EyeLink Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2021 (with some early 2022s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Visual World, Comprehension, Speech Production, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink reading or language articles, please email us!
2006 |
Thomas Habekost; Randi Starrfelt Alexia and quadrant-amblyopia: Reading disability after a minor visual field deficit Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 44, no. 12, pp. 2465–2476, 2006. @article{Habekost2006,Reading difficulties caused by hemianopia are well described. We present a study of alexia in a patient (NT) with a milder visual field deficit. The patient had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage causing damage to the left occipital cortex and underlying white matter. NT's text reading was slow and prone to error, but recognition of single letters was preserved. Single word reading was accurate, but slower than normal. On perimetric testing NT initially showed an upper right quadrantanopia, but by attending covertly to this quadrant he could achieve luminance detection except in a small scotoma above the reading line. A whole report experiment showed that letter perception was severely compromised in the quadrant, consistent with cerebral amblyopia. On follow-up testing one and a half year post stroke, a clear spontaneous recovery had occurred, reflected in improved text reading with close to normal eye movements. Still, subtle reading difficulties and oculo-motor abnormalities remained. Overall, the study shows how amblyopia in one quadrant can lead to a characteristic form of alexia. |
2005 |
Susanne Ferber; Linda J. Murray Are perceptual judgments dissociated from motor processes? - A prism adaptation study Journal Article In: Cognitive Brain Research, vol. 23, no. 2-3, pp. 453–456, 2005. @article{Ferber2005,When asked to choose which of two chimeric faces composed of 'smiling' and 'neutral' half-faces is happier, healthy adults select the face in which the left half is smiling. Here, we show that this perceptual leftward bias is associated with a bias in eye movements to the same side. However, when we shifted the pattern of eye movements towards the right side by using prismatic lenses, we did not observe a concurrent shift in the perceptual judgments. Therefore, we argue that overt motor responses are not necessary for perceptual judgments. Furthermore, we argue that while prism adaptation influences performance on motor tasks, it cannot influence higher-order representational processes. |
Jane L. Morgan; Antje S. Meyer Processing of extrafoveal objects during multiple-object naming Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 428–442, 2005. @article{Morgan2005,In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the extent to which objects that are about to be named are processed prior to fixation. Participants named pairs or triplets of objects. One of the objects, initially seen extrafoveally (the interloper), was replaced by a different object (the target) during the saccade toward it. The interloper-target pairs were identical or unrelated objects or visually and conceptually unrelated objects with homophonous names (e.g., animal- baseball bat). The mean latencies and gaze durations for the targets were shorter in the identity and homophone conditions than in the unrelated condition. This was true when participants viewed a fixation mark until the interloper appeared and when they fixated on another object and prepared to name it while viewing the interloper. These results imply that objects that are about to be named may undergo far-reaching processing, including access to their names, prior to fixation. |
Delphine Dahan; Michael K. Tanenhaus Looking at the rope when looking for the snake: Conceptually mediated eye mov ... Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 453–459, 2005. @article{Dahan2005,Participants' eye movements to four objects displayed on a computer screen were monitored as the participants clicked on the object named in a spoken instruction. The display contained pictures of the referent (e.g., a snake), a competitor that shared features with the visual representation associated with the referent's concept (e.g., a rope), and two distractor objects (e.g., a couch and an umbrella). As the first sounds of the referent's name were heard, the participants were more likely to fixate the visual competitor than to fixate either of the distractor objects. Moreover, this effect was not modulated by the visual similarity between the referent and competitor pictures, independently estimated in a visual similarity rating task. Because the name of the visual competitor did not overlap with the phonetic input, eye movements reflected word-object matching at the level of lexically activated perceptual features and not merely at the level of preactivated sound forms. |
Denis Drieghe; Marc Brysbaert; Timothy Desmet Parafoveal-on-foveal effects on eye movements in text reading: Does an extra space make a difference? Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 45, no. 13, pp. 1693–1706, 2005. @article{Drieghe2005,Schiepers [Schiepers (1980). Response latency and accuracy in visual word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 27, 71-81] proposed that in text reading, the currently fixated word and the next word are processed in parallel but with a time delay of 90 ms per degree of eccentricity. In his model, the benefit of seeing the upcoming word is due to the fact that the parafoveal information from fixation n is combined with the foveal information from fixation n + 1 to boost word recognition, at least when the fixation on word n is of an optimal duration (between 210 and 270 ms). We tested this assumption by adding an extra blank space between the foveal and the parafoveal word. According to the model, this should result in a 30 ms longer processing time for the foveal word. However, reading time was shorter for a word followed by a double space than for a word followed by a single space. An effect of parafoveal word length was also observed with a longer word in the parafovea leading to shorter fixation times on the foveal word. Implications of these low-level parafoveal-on-foveal effects are discussed. |
Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert; Reinhold Kliegl Mislocated fixations during reading and the inverted optimal viewing position effect Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 45, no. 17, pp. 2201–2217, 2005. @article{Nuthmann2005,Refixation probability during reading is lowest near the word center, suggestive of an optimal viewing position (OVP). Counterintuitively, fixation durations are largest at the OVP, a result called the inverted optimal viewing position (IOVP) effect [Vitu, McConkie, Kerr, & O'Regan, (2001). Vision Research 41, 3513-3533]. Current models of eye-movement control in reading fail to reproduce the IOVP effect. We propose a simple mechanism for generating this effect based on error-correction of mislocated fixations due to saccadic errors. First, we propose an algorithm for estimating proportions of mislocated fixations from experimental data yielding a higher probability for mislocated fixations near word boundaries. Second, we assume that mislocated fixations trigger an immediate start of a new saccade program causing a decrease of associated durations. Thus, the IOVP effect could emerge as a result of a coupling between cognitive and oculomotor processes. |
Alexander Pollatsek; Jukka Hyönä The role of semantic transparency in the processing of Finnish compound words Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 20, no. 1-2, pp. 261–290, 2005. @article{Pollatsek2005,Three experiments examined whether the semantic transparency of a long Finnish compound word has any influence on how the compound word is encoded in reading. The frequency of the first constituent (as a separate word) was manipulated, while matching for the frequencies of the compound word and of the second constituent. The effect of this frequency manipulation on encoding time served as a ‘marker' that the compound word was processed, at least in part, componentially. In Experiment 1, each high-frequency transparent compound was paired with a low-frequency transparent compound, and each high-frequency opaque compound was paired with a low-frequency opaque compound. A sentence frame was created for each pair that was identical up to the word following the target word. In Experiments 2 and 3, the matching was done between transparent and opaque word pairs. In addition, Experiment 3 had a display change manipulation in which most of the second constituent was not visible until it was fixated. Readers' eye fixation patterns on and immediately after the target word were examined. Reliable first constituent frequency effects were observed in the fixation duration measures on the target word, but there were no effects of transparency. In addition, a comparison of the display change condition to the standard condition indicated that the constituents of the compound word were processed sequentially. It thus appears that the identification of both transparent and opaque long compound words takes place, at least in part, by accessing the constituent lexemes and does not rely on constructing the meaning from the components. |
Falk Huettig; Gerry T. M. Altmann Word meaning and the control of eye fixation: Semantic competitor effects and the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 96, no. 1, pp. B23–B32, 2005. @article{Huettig2005,When participants are presented simultaneously with spoken language and a visual display depicting objects to which that language refers, participants spontaneously fixate the visual referents of the words being heard [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6(1), 84-107; Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268(5217), 1632-1634]. We demonstrate here that such spontaneous fixation can be driven by partial semantic overlap between a word and a visual object. Participants heard the word 'piano' when (a) a piano was depicted amongst unrelated distractors; (b) a trumpet was depicted amongst those same distractors; and (c), both the piano and trumpet were depicted. The probability of fixating the piano and the trumpet in the first two conditions rose as the word 'piano' unfolded. In the final condition, only fixations to the piano rose, although the trumpet was fixated more than the distractors. We conclude that eye movements are driven by the degree of match, along various dimensions that go beyond simple visual form, between a word and the mental representations of objects in the concurrent visual field. |
Jukka Hyönä; Tuomo Häikiö Is emotional content obtained from parafoveal words during reading? An eye movement analysis Journal Article In: Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 475–483, 2005. @article{Hyoenae2005,An eye-movement-contingent display change technique was employed to study whether adult readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words during reading. Three types of parafoveal preview conditions were contrasted: an emotional word, a neutral word, and an identical word condition. To have a maximally effective parafoveal manipulation, high-arousal emotional words (sex- and threat-related and curse words) were used as parafoveal previews. Readers' eye fixation patterns around the target word revealed no evidence for parafoveal semantic processing. Furthermore, the pupil size showed no signs for an emotional response triggered by an emotional word previewed parafoveally. These results are consistent with the view that, as a rule, only the fixated word is processed to a semantic level during reading. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Brianna M. Eiter; Ralph Radach Time course of linguistic information extraction from consecutive words during eye fixations in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 979–995, 2005. @article{Inhoff2005,Sequential attention shift models of reading predict that an attended (typically fixated) word must be recognized before useful linguistic information can be obtained from the following (parafoveal) word. These models also predict that linguistic information is obtained from a parafoveal word immediately prior to a saccade toward it. To test these assumptions, sentences were constructed with a critical pretarget-target word sequence, and the temporal availability of the (parafoveal) target preview was manipulated while the pretarget word was fixated. Target viewing effects, examined as a function of prior target visibility, revealed that extraction of linguistic target information began 70-140 ms after the onset of pretarget viewing. Critically, acquisition of useful linguistic information from a target was not confined to the ending period of pretarget viewing. These results favor theoretical conceptions in which there is some temporal overlap in the linguistic processing of a fixated and parafoveally visible word during reading. |
