Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink eye tracker reading and language research publications up until 2024 (with some early 2025s) are listed below by year. You can search the eye-tracking 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 research articles, please email us!
2015 |
Joseph C. Toscano; Bob McMurray The time-course of speaking rate compensation: Effects of sentential rate and vowel length on voicing judgments Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 529–543, 2015. @article{Toscano2015,Many sources of context information in speech (such as speaking rate) occur either before or after the phonetic cues they influence, yet there is little work examining the time-course of these effects. Here, we investigate how listeners compensate for preceding sentence rate and subsequent vowel length (VL; a secondary cue that has been used as a proxy for speaking rate) when categorising words varying in voice-onset time (VOT). Participants selected visual objects in a display while their eye-movements were recorded, allowing us to examine when each source of information had an effect on lexical processing. We found that the effect of VOT preceded that of VL, suggesting that each cue is used as it becomes available. In a second experiment, we found that, in contrast, the effect of preceding sentence rate occurred simultaneously with VOT, suggesting that listeners interpret VOT relative to preceding rate. |
Alba Tuninetti; Tessa Warren; Natasha Tokowicz Cue strength in second-language processing: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 568–584, 2015. @article{Tuninetti2015,This study used eye-tracking and grammaticality judgement measures to examine how second-language (L2) learners process syntactic violations in English. Participants were native Arabic and native Mandarin Chinese speakers studying English as an L2, and monolingual English-speaking controls. The violations involved incorrect word order and differed in two ways predicted to be important by the unified competition model [UCM; MacWhinney, B. (2005). A unified model of language acquisition. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 49-67). Oxford: Oxford University Press.]. First, one violation had more and stronger cues to ungrammaticality than the other. Second, the grammaticality of these word orders varied in Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. Sensitivity to violations was relatively quick overall, across all groups. Sensitivity also was related to the number and strength of cues to ungrammaticality regardless of native language, which is consistent with the general principles of the UCM. However, there was little evidence of cross-language transfer effects in either eye movements or grammaticality judgements. |
Alma Veenstra; Antje S. Meyer; Daniel J. Acheson Effects of parallel planning on agreement production Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 162, pp. 29–39, 2015. @article{Veenstra2015,An important issue in current psycholinguistics is how the time course of utterance planning affects the generation of grammatical structures. The current study investigated the influence of parallel activation of the components of complex noun phrases on the generation of subject-verb agreement. Specifically, the lexical interference account (Gillespie & Pearlmutter, 2011b; Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004) predicts more agreement errors (i.e., attraction) for subject phrases in which the head and local noun mismatch in number (e.g., the apple next to the pears) when nouns are planned in parallel than when they are planned in sequence. We used a speeded picture description task that yielded sentences such as the apple next to the pears is red. The objects mentioned in the noun phrase were either semantically related or unrelated. To induce agreement errors, pictures sometimes mismatched in number. In order to manipulate the likelihood of parallel processing of the objects and to test the hypothesized relationship between parallel processing and the rate of agreement errors, the pictures were either placed close together or far apart. Analyses of the participants' eye movements and speech onset latencies indicated slower processing of the first object and stronger interference from the related (compared to the unrelated) second object in the close than in the far condition. Analyses of the agreement errors yielded an attraction effect, with more errors in mismatching than in matching conditions. However, the magnitude of the attraction effect did not differ across the close and far conditions. Thus, spatial proximity encouraged parallel processing of the pictures, which led to interference of the associated conceptual and/or lexical representation, but, contrary to the prediction, it did not lead to more attraction errors. |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Parafoveal lexical activation depends on skilled reading proficiency Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. March, pp. 586–595, 2015. @article{Veldre2015,The boundary paradigm was used to investigate individual differences in the extraction of lexical information from the parafovea in sentence reading. The preview of a target word was manipulated so that it was identical (e.g., sped), a higher frequency orthographic neighbor (seed), a nonword neighbor (sted), or an all-letter-different nonword (glat). Ninety-four skilled adult readers were assessed on measures of reading and spelling ability. The results showed that null effects of preview lexical status in the average data obscured systematic differences on the basis of proficiency and target neighborhood density. For targets from dense neighborhoods, inhibition from a higher frequency neighbor preview occurred among highly proficient readers, and particularly those with superior spelling ability, in early fixation measures. Poorer readers showed inhibition only in second-pass reading of the target. These data suggest that readers with precise lexical representations are more likely to extract lexical information from a word before it is fixated. The implications for computational models of eye movements in reading are discussed. |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Parafoveal preview benefit is modulated by the precision of skilled readers' lexical representations Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 219–232, 2015. @article{Veldre2015a,In skilled reading, the processing of an upcoming word often begins in the parafovea, that is, before the word is fixated. This study investigated whether the extraction and use of multiple sources of information about an upcoming word depends on reading skill. The eye movements of 107 skilled adult readers, assessed on measures of reading and spelling ability, were recorded. