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 |
Roberto R. Heredia; Anna B. Cieślicka Metaphoric reference: An eye movement analysis of Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilingual readers Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 439, 2016. @article{Heredia2016, This study examines the processing of metaphoric reference by bilingual speakers. English dominant, Spanish dominant, and balanced bilinguals read passages in English biasing either a figurative (e.g., describing a weak and soft fighter that always lost and everyone hated) or a literal (e.g., describing a donut and bakery shop that made delicious pastries) meaning of a critical metaphoric referential description (e.g., 'creampuff'). We recorded the eye movements (first fixation, gaze duration, go-past duration, and total reading time) for the critical region, which was a metaphoric referential description in each passage. The results revealed that literal vs. figurative meaning activation was modulated by language dominance, where Spanish dominant bilinguals were more likely to access the literal meaning, and English dominant and balanced bilinguals had access to both the literal and figurative meanings of the metaphoric referential description. Overall, there was a general tendency for the literal interpretation to be more active, as revealed by shorter reading times for the metaphoric reference used literally, in comparison to when it was used figuratively. Results are interpreted in terms of the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora, 2002, 2003) and the Literal Salience Model (Cieślicka, 2006, 2015). |
Ehab W. Hermena; Simon P. Liversedge; Denis Drieghe Parafoveal processing of Arabic diacritical marks Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 2021–2038, 2016. @article{Hermena2016, Diacritics are glyph-like marks on letters that convey vowel information in Arabic, thus allowing for accurate pronunciation and disambiguation of homographs. For skilled readers, diacritics are usually omitted except when their omission causes ambiguity. Undiacritized homographs are very common in Arabic and are predominantly heterophones (where each meaning sounds different), with 1 version more common (dominant) than the others (subordinate). In this study the authors investigated parafoveal processing of diacritics during reading. They presented native readers with heterophonic homographs embedded in sentences with diacritization that instantiated either dominant or subordinate pronunciations of the homographs. Using the boundary paradigm, they presented previews of these words carrying either: identical diacritization to the target; inaccurate diacritization, such that if the target had dominant diacritization, the preview contained subordinate diacritization, and vice versa; or no diacritics. The results showed that readers processed the identity of diacritics parafoveally, such that inaccurate previews of the diacritics resulted in inflated fixation durations, particularly for fixations originating at close launch sites. Moreover, our results clearly indicate that readers' expectation for dominant or subordinate diacritization patterns influences their parafoveal and foveal processing of diacritics. Specifically, a perceived absence of diacritics (either in no-diacritics previews, or because the eyes were too far away to process the presence of diacritics) induced an expectation for the dominant pronunciation, whereas the perceived presence of diacritics induced an expectation for the subordinate meaning. |
Béryl Hilberink-Schulpen; Ulrike Nederstigt; Frank Meurs; Emmie Alem Does the use of a foreign language influence attention and genre-specific viewing patterns for job advertisements? An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Information Processing and Management, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 1018–1030, 2016. @article{HilberinkSchulpen2016, The aim of this online experiment was to find evidence for both the alleged attention-getting function of the use of L2 English in job advertisements and for a possible genre–specific viewing pattern for job advertisements. A mixed design eye–track experiment among 30 native speakers of Dutch who saw all-Dutch and mixed Dutch– English job advertisements tested whether the use of foreign language English in Dutch ads changed the viewing pattern compared to all-Dutch job advertisements. That is, it investigated whether the use of a foreign language attracted more attention (in terms of first fixation, number and duration of fixations, and returned views), and altered the genre–specific viewing pattern for job ads. Overall, no evidence for the attention–getting ability of foreign language use in jobs ads was found. On the contrary, English used in the company information seemed to have a deterring effect. Support was found for a genre–specific viewing pattern for job ads, which, however, was not altered by the use of a foreign language. Our results suggest that use of English is not necessarily a good option to attract attention. Findings for genre-specific viewing patterns suggest that makers of job ads should make the job description as attractive as possible, since this is the first element viewed. This is the first online study to investigate the effect of language choice on attention in job ads and the viewing patterns specific to this ad genre. |
Gerardo Fernández; Salvador Guinjoan; Marcelo Sapognikoff; David Orozco; Osvaldo Agamennoni Contextual predictability enhances reading performance in patients with schizophrenia Journal Article In: Psychiatry Research, vol. 241, pp. 333–339, 2016. @article{Fernandez2016, In the present work we analyzed fixation duration in 40 healthy individuals and 18 patients with chronic, stable SZ during reading of regular sentences and proverbs. While they read, their eye movements were recorded. We used lineal mixed models to analyze fixation durations. The predictability of words N-1, N, and N+1 exerted a strong influence on controls and SZ patients. The influence of the predictabilities of preceding, current, and upcoming words on SZ was clearly reduced for proverbs in comparison to regular sentences. Both controls and SZ readers were able to use highly predictable fixated words for an easier reading. Our results suggest that SZ readers might compensate attentional and working memory deficiencies by using stored information of familiar texts for enhancing their reading performance. The predictabilities of words in proverbs serve as task-appropriate cues that are used by SZ readers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using eyetracking for measuring how patients with SZ process well-defined words embedded in regular sentences and proverbs. Evaluation of the resulting changes in fixation durations might provide a useful tool for understanding how SZ patients could enhance their reading performance. |
Gerardo Fernández; Facundo Manes; Luis E. Politi; David Orozco; Marcela Schumacher; Liliana Castro; Osvaldo Agamennoni; Nora P. Rotstein Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease fail when using their working memory: Evidence from the eye tracking technique Journal Article In: Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 827–838, 2016. @article{Fernandez2016a, Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) develop progressive language, visuoperceptual, attentional, and oculomotor changes that can have an impact on their reading comprehension. However, few studies have examined reading behavior in AD, and none have examined the contribution of predictive cueing in reading performance. For this purpose we analyzed the eye movement behavior of 35 healthy readers (Controls) and 35 patients with probable AD during reading of regular and highpredictable sentences. The cloze predictability of words N- 1, and N+ 1 exerted an influence on the reader's gaze duration. The predictabilities of preceding words in high-predictable sentences served as task-appropriate cues that were used by Control readers. In contrast, these effects were not present in AD patients. In Controls, changes in predictability significantly affected fixation duration along the sentence; noteworthy, these changes did not affect fixation durations in AD patients. Hence, only in healthy readers did predictability of upcoming words influence fixation durations via memory retrieval. Our results suggest that Controls used stored information of familiar texts for enhancing their reading performance and imply that contextual-word predictability, whose processing is proposed to require memory retrieval, only affected reading behavior in healthy subjects. In AD patients, this loss reveals impairments in brain areas such as those corresponding to working memory and memory retrieval. These findings might be relevant for expanding the options for the early detection and monitoring in the early stages of AD. Furthermore, evaluation of eye movements during reading could provide a new tool for measuring drug impact on patients' behavior. |
Gerardo Fernández; Marcelo Sapognikoff; Salvador Guinjoan; David Orozco; Osvaldo Agamennoni Word processing during reading sentences in patients with schizophrenia: Evidences from the eyetracking technique Journal Article In: Comprehensive Psychiatry, vol. 68, pp. 193–200, 2016. @article{Fernandez2016b, Purpose: The current study analyze the effect of word properties (i.e., word length, word frequency and word predictability) on the eye movement behavior of patients with schizophrenia (SZ) compared to age-matched controls. Method: 18 SZ patients and 40 age matched controls participated in the study. Eye movements were recorded during reading regular sentences by using the eyetracking technique. Eye movement analyses were performed using linear mixed models. Findings: Analysis of eye movements revealed that patients with SZ decreased the amount of single fixations, increased their total number of second pass fixations compared with healthy individuals (Controls). In addition, SZ patients showed an increase in gaze duration, compared to Controls. Interestingly, the effects of current word frequency and current word length processing were similar in Controls and SZ patients. The high rate of second pass fixations and its low rate in single fixation might reveal impairments in working memory when integrating neighbor words. In contrast, word frequency and length processing might require less complex mechanisms, which were functioning in SZ patients. Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study measuring how patients with SZ process dynamically well-defined words embedded in regular sentences. The findings suggest that evaluation of the resulting changes in eye movement behavior may supplement current symptom-based diagnosis. |
Aline Ferreira; John Wayne Schwieter; Alexandra Gottardo; Jefferey Jones Cognitive effort in direct and inverse translation performance: Insight from eye-tracking technology Journal Article In: Cadernos de Tradução, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 60–80, 2016. @article{Ferreira2016, This case study examined the translation performance of four professional translators with the aim of exploring the cognitive effort involved in direct and inverse translation. Four professional translators translated two comparable texts from English into Spanish and from Spa- nish into English. Eye-tracking technology was used to analyze the total time spent in each task, fixation time, and average fixation time. Fixation count in three areas of interest was measured including: source text, target text, and browser, used as an external support. Results suggested that although total time and fixation count were indicators of cognitive effort during the tasks, fixation count in the areas of interest data showed that more effort was directed toward the source text in both tasks. Overall, this study demonstrates that while more traditional measures for translation difficulty (e.g., total time) indicate more effort in the inverse translation task, eye-tracking data indicate that differences in the effort applied in both directions must be carefully analyzed, mostly regarding the areas of interest. |
Phillip D. Fletcher; Jennifer M. Nicholas; Laura E. Downey; Hannah L. Golden; Camilla N. Clark; Carolina Pires; Jennifer L. Agustus; Catherine J. Mummery; Jonathan M. Schott; Jonathan D. Rohrer; Sebastian J. Crutch; Jason D. Warren A physiological signature of sound meaning in dementia Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 77, pp. 13–23, 2016. @article{Fletcher2016, The meaning of sensory objects is often behaviourally and biologically salient and decoding of semantic salience is potentially vulnerable in dementia. However, it remains unclear how sensory semantic processing is linked to physiological mechanisms for coding object salience and how that linkage is affected by neurodegenerative diseases. Here we addressed this issue using the paradigm of complex sounds. We used pupillometry to compare physiological responses to real versus synthetic nonverbal sounds in patients with canonical dementia syndromes (behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia - bvFTD, semantic dementia - SD; progressive nonfluent aphasia - PNFA; typical Alzheimer's disease - AD) relative to healthy older individuals. Nonverbal auditory semantic competence was assessed using a novel within-modality sound classification task and neuroanatomical associations of pupillary responses were assessed using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) of patients' brain MR images. After taking affective stimulus factors into account, patients with SD and AD showed significantly increased pupil responses to real versus synthetic sounds relative to healthy controls. The bvFTD, SD and AD groups had a nonverbal auditory semantic deficit relative to healthy controls and nonverbal auditory semantic performance was inversely correlated with the magnitude of the enhanced pupil response to real versus synthetic sounds across the patient cohort. A region of interest analysis demonstrated neuroanatomical associations of overall pupil reactivity and differential pupil reactivity to sound semantic content in superior colliculus and left anterior temporal cortex respectively. Our findings suggest that autonomic coding of auditory semantic ambiguity in the setting of a damaged semantic system may constitute a novel physiological signature of neurodegenerative diseases. |
Melinda Fricke; Judith F. Kroll; Paola E. Dussias Phonetic variation in bilingual speech: A lens for studying the production-comprehension link Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 89, pp. 110–137, 2016. @article{Fricke2016, We exploit the unique phonetic properties of bilingual speech to ask how processes occurring during planning affect speech articulation, and whether listeners can use the phonetic modulations that occur in anticipation of a codeswitch to help restrict their lexical search to the appropriate language. An analysis of spontaneous bilingual codeswitching in the Bangor Miami Corpus (Deuchar, Davies, Herring, Parafita Couto, & Carter, 2014) reveals that in anticipation of switching languages, Spanish-English bilinguals produce slowed speech rate and cross-language phonological influence on consonant voice onset time. A study of speech comprehension using the visual world paradigm demonstrates that bilingual listeners can indeed exploit these low-level phonetic cues to anticipate that a codeswitch is coming and to suppress activation of the non-target language. We discuss the implications of these results for current theories of bilingual language regulation, and situate them in terms of recent proposals relating the coupling of the production and comprehension systems more generally. |
Benjamin Gagl Blue hypertext is a good design decision: No perceptual disadvantage in reading and successful highlighting of relevant information Journal Article In: PeerJ, vol. 4, pp. 1–11, 2016. @article{Gagl2016, BACKGROUND: Highlighted text in the Internet (i.e., hypertext) is predominantly blue and underlined. The perceptibility of these hypertext characteristics was heavily questioned by applied research and empirical tests resulted in inconclusive results. The ability to recognize blue text in foveal and parafoveal vision was identified as potentially constrained by the low number of foveally centered blue light sensitive retinal cells. The present study investigates if foveal and parafoveal perceptibility of blue hypertext is reduced in comparison to normal black text during reading. METHODS: A silent-sentence reading study with simultaneous eye movement recordings and the invisible boundary paradigm, which allows the investigation of foveal and parafoveal perceptibility, separately, was realized (comparing fixation times after degraded vs. un-degraded parafoveal previews). Target words in sentences were presented in either black or blue and either underlined or normal. RESULTS: No effect of color and underlining, but a preview benefit could be detected for first pass reading measures. Fixation time measures that included re-reading, e.g., total viewing times, showed, in addition to a preview effect, a reduced fixation time for not highlighted (black not underlined) in contrast to highlighted target words (either blue or underlined or both). DISCUSSION: The present pattern reflects no detectable perceptual disadvantage of hyperlink stimuli but increased attraction of attention resources, after first pass reading, through highlighting. Blue or underlined text allows readers to easily perceive hypertext and at the same time readers re-visited highlighted words longer. On the basis of the present evidence, blue hypertext can be safely recommended to web designers for future use. |
Lesya Y. Ganushchak; Yiya Chen Incrementality in planning of speech during speaking and reading aloud: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, pp. 33, 2016. @article{Ganushchak2016, Speaking is an incremental process where planning and articulation interleave. While incrementality has been studied in reading and online speech production separately, it has not been directly compared within one investigation. This study set out to compare the extent of planning incrementality in online sentence formulation versus reading aloud and how discourse context may constrain the planning scope of utterance preparation differently in these two modes of speech planning. Two eye-tracking experiments are reported: participants either described pictures of transitive events (Experiment 1) or read aloud the written descriptions of those events (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the information status of an object character was manipulated in the discourse preceding each picture or sentence. In the Literal condition, participants heard a story where object character was literally mentioned (e.g., fly). In the No Mention condition, stories did not literally mention nor prime the object character depicted on the picture or written in the sentence. The target response was expected to have the same structure and content in all conditions (The frog catches the fly). During naming, the results showed shorter speech onset latencies in the Literal condition than in the No Mention condition. However, no significant differences in gaze durations were found. In contrast, during reading, there were no significant differences in speech onset latencies but there were significantly longer gaze durations to the target picture/word in the Literal than in the No Mention condition. Our results shot that planning is more incremental during reading than during naming and that discourse context can be helpful during speaker but may hinder during reading aloud. Taken together our results suggest that on-line planning of response is affected by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors. |