Juhani Järvikivi; Roger P. G. Van Gompel; Jukka Hyönä; Raymond Bertram; Juhani Jarvikivi; Roger P. G. Van Gompel; Jukka Hyona; Raymond Bertram Ambiguous pronoun resolution: Contrasting the first-mention and subject-preference accounts Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 260–264, 2005. @article{Jaervikivi2005,A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first- mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents ofeach pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Jukka Hyönä Perspective effects on expository text comprehension: Evidence from think-aloud protocols, eyetracking, and recall Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 239–257, 2005. @article{Kaakinen2005,In this study, 36 participants read an expository text describing 4 rare illnesses from a given perspective. Their eye movements were recorded during reading, and think-alouds were probed after 10 relevant and 10 irrelevant sentences. A free recall was collected after reading. The results showed that in addition to increasing the fixation time and recall for relevant in comparison to irrelevant text information, a reading perspective guides readers to use slightly different comprehension processes for relevant text information, as shown by think-aloud protocols. Repetitions were more frequent responses after relevant than after irrelevant target sentences. Verbally reported processing strategies were associated with the eye-fixation patterns. Verbal responses indicative of deeper processing were associated with longer first-pass fixation times than those indicative of shallower processing. It is concluded that a "triangulation" using complementary measures is a worthwhile endeavor when studying text-comprehension processes. |
Reinhold Kliegl; Ralf Engbert Fixation durations before word skipping in reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 132–138, 2005. @article{Kliegl2005,We resolve a controversy about reading fixations before word-skipping saccades which were reported as longer or shorter than control fixations in earlier studies. Our statistics are based on resampling of matched sets of fixations before skipped and nonskipped words, drawn from a database of 121,321 single fixations contributed by 230 readers of the Potsdam sentence corpus. Matched fixations originated from single-fixation forward-reading patterns and were equated for their positions within words. Fixations before skipped words were shorter before short or high-frequency words and longer before long or low-frequency words in comparison with control fixations. Reasons for inconsistencies in past research and implications for computational models are discussed. |
Pia Knoeferle; Matthew W. Crocker; Christoph Scheepers; Martin J. Pickering The influence of the immediate visual context on incremental thematic role-assignment: Evidence from eye-movements in depicted events Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 95, pp. 95–127, 2005. @article{Knoeferle2005,Studies monitoring eye-movements in scenes containing entities have provided robust evidence for incremental reference resolution processes. This paper addresses the less studied question of whether depicted event scenes can affect processes of incremental thematic role-assignment. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants inspected agent-action-patient events while listening to German verb-second sentences with initial structural and role ambiguity. The experiments investigated the time course with which listeners could resolve this ambiguity by relating the verb to the depicted events. Such verb-mediated visual event information allowed early disambiguation on-line, as evidenced by anticipatory eye-movements to the appropriate agent/patient role filler. We replicated this finding while investigating the effects of intonation. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when the verb was sentence-final and thus did not establish early reference to the depicted events, linguistic cues alone enabled disambiguation before people encountered the verb. Our results reveal the on-line influence of depicted events on incremental thematic role-assignment and disambiguation of local structural and role ambiguity. In consequence, our findings require a notion of reference that includes actions and events in addition to entities (e.g. Semantics and Cognition, 1983), and argue for a theory of on-line sentence comprehension that exploits a rich inventory of semantic categories. |
John Archibald Second language phonology as redeployment of L1 phonological knowledge Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 285–314, 2005. @article{Archibald2005,This article presents research showing that second language (L2) learners do not have deficient representations and they are capable of acquiring structures that are absent from their first language (L1). The Redeployment Hypothesis—which claims that L2 phonologies include novel representations created via redeployment of L1 phonological components—is consistent with data from several domains, including acquisition of phonological features, syllable structure, moraic structure, and metrical structure. Moreover, it is shown that input prominence plays a role in L2 acquisition, and that language learners are sensitive to robust phonetic cues. Finally, studies done on interlingual homographs and homophones argue for non-selective access to the bilingual lexicon, suggesting that the language processing capacity is always engaged. |
Eva Belke; Antje S. Meyer; Markus F. Damian Refractory effects in picture naming as assessed in a semantic blocking paradigm Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 667–692, 2005. @article{Belke2005,In the cyclic semantic blocking paradigm participants repeatedly name sets of objects with semantically related names (homogeneous sets) or unrelated names (heterogeneous sets). The naming latencies are typically longer in related than in unrelated sets. In Experiment 1 we replicated this semantic blocking effect and demonstrated that the effect only arose after all objects of a set had been shown and named once. In Experiment 2, the objects of a set were presented simultaneously (instead of on successive trials). Evidence for semantic blocking was found in the naming latencies and in the gaze durations for the objects, which were longer in homogeneous than in heterogeneous sets. For the gaze-to-speech lag between the offset of gaze on an object and the onset of the articulation of its name, a repetition priming effect was obtained but no blocking effect. Experiment 3 showed that the blocking effect for speech onset latencies generalized to new, previously unnamed lexical items. We propose that the blocking effect is due to refractory behaviour in the semantic system. |
Keith Rayner; Rebecca L. Johnson Letter-by-letter acquired dyslexia is due to the serial encoding of letters Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 7, pp. 530–534, 2005. @article{Rayner2005,Letter-by-letter acquired dyslexia (pure alexia) is assumed to be related to the serial encoding of letters, but the evidence for this assumption is somewhat indirect. Here, we demonstrate that the deficit is indeed due to serial encoding by comparing the performance of a letter-by-letter dyslexic reader with the performance of normal readers who were forced to read letter by letter; the data patterns are remarkably similar. |
2004 |
Ralph Radach; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Dieter Heller Orthographic regularity gradually modulates saccade amplitudes in reading Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 27–51, 2004. @article{Radach2004,The present research tested the hypothesis that variations in the orthographic regularity of word beginnings influence landing positions and amplitudes of interword saccades in continuous reading. Participants were asked to read sentences including target words of low, medium, and high frequency of initial quadrigrams that were either single‐root nouns or noun‐noun compounds. Saccades landed further into words with more regular beginnings, irrespective of whether the target was a compound word or not. Critically, the orthographic landing site effect was graded, suggesting that orthographic information continuously modulates saccade amplitude before and after the decision to move has been made. |
Susana T. L. Chung; Gordon E. Legge; Sing Hang Cheung Letter-recognition and reading speed in peripheral vision benefit from perceptual learning Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 44, no. 7, pp. 695–709, 2004. @article{Chung2004a,Visual-span profiles are plots of letter-recognition accuracy as a function of letter position left or right of the midline. Previously, we have shown that contraction of these profiles in peripheral vision can account for slow reading speed in peripheral vision. In this study, we asked two questions: (1) can we modify visual-span profiles through training on letter-recognition, and if so, (2) are these changes accompanied by changes in reading speed? Eighteen normally sighted observers were randomly assigned to one of three groups: training at 10° in the upper visual field, training at 10° in the lower visual field and a no-training control group. We compared observers' characteristics of reading (maximum reading speed and critical print size) and visual-span profiles (peak amplitude and bits of information transmitted) before and after training, and at trained and untrained retinal locations (10° upper and lower visual fields). Reading speeds were measured for six print sizes at each retinal location, using the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Visual-span profiles were measured using a trigram letter-recognition task, for a letter size equivalent to 1.4× the critical print size for reading. Training consisted of the repeated measurement of 20 visual-span profiles (over four consecutive days) in either the upper or lower visual field. We also tracked the changes in performance in a sub-group of observers for up to three months following training. We found that the visual-span profiles can be expanded (bits of information transmitted increased by 6 bits) through training with a letter-recognition task, and that there is an accompanying increase (41%) in the maximum reading speed. These improvements transferred, to a large extent, from the trained to an untrained retinal location, and were retained, to a large extent, for at least three months following training. Our results are consistent with the view that the visual span is a bottleneck on reading speed, but a bottleneck that can be increased with practice. |
David Crundall; Claire Shenton; Geoffrey Underwood Eye movements during intentional car following Journal Article In: Perception, vol. 33, no. 8, pp. 975–986, 2004. @article{Crundall2004,Does intentional car following capture visual attention to the extent that driving may be impaired? We tested fifteen participants on a rudimentary driving simulator. Participants were either instructed to follow a vehicle ahead through a simulated version of London, or were given verbal instructions on where to turn during the route. The presence or absence of pedestrians, and the simulated time of the drive (day or night) were varied across the trials. Eye movements were recorded along with behavioural measures including give-way violations, give-way accidents, and kerb impacts. The results revealed that intentional car following reduced the spread of search and increased fixation durations, with a dramatic increase in the time spent processing the vehicle ahead (controlled for exposure). The effects were most pronounced during nighttime drives. During the car-following trials participants were also less aware of pedestrians, produced more give-way violations, and were involved in more give-way accidents. The results draw attention to the problems encountered during car following, and we relate this to the cognitive demands placed on drivers, especially police drivers who often engage in intentional car following and pursuits. |
Delphine Dahan; Michael K. Tanenhaus Continuous mapping from sound to meaning in spoken-language comprehension: Immediate effects of verb-based thematic constraints Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 498–513, 2004. @article{Dahan2004,The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based competitor set. |