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to manipulate the preview of a target word's identity and length in sentences with low- or high-frequency pretarget words. Across all first-pass reading measures, superior reading ability was associated with a larger preview benefit, but only among readers with high spelling ability, suggesting that the orthographic precision of a reader's stored lexical representations influences the extraction of parafoveal information. There was also evidence that the highly skilled reader/spellers' parafoveal processing advantage derived partly from their efficient foveal processing. Finally, in first fixations on the target, increased preview benefit for highly skilled reader/spellers was restricted to accurate length previews, suggesting that readers with precise lexical representations use upcoming word length in combination with parafoveal orthographic information to narrow down potential lexical candidates. The implications of these results for computational models of eye movements are discussed. |
Malte C. Viebahn; Mirjam Ernestus; James M. McQueen Syntactic predictability can facilitate the recognition of casually produced words in connected speech Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1684–1702, 2015. @article{Viebahn2015,The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past participles and auxiliary verbs in Dutch subordinate clauses. Acoustic-phonetic reliability was manipulated by presenting sentences either in a careful or a casual speaking style. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants recognized past participles more quickly when they occurred after their associated auxiliary verbs than when they preceded them. Response measures tapping into later stages of processing suggested that this effect was stronger for casually than for carefully produced sentences. These findings provide further evidence that syntactic predictability can influence word recognition and that this type of information is particularly useful for coping with acoustic-phonetic reductions in conversational speech. We conclude that listeners dynamically adapt to the different sources of linguistic information available to them. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Akira Omaki; Ellen Lau; Imogen Davidson White; Myles Louis Dakan; Aaron Apple; Colin Phillips Hyper-active gap filling Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 384, 2015. @article{Omaki2015,Much work has demonstrated that speakers of verb-final languages are able to construct rich syntactic representations in advance of verb information. This may reflect general architectural properties of the language processor, or it may only reflect a language-specific adaptation to the demands of verb-finality. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether speakers of a verb-medial language (English) wait to consult verb transitivity information before constructing filler-gap dependencies, where internal arguments are fronted and hence precede the verb. This configuration makes it possible to investigate whether the parser actively makes representational commitments on the gap position before verb transitivity information becomes available. A key prediction of the view that rich pre-verbal structure building is a general architectural property is that speakers of verb-medial languages should predictively construct dependencies in advance of verb transitivity information, and therefore that disruption should be observed when the verb has intransitive subcategorization frames that are incompatible with the predicted structure. In three reading experiments (self-paced and eye-tracking) that manipulated verb transitivity, we found evidence for reading disruption when the verb was intransitive, although no such reading difficulty was observed when the critical verb was embedded inside a syntactic island structure, which blocks filler-gap dependency completion. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that in English, as in verb-final languages, information from preverbal noun phrases is sufficient to trigger active dependency completion without having access to verb transitivity information. |
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. |
Paul Metzner; Titus Malsburg; Shravan Vasishth; Frank Rösler Brain responses to world knowledge violations: A comparison of stimulus- and fixation-triggered event-related potentials and neural oscillations Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 1017–1028, 2015. @article{Metzner2015,Recent research has shown that brain potentials time-locked to fixations in natural reading can be similar to brain potentials recorded during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). We attempted two replications of Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, and Petersson [Hagoort, P., Hald, L., Bastiaansen, M., & Petersson, K. M. Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension. Science, 304, 438-441, 2004] to determine whether this correspondence also holds for oscillatory brain responses. Hagoort et al. reported an N400 effect and synchronization in the theta and gamma range following world knowledge violations. Our first experiment (n = 32) used RSVP and replicated both the N400 effect in the ERPs and the power increase in the theta range in the time-frequency domain. In the second experiment (n = 49), participants read the same materials freely while their eye movements and their EEG were monitored. First fixation durations, gaze durations, and regression rates were increased, and the ERP showed an N400 effect. An analysis of time-frequency representations showed synchronization in the delta range (1-3 Hz) and desynchronization in the upper alpha range (11-13 Hz) but no theta or gamma effects. The results suggest that oscillatory EEG changes elicited by world knowledge violations are different in natural reading and RSVP. This may reflect differences in how representations are constructed and retrieved from memory in the two presentation modes. |