Isabel Orenes; Linda M. Moxey; Christoph Scheepers; Carlos Santamaría Negation in context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 69, no. 6, pp. 1082–1092, 2016. @article{Orenes2016, Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dadwas not poor) while viewing two images ofthe affirmed and denied enti- ties. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side oftown) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800 ms in the neutral context, 600 ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450 ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated. |
Irene Ablinger; Ralph Radach Diverging receptive and expressive word processing mechanisms in a deep dyslexic reader Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 81, pp. 12–21, 2016. @article{Ablinger2016, We report on KJ, a patient with acquired dyslexia due to cerebral artery infarction. He represents an unusually clear case of an "output" deep dyslexic reader, with a distinct pattern of pure semantic reading. According to current neuropsychological models of reading, the severity of this condition is directly related to the degree of impairment in semantic and phonological representations and the resulting imbalance in the interaction between the two word processing pathways. The present work sought to examine whether an innovative eye movement supported intervention combining lexical and segmental therapy would strengthen phonological processing and lead to an attenuation of the extreme semantic over-involvement in KJ's word identification process. Reading performance was assessed before (T1) between (T2) and after (T3) therapy using both analyses of linguistic errors and word viewing patterns. Therapy resulted in improved reading aloud accuracy along with a change in error distribution that suggested a return to more sequential reading. Interestingly, this was in contrast to the dynamics of moment-to-moment word processing, as eye movement analyses still suggested a predominantly holistic strategy, even at T3. So, in addition to documenting the success of the therapeutic intervention, our results call for a theoretically important conclusion: Real-time letter and word recognition routines should be considered separately from properties of the verbal output. Combining both perspectives may provide a promising strategy for future assessment and therapy evaluation. |
Zaeinab Afsari; José P. Ossandón; Peter Konig The dynamic effect of reading direction habit on spatial asymmetry of image perception Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 16, no. 11, pp. 1–21, 2016. @article{Afsari2016, Exploration of images after stimulus onset is initially biased to the left. Here, we studied the causes of such an asymmetry and investigated effects of reading habits, text primes, and priming by systematically biased eye movements on this spatial bias in visual exploration. Bilinguals first read text primes with right- to-left (RTL) or left-to-right (LTR) reading directions and subsequently explored natural images. In Experiment 1, native RTL speakers showed a leftward free-viewing shift after reading LTR primes but a weaker rightward bias after reading RTL primes. This demonstrates that reading direction dynamically influences the spatial bias. However, native LTR speakers wholearnedanRTL languagelateinlife showed a leftward bias after reading either LTR or RTL primes, which suggests the role of habit formation in the production of the spatial bias. In Experiment 2, LTR bilinguals showed a slightly enhanced leftward bias after reading LTR text primes in their second language. This might contribute to the differences of native RTL and LTR speakers observed in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, LTR bilinguals read normal (LTR, habitual reading) and mirrored left-to-right (mLTR, nonhabitual reading) texts. We observed a strong leftward bias in both cases, indicating that the bias direction is influenced by habitual reading direction and is not secondary to the actual reading direction. This is confirmed in Experiment 4, in which LTR participants were asked to follow RTL and LTR moving dots in prior image presentation and showed no change in the normal spatial bias. In conclusion, the horizontal bias is a dynamic property and is modulated by habitual reading direction. Introduction |
Agnès Alsius; Rachel V. Wayne; Martin Paré; Kevin G. Munhall High visual resolution matters in audiovisual speech perception, but only for some Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 78, no. 5, pp. 1472–1487, 2016. @article{Alsius2016, The basis for individual differences in the degree to which visual speech input enhances comprehension of acoustically degraded speech is largely unknown. Previous research indicates that fine facial detail is not critical for visual enhancement when auditory information is available; however, these studies did not examine individual differences in ability to make use of fine facial detail in relation to audiovisual speech perception ability. Here, we compare participants based on their ability to benefit from visual speech information in the presence of an auditory signal degraded with noise, modulating the resolution of the visual signal through low-pass spatial frequency filtering and monitoring gaze behavior. Participants who benefited most from the addition of visual information (high visual gain) were more adversely affected by the removal of high spatial frequency information, compared to participants with low visual gain, for materials with both poor and rich contextual cues (i.e., words and sentences, respectively). Differences as a function of gaze behavior between participants with the highest and lowest visual gains were observed only for words, with participants with the highest visual gain fixating longer on the mouth region. Our results indicate that the individual variance in audiovisual speech in noise performance can be accounted for, in part, by better use of fine facial detail information extracted from the visual signal and increased fixation on mouth regions for short stimuli. Thus, for some, audiovisual speech perception may suffer when the visual input (in addition to the auditory signal) is less than perfect. |
Bernhard Angele; Timothy J. Slattery; Keith Rayner Two stages of parafoveal processing during reading: Evidence from a display change detection task Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 1241–1249, 2016. @article{Angele2016, We used a display change detection paradigm (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner Human Perception and Performance, 37, 1924–1938 2011) to investigate whether display change detection uses orthographic regularity and whether detection is affected by the processing difficulty of the word preceding the boundary that triggers the display change. Subjects were significantly more sensitive to display changes when the change was from a nonwordlike preview than when the change was from a wordlike preview, but the preview benefit effect on the target word was not affected by whether the preview was wordlike or nonwordlike. Additionally, we did not find any influence of preboundary word frequency on display change detection performance. Our results suggest that display change detection and lexical processing do not use the same cognitive mechanisms. We propose that parafoveal processing takes place in two stages: an early, orthography-based, preattentional stage, and a late, attention-dependent lexical access stage. |
Manabu Arai; Chie Nakamura It's harder to break a relationship when you commit long Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. e0156482, 2016. @article{Arai2016, Past research has produced evidence that parsing commitments strengthen over the processing of additional linguistic elements that are consistent with the commitments and undoing strong commitments takes more time than undoing weak commitments. It remains unclear, however, whether this so-called digging-in effect is exclusively due to the length of an ambiguous region or at least partly to the extra cost of processing these additional phrases. The current study addressed this issue by testing Japanese relative clause structure, where lexical content and sentence meaning were controlled for. The results showed evidence for a digging-in effect reflecting the strengthened commitment to an incorrect analysis caused by the processing of additional adjuncts. Our study provides strong support for the dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing but poses a problem for other models including serial two-stage models as well as frequency-based probabilistic models such as the surprisal theory. |
Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder; Tori E. Foster; Andrea M. Zawoyski Repeated versus wide reading: A randomized control design study examining the impact of fluency interventions on underlying reading behavior Journal Article In: Journal of School Psychology, vol. 59, pp. 13–38, 2016. @article{Ardoin2016, Repeated readings (RR) has garnered much attention as an evidence based intervention designed to improve all components of reading fluency (rate, accuracy, prosody, and comprehension). Despite this attention, there is not an abundance of research comparing its effectiveness to other potential interventions. The current study presents the findings from a randomized control trial study involving the assignment of 168 second grade students to a RR, wide reading (WR), or business as usual condition. Intervention students were provided with 9–10 weeks of intervention with sessions occurring four times per week. Pre- and post-testing were conducted using Woodcock-Johnson III reading achievement measures (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001, curriculum-based measurement (CBM) probes, measures of prosody, and measures of students' eye movements when reading. Changes in fluency were also monitored using weekly CBM progress monitoring procedures. Data were collected on the amount of time students spent reading and the number of words read by students during each intervention session. Results indicate substantial gains made by students across conditions, with some measures indicating greater gains by students in the two intervention conditions. Analyses do not indicate that RR was superior to WR. In addition to expanding the RR literature, this study greatly expands research evaluating changes in reading behaviors that occur with improvements in reading fluency. Implications regarding whether schools should provide more opportunities to repeatedly practice the same text (i.e., RR) or practice a wide range of text (i.e., WR) are provided. |
Julia Bahnmueller; Stefan Huber; Hans-Christoph Nuerk; Silke M. Göbel; Korbinian Moeller Processing multi-digit numbers: a translingual eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 422–433, 2016. @article{Bahnmueller2016, The present study aimed at investigating the underlying cognitive processes and language specificities of three-digit number processing. More specifically, it was intended to clarify whether the single digits of three-digit numbers are processed in parallel and/or sequentially and whether processing strategies are influenced by the inversion of number words with respect to the Arabic digits [e.g., 43: dreiundvierzig (“three and forty”)] and/or by differences in reading behavior of the respective first language. Therefore, English- and German-speaking adults had to complete a three-digit number comparison task while their eye-fixation behavior was recorded. Replicating previous results, reliable hundred-decade-compatibility effects (e.g., 742_896: hundred-decade compatible because 7 < 8 and 4 < 9; 362_517: hundred-decade incompatible because 3 < 5 but 6 > 1) for English- as well as hundred-unit-compatibility effects for English- and German-speaking participants were observed, indicating parallel processing strategies. While no indices of partial sequential processing were found for the English-speaking group, about half of the German-speaking participants showed an inverse hundred-decade-compatibility effect accompanied by longer inspection time on the hundred digit indicating additional sequential processes. Thereby, the present data revealed that in transition from two- to higher multi-digit numbers, the homogeneity of underlying processing strategies varies between language groups. The regular German orthography (allowing for letter-by-letter reading) and its associated more sequential reading behavior may have promoted sequential processing strategies in multi-digit number processing. Furthermore, these results indicated that the inversion of number words alone is not sufficient to explain all observed language differences in three-digit number processing. |
Adrienne E. Barnes; Young-Suk Kim Low-skilled adult readers look like typically developing child readers: A comparison of reading skills and eye movement behavior Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 29, no. 9, pp. 1889–1914, 2016. @article{Barnes2016, The paper documents 41 European case histories that describe the seismogenic response of crystalline and sedimentary rocks to fluid injection. It is part of an on-going study to identify factors that have a bearing on the seismic hazard associated with fluid injection. The data generally support the view that injection in sedimentary rocks tends to be less seismogenic than in crystalline rocks. In both cases, the presence of faults near the wells that allow pressures to penetrate significant distances vertically and laterally can be expected to increase the risk of producing felt events. All cases of injection into crystalline rocks produce seismic events, albeit usually of non-damaging magnitudes, and all crystalline rock masses were found to be critically stressed, regardless of the strength of their seismogenic responses to injection. Thus, these data suggest that criticality of stress, whilst a necessary condition for producing earthquakes that would disturb (or be felt by) the local population, is not a sufficient condition. The data considered here are not fully consistent with the concept that injection into deeper crystalline formations tends to produce larger magnitude events. The data are too few to evaluate the combined effect of depth and injected fluid volume on the size of the largest events. Injection at sites with low natural seismicity, defined by the expectation that the local peak ground acceleration has less than a 10% chance of exceeding 0.07 g in 50 years, has not produced felt events. Although the database is limited, this suggests that low natural seismicity, corresponding to hazard levels at or below 0.07 g, may be a useful indicator of a low propensity for fluid injection to produce felt or damaging events. However, higher values do not necessarily imply a high propensity. |
2015 |
Gareth Carrol; Kathy Conklin; Josephine Guy; Rebekah Scott Processing punctuation and word changes in different editions of prose fiction Journal Article In: Scientific Study of Literature, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 200–228, 2015. @article{Carrol2015, The digital era has brought with it a shift in the field of literary editing in terms of the amount and kind of textual variation that can reasonably be annotated by editors. However, questions remain about how far readers engage with textual variants, especially minor ones such as small-scale changes to punctuation. In this study we present an eye-tracking experiment investigating reader sensitivity to variations in surface textual features of prose fiction. We monitored eye movements while participants read textual variants from Dickens and James, hypothesising that readers may pay more attention to lexical rather than punctuation changes. We found longer reading times for both types, but only lexical changes also increased reading times for the rest of the sentence. In addition, eye-movement behaviour and conscious ability to report changes were highly correlated. We discuss the implications for how such methods might be applied to questions of “literary” significance and textual processing. |
Matthew J. Abbott; Bernhard Angele; Y. Danbi Ahn; Keith Rayner Skipping syntactically illegal the previews: The role of predictability. Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1703–1714, 2015. @article{Abbott2015a, Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates the-skipping behavior. The results provide further evidence that readers frequently skip the article the when infelicitous in context. Readers skipped predictable words more often than unpredictable words, even when the, which was syntactically illegal and unpredictable from the prior context, was presented as a parafoveal preview. The results of the experiment were simulated using E-Z Reader 10 by assuming that cloze probability can be dissociated from parafoveal visual input. It appears that when a short word is predictable in context, a decision to skip it can be made even if the information available parafoveally conflicts both visually and syntactically with those predictions. |
Christopher A. Sanchez; Allison J. Jaeger If it's hard to read, it changes how long you do it: Reading time as an explanation for perceptual fluency effects on judgment Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 206–211, 2015. @article{Sanchez2015, Perceptual manipulations, such as changes in font type or figure-ground contrast, have been shown to increase judgments of difficulty or effort related to the presented material. Previous theory has suggested that this is the result of changes in online processing or perhaps the post-hoc influence of perceived difficulty recalled at the time of judgment. These two experiments seek to examine by which mechanism (or both) the fluency effect is pro-duced. Results indicate that disfluency does in fact change in situ reading behavior, and this change significantly me-diates judgments. Eye movement analyses corroborate this suggestion and observe a difference in how people read a disfluent presentation. These findings support the notion that readers are using perceptual cues in their reading ex-periences to change how they interact with the material, which in turn produces the observed biases. |