Denis Drieghe; Marc Brysbaert; Timothy Desmet; Constantijn De Baecke Word skipping in reading: On the interplay of linguistic and visual factors Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 79–103, 2004. @article{Drieghe2004,An eye movement experiment is reported in which target words of two and four letters were presented in sentences that strongly raised the expectation of a particular word. There were three possible conditions: The expected word was present in the sentence, an unexpected word of the same length was present, or an unexpected word of a different length was present (all continuations were acceptable, but the latter two were difficult to predict). Our first purpose was to test one of the core assumptions of the Extended Optimal Viewing Position model of eye guidance in reading (Brysbaert & Vitu, 1998). This model states that word skipping is primarily a function of the length of the upcoming word. It leads to the prediction that an unpredicted two-letter word will be skipped more often than a predicted four-letter word, which is indeed what we observed. Our second aim was to determine if we could obtain an interaction between context predictability and parafoveal word length, by looking at what happens when the length of the parafoveal word does not agree with the length of the expected word. No such interaction was observed although the effects of both word length and predictability were substantial. These findings are interpreted as evidence for the hypothesis that visual and language-related factors independently affect word skipping |
Paola E. Dussias Parsing a first language like a second: The erosion of L1 parsing strategies in Spanish-English Bilinguals Journal Article In: International Journal of Bilingualism, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 355–371, 2004. @article{Dussias2004,Past research suggests that parsing processes in a bilingual's first language (L1) can undergo changes as a function of exposure to a second language (L2). Evidence for this claim comes from studies that have examined how Spanish-English bilinguals resolve temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, as is the case in "Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California." Previous studies indicate that whereas monolingual Spanish speakers attach the relative clause to the first noun in the complex noun phrase (non-local attachment), monolingual English speakers interpret the relative clause locally (ie, attach the relative clause to the noun immediately preceding it). With respect to bilinguals, recent research with Spanish-English bilinguals & professional translators (eg, Dussias, 2001, 2003; Parede, 2004) have shown that bilinguals attach the relative clause to the second noun in the complex noun phrase, when reading in Spanish, their first language. The differences observed between monolingual & bilingual speakers have been attributed to experience in a second language immersion environment. For example, Dussias (2003) argues that extensive exposure to a preponderance of English constructions resolved in favor of local attachment can render this interpretation more available, resulting in the low attachment preference observed in Spanish-English bilinguals. Of interest in the present paper is to assess whether speakers with fewer years of immersion experience in the L2 environment than those reported in previous studies employ the correct strategy in each of their languages. To this end, eye-movement data was collected while proficient L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers read ambiguous sentences of the type described above, in their first language, & their performance was compared to a monolingual Spanish group. Analyses revealed that the L1 Spanish speakers of English favored local over non-local attachment when reading in their first languages. The results are most congruent with exposure-based or parallel interactive models of sentence parsing as postulated by Brysbaert & Mitchell (1996), Mitchell & Cuetos (1991), & Mitchell, Cuetos, Corley, & Brysbaert (1995), given the assumption within these models that frequency-based exposure affects parsing decisions. |
Jie-Li Tsai; Chia-Ying Lee; Ovid J. L. Tzeng; Daisy L. Hung; Nai-Shing Yen Use of phonological codes for Chinese characters: Evidence from processing of parafoveal preview when reading sentences Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 91, no. 2, pp. 235–244, 2004. @article{Tsai2004,The role of phonological coding for character identification was examined with the benefit of processing parafoveal characters in eye fixations while reading Chinese sentences. In Experiment 1, the orthogonal manipulation of phonological and orthographic similarity can separate two types of phonological benefits for homophonic previews, according to whether these previews share the same phonetic radical with the targets or not. The significant phonological benefits indicate that phonological coding is activated early when the character is in the parafovea. Experiment 2 manipulated the character's consistency value and found that the phonological preview benefits are reliable only when the targets are high consistency characters. The results of two experiments suggest that phonological computation is rapid and early at both character and radical levels for Chinese character identification. |
Andrea Weber; Anne Cutler Lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 1–25, 2004. @article{Weber2004,Four eye-tracking experiments examined lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Dutch listeners hearing English fixated longer on distractor pictures with names containing vowels that Dutch listeners are likely to confuse with vowels in a target picture name (pencil, given target panda) than on less confusable distractors (beetle, given target bottle). English listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The confusability was asymmetric: given pencil as target, panda did not distract more than distinct competitors. Distractors with Dutch names phonologically related to English target names (deksel, 'lid,' given target desk) also received longer fixations than distractors with phonologically unrelated names. Again, English listeners showed no differential effect. With the materials translated into Dutch, Dutch listeners showed no activation of the English words (desk, given target deksel). The results motivate two conclusions: native phonemic categories capture second-language input even when stored representations maintain a second-language distinction; and lexical competition is greater for non-native than for native listeners. |
Antje S. Meyer; Femke Meulen; Adrian Brooks Eye movements during speech planning: Talking about present and remembered objects Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 553–576, 2004. @article{Meyer2004,Earlier work has shown that speakers naming several objects usually look at each of them before naming them (e.g., Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998). In the present study, participants saw pictures and described them in utterances such as "The chair next to the cross is brown'', where the colour of the first object was mentioned after another object had been mentioned. In Experiment 1, we examined whether the speakers would look at the first object (the chair) only once, before naming the object, or twice (before naming the object and before naming its colour). In Experiment 2, we examined whether speakers about to name the colour of the object would look at the object region again when the colour or the entire object had been removed while they were looking elsewhere. We found that speakers usually looked at the target object again before naming its colour, even when the colour was not displayed any more. Speakers were much less likely to fixate upon the target region when the object had been removed from view. We propose that the object contours may serve as a memory cue supporting the retrieval of the associated colour information. The results show that a speaker's eye movements in a picture description task, far from being random, depend on the available visual information and the content and structure of the planned utterance. |
Benjamin Munson; Nancy Solomon The effect of phonological neighborhood density on vowel articulation Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 47, pp. 1048–1058, 2004. @article{Munson2004,Recent literature suggests that phonological neighborhood density and word frequency can affect speech production, in addition to the well-documented effects that they have on speech perception. This article describes 2 experiments that examined how phonological neighborhood density influences the durations and formant frequencies of adults' productions of vowels in real words. In Experiment 1, 10 normal speakers produced words that covaried in phonological neighborhood density and word frequency. Infrequent words with many phonological neighbors were produced with shorter durations and more expanded vowel spaces than frequent words with few phonological neighbors. Results of this experiment confirmed that this effect was not related to the duration of the vowels constituting the high- and low-density words. In Experiment 2, 15 adults produced words that varied in both word frequency and neighborhood density. Neighborhood density affected vowel articulation in both high- and low-frequency words. Moreover, frequent words were produced with more contracted vowel spaces than infrequent words. There was no interaction between these factors, and the vowel duration did not vary as a function of neighborhood density. Taken together, the results suggest that neighborhood density affects vowel production independent of word frequency and vowel duration. |
Tatjana A. Nazir; Nadia Ben-Boutayab; Nathalie Decoppet; Avital Deutsch; Ram Frost Reading habits, perceptual learning, and recognition of printed words Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 88, no. 3, pp. 294–311, 2004. @article{Nazir2004,The present work aims at demonstrating that visual training associated with the act of reading modifies the way we perceive printed words. As reading does not train all parts of the retina in the same way but favors regions on the side in the direction of scanning, visual word recognition should be better at retinal locations that are frequently used during reading. In two studies that probed word and letter discriminations we provided evidence for a correlation between eye fixation pattern during reading and performance. We showed that effects of reading-related visual training were stimulus-specific in the sense that it affected the perception of words but not that of visually unfamiliar non-words. This stimulus specificity was also evident in the legibility of individual characters of the Roman and the Hebrew scripts - two scripts that are read in opposing directions. When displayed within a sequence of homogenous letters (e.g., xxexx) the legibility of a target character varied with the location of the sequence in the visual field and with the serial position of the target within the sequence. This retinal location- and context-dependency differed between Roman and Hebrew characters. These results seem to indicate that reading modifies the functional structure of early stages in the visual pathway. The cortical network that supports reading seems to comprise components of the visual cortex of both hemispheres before it lateralizes to the left hemisphere. Expanding the reading network to include these visual regions will shed a different light on the potential role of the visual word form area (e.g., Cohen et al., 2000) in word recognition and on the organization of the reading system in general. |
S. -N. Yang; George W. McConkie Saccade generation during reading: Are words necessary? Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 226–261, 2004. @article{Yang2004,Most current theories of eye movement control during reading are word based in multiple ways: They assume that saccade onset times result from word-based processes, & that words are involved in selecting a saccade target. In the current study the role of words was examined by occasionally replacing the text with one of five alternate stimulus patterns for a single fixation during reading, & observing the effects on the time, direction, & length of the saccade that ends that fixation. The onset times of many saccades are unaffected by replacing spaces with random letters, thus removing visible word-units; also, the effects of this removal on saccade length is not different than that of having space-delimited nonwords. It does not appear that words play a critical role in generating saccades. The results are compatible with the Competition/Interaction theory of eye movement control during reading (Yang & McConkie, 2001). |