Holger Mitterer; Eva Reinisch Letters don't matter: No effect of orthography on the perception of conversational speech Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 85, pp. 116–134, 2015. @article{Mitterer2015,It has been claimed that learning to read changes the way we perceive speech, with detrimental effects for words with sound-spelling inconsistencies. Because conversational speech is peppered with segment deletions and alterations that lead to sound-spelling inconsistencies, such an influence would seriously hinder the perception of conversational speech. We hence tested whether the orthographic coding of a segment influences its deletion costs in perception. German glottal stop, a segment that is canonically present but not orthographically coded, allows such a test. The effects of glottal-stop deletion in German were compared to deletion of /h/ in German (grapheme: h) and deletion of glottal stop in Maltese (grapheme: q) in an implicit task with conversational speech and explicit task with careful speech. All segment deletions led to similar reduction costs in the implicit task, while an orthographic effect, with larger effects for orthographically coded segments, emerged in the explicit task. These results suggest that learning to read does not influence how we process speech but mainly how we think about it. |
Mariah Moore; Peter C. Gordon Reading ability and print exposure: item response theory analysis of the author recognition test Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 1095–1109, 2015. @article{Moore2015,In the author recognition test (ART), participants are presented with a series of names and foils and are asked to indicate which ones they recognize as authors. The test is a strong predictor of reading skill, and this predictive ability is generally explained as occurring because author knowledge is likely acquired through reading or other forms of print exposure. In this large-scale study (1,012 college student participants), we used item response theory (IRT) to analyze item (author) characteristics in order to facilitate identification of the determinants of item difficulty, provide a basis for further test development, and optimize scoring of the ART. Factor analysis suggested a potential two-factor structure of the ART, differentiating between literary and popular authors. Effective and ineffective author names were identified so as to facilitate future revisions of the ART. Analyses showed that the ART is a highly significant predictor of the time spent encoding words, as measured using eyetracking during reading. The relationship between the ART and time spent reading provided a basis for implementing a higher penalty for selecting foils, rather than the standard method of ART scoring (names selected minus foils selected). The findings provide novel support for the view that the ART is a valid indicator of reading volume. Furthermore, they show that frequency data can be used to select items of appropriate difficulty, and that frequency data from corpora based on particular time periods and types of texts may allow adaptations of the test for different populations. |
Bruno Nicenboim; Shravan Vasishth; Carolina A. Gattei; Mariano Sigman; Reinhold Kliegl Working memory differences in long-distance dependency resolution Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 312, 2015. @article{Nicenboim2015,There is a wealth of evidence showing that increasing the distance between an argument and its head leads to more processing effort, namely, locality effects; these are usually associated with constraints in working memory (DLT: Gibson, 2000; activation-based model: Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). In SOV languages, however, the opposite effect has been found: antilocality (see discussion in Levy et al., 2013). Antilocality effects can be explained by the expectation-based approach as proposed by Levy (2008) or by the activation-based model of sentence processing as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005). We report an eye-tracking and a self-paced reading study with sentences in Spanish together with measures of individual differences to examine the distinction between expectation- and memory-based accounts, and within memory-based accounts the further distinction between DLT and the activation-based model. The experiments show that (i) antilocality effects as predicted by the expectation account appear only for high-capacity readers; (ii) increasing dependency length by interposing material that modifies the head of the dependency (the verb) produces stronger facilitation than increasing dependency length with material that does not modify the head; this is in agreement with the activation-based model but not with the expectation account; and (iii) a possible outcome of memory load on low-capacity readers is the increase in regressive saccades (locality effects as predicted by memory-based accounts) or, surprisingly, a speedup in the self-paced reading task; the latter consistent with good-enough parsing (Ferreira et al., 2002). In sum, the study suggests that individual differences in working memory capacity play a role in dependency resolution, and that some of the aspects of dependency resolution can be best explained with the activation-based model together with a prediction component. |