Iya Khelm Price; Naoko Witzel; Jeffrey Witzel Orthographic and phonological form interference during silent reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1628–1647, 2015. @article{Price2015, This study reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating form interference during sentence-level silent reading. The items involved reduced and unreduced relative clauses (RCs) with words that were orthographically and phonologically similar (injection-infection; O+P+, Experiment 1) as well as with words that were orthographically similar, but phonologically dissimilar (laughter-daughter; O+P-, Experiment 2). Both experiments revealed syntactic processing disruptions for reduced RCs. Processing difficulty was also observed at the form-related word in both experiments under first-pass and second-pass reading measures. These form-interference effects did not interact with structural processing difficulty under first-pass measures in either experiment. Under second-pass time, there were larger processing disruptions for reduced RCs in O+P+ sentences relative to their controls. This was not the case, however, for O+P- sentences. These results suggest 2 components to form-interference effects during silent reading: (a) an early, low-level component that is driven in large part by visual form overlap and (b) a component that relates to late stages of interpretation and that is associated more closely with phonological form overlap. |
Chiara Reali; Yulia Esaulova; Anton Öttl; Lisa Stockhausen Role descriptions induce gender mismatch effects in eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1607, 2015. @article{Reali2015, The present eye-tracking study investigates the effect of gender typicality on the resolution of anaphoric personal pronouns in English. Participants read descriptions of a person performing a typically male, typically female or gender-neutral occupational activity. The description was followed by an anaphoric reference (he or she) which revealed the referent's gender. The first experiment presented roles which were highly typical for men (e.g., blacksmith) or for women (e.g., beautician), the second experiment presented role descriptions with a moderate degree of gender typicality (e.g., psychologist, lawyer). Results revealed a gender mismatch effect in early and late measures in the first experiment and in early stages in the second experiment. Moreover, eye-movement data for highly typical roles correlated with explicit typicality ratings. The results are discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective, comparing natural gender languages and grammatical gender languages. An interpretation of the cognitive representation of typicality beliefs is proposed. |
Chiara Reali; Yulia Esaulova; Lisa Stockhausen Isolating stereotypical gender in a grammatical gender language: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 977–1006, 2015. @article{Reali2015a, The present study investigates the effects of stereotypical gender during anaphor resolution in German. The study aims at isolating the effects of gender-stereotypical cues from the effects of grammatical gender. Experiment 1 employs descriptions of typically male, female, and neutral occupations that contain no grammatical cue to the referent gender, followed by a masculine or feminine role noun, in a reaction time priming paradigm. Experiment 2 uses eye-tracking methodology to examine how the gender typicality of these descriptions affects the resolution of a matching or mismatching anaphoric pronoun. Results show a mismatch effect manifest at very early stages of processing. Both experiments also reveal asymmetries in the processing of the two genders suggesting that the representation of female rather than male referents is more flexible in counterstereotypical contexts. No systematic relation is found between eye movements and individual gender attitude measures, whereas a reliable correlation is found with gender typicality ratings. |
Hannah Rigler; Ashley Farris-Trimble; Lea Greiner; Jessica Walker; J. Bruce Tomblin; Bob McMurray The slow developmental time course of real-time spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Developmental Psychology, vol. 51, no. 12, pp. 1690–1703, 2015. @article{Rigler2015, This study investigated the developmental time course of spoken word recognition in older children using eye tracking to assess how the real-time processing dynamics of word recognition change over development. We found that 9-year-olds were slower to activate the target words and showed more early competition from competitor words than 16-year-olds; however, both age groups ultimately fixated targets to the same degree. This contrasts with a prior study of adolescents with language impairment (McMurray, Samelson, Lee, & Tomblin, 2010) that showed a different pattern of real-time processes. These findings suggest that the dynamics of word recognition are still developing even at these late ages, and developmental changes may derive from different sources than individual differences in relative language ability. |
Brian Riordan; Melody Dye; Michael N. Jones Grammatical number processing and anticipatory eye movements are not tightly coordinated in English spoken language comprehension Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 590, 2015. @article{Riordan2015, Recent studies of eye movements in world-situated language comprehension have demonstrated that rapid processing of morphosyntactic information - e.g., grammatical gender and number marking - can produce anticipatory eye movements to referents in the visual scene. We investigated how type of morphosyntactic information and the goals of language users in comprehension affected eye movements, focusing on the processing of grammatical number morphology in English-speaking adults. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they listened to simple English declarative (There are the lions.) and interrogative (Where are the lions?) sentences. In Experiment 1, no differences were observed in speed to fixate target referents when grammatical number information was informative relative to when it was not. The same result was obtained in a speeded task (Experiment 2) and in a task using mixed sentence types (Experiment 3). We conclude that grammatical number processing in English and eye movements to potential referents are not tightly coordinated. These results suggest limits on the role of predictive eye movements in concurrent linguistic and scene processing. We discuss how these results can inform and constrain predictive approaches to language processing. |
Joost Rommers; Antje S. Meyer; Falk Huettig Verbal and nonverbal predictors of language-mediated anticipatory eye movements Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 3, pp. 720–730, 2015. @article{Rommers2015, During language comprehension, listeners often anticipate upcoming information. This can draw listeners' overt attention to visually presented objects before the objects are referred to. We investigated to what extent the anticipatory mechanisms involved in such language-mediated attention rely on specific verbal factors and on processes shared with other domains of cognition. Participants listened to sentences ending in a highly predictable word (e.g., "In 1969 Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon") while viewing displays containing three unrelated distractor objects and a critical object, which was either the target object (e.g., a moon), an object with a similar shape (e.g., a tomato), or an unrelated control object (e.g., rice). Language-mediated anticipatory eye movements were observed to targets and to shape competitors. Importantly, looks to the shape competitor were systematically related to individual differences in anticipatory attention, as indexed by a spatial cueing task: Participants whose responses were most strongly facilitated by predictive arrow cues also showed the strongest effects of predictive language input on their eye movements. By contrast, looks to the target were related to individual differences in vocabulary size and verbal fluency. The results suggest that verbal and nonverbal factors contribute to different types of language-mediated eye movements. The findings are consistent with multiple-mechanism accounts of predictive language processing. |
Rachel A. Ryskin; Aaron S. Benjamin; Jonathan Tullis; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Perspective-taking in comprehension, production, and memory: An individual differences approach Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 144, no. 5, pp. 898–915, 2015. @article{Ryskin2015, The ability to take a different perspective is central to a tremendous variety of higher level cognitive skills. To communicate effectively, we must adopt the perspective of another person both while speaking and listening. To ensure the successful retrieval of critical information in the future, we must adopt the perspective of our own future self and construct cues that will survive the passage of time. Here we explore the cognitive underpinnings of perspective-taking across a set of tasks that involve communication and memory, with an eye toward evaluating the proposal that perspective-taking is domain-general (e.g., Wardlow, 2013). We measured participants' perspective-taking ability in a language production task, a language comprehension task, and a memory task in which people generated their own cues for the future. Surprisingly, there was little variance common to the 3 tasks, a result that suggests that perspective-taking is not domain-general. Performance in the language production task was predicted by a measure of working memory, whereas performance in the cue-generation memory task was predicted by a combination of working memory and long-term memory measures. These results indicate that perspective-taking relies on differing cognitive capacities in different situations. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Michelle Lee; Michael Reiderman; Keith Rayner The effect of contextual constraint on parafoveal processing in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 83, pp. 118–139, 2015. @article{Schotter2015, Semantic preview benefit in reading is an elusive and controversial effect because empirical studies do not always (but sometimes) find evidence for it. Its presence seems to depend on (at least) the language being read, visual properties of the text (e.g., initial letter capitalization), the type of relationship between preview and target, and as shown here, semantic constraint generated by the prior sentence context. Schotter (2013) reported semantic preview benefit for synonyms, but not semantic associates when the preview/target was embedded in a neutral sentence context. In Experiment 1, we embedded those same previews/targets into constrained sentence contexts and in Experiment 2 we replicated the effects reported by Schotter (2013; in neutral sentence contexts) and Experiment 1 (in constrained contexts) in a within-subjects design. In both experiments, we found an early (i.e., first-pass) apparent preview benefit for semantically associated previews in constrained contexts that went away in late measures (e.g., total time). These data suggest that sentence constraint (at least as manipulated in the current study) does not operate by making a single word form expected, but rather generates expectations about what kinds of words are likely to appear. Furthermore, these data are compatible with the assumption of the E-Z Reader model that early oculomotor decisions reflect "hedged bets" that a word will be identifiable and, when wrong, lead the system to identify the wrong word, triggering regressions. |
Sarah Schuster; Stefan Hawelka; Fabio Richlan; Philipp Ludersdorfer; Florian Hutzler Eyes on words: A fixation-related fMRI study of the left occipito-temporal cortex during self-paced silent reading of words and pseudowords Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 5, pp. 12686, 2015. @article{Schuster2015, The predominant finding of studies assessing the response of the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOT) to familiar words and to unfamiliar, but pronounceable letter strings (pseudowords) is higher activation for pseudowords. One explanation for this finding is that readers automatically generate predictions about a letter string's identity – pseudowords mismatch these predictions and the higher vOT activation is interpreted as reflecting the resultant prediction errors. The majority of studies, however, administered tasks which imposed demands above and beyond the intrinsic requirements of visual word recognition. The present study assessed the response of the left vOT to words and pseudowords by using the onset of the first fixation on a stimulus as time point for modeling the BOLD signal (fixation-related fMRI). This method allowed us to assess the neural correlates of self-paced silent reading with minimal task demands and natural exposure durations. In contrast to the predominantly reported higher vOT activation for pseudowords, we found higher activation for words. This finding is at odds with the expectation of higher vOT activation for pseudowords due to automatically generated predictions and the accompanying elevation of prediction errors. Our finding conforms to an alternative explanation which considers such top-down processing to be non-automatic and task-dependent. |
Matthias J. Sjerps; Antje S. Meyer Variation in dual-task performance reveals late initiation of speech planning in turn-taking Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 136, pp. 304–324, 2015. @article{Sjerps2015, The smooth transitions between turns in natural conversation suggest that speakers often begin to plan their utterances while listening to their interlocutor. The presented study investigates whether this is indeed the case and, if so, when utterance planning begins. Two hypotheses were contrasted: that speakers begin to plan their turn as soon as possible (in our experiments less than a second after the onset of the interlocutor's turn), or that they do so close to the end of the interlocutor's turn. Turn-taking was combined with a finger tapping task to measure variations in cognitive load. We assumed that the onset of speech planning in addition to listening would be accompanied by deterioration in tapping performance. Two picture description experiments were conducted. In both experiments there were three conditions: (1) Tapping and Speaking, where participants tapped a complex pattern while taking over turns from a pre-recorded speaker, (2) Tapping and Listening, where participants carried out the tapping task while overhearing two pre-recorded speakers, and (3) Speaking Only, where participants took over turns as in the Tapping and Speaking condition but without tapping. The experiments differed in the amount of tapping training the participants received at the beginning of the session. In Experiment 2, the participants' eye-movements were recorded in addition to their speech and tapping. Analyses of the participants' tapping performance and eye movements showed that they initiated the cognitively demanding aspects of speech planning only shortly before the end of the turn of the preceding speaker. We argue that this is a smart planning strategy, which may be the speakers' default in many everyday situations. |
Anja Sperlich; Daniel J. Schad; Jochen Laubrock When preview information starts to matter: Development of the perceptual span in German beginning readers Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 511–530, 2015. @article{Sperlich2015, How is reading development reflected in eye-movement measures? How does the perceptual span change during the initial years of reading instruction? Does parafoveal processing require competence in basic word-decoding processes? We report data from the first cross-sectional measurement of the perceptual span of German beginning readers (n = 139), collected in the context of the large longitudinal PIER (Potsdamer Intrapersonale Entwicklungsrisiken/Potsdam study of intra-personal developmental risk factors) study of intrapersonal developmental risk factors. Using the moving-window paradigm, eye movements of three groups of students (Grades 1–3) were measured with gaze-contingent presentation of a variable amount of text around fixation. Reading rate increased from Grades 1–3, with smaller increases for higher grades. Perceptual-span results showed the expected main effects of grade and window size: fixation durations and refixation probability decreased with grade and window size, whereas reading rate and saccade length increased. Critically, for reading rate, first-fixation duration, saccade length and refixation probability, there were significant interactions of grade and window size that were mainly based on the contrast between Grades 3 and 2 rather than Grades 2 and 1. Taken together, development of the perceptual span only really takes off between Grades 2 and 3, suggesting that efficient parafoveal processing presupposes that basic processes of reading have been mastered. |
Victoria A. McGowan; Sarah J. White; Kevin B. Paterson The effects of interword spacing on the eye movements of young and older readers Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 609–621, 2015. @article{McGowan2015, Recent evidence indicates that older adults (aged 65+) are more disrupted by removing interword spaces than young adults (aged 18–30). However, it is not known whether older readers also show greater sensitivity to the more subtle changes to this spacing that frequently occur during normal reading. In the present study the eye movements of young and older adults were examined when reading texts for which interword spacing was normal, condensed to half its normal size or expanded to 1.5 times its normal size. Although these changes in interword spacing affected eye movement behaviour, this influence did not differ between young and older adults. Furthermore, a word frequency manipulation showed that these changes did not affect word identification for either group. The results indicate that older adults can adapt their eye moment behaviour to accommodate subtle changes in the spatial layout of text equally effectively as young adults. |
Jinger Pan; Hua Shu; Yuling Wang; Ming Yan Parafoveal activation of sign translation previews among deaf readers during the reading of Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 43, no. 6, pp. 964–972, 2015. @article{Pan2015, In the present study, we manipulated the different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined whether deaf readers could activate sign translations of Chinese words during reading. The main finding was that, as compared to unrelated previews, the deaf readers had longer fixation durations on the target words when sign-phonologically related preview words were presented; this preview cost effect due to sign-phonological relatedness was absent for reading-level-matched hearing individuals. These results indicate that Chinese deaf readers activate sign language translations of parafoveal words during reading. We discuss the implications for notions of parafoveal processing in reading. |