Susana T. L. Chung Reading speed benefits from increased vertical Journal Article In: Optometry and Vision Science, vol. 81, no. 7, pp. 525–535, 2004. @article{Chung2004,Purpose. Crowding, the adverse spatial interaction due to proximity of adjacent targets, has been suggested as an explanation for slow reading in peripheral vision. The purposes of this study were to (1) demonstrate that crowding exists at the word level and (2) examine whether or not reading speed in central and peripheral vision can be enhanced with increased vertical word spacing. Methods. Five normal observers read aloud sequences of six unrelated four-letter words presented on a computer monitor, one word at a time, using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Reading speeds were calculated based on the RSVP exposure durations yielding 80% correct. Testing was conducted at the fovea and at 5° and 10° in the inferior visual field. Critical print size (CPS) for each observer and at each eccentricity was first determined by measuring reading speeds for four print sizes using unflanked words. We then presented words at 0.8x or 1.4x CPS, with each target word flanked by two other words, one above and one below the target word. Reading speeds were determined for vertical word spacings (baseline-to-baseline separation between two vertically separated words) ranging from 0.8x to 2x the standard single-spacing, as well as the unflanked condition. Results. At the fovea, reading speed increased with vertical word spacing up to about 1.2x to 1.5x the standard spacing and remained constant and similar to the unflanked reading speed at larger vertical word spacings. In the periphery, reading speed also increased with vertical word spacing, but it remained below the unflanked reading speed for all spacings tested. At 2x the standard spacing, peripheral reading speed was still about 25% lower than the unflanked reading speed for both eccentricities and print sizes. Results from a control experiment showed that the greater reliance of peripheral reading speed on vertical word spacing was also found in the right visual field. Conclusions. Increased vertical word spacing, which presumably decreases the adverse effect of crowding between adjacent lines of text, benefits reading speed. This benefit is greater in peripheral than central vision. |
Gerry T. M. Altmann Language-mediated eye movements in the absence of a visual world: The 'blank screen paradigm' Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 93, no. 2, pp. B79–87, 2004. @article{Altmann2004a,The 'visual world paradigm' typically involves presenting participants with a visual scene and recording eye movements as they either hear an instruction to manipulate objects in the scene or as they listen to a description of what may happen to those objects. In this study, participants heard each target sentence only after the corresponding visual scene had been displayed and then removed. For a scene depicting a man, a woman, a cake, and a newspaper, the eyes were subsequently directed, during 'eat' in 'the man will eat the cake', towards where the cake had previously been located even though the screen had been blank for over 2 s. The rapidity of these movements mirrored the anticipatory eye movements observed in previous studies [Cognition 73 (1999) 247; J. Mem. Lang. 49 (2003) 133]. Thus, anticipatory eye movements are not dependent on a concurrent visual scene, but are dependent on a mental record of the scene that is independent of whether the visual scene is still present. |
Sally Andrews; Brett Miller; Keith Rayner Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words: There is a mouse in mousetrap Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 285–311, 2004. @article{Andrews2004,In two experiments, readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing compound words. In Experiment 1, the frequency of the first and second morpheme was manipulated in compound words of low whole word frequency. Experiment 2 compared pairs of low frequency compounds with high and low frequency first morphemes but identical second morphemes that were embedded in the same sentence frames. The results showed significant effects of the frequency of both morphemes on gaze duration and total fixation time on the compound words. Regression analyses revealed an influence of whole word frequency on the same measures. The results suggest that morphemic constituents of compound words are activated in the course of retrieving the representation of the whole compound word. The fact that the frequency effects were not confined to fixations on the morphemic constituents themselves implies that saccadic eye movements are implemented before morphemic retrieval has been completed. The results highlight the importance of developing more precise models of the perceptual processes underlying reading and how they interact with the processes involved in lexical retrieval and comprehension. |
Raymond Bertram; Alexander Pollatsek; Jukka Hyönä Morphological parsing and the use of segmentation cues in reading Finnish compounds Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 325–345, 2004. @article{Bertram2004,This eye movement study investigated the use of two types of segmentation cues in processing long Finnish compounds. The cues were related to the vowel quality properties of the constituents and properties of the consonant starting the second constituent. In Finnish, front vowels never appear with back vowels in a lexeme, but different quality vowels can appear in different constituents in compounds. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that compounds with different vowel quality constituents are processed faster than those with same vowel quality constituents, but only if the first constituent is long. This indicates that the use of segmentation cues in processing long compounds depends on the ease of encoding the first constituent. Experiment 3 established that (a) the effect does not depend on the crucial vowels being adjacent and (b) processing is affected by the type of consonant beginning the second constituent (i.e., whether or not it could end a first constituent). |
Jörg Sommerhalder; Benjamin Rappaz; Raoul Haller; Angélica Pérez Fornos; Avinoam B. Safran; Marco Pelizzone Simulation of artificial vision: Eccentric reading of full-page text and the learning of this task Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 44, no. 14, pp. 1693–1706, 2004. @article{Sommerhalder2004,Reading of isolated words in conditions mimicking artificial vision has been found to be a difficult but feasible task. In particular at relatively high eccentricities, a significant adaptation process was required to reach optimal performances [Vision Res. 43 (2003) 269]. The present study addressed the task of full-page reading, including page navigation under control of subject's own eye movements. Conditions of artificial vision mimicking a retinal implant were simulated by projecting stimuli with reduced information content (lines of pixelised text) onto a restricted and eccentric area of the retina. Three subjects, naïve to the task, were trained for almost two months (about 1 h/day) to read full-page texts. Subjects had to use their own eye movements to displace a 10°×7°viewing window, stabilised at 15°eccentricity in their lower visual field. Initial reading scores were very low for two subjects (about 13% correctly read words), and astonishingly high for the third subject (86% correctly read words). However, all of them significantly improved their performance with time, reaching close to perfect reading scores (ranging from 86% to 98% correct) at the end of the training process. Reading rates were as low as 1-5 words/min at the beginning of the experiment and increased significantly with time to 14-28 words/min. Qualitative text understanding was also estimated. We observed that reading scores of at least 85% correct were necessary to achieve 'good' text understanding. Gaze position recordings, made during the experimental sessions, demonstrated that the control of eye movements, especially the suppression of reflexive vertical saccades, constituted an important part of the overall adaptive learning process. Taken together, these results suggest that retinal implants might restore full-page text reading abilities to blind patients. About 600 stimulation contacts, distributed on an implant surface of 3×2 mm2, appear to be a minimum to allow for useful reading performance. A significant learning process will however be required to reach optimal performance with such devices, especially if they have to be placed outside the foveal area. |
Reinhold Kliegl; Ellen Grabner; Martin Rolfs; Ralf Engbert Length, frequency, and predictability effects of words on eye movements in reading Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 262–284, 2004. @article{Kliegl2004,We tested the effects of word length, frequency, and predictability on inspection durations (first fixation, single fixation, gaze duration, and reading time) and inspection probabilities during first-pass reading (skipped, once, twice) for a corpus of 144 German sentences (1138 words) and a subset of 144 target words uncorrelated in length and frequency, read by 33 young and 32 older adults. For corpus words, length and frequency were reliably related to inspection durations and probabilities, predictability only to inspection probabilities. For first-pass reading of target words all three effects were reliable for inspection durations and probabilities. Low predictability was strongly related to second-pass reading. Older adults read slower than young adults and had a higher frequency of regressive movements. The data are to serve as a benchmark for computational models of eye movement control in reading. |
Jukka Hyönä; Raymond Bertram; Alexander Pollstsek Are long compound words identified serially via their constituents? Evidence from an eye-movement contingent display change study Journal Article In: Memory and Cognition, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 523–532, 2004. @article{Hyoenae2004a,The processing of two-constituent 12- to 18-letter Finnish compound nouns was studied by using an eye-movement–contingent display change technique. In the display change condition, all but the first 2 letters of the second constituent were replaced by visually similar letters until the eyes moved across an invisible boundary. When the eyes crossed the boundary, the second constituent was changed to its intended form. In the control condition, there was no display change. The frequency of the first con- stituent was also varied. The major findings were that (1) fixation time on the first constituent was strongly affected by the frequency of the first constituent but was not at all affected by whether the sec- ond constituent was visible, but (2) fixation time on the word subsequent to the first constituent's hav- ing been left was strongly affected by the display change. These results are most parsimoniously ex- plained by the serial access of the two constituents for these long compound words. |
Jukka Hyönä; Robert F. Lorch Effects of topic headings on text processing: Evidence from adult readers' eye fixation patterns Journal Article In: Learning and Instruction, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 131–152, 2004. @article{Hyoenae2004,Effects of topic headings on the processing of multiple-topic expository texts were examined with the help of readers' eye fixation patterns. Adult participants read two texts, one in which topic shifts were signaled by topic headings and one in which topic headings were excluded. The presence of topic headings facilitated the processing of topic sentences and increased the number of topics mentioned in the text summaries written after reading the texts. The facilitatory effect of headings was reflected both in the fixations made during the first-pass reading as well as in the later look-backs directed to the topic sentences. A framework is outlined to depict the process of reading and comprehending multiple-topic expository texts. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Cynthia M. Connine; Brianna M. Eiter; Ralph Radach; Dieter Heller Phonological representation of words in working memory during sentence reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 320–325, 2004. @article{Inhoff2004,The temporal dynamics of a visual target word's phonological representation was examined by presentation of an irrelevant spoken companion word when the participant's eyes reached the target's location during sentence reading. The spoken word was identical, similar, or dissimilar to the phonological specification of the visual target. All spoken words increased the time spent viewing the target, with larger effects in the similar and dissimilar spoken word conditions than in the identical condition. The reading of posttarget text was disrupted when the spoken word was similar but not when it was identical or dissimilar to the target. Phonological interference indicates that a word's phonological representation remains active after it has been identified during sentence reading. |