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, & 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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Kathleen Carbary; Meredith Brown; Christine Gunlogson; Joyce M. McDonough; Aleksandra Fazlipour; Michael K. Tanenhaus Anticipatory deaccenting in language comprehension Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 1-2, pp. 197–211, 2015. @article{Carbary2015,We evaluated the hypothesis that listeners can generate expectations about upcoming input using anticipatory deaccenting, in which the absence of a nuclear pitch accent on an utterance-new noun is licensed by the subsequent repetition of that noun (e.g. Drag the SQUARE with the house to the TRIangle with the house). The phonemic restoration paradigm was modified to obscure word-initial segmental information uniquely identifying the final word in a spoken instruction, resulting in a stimulus compatible with two lexical alternatives (e.g. mouse/house). In Experiment 1, we measured participants' final interpretations and response times. In Experiment 2, we used the same materials in a crowd-sourced gating study. Sentence interpretations at gated intervals, final interpretations and response times provided converging evidence that the anticipatory deaccenting pattern contributed to listeners' referential expectations. The results illustrate the availability and importance of sentence-level accent patterns in spoken language comprehension.$backslash$nWe evaluated the hypothesis that listeners can generate expectations about upcoming input using anticipatory deaccenting, in which the absence of a nuclear pitch accent on an utterance-new noun is licensed by the subsequent repetition of that noun (e.g. Drag the SQUARE with the house to the TRIangle with the house). The phonemic restoration paradigm was modified to obscure word-initial segmental information uniquely identifying the final word in a spoken instruction, resulting in a stimulus compatible with two lexical alternatives (e.g. mouse/house). In Experiment 1, we measured participants' final interpretations and response times. In Experiment 2, we used the same materials in a crowd-sourced gating study. Sentence interpretations at gated intervals, final interpretations and response times provided converging evidence that the anticipatory deaccenting pattern contributed to listeners' referential expectations. The results illustrate the availability and importance of sentence-level accent patterns in spoken language comprehension. |
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, & 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, & 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. |
Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller The interaction of visual and linguistic saliency during syntactic ambiguity resolution Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 46–74, 2015. @article{Coco2015,Psycholinguistic research using the visual world paradigm has shown that the processing ofsentences is constrained by the visual context in which they occur. Recently, there has been growing interest in the interactions observed when both language and vision provide relevant information during sentence pro- cessing. In three visual world experiments on syntactic ambiguity resolution, we investigate how visual and linguistic information influence the interpretation ofambiguous sentences. We hypothesize that (1) visual and linguistic information both constrain which interpretation is pursued by the sentence pro- cessor, and (2) the two types of information act upon the interpretation of the sentence at different points during processing. In Experiment 1, we show that visual saliency is utilized to anticipate the upcoming arguments ofa verb. In Experiment 2, we operationalize linguistic saliency using intonational breaks and demonstrate that these give prominence to linguistic referents. These results confirm pre- diction (1). In Experiment 3, we manipulate visual and linguistic saliency together and find that both types of information are used, but at different points in the sentence, to incrementally update its current interpretation. This finding is consistent with prediction (2). Overall, our results suggest an adaptive processing architecture in which different types of information are used when they become available, optimizing different aspects of situated language processing. |
Saveria Colonna; Sarah Schimke; Barbara Hemforth Different effects of focus in intra- and inter-sentential pronoun resolution in German Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 10, pp. 1306–1325, 2015. @article{Colonna2015,It is widely assumed that focused entities are more salient than non-focused ones and consequently, that an antecedent should be particularly available for a pronoun when it is foregrounded in a cleft construction. Contrary to this assumption, however, some studies observed that an antecedent focused by a cleft was less accessible than a non-focused one. We claim that the influence of clefting depends on the position of the ambiguous pronoun: clefted antecedents are only preferred as antecedents of a pronoun when the pronoun and its antecedent are in different discourse units. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a questionnaire and a visual world experiment in German in which we manipulated inter- vs. intra-sentential pronoun resolution. Results showed that clefting had different effects depending on the position of the pronoun. We will discuss why these results are consistent with the claim that pronouns preferentially co-refer with the sentence topic. |
Georgie Columbus; Naveed A. Sheikh; Marilena Cote-Lecaldare; Katja Hauser; Shari R. Baum; Debra Titone Individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing: An eye movement study of sentence reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 8, pp. 1057, 2015. @article{Columbus2015,Metaphors are common elements of language that allow us to creatively stretch the limits of word meaning. However, metaphors vary in their degree of novelty, which determines whether people must create new meanings on-line or retrieve previously known metaphorical meanings from memory. Such variations affect the degree to which general cognitive capacities such as executive control are required for successful comprehension. We investigated whether individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing using eye movement measures of reading. Thirty-nine participants read sentences including metaphors or idioms, another form of figurative language that is more likely to rely on meaning retrieval. They also completed the AX-CPT, a domain-general executive control task. In Experiment 1, we examined sentences containing metaphorical or literal uses of verbs, presented with or without prior context. In Experiment 2, we examined sentences containing idioms or literal phrases for the same participants to determine whether the link to executive control was qualitatively similar or different to Experiment 1. When metaphors were low familiar, all people read verbs used as metaphors more slowly than verbs used literally (this difference was smaller for high familiar metaphors). Executive control capacity modulated this pattern in that high executive control readers spent more time reading verbs when a prior context forced a particular interpretation (metaphorical or literal), and they had faster total metaphor reading times when there was a prior context. Interestingly, executive control did not relate to idiom processing for the same readers. Here, all readers had faster total reading times for high familiar idioms than literal phrases. Thus, executive control relates to metaphor but not idiom processing for these readers, and for the particular metaphor and idiom reading manipulations presented. |