Kevin B. Paterson; Abubaker A. A. Almabruk; Victoria A. McGowan; Sarah J. White; Timothy R. Jordan Effects of word length on eye movement control: The evidence from Arabic Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 1443–1450, 2015. @article{Paterson2015, The finding that word length plays a fundamental role in determining where and for how long readers fixate within a line of text has been central to the development of sophisticated models of eye movement control. However, research in this area is dominated by the use of Latinate languages (e.g., English, French, German), and little is known about eye movement control for alphabetic languages with very different visual characteristics. To address this issue, the present experiment undertook a novel investigation of the influence of word length on eye movement behavior when reading Arabic. Arabic is an alphabetic language that not only is read from right to left but has visual characteristics fundamentally different from Latinate languages, and so is ideally suited to testing the generality of mechanisms of eye movement control. The findings reveal that readers were more likely to fixate and refixate longer words, and also that longer words tended to be fixated for longer. In addition, word length influenced the landing positions of initial fixations on words, with the effect that readers fixated the center of short words and fixated closer to the beginning letters for longer words, and the location of landing positions affected both the duration of the first fixation and probability of refixating the word. The indication now, therefore, is that effects of word length are a widespread and fundamental component of reading and play a central role in guiding eye-movement behavior across a range of very different alphabetic systems. |
Manuel Perea; María Jiménez; Miguel Martín-Suesta; Pablo Gómez Letter position coding across modalities: Braille and sighted reading of sentences with jumbled words Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 531–536, 2015. @article{Perea2015, This article explores how letter position coding is attained during braille reading and its implications for models of word recognition. When text is presented visually, the reading process easily adjusts to the jumbling of some letters (jugde-judge), with a small cost in reading speed. Two explanations have been proposed: One relies on a general mechanism of perceptual uncertainty at the visual level, and the other focuses on the activation of an abstract level of representation (i.e., bigrams) that is shared by all orthographic codes. Thus, these explanations make differential predictions about reading in a tactile modality. In the present study, congenitally blind readers read sentences presented on a braille display that tracked the finger position. The sentences either were intact or involved letter transpositions. A parallel experiment was conducted in the visual modality. Results revealed a substantially greater reading cost for the sentences with transposed-letter words in braille readers. In contrast with the findings with sighted readers, in which there is a cost of transpositions in the external (initial and final) letters, the reading cost in braille readers occurs serially, with a large cost for initial letter transpositions. Thus, these data suggest that the letter-position-related effects in visual word recognition are due to the characteristics of the visual stream. |
Manuel Perea; Pilar Tejero; Heather Winskel Can colours be used to segment words when reading? Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 159, pp. 8–13, 2015. @article{Perea2015a, Rayner, Fischer, and Pollatsek (1998, Vision Research) demonstrated that reading unspaced text in Indo-European languages produces a substantial reading cost in word identification (as deduced from an increased word-frequency effect on target words embedded in the unspaced vs. spaced sentences) and in eye movement guidance (as deduced from landing sites closer to the beginning of the words in unspaced sentences). However, the addition of spaces between words comes with a cost: nearby words may fall outside high-acuity central vision, thus reducing the potential benefits of parafoveal processing. In the present experiment, we introduced a salient visual cue intended to facilitate the process of word segmentation without compromising visual acuity: each alternating word was printed in a different colour (i.e., ). Results only revealed a small reading cost of unspaced alternating colour sentences relative to the spaced sentences. Thus, present data are a demonstration that colour can be useful to segment words for readers of spaced orthographies. |
Andrea M. Philipp; Lynn Huestegge Language switching between sentences in reading: Exogenous and endogenous effects on eye movements and comprehension Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 614–625, 2015. @article{Philipp2015, The present study explored the influence of language switching on both comprehension (utilizing a picture-sentence matching procedure) and word-level processing (utilizing eye movement registration) in reading simple German and English sentences. Language sequence was unpredictable and contained language switches (subsequent sentence in a different language) and language repetitions (subsequent sentence in the same language). The results revealed a substantial decrease of comprehension following language switches (with greater switch costs in L1 than in L2), likely indicating relatively long-lasting, endogenous inhibition processes affecting higher-level text integration. In contrast, there were comparatively minor and transient effects on eye movements (in terms of altered skipping probabilities and gaze durations) that were restricted to the initial words within a sentence, presumably representing short-lasting exogenous (stimulus-driven) activation effects after language switches (with greater switch costs in L2 than in L1). Overall, the results are in line with predictions from recent interactive-activation frameworks of bilingual language processing. |
Pingping Liu; Xingshan Li; Buxin Han Additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency on eye movements during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 199–215, 2015. @article{Liu2015, Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded for sentences in which high- and low-frequency target words were presented normally or with reduced stimulus quality in two experiments. We found stimulus quality and word frequency produced strong additive effects on fixation durations for target words. The results demonstrate that stimulus quality and word frequency affect different stages of processing (e.g., visual processing and lexical processing). These results are consistent with the findings of previous single-word lexical decision studies, which showed that stimulus quality manipulation primarily affects the early pre- attentive stage of visual processing, whereas word frequency affects lexical pro- cesses. We discuss these findings in terms of the role of stimulus quality in word recognition and in relation to the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control. |
Yanping Liu; Erik D. Reichle; Xingshan Li Parafoveal processing affects outgoing saccade length during the reading of Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 1229–1236, 2015. @article{Liu2015b, Participants' eye movements were measured while reading Chinese sentences in which target-word frequency and the availability of parafoveal processing were manipulated using a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The results of this study indicate that preview availability and its interaction with word frequency modulated the length of the saccades exiting the target words, suggesting important functional roles for parafoveal processing in determining where the eyes move during reading. The theoretical significance of these findings is discussed in relation to 2 current models of eye-movement control during reading, both of which assume that saccades are directed toward default targets (e.g., the center of the next unidentified word). A possible method for addressing these limitations (i.e., dynamic attention allocation) is also discussed. |
Francisco López-Orozco; Luis D. Rodríguez-Vega Model of making decisions during an information search task Journal Article In: Research in Computing Science, vol. 105, pp. 157–166, 2015. @article{LopezOrozco2015, This paper presents a cognitive computational model of the way people read a paragraph with the task of quickly deciding whether it is related or not to a given goal. In particular, the model attempts to predict the time at which participants would decide to stop reading the paragraph because they have enough information to make their decision. Our model makes predictions at the level of words that are likely to be ?xated before the paragraph is abandoned. Human semantic judgments are mimicked by computing the semantic similarities between sets of words using Latent Semantic Analysis. A two-variable linear threshold is proposed to account for that decision, based on the rank of the ?xation and the semantic similarity between the paragraph and the goal. Model performance is compared to eyetracking data of 19 participants. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon The manuscript that we finished: Structural separation reduces the cost of complement coercion Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 526–540, 2015. @article{Lowder2015a, Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., began the memo). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the need to type-shift the entity into an event in order for the sentence to be interpretable (e.g., began writing the memo). Both experiments showed that the magnitude of the coercion cost was reduced when the verb and complement appeared in separate clauses (e.g., The memo that was begun by the secretary; What the secretary began was the memo) compared with when the constituents appeared together in the same clause. The moderating effect of sentence structure on coercion is similar to effects that have been reported for the processing of 2 other types of semantically complex expressions (inanimate subject–verb integration and metonymy). We propose that sentence structure influences the depth at which complex semantic relationships are computed. When the constituents that create the need for a complex semantic interpretation appear in a single clause, readers experience processing difficulty stemming from the need to detect or resolve the semantic mismatch. In contrast, the need to engage in additional processing is reduced when the expression is established across a clause boundary or other structure that deemphasizes the complex relationship. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon Natural forces as agents: Reconceptualizing the animate-inanimate distinction Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 136, pp. 85–90, 2015. @article{Lowder2015b, Research spanning multiple domains of psychology has demonstrated preferential processing of animate as compared to inanimate entities-a pattern that is commonly explained as due to evolutionarily adaptive behavior. Forces of nature represent a class of entities that are semantically inanimate but which behave as if they are animate in that they possess the ability to initiate movement and cause actions. We report an eye-tracking experiment demonstrating that natural forces are processed like animate entities during online sentence processing: they are easier to integrate with action verbs than instruments, and this effect is mediated by sentence structure. The results suggest that many cognitive and linguistic phenomena that have previously been attributed to animacy may be more appropriately attributed to perceived agency. To the extent that this is so, the cognitive potency of animate entities may not be due to vigilant monitoring of the environment for unpredictable events as argued by evolutionary psychologists but instead may be more adequately explained as reflecting a cognitive and linguistic focus on causal explanations that is adaptive because it increases the predictability of events. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon Focus takes time: Structural effects on reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 1733–1738, 2015. @article{Lowder2015, Previous eye-tracking work has yielded inconsistent evidence regarding whether readers spend more or less time encoding focused information compared with information that is not focused. We report the results of an eye-tracking experiment that used syntactic structure to manipulate whether a target word was linguistically defocused, neutral, or focused, while controlling for possible oculomotor differences across conditions. As the structure of the sentence made the target word increasingly more focused, reading times systematically increased. We propose that the longer reading times for linguistically focused words reflect deeper encoding, which explains previous findings showing that readers have better subsequent memory for focused versus defocused information. |
Steven G. Luke; Kiel Christianson Predicting inflectional morphology from context Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 735–748, 2015. @article{Luke2015, The present studies investigated the influence of the semantic and syntactic predictability of an inflectional morpheme on word recognition and morphological processing. In two eye-tracking experiments, we examined the effect of syntactic and semantic context on the processing of letter transpositions in inflected words. Participants experienced greater and earlier disruption from cross-morpheme letter transpositions when target verbs appeared in a context that syntactically predicted the presence of a past-tense suffix. Further, internal transpositions caused greater and earlier disruption even in monomorphemic verbs when syntactic context created an expectation of morphological complexity. No effect of semantic predictability was observed, potentially because the semantic manipulation was insufficiently strong. The results reveal that syntactic contexts typical of most English sentences can lead readers to make predictions about the morphological structure of upcoming words. |
Steven G. Luke; John M. Henderson; Fernanda Ferreira Children's eye-movements during reading reflect the quality of lexical representations: An individual differences approach Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1675–1683, 2015. @article{Luke2015a, The lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) suggests that skilled reading requires high-quality lexical representations. In children, these representations are still developing, and it has been suggested that this development leads to more adult-like eye-movement behavior during the reading of connected text. To test this idea, a set of young adolescents (aged 11-13 years) completed a standardized measure of lexical quality and then participated in 3 eye-movement tasks: reading, scene search, and pseudoreading. The richness of participants' lexical representations predicted a variety of eye-movement behaviors in reading. Further, the influence of lexical quality was domain specific: Fixation durations in reading diverged from the other tasks as lexical quality increased. These findings suggest that eye movements become increasingly tuned to written language processing as lexical representations become more accurate and detailed. |
Yingyi Luo; Yunyan Duan; Xiaolin Zhou Processing rhythmic pattern during chinese sentence reading: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1881, 2015. @article{Luo2015b, Prosodic constraints play a fundamental role during both spoken sentence comprehension and silent reading. In Chinese, the rhythmic pattern of the verb-object (V-O) combination has been found to rapidly affect the semantic access/integration process during sentence reading (Luo and Zhou, 2010). Rhythmic pattern refers to the combination of words with different syllabic lengths, with certain combinations disallowed (e.g., [2 + 1]; numbers standing for the number of syllables of the verb and the noun respectively) and certain combinations preferred (e.g., [1 + 1] or [2 + 2]). This constraint extends to the situation in which the combination is used to modify other words. A V-O phrase could modify a noun by simply preceding it, forming a V-O-N compound; when the verb is disyllabic, however, the word order has to be O-V-N and the object is preferred to be disyllabic. In this study, we investigated how the reader processes the rhythmic pattern and word order information by recording the reader's eye-movements. We created four types of sentences by crossing rhythmic pattern and word order in compounding. The compound, embedding a disyllabic verb, could be in the correct O-V-N or the incorrect V-O-N order; the object could be disyllabic or monosyllabic. We found that the reader spent more time and made more regressions on and after the compounds when either type of anomaly was detected during the first pass reading. However, during re-reading (after all the words in the sentence have been viewed), less regressive eye movements were found for the anomalous rhythmic pattern, relative to the correct pattern; moreover, only the abnormal rhythmic pattern, not the violated word order, influenced the regressive eye movements. These results suggest that while the processing of rhythmic pattern and word order information occurs rapidly during the initial reading of the sentence, the process of recovering from the rhythmic pattern anomaly may ease the reanalysis processing at the later stage of sentence integration. Thus, rhythmic pattern in Chinese can dynamically affect both local phrase analysis and global sentence integration during silent reading. |
Guojie Ma; Xingshan Li; Alexander Pollatsek There is no relationship between preferred viewing location and word segmentation in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 399–414, 2015. @article{Ma2015b, In Chinese, as there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries, readers usually do not target their eyes to the centre of the word as readers of English do. Previous studies showed that the distribution of the initial landing positions on a word (the PVL curve) peaked at the beginning of a word when there was more than one fixation; but peaked at the centre of a word if there was only one fixation on the word. Based on this phenomenon, it was argued that Chinese readers move their eyes to the beginning of a word if they cannot correctly segment words in the parafovea, but move to the centre of a word if they can. In the present study, we implemented a natural sentence reading task in Experiment 1 and a shuffled-character reading task in Experiment 2 to test whether the above PVL phenomenon was in fact caused by word segmentation. In both experiments, we found that the different PVL patterns in multiple- and single-fixation cases occurred not only for a 3-character word region but also for a 3-character nonword region. These results suggest that the different PVL curves in multiple- and single-fixation cases are likely to be due to a statistical artefact instead of parafoveal word segmentation. |