Min Ju; Paul A. Luce Falling on sensitive ears. Constraints on bilingual lexical activation Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 314–318, 2004. @article{Ju2004,Spoken word recognition is characterized by multiple activation of sound patterns that are consistent with the acoustic-phonetic input. Recently, an extreme form of multiple activation was observed: Bilingual listeners activated words from both languages that were consistent with the input. We explored the degree to which bilingual multiple activation may be constrained by fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information. In a head-mounted eyetracking experiment, we presented Spanish-English bilinguals with spoken Spanish words having word-initial stop consonants with either English- or Spanish-appropriate voice onset times. Participants fixated interlingual distractors (nontarget pictures whose English names shared a phonological similarity with the Spanish targets) more frequently than control distractors when the target words contained English-appropriate voice onset times. These results demonstrate that fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information and a precise match between input and representation are critical for parallel activation of two languages. |
2003 |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Ralph Radach; Brianna M. Eiter; Barbara J. Juhasz Distinct subsystems for the parafoveal processing of spatial and linguistic information during eye fixations in reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 56A, no. 5, pp. 803–827, 2003. @article{Inhoff2003,Two experiments examined readers' use of parafoveally obtained word length information for word recognition. Both experiments manipulated the length (number of constituent characters) of a parafoveally previewed target word so that it was either accurately or inaccurately specified. In experiment 1, previews either revealed or denied useful orthographic information. In experiment 2, parafoveal targets were either high- or low-frequency words. Eye movement contingent display changes were used to show the intact target upon its fixation. Examination of target viewing duration showed completely additive effects of word length previews & of orthographic previews in experiment 1, viewing duration being shorter in the accurate-length & the orthographic preview conditions. Experiment 2 showed completely additive effects of word length & word frequency, target viewing being shorter in the accurate-length & the high-frequency conditions. Together, these results indicate that functionally distinct subsystems control the use of parafoveally visible spatial & linguistic information in reading. Parafoveally visible spatial information appears to be used for two distinct extralinguistic computations: visual object selection & saccade specification. |
Thomas Wynn; Frederick Coolidge The role of working memory in the evolution of managed foraging Journal Article In: Before Farming, no. 2, pp. 1–16, 2003. @article{Wynn2003,This article proposes that a relatively simple evolutionary development in human cognition enabled the develop- ment of managed foraging systems and, ultimately, agriculture. This development, an increase in the capacity of working memory, resulted in an enhancement of such specific cognitive abilities as response inhibition, response preparation, resistance to interference, and the ability to integrate action across space and time. All are required for modern managed foraging systems, including hunting and gathering and agriculture. Archaeological evidence provides strong evidence for managed foraging by the middle of the European Upper Palaeolithic and South African Later Stone Age, and independent evidence for enhanced working memory capacity slightly earlier. This fits the hypothesis that enhanced working memory capacity was a relatively recent development in human evolu- tion, and one that enabled not just managed foraging, but perhaps modern culture itself. |
Timothy Desmet; Edward Gibson Disambiguation preferences and corpus frequencies in noun phrase conjunction Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 353–374, 2003. @article{Desmet2003,Gibson and Schütze (1999) showed that on-line disambiguation preferences do not always mirror corpus frequencies. When presented with a syntactic ambiguity involving the conjunction of a noun phrase to three possible attachment sites, participants were faster to read attachments to the first site than attachments to the second one, although the latter were shown to be more frequent in text corpora. In the present study, we investigated whether a particular feature in their items - disambiguation using the pronoun 'one'-could account for this discrepancy. The results of a corpus analysis and two on-line reading experiments showed that the presence of this pronoun is indeed responsible for the high attachment preference in the conjunction ambiguity. We conclude that for this syntactic ambiguity there is no discrepancy between on-line preferences and corpus frequencies. Consequently, there is no need to assume different processes underlying sentence comprehension and sentence production on the basis of the noun phrase conjunction ambiguity. |
Avital Deutsch; Ram Frost; Sharon Pelleg; Alexander Pollatsek; Keith Rayner Early morphological effects in reading: Evidence from parafoveal preview benefit in Hebrew Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 415–422, 2003. @article{Deutsch2003,Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern.We examined the role of the root morpheme in word identificationby assessingthe benefit of presentation of a parafoveal previewword derived from the same root as a target word. Although the letter information of the preview was not consciously perceived, a preview of a word derived from the same root morpheme as the foveal target word facilitated eye-movement measures of first-pass reading (i.e., first fixation and gaze duration). These results are the first to demonstrate early morphological effects in the context of sentence reading in which no external task is imposed on the reader, and converge with previous findings of morphemic priming in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, and morphemic parafoveal preview benefit effects in a single-word identification task. |
Mike Rinck; Elena Gámez; José M. Díaz; Manuel De Vega Processing of temporal information: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Memory and Cognition, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 77–86, 2003. @article{Rinck2003,In two experiments, we recorded eye movements to study how readers monitor temporal order information contained in narrative texts. Participants read short texts containing critical temporal information in the sixth sentence, which could be either consistent or inconsistent with temporal order information given in the second sentence. In Experiment 1, inconsistent sentences yielded more regressions to the second sentence and longer refixations of it. In Experiment 2, this pattern of eye movements was shown only by readers who noticed the inconsistency and were able to report it. Theoretical and methodological implications of the results for research on text comprehension are discussed. |
Anne Pier Salverda; Delphine Dahan; James M. McQueen The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 51–89, 2003. @article{Salverda2003,Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process. |
Antje S. Meyer; Ardi Roelofs; Willem J. M. Levelt Word length effects in object naming: The role of a response criterion Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 48, pp. 131–147, 2003. @article{Meyer2003,According to Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) speakers generate the phonological and phonetic representations of successive syllables of a word in sequence and only begin to speak after having fully planned at least one complete phonological word. Therefore, speech onset latencies should be longer for long than for short words. We tested this prediction in four experiments in which Dutch participants named or categorized objects with monosyllabic or di- syllabic names. Experiment 1 yielded a length effect on production latencies when objects with long and short names were tested in separate blocks, but not when they were mixed. Experiment 2 showed that the length effect was not due to a difference in the ease of object recognition. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using a within-participants design. In Experiment 4, the long and short target words appeared in a phrasal context. In addition to the speech onset latencies, we obtained the viewing times for the target objects, which have been shown to depend on the time necessary to plan the form of the target names. We found word length effects for both dependent variables, but only when objects with short and long names were presented in separate blocks. We argue that in pure and mixed blocks speakers used different response deadlines, which they tried to meet by either generating the motor programs for one syllable or for all syllables of the word before speech onset. Computer simulations using WEAVER++ support this view. |
N. J. Upton; Timothy L. Hodgson; G. T. Plant; Richard J. S. Wise; Alexander P. Leff "Bottom-up" and "top-down" effects on reading saccades: A case study Journal Article In: Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, vol. 74, no. 10, pp. 1423–1428, 2003. @article{Upton2003,OBJECTIVE: To investigate the role right foveal/parafoveal sparing plays in reading single words, word arrays, and eye movement patterns in a single case with an incongruous hemianopia. METHODS: The patient, a 48-year-old right handed male with a macular sparing hemianopia in his left eye and a macular splitting hemianopia in his right eye, performed various reading tasks. Single word reading speeds were monitored using a "voice-trigger" system. Eye movements were recorded while reading three passages of text, and PET data were gathered while the subject performed a variety of reading tasks in the camera. RESULTS: The patient was faster at reading single words and text with his left eye compared with his right. A small word length effect was present in his right eye but not his left. His eye movement patterns were more orderly when reading text with his left eye, making fewer saccades. The PET data provided evidence of "top-down" processes involved in reading. Binocular single word reading produced activity in the representation of foveal V1 bilaterally; however, text reading with the left eye only was associated with activation in left but not right parafoveal V1, despite there being visual stimuli in both visual fields. CONCLUSIONS: The presence of a word length effect (typically associated with pure alexia) can be caused by a macular splitting hemianopia. Right parafoveal vision is not critically involved in single word identification, but is when planning left to right reading saccades. The influence of top-down attentional processes during text reading can be visualised in parafoveal V1 using PET. |
Seppo Vainio; Jukka Hyönä; Anneli Pajunen Facilitatory and inhibitory effects of grammatical agreement: Evidence from readers' eye fixation patterns Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 85, no. 2, pp. 197–202, 2003. @article{Vainio2003,The study examined how grammatical agreement affects reading in Finnish. Readers' eye fixation patterns were recorded when they read one of three alternative versions of the same sentences, where the critical difference was the type of preceding word of the target nouns. The preceding word was (a) an agreeing modifier (mainioksi orkesteriksi='for an excellent orchestra'), (b) a non-agreeing modifier that was grammatical, unambiguous and synonymous to the agreeing modifier (kelpo orkesteriksi='for an excellent orchestra'), or (c) a baseline condition without a modifier (orkesteriksi='for an orchestra'). Two different types of agreement were used, a modifier-head agreement and a possessive agreement. The results showed that the agreeing modifiers facilitate and the non-agreeing modifiers inhibit the reading of the target nouns compared to the neutral baseline condition. These effects appeared in the second-pass reading. The pattern was similar between the two agreement structures. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Jukka Hyönä; Janice M. Keenan How prior knowledge, WMC, and relevance of information affect eye fixations in expository text Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 29, pp. 447–457, 2003. @article{Kaakinen2003,This study examined how prior knowledge and working memory capacity (WMC) influence the effect of a reading perspective on online text processing. In Experiment 1, 47 participants read and recalled 2 texts of different familiarity from a given perspective while their eye movements were recorded. The participants' WMC was assessed with the reading span test. The results suggest that if the reader has prior knowledge related to text contents and a high WMC, relevant text information can be encoded into memory without extra processing time. In Experiment 2, baseline processing times showed whether readers slow down their processing of relevant information or read faster through their relevant information. The results are discussed in the light of different working memory theories. |