Uschi Cop; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck Eye movement patterns in natural reading: A comparison of monolingual and bilingual reading of a novel Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. e0134008, 2015. @article{Cop2015,INTRODUCTION AND METHOD: This paper presents a corpus of sentence level eye movement parameters for unbalanced bilingual first language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading and monolingual reading of a complete novel (56 000 words). We present important sentence-level basic eye movement parameters of both bilingual and monolingual natural reading extracted from this large data corpus.$backslash$n$backslash$nRESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Bilingual L2 reading patterns show longer sentence reading times (20%), more fixations (21%), shorter saccades (12%) and less word skipping (4.6%), than L1 reading patterns. Regression rates are the same for L1 and L2 reading. These results could indicate, analogous to a previous simulation with the E-Z reader model in the literature, that it is primarily the speeding up of lexical access that drives both L1 and L2 reading development. Bilingual L1 reading does not differ in any major way from monolingual reading. This contrasts with predictions made by the weaker links account, which predicts a bilingual disadvantage in language processing caused by divided exposure between languages. |
Uschi Cop; Emmanuel Keuleers; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck Frequency effects in monolingual and bilingual natural reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 1216–1234, 2015. @article{Cop2015a,This paper presents the first systematic examination of the monolingual and bilingual frequency effect (FE) during natural reading. We analyzed single fixation durations on content words for participants reading an entire novel. Unbalanced bilinguals and monolinguals show a similarly sized FE in their mother tongue (L1), but for bilinguals the FE is considerably larger in their second language (L2) than in their L1. The FE in both L1 and L2 reading decreased with increasing L1 proficiency, but it was not affected by L2 proficiency. Our results are consistent with an account of bilingual language processing that assumes an integrated mental lexicon with exposure as the main determiner for lexical entrenchment. This means that no qualitative difference in language processing between monolingual, bilingual L1, or bilingual L2 is necessary to explain reading behavior. We present this account and argue that not all groups of bilinguals necessarily have lower L1 exposure than monolinguals do and, in line with Kuperman and Van Dyke (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39 (3), 802-823, 2013), that individual vocabulary size and language exposure change the accuracy of the relative corpus word frequencies and thereby determine the size of the FEs in the same way for all participants. |
Marie-Josée Bisson; Walter J. B. Heuven; Kathy Conklin; Richard J. Tunney The role of verbal and pictorial information in multimodal incidental acquisition of foreign language vocabulary Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 7, pp. 1306–1326, 2015. @article{Bisson2015,This study used eye tracking to investigate the allocation of attention to multimodal stimuli during an incidental learning situation, as well as its impact on subsequent explicit learning. Participants were exposed to foreign language (FL) auditory words on their own, in conjunction with written native language (NL) translations, or with both written NL translations and pictures. Incidental acquisition of FL words was assessed the following day through an explicit learning task where participants learned to recognize translation equivalents, as well as one week later through recall and translation recognition tests. Results showed higher accuracy scores in the explicit learning task for FL words presented with meaning during incidental learning, whether written meaning or both written meaning and picture, than for FL words presented auditorily only. However, participants recalled significantly more FL words after a week delay if they had been presented with a picture during incidental learning. In addition, the time spent looking at the pictures during incidental learning significantly predicted recognition and recall scores one week later. Overall, results demonstrated the impact of exposure to multimodal stimuli on subsequent explicit learning, as well as the important role that pictorial information can play in incidental vocabulary acquisition. |
Hazel I. Blythe; Ascensión Pagán; Megan Dodd Beyond decoding: Phonological processing during silent reading in beginning readers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 1244–1252, 2015. @article{Blythe2015,In this experiment, the extent to which beginning readers process phonology during lexical identification in silent sentence reading was investigated. The eye movements of children aged seven to nine years and adults were recorded as they read sentences containing either a correctly spelled target word (e.g., girl), a pseudohomophone (e.g., gerl), or a spelling control (e.g., garl). Both children and adults showed a benefit from the valid phonology of the pseudohomophone, compared to the spelling control during reading. This indicates that children as young as seven years old exhibit relatively skilled phonological processing during reading, despite having moved past the use of overt phonological decoding strategies. In addition, in comparison to adults, children's lexical processing was more disrupted by the presence of spelling errors, suggesting a developmental change in the relative dependence upon phonological and orthographic processing in lexical identification during silent sentence reading. |