Guojie Ma; Xingshan Li; Keith Rayner Readers extract character frequency information from nonfixated-target word at long pretarget fixations during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 1409–1419, 2015. @article{Ma2015c, We performed 2 eye movement studies to explore whether readers can extract character or word frequency information from nonfixated-target words in Chinese reading. In Experiments 1A and 1B, we manipulated the character frequency of the first character in a 2-character target word and the word frequency of a 2-character target word, respectively. We found that fixation durations on the pretarget words were shorter when the first character of a 2-character target word was presented with high frequency. Such effects were not observed for word frequency manipulations of a 2-character target word. In particular, further analysis revealed that such effects only occurred for long pretarget fixations. These results for character and word frequency manipulations were replicated in a within-subjects design in Experiment 2. These findings are generally consistent with the notion that characters are processed in parallel during Chinese reading. However, we did not find evidence that words are processed in parallel during Chinese reading. |
Min-Yuan Ma; Hsien-Chih Chuang How form and structure of Chinese characters affect eye movement control Min-Yuan Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 1–12, 2015. @article{Ma2015, This study investigated the correlations between the form features and legibility of Chinese characters by employing the eye tracking method in two experiments: Experiment 1 examined factors affecting Chinese character legibility with character modules and identified the correlations between character form and legibility of crossing strokes; and Experiment 2 examined the effect of crossing strokes on subjective complicacy perception in both Chinese characters and English letters. This study determined that enclosed Chinese characters affect subjective complicacy perception and reduce saccadic amplitude. In addition, greater number of stroke crossings produced higher subjective complicacy perceived for both Chinese characters and English letters. The results of this study serve as a reference for predicting Chinese character legibility and assessing type design superiority. |
Min-Yuan Ma; Hsien-Chih Chuang A legibility study of Chinese character complicacy and eye movement data Journal Article In: Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 120, no. 1, pp. 232–246, 2015. @article{Ma2015a, This study investigated the correlations between the complicacy and legibility of Chinese characters by using eye tracking analyzed with structural equation modeling. 13 university students, 6 men and 7 women, with a mean age of 21 yr. (SD = 1.7) participated. The results indicated that block types affected legibility and that saccade amplitude, number of fixations, and complicacy differed due to diverse character structures. Structural Equation Modeling showed that the number of strokes, number of nodes, and image density in stroke complicacy affected the number of fixations and saccade amplitude in eye movement data. Constructing a character complicacy and eye tracking information model to investigate the correlations between Chinese character features and human viewing behavior can provide guidance for Chinese character recognizability and type design. |
Mary H. Maclean; Barry Giesbrecht Neural evidence reveals the rapid effects of reward history on selective attention Journal Article In: Brain Research, vol. 1606, pp. 86–94, 2015. @article{Maclean2015b, Selective attention is often framed as being primarily driven by two factors: task-relevance and physical salience. However, factors like selection and reward history, which are neither currently task-relevant nor physically salient, can reliably and persistently influence visual selective attention. The current study investigated the nature of the persistent effects of irrelevant, physically non-salient, reward-associated features. These features affected one of the earliest reliable neural indicators of visual selective attention in humans, the P1 event-related potential, measured one week after the reward associations were learned. However, the effects of reward history were moderated by current task demands. The modulation of visually evoked activity supports the hypothesis that reward history influences the innate salience of reward associated features, such that even when no longer relevant, nor physically salient, these features have a rapid, persistent, and robust effect on early visual selective attention. |
Lyuba Mancheva; Erik D. Reichle; Benoît Lemaire; Sylviane Valdois; Jean Ecalle; Anne Guérin-Dugué An analysis of reading skill development using E-Z Reader Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 657–676, 2015. @article{Mancheva2015, Previously reported simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control suggest that the patterns of eye movements observed with children versus adult readers reflect differences in lexical processing proficiency. However, these simulations fail to specify precisely what aspect(s) of lexical processing (e.g., orthographic processing) account for the concurrent changes in eye movements and reading skill. To examine this issue, the E-Z Reader model was first used to simulate the aggregate eye-movement data from 15 adults and 75 children to replicate the finding that gross differences in reading skill can be accounted for by differences in lexical processing proficiency. The model was then used to simulate the eye-movement data of individual children so that the best-fitting lexical processing parameters could be correlated to measures of orthographic knowledge, phonological processing skill, sentence comprehension, and general intelligence. These analyses suggest that orthographic knowledge accounts for variance in the eye-movement measures that is observed with between-individual differences in reading skill. The theoretical implications of this conclusion will be discussed in relation to computational models of reading and our understanding of reading skill development. |
Christina Marx; Stefan Hawelka; Sarah Schuster; Florian Hutzler An incremental boundary study on parafoveal preprocessing in children reading aloud: Parafoveal masks overestimate the preview benefit Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 549–561, 2015. @article{Marx2015a, Parafoveal preprocessing is an important factor for efficient reading and, in eye-movement studies, is typically investigated by means of parafoveal masking: Valid previews are compared to instances in which masks prevent preprocessing. A long-held assumption was that parafoveal preprocessing, as assessed by this technique, only reflects facilitation (i.e., a preview benefit). Recent studies, however, suggested that the benefit estimate is inflated due to interference of the parafoveal masks, i.e., the masks inflict processing costs. With children from Grades 4 and 6, we administered the novel incremental priming technique. The technique manipulates the salience of the previews by systematically varying its perceptibility (i.e., by visually degrading the previews). This technique does not require a baseline condition, but makes it possible to determine whether a preview induces facilitation or interference. Our salience manipulation of valid previews revealed a preview benefit in the children of both Grades. For two commonly used parafoveal masks, we observed interference corroborating the notion that masks are not a proper baseline. With the novel incremental boundary technique, in contrast, one can achieve an accurate estimate of the preview benefit. |
Bastian Mayerhofer; Annekathrin Schacht From incoherence to mirth: Neuro-cognitive processing of garden-path jokes Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 550, 2015. @article{Mayerhofer2015, In so-called garden-path jokes, an initial semantic representation is violated, and semantic revision reestablishes a coherent representation. 48 jokes were manipulated in three conditions: (i) a coherent ending, (ii) a joke ending, and (iii) a discourse-incoherent ending. A reading times study (N =24) and three studies with recordings of ERP and pupil changes (N = 21, 24, and 24, respectively) supported the hypothesized cognitive processes. Jokes showed increased reading times of the final word compared to coherent endings. ERP data mainly indicated semantic integration difficulties (N400). Larger pupil diameters to joke endings presumably reflect emotional responses. ERP evidence for increased discourse processing efforts and emotional responses, as assumed to be reflected in late left anterior negativity and LLAN modulations and an enhanced late frontal positivity (fP600), respectively, remains however incomplete. Processing of incoherent endings was also accompanied by increased reading times, a stronger and sustained N400, and context-sensitive P600 effects. Together, these findings provide evidence for a sequential, non-monotonic, and incremental discourse comprehension of garden-path jokes. |
Franziska Kretzschmar; Matthias Schlesewsky; Adrian Staub Dissociating word frequency and predictability effects in reading: Evidence from coregistration of eye movements and EEG Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1648–1662, 2015. @article{Kretzschmar2015, Two very reliable influences on eye fixation durations in reading are word frequency, as measured by corpus counts, and word predictability, as measured by cloze norming. Several studies have reported strictly additive effects of these 2 variables. Predictability also reliably influences the amplitude of the N400 component in event-related potential studies. However, previous research suggests that while frequency affects the N400 in single-word tasks, it may have little or no effect on the N400 when a word is presented with a preceding sentence context. The present study assessed this apparent dissociation between the results from the 2 methods using a coregistration paradigm in which the frequency and predictability of a target word were manipulated while readers' eye movements and electroencephalograms were simultaneously recorded. We replicated the pattern of significant, and additive, effects of the 2 manipulations on eye fixation durations. We also replicated the predictability effect on the N400, time-locked to the onset of the reader's first fixation on the target word. However, there was no indication of a frequency effect in the electroencephalogram record. We suggest that this pattern has implications both for the interpretation of the N400 and for the interpretation of frequency and predictability effects in language comprehension. |
Dave Kush; Jeffrey Lidz; Colin Phillips Relation-sensitive retrieval: Evidence from bound variable pronouns Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 82, pp. 18–40, 2015. @article{Kush2015, Formal grammatical theories make extensive use of syntactic relations (e.g. c-command, Reinhart, 1983) in the description of constraints on antecedent-anaphor dependencies. Recent research has motivated a model of processing that exploits a cue-based retrieval mechanism in content-addressable memory (e.g. Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006) in which item-to-item syntactic relations such as c-command are difficult to use as retrieval cues. As such, the c-command constraints of formal grammars are predicted to be poorly implemented by the retrieval mechanism. We tested whether memory access mechanisms are able to exploit relational information by investigating the processing of bound variable pronouns, a form of anaphoric dependency that imposes a c-command restriction on antecedent-pronoun relations. A quantificational NP (QP, e.g., no janitor) must c-command a pronoun in order to bind it. We contrasted the retrieval of QPs with the retrieval of referential NPs (e.g. the janitor), which can co-refer with a pronoun in the absence of c-command. In three off-line judgment studies and two eye-tracking studies, we show that referential NPs are easily accessed as antecedents, irrespective of whether they c-command the pronoun, but that quantificational NPs are accessed as antecedents only when they c-command the pronoun. These results are unexpected under theories that hold that retrieval exclusively uses a limited set of content features as retrieval cues. Our results suggest either that memory access mechanisms can make use of relational information as a guide for retrieval, or that the set of features that is used to encode syntactic relations in memory must be enriched. |
Jochen Laubrock; Reinhold Kliegl The eye-voice span during reading aloud Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1432, 2015. @article{Laubrock2015, Although eye movements during reading are modulated by cognitive processing demands, they also reflect visual sampling of the input, and possibly preparation of output for speech or the inner voice. By simultaneously recording eye movements and the voice during reading aloud, we obtained an output measure that constrains the length of time spent on cognitive processing. Here we investigate the dynamics of the eye-voice span (EVS), the distance between eye and voice. We show that the EVS is regulated immediately during fixation of a word by either increasing fixation duration or programming a regressive eye movement against the reading direction. EVS size at the beginning of a fixation was positively correlated with the likelihood of regressions and refixations. Regression probability was further increased if the EVS was still large at the end of a fixation: if adjustment of fixation duration did not sufficiently reduce the EVS during a fixation, then a regression rather than a refixation followed with high probability. We further show that the EVS can help understand cognitive influences on fixation duration during reading: in mixed model analyses, the EVS was a stronger predictor of fixation durations than either word frequency or word length. The EVS modulated the influence of several other predictors on single fixation durations (SFDs). For example, word-N frequency effects were larger with a large EVS, especially when word N−1 frequency was low. Finally, a comparison of SFDs during oral and silent reading showed that reading is governed by similar principles in both reading modes, although EVS maintenance and articulatory processing also cause some differences. In summary, the EVS is regulated by adjusting fixation duration and/or by programming a regressive eye movement when the EVS gets too large. Overall, the EVS appears to be directly related to updating of the working memory buffer during reading. |
Jiyeon Lee; Cynthia K. Thompson Phonological facilitation effects on naming latencies and viewing times during noun and verb naming in agrammatic and anomic aphasia Journal Article In: Aphasiology, vol. 29, no. 10, pp. 1164–1188, 2015. @article{Lee2015, Background: Phonological priming has been shown to facilitate naming in$backslash$nindividuals with aphasia, as well as healthy speakers, resulting in$backslash$nfaster naming latencies. However, the mechanisms of phonological$backslash$nfacilitation (PF) in aphasia remain unclear.Aims: Within discrete vs.$backslash$ninteractive models of lexical access, this study examined whether PF$backslash$noccurs via the sub-lexical or lexical route during noun and verb naming$backslash$nin agrammatic and anomic aphasia.Methods & Procedures: Thirteen$backslash$nparticipants with agrammatic aphasia and 10 participants with anomic$backslash$naphasia and their young and age-matched controls (n=20/each) were$backslash$ntested. Experiment 1 examined noun and verb naming deficit patterns in$backslash$nan off-line confrontation naming task. Experiment 2 examined PF effects$backslash$non naming both word categories using eyetracking priming$backslash$nparadigm.Outcomes &Results: Results of Experiment 1 showed greater$backslash$nnaming difficulty for verbs than for nouns in the agrammatic group, with$backslash$nno difference between the two word categories in the anomic group. For$backslash$nboth participant groups, errors were dominated by semantic paraphasias,$backslash$nindicating impaired lexical selection. In the phonological priming task$backslash$n(Experiment 2), young and age-matched control groups showed PF in both$backslash$nnoun and verb naming. Interestingly, the agrammatic group showed PF when$backslash$nnaming verbs, but not nouns, whereas the anomic group showed PF for$backslash$nnouns only.Conclusions: Consistent with lexically mediated PF in$backslash$ninteractive models of lexical access, selective PF for different word$backslash$ncategories in our agrammatic and anomic groups suggest that phonological$backslash$nprimes facilitate lexical selection via feedback activation, resulting$backslash$nin greater PF for more difficult (i.e., verbs in agrammatic and possibly$backslash$nnouns in anomic group) lexical items. |
Yoonhyoung Lee; Youan Kwon; Peter C. Gordon Thematic roles, markedness alignment and processing complexity Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 317–336, 2015. @article{Lee2015c, Two experiments used eye-tracking during reading to investigate the role of the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of noun phrases (NPs) in the processing of complex sentences in Korean. To do so, the animacy of the first NP was varied in both experiments to manipulate the relative markedness of NPs. In addition, case markings of the second NP (nominative vs. accusative) were manipulated in the first experiment and the markings of the first NP (nominative vs. topic) were manipulated in the second experiment. Results revealed that the animacy manipulation and the nominative-topicality manipulation showed measurable influence on the participants' reading of the complex sentences. Also, the effect of the prominence misalignment caused by animacy seems to have a stronger effect on reading than the effect caused by the nominative-topicality manipulation. The experiments suggested that on-lineprocessing of Korean complex sentences are affected by the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of NPs. |