Yuki Kamide; Gerry T. M. Altmann; Sarah L. Haywood The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 133–156, 2003. @article{Kamide2003,Three eye-tracking experiments using the 'visual-world' paradigm are described that explore the basis by which thematic dependencies can be evaluated in advance of linguistic input that unambiguously signals those dependencies. Following Altmann and Kamide (1999), who found that selectional information conveyed by a verb can be used to anticipate an upcoming Theme, we attempt to draw here a more precise picture of the basis for such anticipatory processing. Our data from two studies in English and one in Japanese suggest that (a) verb-based information is not limited to anticipating the immediately following (grammatical) object, but can also anticipate later occurring objects (e.g., Goals), (b) in combination with information conveyed by the verb, a pre-verbal argument (Agent) can constrain the anticipation of a subsequent Theme, and (c) in a head-final construction such as that typically found in Japanese, both syntactic and semantic constraints extracted from pre-verbal arguments can enable the anticipation, in effect, of a further forthcoming argument in the absence of their head (the verb). We suggest that such processing is the hallmark of an incremental processor that is able to draw on different sources of information (some non-linguistic) at the earliest possible opportunity to establish the fullest possible interpretation of the input at each moment in time. |
Yuki Kamide; Christoph Scheepers; Gerry T. M. Altmann Integration of syntactic and semantic information in predictive processing: Cross-linguistic evidence from German and English Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 37–55, 2003. @article{Kamide2003a,Two visual-world eyetracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether, how, and when syntactic and semantic constraints are integrated and used to predict properties of subsequent input. Experiment 1 contrasted auditory German constructions such as, "The hare-nominative eats ... (the cabbage-acc)" versus "The hare-accusative eats ... (the fox-nom)," presented with a picture containing a hare, fox, cabbage, and distractor. We found that the probabilities of the eye movements to the cabbage and fox before the onset of NP2 were modulated by the case-marking of NP1, indicating that the case-marking (syntactic) information and verbs' semantic constraints are integrated rapidly enough to predict the most plausible NP2 in the scene. Using English versions of the some stimuli in active/passive voice (Experiment 2), we replicated the same effect, but at a slightly earlier position in the sentence. We discuss the discrepancies in the two Germanic languages in terms of the ease of integrating information across, or within, constituents. |
James S. Magnuson; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin; Delphine Dahan The microstructure of spoken word recognition: Studies with artificial lexicons Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 132, no. 2, pp. 202–227, 2003. @article{Magnuson2003a,The time course of spoken word recognition depends largely on the frequencies of a word and its competitors, or neighbors (similar-sounding words). However, variability in natural lexicons makes systematic analysis of frequency and neighbor similarity difficult. Artificial lexicons were used to achieve precise control over word frequency and phonological similarity. Eye tracking provided time course measures of lexical activation and competition (during spoken instructions to perform visually guided tasks) both during and after word learning, as a function of word frequency, neighbor type, and neighbor frequency. Apparent shifts from holistic to incremental competitor effects were observed in adults and neural network simulations, suggesting such shifts reflect general properties of learning rather than changes in the nature of lexical representations. |
James S. Magnuson; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin; Delphine Dahan The time course of spoken word learning and recognition: Studies with artificial lexicons Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 132, no. 2, pp. 202–227, 2003. @article{Magnuson2003,The time course of spoken word recognition depends largely on the frequencies of a word and its competitors, or neighbors (similar-sounding words). However, variability in natural lexicons makes systematic analysis of frequency and neighbor similarity difficult. Artificial lexicons were used to achieve precise control over word frequency and phonological similarity. Eye tracking provided time course measures of lexical activation and competition (during spoken instructions to perform visually guided tasks) both during and after word learning, as a function of word frequency, neighbor type, and neighbor frequency. Apparent shifts from holistic to incremental competitor effects were observed in adults and neural network simulations, suggesting such shifts reflect general properties of learning rather than changes in the nature of lexical representations. |
Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 48, pp. 615–634, 2003. @article{Bertram2003,This study explored whether the length of a complex word modifies the role of morphological structure in lexical processing: Does morphological structure play a similar role in short complex words that typically elicit one eye fixation (e.g., eyelid) as it does in long complex words that typically elicit two or more eye fixations (e.g., watercourse)? Two eye movement experiments with short vs. long Finnish compound words in context were conducted to find an answer to this question. In Experiment 1, a first-constituent frequency manipulation revealed solid effects for long compounds in early and late processing measures, but no effects for short compounds. In contrast, in Experiment 2, a whole-word frequency manipulation elicited solid effects for short compounds in early and late processing measures, but mainly late effects for long compounds. A race model, incorporating a headstart for the decomposition route, in case whole-word information of complex words cannot be extracted in a single fixation can explain the pattern of results. |
Frank A. Proudlock; Himanshu Shekhar; Irene Gottlob Coordination of eye and head movements during reading Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 44, no. 7, pp. 2991–2998, 2003. @article{Proudlock2003,PURPOSE. There is little information regarding the characteristics of head movements during reading. This study was undertaken to investigate horizontal and vertical head movements during two different reading tasks. METHODS. Head and eye movements were monitored with an infrared pupil and head tracker in 15 subjects during repeated reading of text from an A4-sized card and a card 90 degrees wide. In addition, head and eye movements were recorded in 45 subjects to compare head movement propensity during an A4 text-reading task and a saccadic task of an equivalent gaze shift. RESULTS. During the A4 standard reading task, horizontal and vertical head movements accounted for 4.7% and 28.7% of the gaze shift, respectively. During the 90 degrees text reading, horizontal head movements accounted for 40.3% of the gaze amplitude, and vertical head movements accounted for 28.4%. Horizontal gaze velocities increased significantly on repeated A4 and 90degrees text readings, as did horizontal head velocities and amplitudes. Reading head movement propensities were significantly smaller than saccadic head movement propensities (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS. Head movement strategies are rapidly switched between the A4 and 90 degrees text-reading paradigms. They are minimized during A4 text reading but actively assist the gaze strategy during 90degrees text reading. Horizontal head movement is reduced during A4 reading compared to the equivalent saccadic task and may be suppressed to improve fixation stability. The results support the view that the head and eye movement system is a highly coupled but extremely flexible system. |
Jörg Sommerhalder; Evelyne Oueghlani; Marc Bagnoud; Ute Leonards; Avinoam B. Safran; Marco Pelizzone Simulation of artificial vision: I. Eccentric reading of isolated words, and perceptual learning Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 269–283, 2003. @article{Sommerhalder2003,Simulations of artificial vision were performed to assess "minimum requirements for useful artificial vision". Retinal prostheses will be implanted at a fixed (and probably eccentric) location of the retina. To mimic this condition on normal observers, we projected stimuli of various sizes and content on a defined stabilised area of the visual field. In experiment 1, we asked subjects to read isolated 4-letter words presented at various degrees of pixelisation and at various eccentricities. Reading performance dropped abruptly when the number of pixels was reduced below a certain threshold. For central reading, a viewing area containing about 300 pixels was necessary for close to perfect reading (>90% correctly read words). At eccentricities beyond 10°, close to perfect reading was never achieved even if more than 300 pixels were used. A control experiment using isolated letter recognition in the same conditions suggested that lower reading performance at high eccentricity was in part due to the "crowding effect". In experiment 2, we investigated whether the task of eccentric reading under such specific conditions could be improved by training. Two subjects, naive to this task, were trained to read pixelised 4-letter words presented at 15° eccentricity. Reading performance of both subjects increased impressively throughout the experiment. Low initial reading scores (range 6%-23% correct) improved impressively (range 64%-85% correct) after about one month of training (about 1 h/day). Control tests demonstrated that the learning process consisted essentially in an adaptation to use an eccentric area of the retina for reading. These results indicate that functional retinal implants consisting of more than 300 stimulation contacts will be needed. They might successfully restore some reading abilities in blind patients, even if they have to be placed outside the foveal area. Reaching optimal performance may, however, require a significant adaptation process. |
2002 |
Bob McMurray; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin Gradient effects of within-category phonetic variation on lexical access Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. B33–B42, 2002. @article{McMurray2002,In order to determine whether small within-category differences in voice onset time (VOT) affect lexical access, eye movements were monitored as participants indicated which of four pictures was named by spoken stimuli that varied along a 0-40 ms VOT continuum. Within-category differences in VOT resulted in gradient increases in fixations to cross-boundary lexical competitors as VOT approached the category boundary. Thus, fine-grained acoustic/phonetic differences are preserved in patterns of lexical activation for competing lexical candidates and could be used to maximize the efficiency of on-line word recognition. |
Jukka Hyönä; Robert F. Lorch; Johanna K. Kaakinen Individual differences in reading to summarize expository text: Evidence from eye fixation patterns. Journal Article In: Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 94, no. 1, pp. 44–55, 2002. @article{Hyoenae2002,Eye fixation patterns were used to identify reading strategies of adults as they read multiple-topic expository texts. A clustering technique distinguished 4 strategies that differed with respect to the ways in which readers reprocessed text. The processing of fast linear readers was characterized by the absence of fixations returning to previous text. Slow linear readers made lots of forward fixations and reinspected each sentence before moving to the next. The reading of nonselective reviewers was characterized by look backs to previous sentences. The distinctive feature of topic structure processors was that they paid close attention to headings. They also had the largest working-memory capacity and wrote the most accurate text summaries. Thus, qualitatively distinct reading strategies are observable among competent, adult readers. |