Jens Bölte; Andrea Böhl; Christian Dobel; Pienie Zwitserlood In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1540, 2015. @article{Boelte2015,In three experiments, participants named target pictures by means of German compound words (e.g., Gartenstuhl-garden chair), each accompanied by two different distractor pictures (e.g., lawn mower and swimming pool). Targets and distractor pictures were semantically related either associatively (garden chair and lawn mower) or by a shared semantic category (garden chair and wardrobe). Within each type of semantic relation, target and distractor pictures either shared morpho-phonological (word-form) information (Gartenstuhl with Gartenzwerg, garden gnome, and Gartenschlauch, garden hose) or not. A condition with two completely unrelated pictures served as baseline. Target naming was facilitated when distractor and target pictures were morpho-phonologically related. This is clear evidence for the activation of word-form information of distractor pictures. Effects were larger for associatively than for categorically related distractors and targets, which constitute evidence for lexical competition. Mere categorical relatedness, in the absence of morpho-phonological overlap, resulted in null effects (Experiments 1 and 2), and only speeded target naming when effects reflect only conceptual, but not lexical processing (Experiment 3). Given that distractor pictures activate their word forms, the data cannot be easily reconciled with discrete serial models. The re sults fit well with models that allow information to cascade forward from conceptual to word-form levels. |
Tobias Bormann; Sascha A. Wolfer; Wibke Hachmann; Claudia Neubauer; Lars Konieczny Fast word reading in pure alexia: “Fast, yet serial” Journal Article In: Neurocase, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 251–267, 2015. @article{Bormann2015,Pure alexia is a severe impairment of word reading in which individuals process letters serially with a pronounced length effect. Yet, there is considerable variation in the performance of alexic readers with generally very slow, but also occasionally fast responses, an observation addressed rarely in previous reports. It has been suggested that "fast" responses in pure alexia reflect residual parallel letter processing or that they may even be subserved by an independent reading system. Four experiments assessed fast and slow reading in a participant (DN) with pure alexia. Two behavioral experiments investigated frequency, neighborhood, and length effects in forced fast reading. Two further experiments measured eye movements when DN was forced to read quickly, or could respond faster because words were easier to process. Taken together, there was little support for the proposal that "qualitatively different" mechanisms or reading strategies underlie both types of responses in DN. Instead, fast responses are argued to be generated by the same serial-reading strategy. |
Oliver Bott; Anja Gattnar The cross-linguistic processing of aspect – an eyetracking study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in Russian and German Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 877–898, 2015. @article{Bott2015a,This paper reports a cross-linguistic study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in an aspect language (Russian) and a non-aspect language (German). In Russian, mereological semantics led us to expect incremental mismatch detection independently of the presence or absence of the verbal arguments. In German, however, mismatch effects should be delayed until the processor has encountered the complete predication. These predictions were tested in two eyetracking during reading experiments. We investigated the processing of achievement verbs modified by aspectually mismatching adverbials in Russian (Exp. 1) and German (Exp. 2) and manipulated the word order in such a way that the mismatch occurred before or after the predication was complete. The data show that Russian readers immediately noticed the mismatch independently of whether the verb preceded or followed its arguments, whereas German readers showed mismatch effects only after a complete predication. We take this as evidence for cross-linguistically different increment sizes in event interpretation. |
Oliver Bott; Fabian Schlotterbeck The processing domain of scope interaction Journal Article In: Journal of Semantics, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 39–92, 2015. @article{Bott2015,The present study investigates whether quantifier scope is computed incrementally during online sentence processing. We exploited the free word order in German to manipulate whether the verbal predicate preceded or followed the second quantifier in doubly quantified sentences that required the computation of inverse scope. A pos- sessive pronoun in the first quantifier that had to be bound by the second quantifier was used to enforce scope inversion. We tested whether scope inversion causes diffi- culty and whether this difficulty emerges even at a point before comprehenders have encountered the main verb. We report three pretests and two reading time experi- ments. The first two pretests were offline tests that established (1) that the sentences exhibited the assumed scope preferences and (2) that variable binding forced scope inversion. The third pretest employed self-paced reading to show that interpreting a bound variable is not difficult per se and that difficulty in the critical construction must thus be due to inverting scope. Incremental processing of quantifier scope was inves- tigated in a self-paced reading experiment. We observed difficulty right after the second quantifier, but only if it appeared after the main verb, that is, after the predi- cation was complete. Further evidence for late scope inversion comes from an eye- tracking experiment. Again, a scope inversion effect could only be observed at the end ofthe sentence. Taken together, our study demonstrates that in German inverse scope is only computed at the sentence boundary. 1 |