Xiao-Qing Li; Hai-Yan Zhao; Yuan-Yuan Zheng; Yu-Fang Yang Two-stage interaction between word order and noun animacy during online thematic processing of sentences in Mandarin Chinese Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 555–573, 2015. @article{Li2015, How different sources of linguistic information are used during online language comprehension is a central question in psycholinguistic research. This study used eye-tracking and electrophysiological techniques to investigate how and when word order and noun animacy interact with each other during online thematic processing of Mandarin Chinese sentences. The initial argument in the sentence is animate or inanimate and the following verb disambiguates it as an agent or patient. The results at the verb revealed that, at the early processing stage, the patient-first sentences elicited longer gaze duration and larger N400 than the agent-first ones only when the initial argument was inanimate; however, at the late stage, the patient-first sentences elicited prolonged second-pass time and enhanced P600 only when the initial argument was animate. In addition, the brain oscillations at the verb also showed different patterns in the early and later window latencies. The present results suggested that the online thematic processing of Mandarin Chinese sentences involves not only universal processing strategies (subject-preference) but also language-specific strategies as well. That is, in Mandarin Chinese, noun animacy interacts with word order immediately during online sentence comprehension; the initial processing results can be overridden by additional interpretively relevant information types at a later stage. Those results provided important indications for the language comprehension models. |
Xingshan Li; Pingping Liu; Keith Rayner Saccade target selection in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 524–530, 2015. @article{Li2015b, In Chinese reading, there are no spaces to mark the word boundaries, so Chinese readers cannot target their saccades to the center of a word. In this study, we investigated how Chinese readers decide where to move their eyes during reading. To do so, we introduced a variant of the boundary paradigm in which only the target stimulus remained on the screen, displayed at the saccade landing site, after the participant's eyes crossed an invisible boundary. We found that when the saccade target was a word, reaction times in a lexical decision task were shorter when the saccade landing position was closer to the end of that word. These results are consistent with the predictions of a processing-based strategy to determine where to move the eyes. Specifically, this hypothesis assumes that Chinese readers estimate how much information is processed in parafoveal vision and saccade to a location that will carry novel information. |
Feifei Liang; Hazel I. Blythe; Chuanli Zang; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Positional character frequency and word spacing facilitate the acquisition of novel words during Chinese children's reading Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 594–608, 2015. @article{Liang2015, Children's eye movements were recorded to examine the role of word spacing and positional character frequency on the process of Chinese lexical acquisition during reading. Three types of two-character novel pseudowords were constructed: words containing characters in positions in which they frequently occurred (congruent), words containing characters in positions they do not frequently occur in (incongruent) and words containing characters that do not have a strong position bias (balanced). There were two phases within the experiment, a learning phase and a test phase. There were also two learning groups: half the children read sentences in a word-spaced format and the other half read the sentences in an unspaced format during the learning phase. All the participants read normal, unspaced text at test. A benefit of word spacing was observed in the learning phase, but not at test. Also, facilitatory effects of positional character congruency were found both in the learning and test phase; however, this benefit was greatly reduced at test. Furthermore, we did not find any interaction between word spacing and positional character frequencies, indicating that these two types of cues affect lexical acquisition independently. With respect to theoretical accounts of lexical acquisition, we argue that word spacing might facilitate the very earliest stages of word learning by clearly demarking word boundary locations. In contrast, we argue that characters' positional frequencies might affect relatively later stages of word learning. |
Jung Hyun Lim; Kiel Christianson Second language sensitivity to agreement errors: Evidence from eye movements during comprehension and translation Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 1283–1315, 2015. @article{Lim2015, The present study addresses the questions of (a) whether Korean learners of English show sensitivity to subject–verb agreement violations in an eye-tracking paradigm, and (b) how reading goals (reading for comprehension vs. translation) and second language (L2) proficiency modulate depth of morphological agreement processing. Thirty-six Korean speakers of L2 English and 32 native English speakers read 40 stimulus sentences, half of which contained subject–verb agreement violations in English. The factors were whether a head and a local intervening noun matched in number and whether a sentence was grammatical or not. In linear mixed models analyses, both agreement violations and noun phrase match/mismatch were found to be disruptive in processing for native speakers at the critical regions (verb and following word), and locally distracting number-marked nouns yielded an asymmetric pattern depending on grammaticality. When L2 speakers were asked to produce offline oral translations of the English sentences into Korean, they became more sensitive to agreement violations. In addition, higher L2 proficiency predicted greater sensitivity to morphological violations. The results indicate that L2 speakers are not necessarily insensitive to morphological violations and that L2 proficiency and task modulate the depth of L2 morphological processing. |
Suzanne R. Jongman; Antje S. Meyer; Ardi Roelofs The role of sustained attention in the production of conjoined noun phrases: An individual differences study Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 9, pp. e0137557, 2015. @article{Jongman2015a, It has previously been shown that language production, performed simultaneously with a nonlinguistic task, involves sustained attention. Sustained attention concerns the ability to maintain alertness over time. Here, we aimed to replicate the previous finding by showing that individuals call upon sustained attention when they plan single noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot") and perform a manual arrow categorization task. In addition, we investigated whether speakers also recruit sustained attention when they produce conjoined noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot and the bucket") describing two pictures, that is, when both the first and second task are linguistic. We found that sustained attention correlated with the proportion of abnormally slow phrase-production responses. Individuals with poor sustained attention displayed a greater number of very slow responses than individuals with better sustained attention. Importantly, this relationship was obtained both for the production of single phrases while performing a nonlinguistic manual task, and the production of noun phrase conjunctions in referring to two spatially separated objects. Inhibition and updating abilities were also measured. These scores did not correlate with our measure of sustained attention, suggesting that sustained attention and executive control are distinct. Overall, the results suggest that planning conjoined noun phrases involves sustained attention, and that language production happens less automatically than has often been assumed. |
Suzanne R. Jongman; Ardi Roelofs; Antje S. Meyer Sustained attention in language production: An individual differences investigation Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 4, pp. 710–730, 2015. @article{Jongman2015, Whereas it has long been assumed that most linguistic processes underlying language production happen automatically, accumulating evidence suggests that these processes do require some form of attention. Here we investigated the contribution of sustained attention: the ability to maintain alertness over time. In Experiment 1, participants' sustained attention ability was measured using auditory and visual continuous performance tasks. Subsequently, employing a dual-task procedure, participants described pictures using simple noun phrases and performed an arrow-discrimination task while their vocal and manual response times (RTs) and the durations of their gazes to the pictures were measured. Earlier research has demonstrated that gaze duration reflects language planning processes up to and including phonological encoding. The speakers' sustained attention ability correlated with the magnitude of the tail of the vocal RT distribution, reflecting the proportion of very slow responses, but not with individual differences in gaze duration. This suggests that sustained attention was most important after phonological encoding. Experiment 2 showed that the involvement of sustained attention was significantly stronger in a dual-task situation (picture naming and arrow discrimination) than in simple naming. Thus, individual differences in maintaining attention on the production processes become especially apparent when a simultaneous second task also requires attentional resources. |
Holly S. S. L. Joseph; Georgina Bremner; Simon P. Liversedge; Kate Nation Working memory, reading ability and the effects of distance and typicality on anaphor resolution in children Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 622–639, 2015. @article{Joseph2015, We investigated the time course of anaphor resolution in children and whether this is modulated by individual differences in working memory and reading skill. The eye movements of 30 children (10–11 years) were monitored as they read short paragraphs in which (1) the semantic typicality of an antecedent and (2) its distance in relation to an anaphor were orthogonally manipulated. Children showed effects of distance and typicality on the anaphor itself and also on the word to the right of the anaphor, suggesting that anaphoric processing begins immediately but continues after the eyes have left the anaphor. Furthermore, children showed no evidence of resolving anaphors in the most difficult condition (distant atypical antecedent), suggesting that anaphoric processing that is demanding may not occur online in children of this age. Finally, working memory capacity and reading comprehension skill affect the magnitude and time course of typicality and distance effects during anaphoric processing. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Annika Lehtola; Satu Paattilammi The influence of a reading task on children's eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 640–656, 2015. @article{Kaakinen2015, In the present study, second graders (n= 23), fourth graders (n= 16), sixth graders (n= 24) and adults (n= 21) read texts adopted from children's science textbooks either with the task to answer a “why” question presented as the title of the text or for comprehension when their eye movements were recorded. Immediately after reading, readers answered a text memory and an integration question. Second graders showed an effect of questions as increased processing during first-pass reading, whereas older readers showed the effect in later look-backs. For adult readers, questions also facilitated first-pass reading. Text memory or integration question-answering was not influenced by the reading task. The results indicate that questions increase the standards of coherence for text information and that already young readers do modify their reading behaviour according to task demands. |
Efthymia C. Kapnoula; Stephanie Packard; Prahlad Gupta; Bob McMurray Immediate lexical integration of novel word forms Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 134, pp. 85–99, 2015. @article{Kapnoula2015, It is well known that familiar words inhibit each other during spoken word recognition. However, we do not know how and under what circumstances newly learned words become integrated with the lexicon in order to engage in this competition. Previous work on word learning has highlighted the importance of offline consolidation (Gaskell & Dumay, 2003) and meaning (Leach & Samuel, 2007) to establish this integration. In two experiments we test the necessity of these factors by examining the inhibition between newly learned items and familiar words immediately after learning.Participants learned a set of nonwords without meanings in active (Experiment 1) or passive (Experiment 2) exposure paradigms. After training, participants performed a visual world paradigm task to assess inhibition from these newly learned items. An analysis of participants' fixations suggested that the newly learned words were able to engage in competition with known words without any consolidation. |
Christina S. Kim; Christine Gunlogson; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Jeffrey T. Runner Context-driven expectations about focus alternatives Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 139, pp. 28–49, 2015. @article{Kim2015, What is conveyed by a sentence frequently depends not only on the descriptive content carried by its words, but also on implicit alternatives determined by the context of use. Four visual world eye-tracking experiments examined how alternatives are generated based on aspects of the discourse context and used in interpreting sentences containing the focus operators only and also. Experiment 1 builds on previous reading time studies showing that the interpretations of only sentences are constrained by alternatives explicitly mentioned in the preceding discourse, providing fine-grained time course information about the expectations triggered by only. Experiments 2 and 3 show that, in the absence of explicitly mentioned alternatives, lexical and situation-based categories evoked by the context are possible sources of alternatives. While Experiments 1-3 all demonstrate the discourse dependence of alternatives, only explicit mention triggered expectations about alternatives that were specific to sentences with only. By comparing only with also, Experiment 4 begins to disentangle expectations linked to the meanings of specific operators from those generalizable to the class of focus-sensitive operators. Together, these findings show that the interpretation of sentences with focus operators draws on both dedicated mechanisms for introducing alternatives into the discourse context and general mechanisms associated with discourse processing. |
Eunah Kim; Silvina Montrul; James Yoon The on-line processing of binding principles in second language acquisition: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 36, pp. 1317–1374, 2015. @article{Kim2015a, This study examined how adult L2 learners make use of grammatical and extragrammatical information to interpret reflexives and pronouns. Forty adult English native speakers and 32 intermediate–advanced Korean L2 learners participated in a visual world paradigm eye-tracking experiment. We investigated the interpretation of reflexives ( himself ) and pronouns ( him ) in contexts where there is a potential coargument antecedent and in the context of picture noun phrases ( a picture of him/himself ), where the distribution of reflexives and pronouns can overlap. The results indicated that the learners interpreted reflexives in a nativelike fashion in both contexts, whereas they interpreted pronouns differently from native speakers, even when learners had advanced English proficiency. Adopting the binding theory as developed in the reflexivity/primitives of binding framework (Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; Reuland, 2001, 2011), we interpret these results to mean that while adult L2 learners are able to apply syntactic binding principles to assign an interpretation to anaphoric expressions, they have difficulty in integrating syntactic information with contextual and discourse information. |
Hugh Knickerbocker; Rebecca L. Johnson; Jeanette Altarriba Emotion effects during reading: Influence of an emotion target word on eye movements and processing Journal Article In: Cognition and Emotion, vol. 29, no. 5, pp. 784–806, 2015. @article{Knickerbocker2015, Recently, Scott, O'Donnell and Sereno reported that words of high valence and arousal are processed with greater ease than neutral words during sentence reading. However, this study unsystematically intermixed emotion (label a state of mind, e.g., terrified or happy) and emotion-laden words (refer to a concept that is associated with an emotional state, e.g., debt or marriage). We compared the eye-movement record while participants read sentences that contained a neutral target word (e.g., chair) or an emotion word (no emotion-laden words were included). Readers were able to process both positive (e.g., happy) and negative emotion words (e.g., distressed) faster than neutral words. This was true across a wide range of early (e.g., first fixation durations) and late (e.g., total times on the post-target region) measures. Additional analyses revealed that State Trait Anxiety Inventory scores interacted with the emotion effect and that the emotion effect was not due to arousal alone. |
Jessica Knilans; Gayle DeDe Online sentence reading in people with aphasia: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. S961–S973, 2015. @article{Knilans2015, PURPOSE: There is a lot of evidence that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding structurally complex sentences (e.g., object clefts) than simpler sentences (subject clefts). However, subject clefts also occur more frequently in English than object clefts. Thus, it is possible that both structural complexity and frequency affect how people with aphasia understand these structures. METHOD: Nine people with aphasia and 8 age-matched controls participated in the study. The stimuli consisted of 24 object cleft and 24 subject cleft sentences. The task was eye tracking during reading, which permits a more fine-grained analysis of reading performance than measures such as self-paced reading. RESULTS: As expected, controls had longer reading times for critical regions in object cleft sentences compared with subject cleft sentences. People with aphasia showed the predicted effects of structural frequency. Effects of structural complexity in people with aphasia did not emerge on their first pass through the sentence but were observed when they were rereading critical regions of complex sentences. CONCLUSIONS: People with aphasia are sensitive to both structural complexity and structural frequency when reading. However, people with aphasia may use different reading strategies than controls when confronted with relatively infrequent and complex sentence structures. |