Jukka Hyönä; Seppo Vainio; Matti Laine A morphological effect obtains for isolated words but not for words in sentence context Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 417–433, 2002. @article{Hyoenae2002a,The effect of morphological complexity on word identification was studied in three experiments conducted in Finnish, employing the same set of target nouns. In Experiment 1, the target nouns were presented in isolation, and lexical decision times were employed as lexical access measures. In Experiments 2 and 3, the same wordsnwere embedded in sentence contexts, where both the inflected and non-inflected forms were equally plausible, and eye fixation patterns (Exp. 2) and lexical decision latencies (Exp. 3) were recorded. The experiment with isolated words replicated previous lexical decision studies by showing more effortful processing for inflected than monomorphemic nouns. However, this morphological complexity effect did not generalise to the context experiments; fixation durations and response latencies were highly similar for inflected and monomorphemic words. It is suggested that, at least for the type of inflected nouns studied,nthe morphological effect observed for isolated words may derive from the syntactic and/or semantic level and not necessarily from the lexical level, as previously assumed. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Cynthia M. Connine; Ralph Radach A contingent speech technique in eye movement research on reading Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 471–480, 2002. @article{Inhoff2002,A novel eye-movement-contingent method is presented. It builds on and extends established eye-movement-contingent visual display change methods in that it uses movements of the eyes to control the presentation of acoustic information during sentence reading. In one implementation, an irrelevant spoken word is presented when the eyes cross a predetermined spatial boundary before they move on to a selected visual target word. The relationship between the spoken word and the visual target is manipulated, and the pattern of interference, caused by the presentation of the spoken word, is used to determine the nature and time course of activated representations. Results from three recently completed experiments in which the technique was used show that a word's phonological code remains active after it has been read and that the activated code has speech-like properties. |
Timothy Desmet; Constantijn De Baecke; Marc Brysbaert The influence of referential discourse context on modifier attachment in Dutch Journal Article In: Memory and Cognition, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 150–157, 2002. @article{Desmet2002,In an eye-tracking experiment we investigated the influence of referential context on the attachment of a relative clause to two possible hosts (as in "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony"). The attachment of the relative clause was disambiguated grammatically at the first word after the onset of the ambiguity in order to investigate immediate effects of discourse. The contexts had been verified in a sentence completion study to make sure that they induced a strong bias toward early or late closure. The results of the reading experiment, however, revealed no significant interaction of referential context with the attachment preference of the relative clause. The only robust and consistent effect we found was a preference for early closure, independent of the preceding context. These data favor accounts positing that referential context does not influence the initial attachment decision, but does play a role in later phases of sentence processing. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Jukka Hyönä; Janice M. Keenan Perspective effects on online text processing Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 159–173, 2002. @article{Kaakinen2002,The effect of a reading perspective on online text processing was studied by recording readers' eye movements during reading. Participants read an expository text about 4 countries with the goal of deciding whether one of the countries, designated by the experimenter as the reading perspective, would be a good new place of residence. The results showed better memory for perspective-relevant information and longer fixation times on perspective-relevant information. Individual differences in working memory were assessed with the reading span test. Results showed that the time course of the perspective effect varied with memory span: High-span readers showed a perspective relevance effect on initial reading of the target segments, whereas low-span readers showed the effect only in the later look backs. |
Dale J. Barr; Boaz Keysar Anchoring comprehension in linguistic precedents Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 391–418, 2002. @article{Barr2002,Past research has shown that when speakers refer to the same referent multiple times, they tend to standardize their descriptions by establishing linguistic precedents. In three experiments, we show that listeners reduce uncertainty in comprehension by taking advantage of these precedents. We tracked listeners' eye movements in a referential communication task and found that listeners identified referents more quickly when specific precedents existed than when there were none. Furthermore, we found that listeners expected speakers to adhere to precedents even in contexts where it would lead to referential overspecification. Finally, we provide evidence that the benefits of linguistic precedents are independent of mutual knowledge - listeners were not more likely to benefit from precedents when they were mutually known than when they were not. We conclude that listeners use precedents simply because they are available, not because they are mutually known. |
2001 |
Jukka Hyönä; Seppo Vainio Reading morphologically complex clause structures in Finnish. Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 451–474, 2001. @article{Hyoenae2001,The study examined how morphologically complex clause constructions were processed during reading Finnish. Readers' eye fixation patterns were recorded when they read two alternative versions of the same linguistic construction, a morphologically complex converb construction and its less complex subclause counterpart. The complexity of the converb construction is apparent in the construction being marked by less perceivable bound morphemes, which make the clause subject and predicate morphologically more complex and more dense in information. Experiment 1 showed that more complex converb constructions produced longer gaze durations than the length- and frequency-matched subclause constructions. Experiment 2 showed that the complexity effect is reversed when the more complex clause form was clearly more common in the language than its less complex counterpart. It is concluded that both structural complexity and structural frequency influence the ease with which linguistic expressions are processed during reading. |
S. -N. Yang; George W. McConkie Eye movements during reading: A theory of saccade initiation times Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 41, no. 25–26, pp. 3567–3585, 2001. @article{Yang2001,As people read continuous text, on occasional single eye fixations the text was replaced by one of six alternate stimulus patterns. Frequency distributions of the durations of these fixations were used to test predictions from four types of theories of saccadic eye movement control. Contrary to current cognitive theories, cognitive influences appeared to delay saccades rather than trigger them. Two saccade disruption times were identified, suggesting the existence of three distributions of saccades, labeled early, normal and late. The Competition–inhibition theory, an enhanced version of Findlay and Walker's (1999) theory, is proposed to account for eye movement control during reading. |
Gary Feng; Kevin Miller; Hua Shu; Houcan Zhang Rowed to recovery: The use of phonological and orthographic information in reading Chinese and English Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 1079–1100, 2001. @article{Feng2001,To examine how readers of Chinese and English take advantage of orthographic and phonological features in reading, the authors investigated the effects of spelling errors on reading text in Chinese and English using the error disruption paradigm of M. Daneman and E. Reingold (1993). Skilled readers in China and the United States read passages in their native language that contained occasional spelling errors. Results showed that under some circumstances very early phonological activation can be identified in English, but no evidence for early phonology was found in Chinese. In both languages, homophone errors showed a benefit in measures of later processing, suggesting that phonology helps readers recover from the disruptive effects of errors. These results suggest that skilled readers take advantage of the special features of particular orthographies but that these orthographic effects may be most pronounced in the early stages of lexical access. |
Jean Saint-Aubin; Raymond M. Klein Influence of parafoveal processing on the missing letter effect Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 318–334, 2001. @article{SaintAubin2001,According to the parafoveal-processing hypothesis, letters are more often missed in function words than in content words because the former are more likely to be identified in the parafovea, where letter processing is not available. Contrary to previous demonstrations, more omissions occurred in function words than in content words when parafoveal processing was not available because words were displayed in column format, text was read through a 5-letter window, or words were presented 1 at a time on a computer screen. In all experiments, impeding parafoveal processing decreased omission rates for function but not for content words. In the last experiment, direct monitoring of eye movements revealed that, for both fixated and skipped words, letters in function words are missed more often than content words. These results are best interpreted within a model including the structural precedence hypothesis and stressing the importance of visual factors. |
Femke Meulen; Antje S. Meyer; Willem J. M. Levelt Eye movements during the production of nouns and pronouns Journal Article In: Memory and Cognition, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 512–521, 2001. @article{Meulen2001,Earlier research has established that speakers usually fixate the objects they name and that the viewing time for an object depends on the time necessary for object recognition and for the retrieval of its name. In three experiments, speakers produced pronouns and noun phrases to refer to new objects and to objects already known. Speakers looked less frequently and for shorter periods at the objects to be named when they had very recently seen or heard of these objects than when the objects were new. Looking rates were higher and viewing times longer in preparation of noun phrases than in preparation of pronouns. If it is assumed that there is a close relationship between eye gaze and visual attention, these results reveal (1) that speakers allocate less visual attention to given objects than to new ones and (2) that they allocate visual attention both less often and for shorter periods to objects they will refer to by a pronoun than to objects they will name in a full noun phrase. The experiments suggest that linguistic processing benefits, directly or indirectly, from allocation of visual attention to the referent object. |
Avital Deutsch; Shlomo Bentin Syntactic and semantic factors in processing gender agreement in Hebrew: Evidence from ERPs and eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 200–224, 2001. @article{Deutsch2001,The interrelation between syntactic analysis of agreement and semantic processing was examined by recording eye movements and event-related potentials. Subject-predicate gender agreement was manipulated within Hebrew sentences. The subject was either animate or inanimate, with conceptual gender denoted by the subject's morphological structure. First-pass reading time was found to be longer for incongruent predicates than of congruent predicates but only if the predicate's gender was morphologically marked. Furthermore, this effect was larger in the animate than in the inanimate condition. Second-pass reading time was also prolonged by gender incongruity but this effect was not affected by either markedness or animacy. Gender incongruity enhanced the amplitude of an early negative potential (ostensibly ELAN), of a later negative potential (N400), and of a positive potential (P600). Like first-pass reading time, the congruity effect on the syntactically modulated P600 was significant only for marked predicates, but it did not interact with animacy. In contrast, the congruity effect on the semantically modulated N400 was significant only in the animate condition. The N400 was not affected by markedness. The congruity effect on the early negativity did not interact with either animacy or markedness. The interaction between semantic and syntactic processing and its time course are discussed within the framework set by interactive, constraint-based models for online sentence processing. |
