an item correctly but not with significantly longer response time. Importantly, these relations varied across English proficiency levels such that participants with higher proficiency performed better without previewing, but there was no difference for lower-intermediate learners of English. These findings suggest that previewing does not facilitate performance on a sentence comprehension task, but instead interferes with the comprehension process, particularly for individuals with relatively high language proficiency. |
Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff; Paola E. Dussias Examining the relationship between comprehension and production processes in code-switched language Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 89, pp. 138–161, 2016. @article{GuzzardoTamargo2016, We employ code-switching (the alternation of two languages in bilingual communication) to test the hypothesis, derived from experience-based models of processing (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, Carlson, & Garnsey, 1989; Gennari & MacDonald, 2009), that bilinguals are sensitive to the combinatorial distributional patterns derived from production and that they use this information to guide processing during the comprehension of code-switched sentences. An analysis of spontaneous bilingual speech confirmed the existence of production asymmetries involving two auxiliary + participle phrases in Spanish-English code-switches. A subsequent eye-tracking study with two groups of bilingual code-switchers examined the consequences of the differences in distributional patterns found in the corpus study for comprehension. Participants' comprehension costs mirrored the production patterns found in the corpus study. Findings are discussed in terms of the constraints that may be responsible for the distributional patterns in code-switching production and are situated within recent proposals of the links between production and comprehension. |
Julia Habicht; Birger Kollmeier; Tobias Neher Are experienced hearing aid users faster at grasping the meaning of a sentence than inexperienced users? An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 20, 2016. @article{Habicht2016, This study assessed the effects of hearing aid (HA) experience on how quickly a participant can grasp the meaning of an acoustic sentence-in-noise stimulus presented together with two similar pictures that either correctly (target) or incorrectly (competitor) depict the meaning conveyed by the sentence. Using an eye tracker, the time taken by the participant to start fixating the target (the processing time) was measured for two levels of linguistic complexity (low vs. high) and three HA conditions: clinical linear amplification (National Acoustic Laboratories-Revised), single-microphone noise reduction with National Acoustic Laboratories-Revised, and linear amplification ensuring a sensation level of515 dB up to at least 4 kHz for the speech material used here. Timed button presses to the target stimuli after the end of the sentences (offline reaction times) were also collected. Groups of experienced (eHA) and inexperienced (iHA) HA users matched in terms of age, hearing loss, and working memory capacity took part (N¼15 each). For the offline reaction times, no effects were found. In contrast, processing times increased with linguistic complexity. Furthermore, for all HA conditions, processing times were longer (poorer) for the iHA group than for the eHA group, despite comparable speech recognition performance. Taken together, these results indicate that processing times are more sensitive to speech processing-related factors than offline reaction times. Furthermore, they support the idea that HA experience positively impacts the ability to process noisy speech quickly, irrespective of the precise gain characteristics. |
Britt Hadar; Joshua E. Skrzypek; Arthur Wingfield; Boaz M. Ben-David Working memory load affects processing time in spoken word recognition: Evidence from eye-movements Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 10, pp. 221, 2016. @article{Hadar2016, In daily life, speech perception is usually accompanied by other tasks that tap into working memory capacity. However, the role of working memory on speech processing is not clear. The goal of this study was to examine how working memory load affects the timeline for spoken word recognition in ideal listening conditions. We used the “visual world” eye-tracking paradigm. The task consisted of spoken instructions referring to one of four objects depicted on a computer monitor (e.g., “point at the candle”). Half of the trials presented a phonological competitor to the target word that either overlapped in the initial syllable (onset) or at the last syllable (offset). Eye movements captured listeners' ability to differentiate the target noun from its depicted phonological competitor (e.g., candy or sandal). We manipulated working memory load by using a digit pre-load task, where participants had to retain either one (low-load) or four (high-load) spoken digits for the duration of a spoken word recognition trial. The data show that the high-load condition delayed real-time target discrimination. Specifically, a four-digit load was sufficient to delay the point of discrimination between the spoken target word and its phonological competitor. Our results emphasize the important role working memory plays in speech perception, even when performed by young adults in ideal listening conditions. |
Matthew Haigh; Jeffrey S. Wood; Andrew J. Stewart Slippery slope arguments imply opposition to change Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 819–836, 2016. @article{Haigh2016, Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) of the form if A, then C describe an initial proposal (A) and a predicted, undesirable consequence of this proposal (C) (e.g., “If cannabis is ever legalized, then eventually cocaine will be legalized, too”). Despite SSAs being a common rhetorical device, there has been surprisingly little empirical research into their subjective evaluation and perception. Here, we present evidence that SSAs are interpreted as a form of consequentialist argument, inviting inferences about the speaker's (or writer's) attitudes. Study 1 confirmed the common intuition that a SSA is perceived to be an argument against the initial proposal (A), whereas Study 2 showed that the subjective strength of this inference relates to the subjective undesirability of the predicted consequences (C). Because arguments are rarely made out of context, in Studies 3 and 4 we examined how one important contextual factor, the speaker's known beliefs, influences the perceived coherence, strength, and persuasiveness of a SSA. Using an unobtrusive dependent variable (eye movements during reading), in Study 3 we showed that readers are sensitive to the internal coherence between a speaker's beliefs and the implied meaning of the argument. Finally, Study 4 revealed that this degree of internal coherence influences the perceived strength and persuasiveness of the argument. Together, these data indicate that SSAs are treated as a form of negative consequentialist argument. People infer that the speaker of a SSA opposes the initial proposal; therefore, SSAs are only perceived to be persuasive and conversationally relevant when the speaker's attitudes match this inference. |