Agnieszka E. Konopka; Stefanie E. Kuchinsky How message similarity shapes the timecourse of sentence formulation Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 84, pp. 1–23, 2015. @article{Konopka2015, Transforming a preverbal message into an utterance (e.g., The swimmer is pushing the paparazzo) requires conceptual and linguistic encoding. Two experiments tested whether the timecourse of sentence formulation is shaped jointly or independently by message-level and sentence-level processes. Eye-tracked speakers described pictures of simple events with verb-medial (SVO/OVS) and verb-initial (VSO/aux-OVS) sentences in Dutch. To assess effects of message-level and sentence-level variables on formulation, the experiments manipulated the ease of relational encoding at both levels: target events were preceded by conceptually similar or dissimilar prime events (event primes) that increased speakers' familiarity with the action shown in the target event (e.g., pushing), and the prime events were accompanied by recorded active or passive descriptions (structural primes) that facilitated generation of suitable linguistic structures on target trials. The results showed effects of both types of primes on the form of target descriptions and on formulation. Speakers repeated the primed structures more often when target events were conceptually similar to the prime events. Importantly, conceptual similarity constrained the effects of structural primes on the timecourse of formulation: speakers showed more consistent deployment of attention to the two characters during linguistic encoding in structurally primed than unprimed active sentences, but conceptual familiarity reduced the priming effects in eye movements. Thus familiarity with message-level information can change how speakers express their messages and, during formulation, can provide conceptual guidance that supersedes effects of sentence-level variables. Effects of the event primes were stronger in VSO sentences, where early verb placement explicitly required early encoding of relational information, suggesting that linear word order can also constrain message-level influences on formulation. |
Yufen Hsieh; Julie E. Boland Semantic support and parallel parsing in Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 251–276, 2015. @article{Hsieh2015, Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted using written Chinese sentences that contained a multi-word ambiguous region. The goal was to determine whether readers maintained multiple interpretations throughout the ambiguous region or selected a single interpretation at the point of ambiguity. Within the ambiguous region, we manipulated the strength of support for the complement clause (CC) analysis and the relative clause (RC) analysis of the ambiguous construction Verb NP1 de NP2. In Experiment 1, the critical sentences were disambiguated to the dispreferred CC interpretation; in Experiment 2, the sentences were disambiguated as the preferred RC interpretation. Unsurprisingly, processing difficulty at the point of disambiguation was observed only in Experiment 1. As predicted by a parallel mechanism, greater processing difficulty arose at disambiguation when the RC interpretation was much more strongly supported by semantic cues relative to the CC alternative, than when the two analyses were semantically supported to a similar degree. Regression analyses confirmed that the degree of semantic support predicted processing difficulty at disambiguation. The findings provide evidence for a parallel constraint-based parsing mechanism. |
Falk Huettig; Susanne Brouwer Delayed anticipatory spoken language processing in adults with dyslexia - Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Dyslexia, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 97–122, 2015. @article{Huettig2015, It is now well established that anticipation of upcoming input is a key characteristic of spoken language comprehension. It has also frequently been observed that literacy influences spoken language processing. Here, we investigated whether anticipatory spoken language processing is related to individuals' word reading abilities. Dutch adults with dyslexia and a control group participated in two eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 was conducted to assess whether adults with dyslexia show the typical language-mediated eye gaze patterns. Eye movements of both adults with and without dyslexia closely replicated earlier research: spoken language is used to direct attention to relevant objects in the environment in a closely time-locked manner. In Experiment 2, participants received instructions (e.g., 'Kijk naar deCOM afgebeelde pianoCOM ', look at the displayed piano) while viewing four objects. Articles (Dutch 'het' or 'de') were gender marked such that the article agreed in gender only with the target, and thus, participants could use gender information from the article to predict the target object. The adults with dyslexia anticipated the target objects but much later than the controls. Moreover, participants' word reading scores correlated positively with their anticipatory eye movements. We conclude by discussing the mechanisms by which reading abilities may influence predictive language processing. |
Heeju Hwang; Elsi Kaiser Accessibility effects on production vary cross-linguistically: Evidence from English and Korean Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 84, pp. 190–204, 2015. @article{Hwang2015, Previous work on English suggests that accessibility of individual lexical items plays an important role in shaping speakers' choice of sentence structure, providing evidence for lexically incremental production. In order to investigate the role of accessibility in cross-linguistic production, we manipulated accessibility in English and Korean via semantic priming in Experiment 1 and visual cueing in Experiment 2. We recorded English and Korean speakers' speech and eye movements as they described pictured events. The production results show that English speakers' choice of sentence structure was significantly affected by semantic priming or visual cueing, consistent with the findings of prior research: Priming the patient entity significantly increased the production of passive sentences. In contrast, Korean speakers' choice of sentence structure was not influenced by accessibility of lexical items. Analyses of participants' eye-movements are consistent with the production results. In Experiment 1, English speakers fixated the semantically primed entity in the visual scene, whereas Korean speakers did not. Even when the visual cueing manipulation drew Korean speakers' focus of attention toward the cued entity in Experiment 2, Korean speakers' choice of the first referent was not influenced by the lexical accessibility. These findings strongly suggest that lexically incremental production is not a universal production mechanism. In light of the typological differences between English and Korean, we suggest that the relative contributions of accessibility during language production are mediated by the grammatical constraints of a language. |
Inbal Itzhak; Shari R. Baum Misleading bias-driven expectations in referential processing and the facilitative role of contrastive accent Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 623–650, 2015. @article{Itzhak2015, Probabilistic preferences are often facilitative in language processing and may assist in discourse prediction. However, occasionally these sources of information may lead to inaccurate expectations. The current study investigated a test case of this scenario. An eye-tracking experiment examined the interpretation of ambiguous personal pronouns in the context of implicit causality biases. We tested whether reference resolution may be facilitated online by contrastive accent in cases of a bias-inconsistent referent. Implicit causality biases directed looks to the biased noun phrase; however, when the name of the bias-inconsistent antecedent was accented (e.g., JOHN envied Bill because he [Formula: see text]), this tendency was modulated. Contrastive accent seems to dampen the occasionally confusing prediction of implicit causality biases in referential processing. This demonstrates one way in which the spoken language comprehension system copes with occasional misguidance of otherwise helpful probabilistic information. |
Lena A. Jäger; Zhong Chen; Qiang Li; Chien-Jer Charles Lin; Shravan Vasishth The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 79-80, pp. 97–120, 2015. @article{Jaeger2015a, Chinese relative clauses are an important test case for pitting the predictions of expectation-based accounts against those of memory-based theories. The memory-based accounts predict that object relatives are easier to process than subject relatives because, in object relatives, the distance between the relative clause verb and the head noun is shorter. By contrast, expectation-based accounts such as surprisal predict that the less frequent object relative should be harder to process. In previous studies on Chinese relative clause comprehension, local ambiguities may have rendered a comparison between relative clause types uninterpretable. We designed experimental materials in which no local ambiguities confound the comparison. We ran two experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) to compare reading difficulty in subject and object relatives which were placed either in subject or object modifying position. The evidence from our studies is consistent with the predictions of expectation-based accounts but not with those of memory-based theories. |
Lena A. Jäger; Felix Engelmann; Shravan Vasishth Retrieval interference in reflexive processing: Experimental evidence from Mandarin, and computational modeling Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 617, 2015. @article{Jaeger2015b, We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. |
Yu-Cin Jian; Chao-Jung Wu Using eye tracking to investigate semantic and spatial representations of scientific diagrams during text-diagram integration Journal Article In: Journal of Science Education and Technology, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 43–55, 2015. @article{Jian2015, We investigated strategies used by readers when reading a science article with a diagram and assessed whether semantic and spatial representations were constructed while reading the diagram. Seventy-one undergraduate participants read a scientific article while tracking their eye movements and then completed a reading comprehension test. Our results showed that the text-diagram referencing strategy was commonly used. However, some readers adopted other reading strategies, such as reading the diagram or text first. We found all readers who had referred to the diagram spent roughly the same amount of time reading and performed equally well. However, some participants who ignored the diagram performed more poorly on questions that tested understanding of basic facts. This result indicates that dual coding theory may be a possible theory to explain the phenomenon. Eye movement patterns indicated that at least some readers had extracted semantic information of the scientific terms when first looking at the diagram. Readers who read the scientific terms on the diagram first tended to spend less time looking at the same terms in the text, which they read after. Besides, presented clear diagrams can help readers process both semantic and spatial information, thereby facilitating an overall understanding of the article. In addition, although text-first and diagram-first readers spent similar total reading time on the text and diagram parts of the article, respectively, text-first readers had significantly less number of saccades of text and diagram than diagram-first readers. This result might be explained as text-directed reading. |
Matthew J. Abbott; Adrian Staub The effect of plausibility on eye movements in reading: Testing E-Z Reader's null predictions Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 85, pp. 76–87, 2015. @article{Abbott2015, The E-Z Reader 10 model of eye movements in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009) posits that the process of word identification strictly precedes the process of integration of a word into its syntactic and semantic context. The present study reports a single large-scale (N=112) eyetracking experiment in which the frequency and plausibility of a target word in each sentence were factorially manipulated. The results were consistent with E-Z Reader's central predictions: frequency but not plausibility influenced the probability that the word was skipped over by the eyes rather than directly fixated, and the two variables had additive, not interactive, effects on all reading time measures. Evidence in favor of null effects and null interactions was obtained by computing Bayes factors, using the default priors and sampling methods for ANOVA models implemented by Rouder, Morey, Speckman, and Province (2012). The results suggest that though a word's plausibility may have a measurable influence as early as the first fixation duration on the target word, in fact plausibility may be influencing only a post-lexical processing stage, rather than lexical identification itself. |
Denis Alamargot; Lisa Flouret; Denis Larocque; Gilles Caporossi; Virginie Pontart; Carmen Paduraru; Pauline Morisset; Michel Fayol Successful written subject–verb agreement: An online analysis of the procedure used by students in Grades 3, 5 and 12 Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 291–312, 2015. @article{Alamargot2015, This study was designed to (1) investigate the procedure responsible for successful written subject–verb agreement, and (2) describe how it develops across grades. Students in Grades 3, 5 and 12 were asked to read noun–noun–verb sen- tences aloud (e.g., Le chien des voisins mange [The dog of the neighbors eats]) and write out the verb inflections. Some of the nouns differed in number, thus inducing attraction errors. Results showed that third graders were successful because they implemented a declarative procedure requiring regressive fixations on the subject noun while writing out the inflection. A dual-step procedure (Hupet, Schelstraete, Demaeght, & Fayol, 1996) emerged in Grade 5, and was fully efficient by Grade 12. This procedure, which couples an automatized agreement rule with a monitoring process operated within working memory (without the need for regressive fixa- tions), was found to trigger a mismatch asymmetry (singular–plural > plural–sin- gular) in Grade 5. The time course of written subject–verb agreement, the origin of agreement errors and differences between the spoken and written modalities are discussed. |
Simona Amenta; Marco Marelli; Davide Crepaldi The fruitless effort of growing a fruitless tree: Early morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic effects in sentence reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 1587–1596, 2015. @article{Amenta2015, In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a "morphologically transparent" way or in a "morphologically opaque" way according to the sentence context to which they belong. This way, each target word was embedded in a sentence eliciting either its transparent or opaque interpretation. We analyzed whether the effect of stem frequency changes according to whether the (very same) word is read as a genuine derivation (transparent context) versus as a pseudoderived word (opaque context). Analysis of the first fixation durations revealed a stem-word frequency effect in both opaque and transparent contexts, thus showing that stems were accessed whether or not they contributed to word meaning, that is, word decomposition is indeed blind to semantics. However, while the stem-word frequency effect was facilitatory in the transparent context, it was inhibitory in the opaque context, thus showing an early involvement of semantic representations. This pattern of data is revealed by words with short suffixes. These results indicate that derived and pseudoderived words are segmented into their constituent morphemes also in natural reading; however, this blind-to-semantics process activates morpheme representations that are semantically connoted. |
Bernhard Angele; Elizabeth R. Schotter; Timothy J. Slattery; Tara L. Tenenbaum; Klinton Bicknell; Keith Rayner Do successor effects in reading reflect lexical parafoveal processing? Evidence from corpus-based and experimental eye movement data Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 79-80, pp. 76–96, 2015. @article{Angele2015, In the past, most research on eye movements during reading involved a limited number of subjects reading sentences with specific experimental manipulations on target words. Such experiments usually only analyzed eye-movements measures on and around the target word. Recently, some researchers have started collecting larger data sets involving large and diverse groups of subjects reading large numbers of sentences, enabling them to consider a larger number of influences and study larger and more representative subject groups. In such corpus studies, most of the words in a sentence are analyzed. The complexity of the design of corpus studies and the many potentially uncontrolled influences in such studies pose new issues concerning the analysis methods and interpretability of the data. In particular, several corpus studies of reading have found an effect of successor word (n+. 1) frequency on current word (n) fixation times, while studies employing experimental manipulations tend not to. The general interpretation of corpus studies suggests that readers obtain parafoveal lexical information from the upcoming word before they have finished identifying the current word, while the experimental manipulations shed doubt on this claim. In the present study, we combined a corpus analysis approach with an experimental manipulation (i.e., a parafoveal modification of the moving mask technique, Rayner & Bertera, 1979), so that, either (a) word n+. 1, (b) word n+. 2, (c) both words, or (d) neither word was masked. We found that denying preview for either or both parafoveal words increased average fixation times. Furthermore, we found successor effects similar to those reported in the corpus studies. Importantly, these successor effects were found even when the parafoveal word was masked, suggesting that apparent successor frequency effects may be due to causes that are unrelated to lexical parafoveal preprocessing. We discuss the implications of this finding both for parallel and serial accounts of word identification and for the interpretability of large correlational studies of word identification in reading in general. |
Benjamin Anible; Paul Twitchell; Gabriel S. Waters; Paola E. Dussias; Pilar Piñar; Jill P. Morford Sensitivity to verb bias in American Sign Language-English bilinguals Journal Article In: Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 215–228, 2015. @article{Anible2015, Native speakers of English are sensitive to the likelihood that a verb will appear in a specific subcategorization frame, known as verb bias. Readers rely on verb bias to help them resolve temporary ambiguity in sentence comprehension. We investigate whether deaf sign–print bilinguals who have acquired English syntactic knowledge primarily through print exposure show sensitivity to English verb biases in both production and comprehension. We first elicited sentence continuations for 100 English verbs as an offline production measure of sensitivity to verb bias. We then collected eye movement records to examine whether deaf bilinguals' online parsing decisions are influenced by English verb bias. The results indicate that exposure to a second language primarily via print is sufficient to influence use of implicit frequency-based characteristics of a language in production and also to inform parsing decisions in comprehension for some, but not all, verbs. |