2000 |
Avital Deutsch; Ram Frost; Alexander Pollatsek; Keith Rayner Early morphological effects in word recognition in Hebrew: Evidence from parafoveal preview benefit Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 15, no. 4-5, pp. 487–506, 2000. @article{Deutsch2000,Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconso- nantal root and a word pattern. Two experiments examined the effect of the root morpheme on word identi?cation by assessing parafoveal preview bene?t effects.Although the information of the previewwas not consciously perceived, preview of the root's letters facilitated both naming and lexical decisions of target words derived from these roots. These results converge with previous results in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, suggesting that morphological units mediate early stages of word identification in Hebrew. |
Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä; Matti Laine The role of context in morphological processing: Evidence from Finnish Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 15, no. 4/5, pp. 367–388, 2000. @article{Bertram2000,This paper is concernedwith the role of context on the processing of in?ected nouns inFinnish. Identi?cation of partitive plurals with the homonymic suf?x -jA was studied by presenting the target nouns in a sentence context and by recording durations of readers' eye ?xations and self-paced reading times for these targets. A recent visual lexical decision study indicated that the same in?ected words with -jA were sensitive to surface frequency manipulations, but not to base frequency manipulations. The authors interpreted these results to suggest that these in?ectional forms are stored and processed by means of their whole-word representations. In contrast, the present context study shows both a surface frequency effect and a lagged base frequency effect. We argue that syntactic cues prior to the target word prime the in?ectional reading of the -jA suf?x, and as a consequence the base is reinstated as an effective unit in processing these nouns with a homonymic suf?x. INTRODUCTION |
Zenzi M. Griffin; Kathryn Bock What the eyes say about speaking Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 274–279, 2000. @article{Griffin2000,To study the time course of sentence formulation, we monitored the eye movements of speakers as they described simple events. The similarity between speakers' initial eye movements and those ofobservers performing a nonverbal event-comprehension task suggested that response-relevant information was rapidly extracted from scenes, allowing speakers to select grammatical subjects based on comprehended events rather than salience. When speaking extem- poraneously, speakers began fixating pictured elements less than a second before naming them within their descriptions, a finding con- sistent with incremental lexical encoding. Eye movements anticipated the order of mention despite changes in picture orientation, in who- did-what-to-whom, and in sentence structure. The results support Wundt's theory of sentence production. From |
Antje S. Meyer; Femke Meulen Phonological priming effects on speech onset latencies and viewing times in object naming Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 314–319, 2000. @article{Meyer2000,An earlier experiment (Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998) had shown that speakers naming object pairs usually inspected the objects in the required order of mention (left object first) and that the viewing time for the left object depended on the word frequency of its name. In the present experiment, object pairs were presented simultaneously with auditory distractor words that could be phonologically related or unrelated to the name of the object to be named first. The speech onset latencies and the viewing times for that object were shorter after related distractors than after unrelated distractors. Since this phonological priming effect, like the word frequency effect, most likely arises during word-form retrieval, we conclude that the shift of gaze from the first to the second object is initiated after the word form of the first object's name has been accessed. |
Alexander Pollatsek; Jukka Hyönä; Raymond Bertram The role of morphological constituents in Reading finnish compound words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 820–833, 2000. @article{Pollatsek2000,The processing of transparent Finnish compound words was investigated in 2 experiments in which eye movements were recorded while sentences were read silently. The frequency of the second constituent had a large influence (95 ms) on gaze duration on the target words, but its influence was relatively late in processing: A clear effect only occurred on the probability of a third fixation. The frequency of the whole compound word had a similar influence on gaze duration (82 ms) and influenced eye movements at least as rapidly as did the frequency of the second constituent. These results, together with an earlier finding that the frequency of the first constituent affected the first fixation duration, indicate that the identification of these compound words involves parallel processing of both morphological constituents and whole-word representations. |
1999 |
Avital Deutsch; Keith Rayner Initial fixation location effects in reading Hebrew words Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 393–421, 1999. @article{Deutsch1999,Three experiments examined initial fixation position effects for Hebrew readers. In English, the preferred viewing location (where readers' eyes initially land in a word) is to the left of the centre of words, and words presented in isolation are identified more easily when the initial fixation point is near the optimal viewing location (close to the centre of the word). In Experiment 1, we found that the preferred viewing location for Hebrew readers was to the right of the centre of words and that it was notmodulated by infectional morphological constraints. However, the results from the word identification task in Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that derivational morphological constraints do modulate the optimal viewing location. |
Gerry T. M. Altmann; Yuki Kamide Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 247–264, 1999. @article{Altmann1999,Participants' eye movements were recorded as they inspected a semi-realistic visual scene showing a boy, a cake, and various distractor objects. Whilst viewing this scene, they heard sentences such as 'the boy will move the cake' or 'the boy will eat the cake'. The cake was the only edible object portrayed in the scene. In each of two experiments, the onset of saccadic eye movements to the target object (the cake) was significantly later in the move condition than in the eat condition; saccades to the target were launched after the onset of the spoken word cake in the move condition, but before its onset in the eat condition. The results suggest that information at the verb can be used to restrict the domain within the context to which subsequent reference will be made by the (as yet unencountered) post-verbal grammatical object. The data support a hypothesis in which sentence processing is driven by the predictive relationships between verbs, their syntactic arguments, and the real-world contexts in which they occur. |
Kin Fai Ellick Wong; Hsuan-Chih Chen Orthographic and phonological processing in reading Chinese: Evidence from eye fixations Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 14, no. 5-6, pp. 461–480, 1999. @article{Wong1999,The use of orthographic and phonologic information in reading Chinese text was investigated using an eye-monitoring technique. The basic manipulation was to change a critical character in a short passage so that various combinations of orthographic and phonological information were altered. Patterns of disruption caused by different manipulations were compared in order to reveal the use of orthographic and phonological information from individual characters during reading for comprehension. Results showed that orthographic manipulations produced reliable and early disruption in first fixation duration at the target word position. In contrast, phonological effects were only found in the measure of a relatively late stage of processing (i.e., total reading time) at the target position, but not in early measures of processing. These results supported the position that it is orthography rather than phonology, which plays an early and dominant role in reading Chinese. |
1998 |
Jukka Hyönä; Alexander Pollatsek Reading Finnish compound words: Eye fixations are affected by component morphemes Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1612–1627, 1998. @article{Hyoenae1998,The role of morphemic processing in reading was investigated in 2 experiments in which participants read sentences as their eye movements were monitored. The target words were 2-morpheme Finnish compound words. In Experiment 1, the length of the component morphemes was varied and word length was held constant, and in Experiment 2, the uniqueness of the initial morpheme was varied and the rated familiarity and length of the word were held constant. The length of the initial morpheme influenced the location of the second fixation on the target word and the pattern of fixation durations (although it had a negligible influence on the gaze duration of the word). The frequency of the initial morpheme influenced the duration of the first fixation on the target word, had a substantial effect on the gaze duration, and also influenced the location of the first and second fixations on the target word. Subsidiary analyses indicated that these effects were unlikely to stem from orthographic factors such as bigram frequency. |
Antje S. Meyer; Astrid M. Sleiderink; Willem J. M. Levelt Viewing and naming objects: Eye movements during noun phrase production Antje Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. B25–B33, 1998. @article{Meyer1998,Eye movements have been shown to reflect word recognition and language comprehension processes occurring during reading and auditory language comprehension. The present study examines whether the eye movements speakers make during object naming similarly reflect speech planning processes. In Experiment 1, speakers named object pairs saying, for instance, ‘scooter and hat'. The objects were presented as ordinary line drawings or with partly deleted contours and had high or low frequency names. Contour type and frequency both significantly affected the mean naming latencies and the mean time spent looking at the objects. The frequency effects disappeared in Experiment 2, in which the participants categorized the objects instead of naming them. This suggests that the frequency effects of Experiment 1 arose during lexical retrieval. We conclude that eye movements during object naming indeed reflect linguistic planning processes and that the speakers' decision to move their eyes from one object to the next is contingent upon the retrieval of the phonological form of the object names. |
1997 |
Dino Chincotta; Jukka Hyönä; Geoffrey Underwood Eye fixations, speech rate and bilingual digit span: Numeral reading indexes fluency not word length Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 97, no. 3, pp. 253–275, 1997. @article{Chincotta1997,The present study examined whether the reading of language-neutral stimuli, as numerals are, at maximal speed by bilinguals indexes processes related to fluency rather than differences in articulation time between languages. We tested two groups of bilinguals that spoke the same languages (Finnish and Swedish) but whose mother tongues were different and obtained measures of Arabic numeral processing by monitoring eye movements. These measures were contrasted with articulation and numeral reading estimates of word length. The results indicated that Finnish- and Swedish-dominant bilinguals had shorter gaze durations and shorter reading times in their respective dominant languages, whereas both groups articulated digits faster in Swedish than Finnish. The Swedish-dominant group had a larger digit span in Swedish, whereas digit span was marginally greater in Finnish than Swedish for the Finnish-dominant group. The finding that numeral reading was influenced by cognitive loads independent of articulation, thus, moderated the view that bilingual digit span effects are mediated exclusively by variation in word length between languages. |