Tuomo Häikiö; Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä The hyphen as a syllabification cue in reading bisyllabic and multisyllabic words among Finnish 1st and 2nd graders Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 159–182, 2016. @article{Haeikioe2016, Finnish ABC books present words with hyphens inserted at syllable boundaries. Syllabification by hyphens is abandoned in the 2nd grade for bisyllabic words, but continues for words with three or more syllables. The current eye movement study investigated how and to what extent syllable hyphens in bisyllabic (kah-vi ?cof-fee?) and multisyllabic words (haa-ruk-ka ?fork?, ap-pel-sii-ni ?orange?) affect eye movement behavior and reading speed of Finnish 1st and 2nd graders. Experiment 1 showed that 2nd graders had longer gaze durations, needed more fixations and had longer selective regression path durations for hyphenated than concatenated words. This implies that hyphenated words were difficult to process when first encountered, but also hard to integrate with prior sentence context. The effects were modified by number of syllables and reading skill. That is, the hyphenation effects were larger for multisyllabic than bisyllabic words and larger for more than less proficient readers. Experiment 2 showed the same hyphenation effect for 1st graders reading long multisyllabic words, even with a hyphen that was smaller in size and hence visually less salient. We argue that syllable hyphens prevent reasonably proficient readers from using the most efficient processing route for bi- and multisyllabic words and discuss the possible implications of the results for early Finnish reading instruction. |
Jesse A. Harris Processing let alone coordination in silent reading Journal Article In: Lingua, vol. 169, pp. 70–94, 2016. @article{Harris2016, Processing research on coordination indicates that simpler conjuncts are preferred over more complex ones, and that positing ellipsis structure in the second conjunct is taxing to process when a simpler non-ellipsis structure exists. The present study investigates let alone coordination, which is argued to require clausal ellipsis in the second conjunct. It is proposed that the processor always projects a clausal structure for the second conjunct for the ellipsis, obviating a general preference for a less complex conjunct. Experiment 1 consists of several sentence-completion questionnaires testing whether a DP or VP conjunct is preferred in let alone structures as in John doesn't like Mary, let alone (Sue | love her). The results found a bias towards VP remnants that was weakly affected by syntactic placement of the focus particle even, as well as by prior context. Experiment 2 examined the effect of remnant type on eye movements during silent reading, revealing only distinct processing patterns, rather than major processing penalties, for different remnant types, and a general facilitation when even was present to signal upcoming scalar contrast. |
R. A. Hayes; Michael Walsh Dickey; Tessa Warren Looking for a location: Dissociated effects of event-related plausibility and verb–argument information on predictive processing in aphasia Journal Article In: American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. S758–S775, 2016. @article{Hayes2016a, PURPOSE: This study examined the influence of verb-argument information and event-related plausibility on prediction of upcoming event locations in people with aphasia, as well as older and younger, neurotypical adults. It investigated how these types of information interact during anticipatory processing and how the ability to take advantage of the different types of information is affected by aphasia. METHOD: This study used a modified visual-world task to examine eye movements and offline photo selection. Twelve adults with aphasia (aged 54-82 years) as well as 44 young adults (aged 18-31 years) and 18 older adults (aged 50-71 years) participated. RESULTS: Neurotypical adults used verb argument status and plausibility information to guide both eye gaze (a measure of anticipatory processing) and image selection (a measure of ultimate interpretation). Argument status did not affect the behavior of people with aphasia in either measure. There was only limited evidence of interaction between these 2 factors in eye gaze data. CONCLUSIONS: Both event-related plausibility and verb-based argument status contributed to anticipatory processing of upcoming event locations among younger and older neurotypical adults. However, event-related likelihood had a much larger role in the performance of people with aphasia than did verb-based knowledge regarding argument structure. |
Daphna Heller; Christopher Parisien; Suzanne Stevenson Perspective-taking behavior as the probabilistic weighing of multiple domains Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 149, pp. 104–120, 2016. @article{Heller2016, Our starting point is the apparently-contradictory results in the psycholinguistic literature regarding whether, when interpreting a definite referring expressions, listeners process relative to the common ground from the earliest moments of processing. We propose that referring expressions are not interpreted relative solely to the common ground or solely to one's Private (or egocentric) knowledge, but rather reflect the simultaneous integration of the two perspectives. We implement this proposal in a Bayesian model of reference resolution, focusing on the model's predictions for two prior studies: Keysar, Barr, Balin, and Brauner (2000) and Heller, Grodner and Tanenhaus (2008). We test the model's predictions in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, demonstrating that the original results cannot simply be attributed to different perspective-taking strategies, and showing how they can arise from the same perspective-taking behavior. |
John M. Henderson; Wonil Choi; Matthew W. Lowder; Fernanda Ferreira Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 132, pp. 293–300, 2016. @article{Henderson2016, How is syntactic analysis implemented by the human brain during language comprehension? The current study combined methods from computational linguistics, eyetracking, and fMRI to address this question. Subjects read passages of text presented as paragraphs while their eye movements were recorded in an MRI scanner. We parsed the text using a probabilistic context-free grammar to isolate syntactic difficulty. Syntactic difficulty was quantified as syntactic surprisal, which is related to the expectedness of a given word's syntactic category given its preceding context. We compared words with high and low syntactic surprisal values that were equated for length, frequency, and lexical surprisal, and used fixation-related (FIRE) fMRI to measure neural activity associated with syntactic surprisal for each fixated word. We observed greater neural activity for high than low syntactic surprisal in two predicted cortical regions previously identified with syntax: left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and less robustly, left anterior superior temporal lobe (ATL). These results support the hypothesis that left IFG and ATL play a central role in syntactic analysis during language comprehension. More generally, the results suggest a broader cortical network associated with syntactic prediction that includes increased activity in bilateral IFG and insula, as well as fusiform and right lingual gyri. |