Manabu Arai; Chie Nakamura; Reiko Mazuka Predicting the unbeaten path through syntactic priming Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 482–500, 2015. @article{Arai2015, A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in comprehension; following the costly processing of a temporarily ambiguous sentence, comprehenders experience less processing difficulty with the same structure with the same verb in subsequent processing. In previous studies using a reading paradigm, however, the effect was observed at or following disambiguating information and it is not known whether a priming effect affects only the process ofresolving structural ambiguity following disambiguating input or it also affects the process before ambiguity is resolved. Using a visual world paradigm, the current study addressed this issue with Japanese relative clause sentences. Our results demonstrated that after experiencing the relative clause structure, comprehenders were more likely to predict the usually dispreferred structure immediately upon hearing the same verb. No compatible effect, in contrast, was observed on hearing a different verb. Our results are consistent with the constraint-based lexicalist view, which assumes the parallel activation of possible structural analyses at the verb. Our study demonstrated that an experience of a dispreferred structure activates the structural information in a lexically specific manner, leading comprehenders to predict another instance of the same structure on encountering the same verb. |
Jennifer E. Arnold Women and men have different discourse biases for pronoun interpretation Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 77–110, 2015. @article{Arnold2015a, Two experiments examine how men and women interpret pronouns in discourse. Adults are known to show a strong “first-mention bias”: When two characters are mentioned (Michael played with William . . . ), comprehenders tend to interpret subsequent pronouns as coreferential with the first of the two characters and to find pronouns more natural than names for reference to the first character. However, this bias is not absolute. Experiment 1 demonstrates a stronger first-mention bias for women than men in their naturalness ratings for short stories. Experiment 2 monitors eye movements during story comprehension and finds that women are more likely than men to consider the first-mentioned character as the pronoun referent. These findings reveal the first known gender difference in reference processing and reinforce the view that reference processing is driven by more than the discourse context alone. |
Sheena K. Au-Yeung; Johanna K. Kaakinen; Simon P. Liversedge; Valerie Benson Processing of written irony in autism spectrum disorder: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 8, no. 6, pp. 749–760, 2015. @article{AuYeung2015, Previous research has suggested that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulties understanding others communicative intent and with using contextual information to correctly interpret irony. We recorded the eye movements of typically developing (TD) adults ASD adults when they read statements that could either be interpreted as ironic or non-ironic depending on the context of the passage. Participants with ASD performed as well as TD controls in their comprehension accuracy for speaker's statements in both ironic and non-ironic conditions. Eye movement data showed that for both participant groups, total reading times were longer for the critical region containing the speaker's statement and a subsequent sentence restating the context in the ironic condition compared to the non-ironic condition. The results suggest that more effortful processing is required in both ASD and TD participants for ironic compared with literal non-ironic statements, and that individuals with ASD were able to use contextual information to infer a non-literal interpretation of ironic text. Individuals with ASD, however, spent more time overall than TD controls rereading the passages, to a similar degree across both ironic and non-ironic conditions, suggesting that they either take longer to construct a coherent discourse representation of the text, or that they take longer to make the decision that their representation of the text is reasonable based on their knowledge of the world. |
Briony Banks; Emma Gowen; Kevin J. Munro; Patti Adank Audiovisual cues benefit recognition of accented speech in noise but not perceptual adaptation Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 9, pp. 422, 2015. @article{Banks2015, Perceptual adaptation allows humans to recognize different varieties of accented speech. We investigated whether perceptual adaptation to accented speech is facilitated if listeners can see a speaker's facial and mouth movements. In Study 1, participants listened to sentences in a novel accent and underwent a period of training with audiovisual or audio-only speech cues, presented in quiet or in background noise. A control group also underwent training with visual-only (speech-reading) cues. We observed no significant difference in perceptual adaptation between any of the groups. To address a number of remaining questions, we carried out a second study using a different accent, speaker and experimental design, in which participants listened to sentences in a non-native (Japanese) accent with audiovisual or audio-only cues, without separate training. Participants' eye gaze was recorded to verify that they looked at the speaker's face during audiovisual trials. Recognition accuracy was significantly better for audiovisual than for audio-only stimuli; however, no statistical difference in perceptual adaptation was observed between the two modalities. Furthermore, Bayesian analysis suggested that the data supported the null hypothesis. Our results suggest that although the availability of visual speech cues may be immediately beneficial for recognition of unfamiliar accented speech in noise, it does not improve perceptual adaptation. |
Carol J. Y. Bao; Cristina Rubino; Alisdair J. G. Taylor; Jason J. S. Barton The effects of homonymous hemianopia in experimental studies of alexia Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 70, pp. 156–164, 2015. @article{Bao2015a, Pure alexia is characterized by an increased word-length effect in reading. However, this disorder is usually accompanied by right homonymous hemianopia, which itself can cause a mildly increased word-length effect. Some alexic studies have used hemianopic patients with modest word-length effects: it is not clear (a) whether they had pure alexia and (b) if not, whether their results could be explained by the field defect. Our goal was to determine if impairments in visual processing claimed to be related to alexia could be replicated in homonymous hemianopia alone. Twelve healthy subjects performed five experiments used in two prior studies of alexia, under both normal and simulated hemianopic conditions, using a gaze-contingent display generated by an eye-tracker. We replicated the increased word-length effect for reading time with right homonymous hemianopia, and showed a similar effect for a lexical decision task. Simulated hemianopia impaired scanning accuracy for letter or number strings, and slowed object part processing, though the effect of configuration was not greater under hemianopic viewing. Hemianopia impaired the identification of words whose letters appeared and disappeared sequentially on the screen, with better performance on a cumulative presentation in which the letters remained on the screen. The reporting of trigrams was less accurate with hemianopia, though syllabic structure did not influence the results. We conclude that some impairments that have been attributed to the processing defects underlying alexia may actually be due to right homonymous hemianopia. Our results underline the importance of considering the contribution of accompanying low-level visual impairments when studying high-level processes. |
Dario Cazzoli; René M. Müri; Christopher Kennard; Clive R. Rosenthal The role of the right posterior parietal cortex in letter migration between words Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 377–386, 2015. @article{Cazzoli2015a, When briefly presented with pairs of words, skilled readers can sometimes report words with migrated letters (e.g., they report hunt when presented with the words hint and hurt). This and other letter migration phenomena have been often used to investigate factors that influence reading such as letter position coding. However, the neural basis of letter migration is poorly understood. Previous evidence has implicated the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) in processing visuospatial attributes and lexical properties during word reading. The aim of this study was to assess this putative role by combining an inhibitory TMS protocol with a letter migration paradigm, which was designed to examine the contributions of visuospatial attributes and lexical factors. Temporary interference with the right PPC led to three specific effects on letter migration. First, the number of letter migrations was significantly increased only in the group with active stimulation (vs. a sham stimulation group or a control group without stimulation), and there was no significant effect on other error types. Second, this effect occurred only when letter migration could result in a meaningful word (migration vs. control context). Third, the effect of active stimulation on the number of letter migrations was lateralized to target words presented on the left. Our study thus demonstrates that the right PPC plays a specific and causal role in the phenomenon of letter migration. The nature of this role cannot be explained solely in terms of visuospatial attention, rather it involves an interplay between visuospatial attentional and word reading-specific factors. |
Lijing Chen; Yufang Yang Emphasizing the only character: EMPHASIS, attention and contrast Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 136, pp. 222–227, 2015. @article{Chen2015b, In conversations, pragmatic information such as emphasis is important for identifying the speaker's/writer's intention. The present research examines the cognitive processes involved in emphasis processing. Participants read short discourses that introduced one or two character(s), with the character being emphasized or non-emphasized in subsequent texts. Eye movements showed that: (1) early processing of the emphasized word was facilitated, which may have been due to increased attention allocation, whereas (2) late integration of the emphasized character was inhibited when the discourse involved only this character. These results indicate that it is necessary to include other characters as contrastive characters to facilitate the integration of an emphasized character, and support the existence of a relationship between Emphasis and Contrast computation. Taken together, our findings indicate that both attention allocation and contrast computation are involved in emphasis processing, and support the incremental nature of sentence processing and the importance of contrast in discourse comprehension. |
Po-Heng Chen; Jie-Li Tsai In: Language and Linguistics, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 555–586, 2015. @article{Chen2015, The purpose of the present study is twofold: (1) To examine whether the syntactic category constraint can determine the semantic resolution of Chinese syntactic category ambiguous words; and (2) to investigate whether the syntactic category of alternative meanings of Chinese homographs can influence the subordinate bias effect (SBE) during lexical ambiguity resolution. In the present study, four types of Chinese biased homo- graphs (NN, VV, VN, and NV) were embedded into syntactically and semantically subordinate-biased sentences. Each homograph was assigned a frequency-matched unambiguous word as control, which could fit into the same sentence frame. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read each sentence. In general, the results showed that in a subordinate-biased context, (1) the SBE for the four types of homograph was significant only in the second-pass reading on the post-target words and (2) numerically, the NV homographs revealed a larger effect size of SBE than VN homographs on both target and post-target words. Our findings support the constraint-satisfaction models, suggesting that the syntactic category constraint is not the only factor influencing the semantic resolution of syntactic category ambiguous words, which is opposed to the prediction of the syntax-first models. |
Qi Chen; Daniel Mirman Interaction between phonological and semantic representations: Time matters Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 538–558, 2015. @article{Chen2015a, Computational modeling and eye-tracking were used to investigate how phonological and semantic information interact to influence the time course of spoken word recognition. We extended our recent models (Chen & Mirman, 2012; Mirman, Britt, & Chen, 2013) to account for new evidence that competition among phonological neighbors influences activation of semantically related concepts during spoken word recognition (Apfelbaum, Blumstein, & McMurray, 2011). The model made a novel prediction: Semantic input modulates the effect of phonological neighbors on target word processing, producing an approximately inverted-U-shaped pattern with a high phonological density advantage at an intermediate level of semantic input-in contrast to the typical disadvantage for high phonological density words in spoken word recognition. This prediction was confirmed with a new analysis of the Apfelbaum et al. data and in a visual world paradigm experiment with preview duration serving as a manipulation of strength of semantic input. These results are consistent with our previous claim that strongly active neighbors produce net inhibitory effects and weakly active neighbors produce net facilitative effects. |
Wonil Choi; Matthew W. Lowder; Fernanda Ferreira; John M. Henderson Individual differences in the perceptual span during reading: Evidence from the moving window technique Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 7, pp. 2463–2475, 2015. @article{Choi2015a, We report the results of an eye tracking experiment that used the gaze-contingent moving window technique to examine individual differences in the size of readers' perceptual span. Participants read paragraphs while the size of the rightward window of visible text was systematically manipulated across trials. In addition, participants completed a large battery of individual-difference measures representing two cognitive constructs: language ability and oculomotor processing speed. Results showed that higher scores on language ability measures and faster oculomotor processing speed were associated with faster reading times and shorter fixation durations. More interestingly, the size of readers' perceptual span was modulated by individual differences in language ability but not by individual differences in oculomotor processing speed, suggesting that readers with greater language proficiency are more likely to have efficient mechanisms to extract linguistic information beyond the fixated word. |
Meghan Clayards; Oliver Niebuhr; M. Gareth Gaskell The time course of auditory and language-specific mechanisms in compensation for sibilant assimilation Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 311–328, 2015. @article{Clayards2015, Models of spoken-word recognition differ onwheth- er compensation for assimilation is language-specific or depends on general auditory processing. English and French participants were taught words that began or ended with the sibilants /s/ and /∫/. Both languages exhibit some assimilation in sibilant sequences (e.g., /s/ becomes like [∫]in dress shop and classe chargée), but they differ in the strength and predomi- nance of anticipatory versus carryover assimilation. After train- ing, participants were presentedwith novelwords embedded in sentences, some of which contained an assimilatory context either preceding or following. A continuum of target sounds ranging from [s] to [∫] was spliced into the novel words, representing a range of possible assimilation strengths. Listeners' perceptions were examined using a visual-world eyetracking paradigm in which the listener clicked on pictures matching the novel words. We found two distinct language- general context effects: a contrastive effect when the assimilat- ing context preceded the target, and flattening of the sibilant categorization function (increased ambiguity) when the assim- ilating context followed. Furthermore, we found that English but not French listeners were able to resolve the ambiguity created by the following assimilatory context, consistent with their greater experience with assimilation in this context. The combination of these mechanisms allows listeners to deal flexibly with variability in speech forms. |
Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production Journal Article In: Cognitive Processing, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 131–150, 2015. @article{Coco2015a, Situated language production requires the integration of visual attention and linguistic processing. Previous work has not conclusively disentangled the role of perceptual scene information and structural sentence information in guiding visual attention. In this paper, we present an eye-tracking study that demonstrates that three types of guidance, perceptual, conceptual, and structural, interact to control visual attention. In a cued language production experiment, we manipulate perceptual (scene clutter) and conceptual guidance (cue animacy) and measure structural guidance (syntactic complexity of the utterance). Analysis of the time course of language production, before and during speech, reveals that all three forms of guidance affect the complexity of visual responses, quantified in terms of the entropy of attentional landscapes and the turbulence of scan patterns, especially during speech. We find that perceptual and conceptual guidance mediate the distribution of attention in the scene, whereas structural guidance closely relates to scan pattern complexity. Furthermore, the eye-voice span of the cued object and its perceptual competitor are similar; its latency mediated by both perceptual and structural guidance. These results rule out a strict interpretation of structural guidance as the single dominant form of visual guidance in situated language production. Rather, the phase of the task and the associated demands of cross-modal cognitive processing determine the mechanisms that guide attention. |