Meredith Brown; Anne Pier Salverda; Laura C. Dilley; Michael K. Tanenhaus Metrical expectations from preceding prosody influence perception of lexical stress Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 306–323, 2015. @article{Brown2015,Two visual-world experiments tested the hypothesis that expectations based on preceding prosody influence the perception of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress. The results demonstrate that listeners' consideration of competing alternatives with different stress patterns (e.g., 'jury/gi'raffe) can be influ- enced by the fundamental frequency and syllable timing patterns across material preceding a target word. When preceding stressed syllables distal to the target word shared pitch and timing characteristics with the first syllable of the target word, pictures of alternatives with primary lexical stress on the first syllable (e.g., jury) initially attracted more looks than alternatives with unstressed initial syllables (e.g., giraffe). This effect was modulated when preceding unstressed syllables had pitch and timing characteristics similar to the initial syllable of the target word, with more looks to alternatives with unstressed initial syllables (e.g., giraffe) than to those with stressed initial syllables (e.g., jury). These findings suggest that expectations about the acoustic realization of upcoming speech include information about metrical organization and lexical stress and that these expectations constrain the initial interpretation of supraseg- mental stress cues. These distal prosody effects implicate online probabilistic inferences about the sources of acoustic–phonetic variation during spoken-word recognition. |
Meredith Brown; Anne Pier Salverda; Laura C. Dilley; Michael K. Tanenhaus Metrical expectations from preceding prosody influence spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 306–323, 2015. @article{Brown2015a,Two visual world experiments tested the hypothesis that ex- pectations based on preceding prosody influence the percep- tion of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress. Experiment 1 showed that phonemically overlapping words with different initial stress patterns compete for recognition. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that fundamental frequency and sylla- ble timing patterns across material preceding the target word can influence the relative activation of competing alternatives with different initial stress patterns. The activation of alter- natives with initial stress was higher when preceding stressed syllables had suprasegmental acoustic characteristics similar to the initial syllable of the target word. These findings sug- gest that expectations about the acoustic realization of an ut- terance include information about metrical organization and lexical stress, and that these expectations constrain the initial interpretation of suprasegmental stress cues. These results are interpreted as support for expectation-based forward models in which acoustic information in the speech stream is interpreted based on expectations created by prosody. |
Meredith Brown; Anne Pier Salverda; Christine Gunlogson; Michael K. Tanenhaus Interpreting prosodic cues in discourse context Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 1-2, pp. 149–166, 2015. @article{Brown2015b,Two visual-world experiments investigated whether and how quickly discourse-based expectations about the prosodic realization of spoken words modulate interpretation of acoustic- prosodic cues. Experiment 1 replicated effects of segmental lengthening on activation of onset- embedded words (e.g. pumpkin) using resynthetic manipulation of duration and fundamental frequency (F0). In Experiment 2, the same materials were preceded by instructions establishing information-structural differences between competing lexical alternatives (i.e. repeated vs. newly- assigned thematic roles) in critical instructions. Eye-movements generated upon hearing the critical target word revealed a significant interaction between information structure and target- word realization: Segmental lengthening and pitch excursion elicited more fixations to the onset- embedded competitor when the target word remained in the same thematic role, but not when its thematic role changed. These results suggest that information structure modulates the interpretation of acoustic-prosodic cues by influencing expectations about fine-grained acoustic- phonetic properties of the unfolding utterance. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Scott H. Fraundorf Interpretation of informational questions modulated by joint knowledge and intonational contours Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 84, pp. 49–74, 2015. @article{BrownSchmidt2015,We examine processes by which dialogue partners form and use representations of joint knowledge, or common ground, during on-line language processing. Eye-tracked participants interpreted wh-questions that inquired about task-relevant objects during interactive conversation. Some objects were known to both speaker and listener, and thus in common ground, whereas others were only known to the listener, and thus in privileged ground. Questions were produced with a typical, falling intonation (Experiment 1) or with either falling or rising intonation (Experiments 2-3). Unlike the falling contour, the rising contour can indicate a request for clarification about previously mentioned information. Participants interpreted falling-contour questions as asking about privileged-ground objects. By contrast, rising questions elicited more consideration of common-ground objects. Directly comparing questions that were produced during live conversation vs. questions that were pre-recorded revealed that this sensitivity to common vs. privileged ground emerged only during live conversation. Finally, individual difference analyses in all three experiments did not support the claim that individuals fail to take perspective when executive function is limited. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for the on-line integration of perspective and intonation during conversational language processing. The lack of perspective effects in non-interactive settings speaks to the inherently interactive nature of conversational processes. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Agnieszka E. Konopka Processes of incremental message planning during conversation Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 833–843, 2015. @article{BrownSchmidt2015a,Speaking begins with the formulation of an intended preverbal message and linguistic encoding of this information. The transition from thought to speech occurs incrementally, with cascading planning at subsequent levels of production. In this article, we aim to specify the mechanisms that support incremental message preparation. We contrast two hypotheses about the mechanisms responsible for incorporating message-level information into a linguistic plan. According to the Initial Preparation view, messages can be encoded as fluent utterances if all information is ready before speaking begins. By contrast, on the Continuous Incrementality view, messages can be continually prepared and updated throughout the production process, allowing for fluent production even if new information is added to the message while speaking is underway. Testing these hypotheses, eye-tracked speakers in two experiments produced unscripted, conjoined noun phrases with modifiers. Both experiments showed that new message elements can be incrementally incorporated into the utterance even after articulation begins, consistent with a Continuous Incrementality view of message planning, in which messages percolate to linguistic encoding immediately as that information becomes available in the mind of the speaker. We conclude by discussing the functional role of incremental message planning in conversational speech and the situations in which this continuous incremental planning would be most likely to be observed. |
Michele Burigo; Pia Knoeferle Visual attention during spatial language comprehension Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. e0115758, 2015. @article{Burigo2015,Spatial terms such as “above”, “in front of”, and “on the left of” are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday communication. Apprehending such spatial relations involves relating linguistic to object representations by means of attention. This requires at least one attentional shift, andmodels such as the Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) predict the direction of that attention shift, from the sausage to the box for spatial utterances such as “The box is above the sausage”. To the extent that this prediction generalizes to overt gaze shifts, a listener's visual attention should shift from the sausage to the box. However, listeners tend to rapidly look at referents in their order of mention and even anticipate them based on linguistic cues, a behavior that predicts a converse attention- al shift from the box to the sausage. Four eye-tracking experiments assessed the role of overt attention in spatial language comprehension by examining to which extent visual at- tention is guided by words in the utterance and to which extent it also shifts “against the grain” of the unfolding sentence. The outcome suggests that comprehenders' visual attention is predominantly guided by their interpretation of the spatial description. Visual shifts against the grain occurred only when comprehenders had some extra time, and their absence did not affect comprehension accuracy. However, the timing of this reverse gaze shift on a trial correlated with that trial's verification time. Thus, while the timing of these gaze shifts is subtly related to the verification time, their presence is not necessary for successful verification of spatial relations. |
Robyn Burton; Luke J. Saunders; David P. Crabb Areas of the visual field important during reading in patients with glaucoma Journal Article In: Japanese Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 94–102, 2015. @article{Burton2015,PURPOSE To determine the areas of the binocular visual field (VF) associated with reading speed in glaucomatous patients with preserved visual acuity (VA). MATERIALS AND METHODS Fifty-four patients with glaucoma (mean age ± standard deviation 70 ± 8 years) and 38 visually healthy controls (mean age 66 ± 9 years) had silent reading speeds measured using non-scrolling text on a computer setup. Participants completed three cognitive tests and tests of visual function, including the Humphrey 24-2 threshold VF test in each eye; the results were combined to produce binocular integrated VFs (IVFs). Regression analyses using the control group to correct for cognitive test scores, age and VA were conducted to obtain the IVF mean deviation (MD) and total deviation (TD) value from each IVF test location. Concordance between reading speed and TD, assessed using R (2) statistics, was ranked in order of importance to explore the parts of the IVF most likely to be linked with reading speed. RESULTS No significant association between IVF MD value and reading speed was observed (p = 0.38). Ranking individual thresholds indicated that the inferior left section of the IVF was most likely to be associated with reading speed. CONCLUSIONS Certain regions of the binocular VF impairment may be associated with reading performance even in patients with preserved VA. The inferior left region of patient IVFs may be important for changing lines during reading. |
Ian Cunnings; Clare Patterson; Claudia Felser Structural constraints on pronoun binding and coreference: Evidence from eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 840, 2015. @article{Cunnings2015,A number of recent studies have investigated how syntactic and non-syntactic constraints combine to cue memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. In this paper we investigate how syntactic constraints and gender congruence interact to guide memory retrieval during the resolution of subject pronouns. Subject pronouns are always technically ambiguous, and the application of syntactic constraints on their interpretation depends on properties of the antecedent that is to be retrieved. While pronouns can freely corefer with non-quantified referential antecedents, linking a pronoun to a quantified antecedent is only possible in certain syntactic configurations via variable binding. We report the results from a judgment task and three online reading comprehension experiments investigating pronoun resolution with quantified and non-quantified antecedents. Results from both the judgment task and participants' eye movements during reading indicate that comprehenders freely allow pronouns to corefer with non-quantified antecedents, but that retrieval of quantified antecedents is restricted to specific syntactic environments. We interpret our findings as indicating that syntactic constraints constitute highly weighted cues to memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. |