EyeLink Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2022 (with some early 2023s) 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!
2010 |
André Krügel; Ralf Engbert On the launch-site effect for skipped words during reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 50, no. 16, pp. 1532–1539, 2010. @article{Kruegel2010,The launch-site effect, a systematic variation of within-word landing position as a function of launch-site distance, is among the most important oculomotor phenomena in reading. Here we show that the launch-site effect is strongly modulated in word skipping, a finding which is inconsistent with the view that the launch-site effect is caused by a saccadic-range error. We observe that distributions of landing positions in skipping saccades show an increased leftward shift compared to non-skipping saccades at equal launch-site distances. Using an improved algorithm for the estimation of mislocated fixations, we demonstrate the reliability of our results. |
Victor Kuperman; Michael Dambacher; Antje Nuthmann; Reinhold Kliegl The effect of word position on eye-movements in sentence and paragraph reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 9, pp. 1838–1857, 2010. @article{Kuperman2010a,The present study explores the role of the word position-in-text in sentence and paragraph reading. Three eye-movement data sets based on the reading of Dutch and German unrelated sentences reveal a sizeable, replicable increase in reading times over several words at the beginning and the end of sentences. The data from the paragraph-based English-language Dundee corpus replicate the pattern and also indicate that the increase in inspection times is driven by the visual boundaries of the text organized in lines, rather than by syntactic sentence boundaries. We argue that this effect is independent of several established lexical, contextual, and oculomotor predictors of eye-movement behaviour. We also provide evidence that the effect of word position-in-text has two independent components: a start-up effect, arguably caused by a strategic oculomotor programme of saccade planning over the line of text, and a wrap-up effect, originating in cognitive processes of comprehension and semantic integration. |
Chin-An Wang; Albrecht W. Inhoff The influence of visual contrast and case changes on parafoveal preview benefits during reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 805–817, 2010. @article{Wang2010,Reingold and Rayner (2006) showed that the visual contrast of a fixated target word influenced its viewing duration, but not the viewing of the next (posttarget) word in the text that was shown in regular contrast. Configurational target changes, by contrast, influenced target and posttarget viewing. The current study examined whether this effect pattern can be attributed to differential processing of the posttarget word during target viewing. A boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to provide an informative or uninformative posttarget preview and to reveal the word when it was fixated. Consistent with the earlier study, more time was spent viewing the target when its visual contrast was low and its configuration unfamiliar. Critically, target contrast had no effect on the acquisition of useful information from a posttarget preview, but an unfamiliar target configuration diminished the usefulness of an informative posttarget preview. These findings are consistent with Reingold and Rayner's (2006) claim that saccade programming and attention shifting during reading can be controlled by functionally distinct word recognition processes. |
Hsueh-Cheng Wang; Marc Pomplun; Minglei Chen; Hwa Wei Ko; Keith Rayner Estimating the effect of word predictability on eye movements in Chinese reading using latent semantic analysis and transitional probability Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 7, pp. 1374–1386, 2010. @article{Wang2010a,Latent semantic analysis (LSA) and transitional probability (TP), two computational methods used to reflect lexical semantic representation from large text corpora, were employed to examine the effects of word predictability on Chinese reading. Participants' eye movements were monitored, and the influence of word complexity (number of strokes), word frequency, and word predictability on different eye movement measures (first-fixation duration, gaze duration, and total time) were examined. We found influences of TP on first-fixation duration and gaze duration and of LSA on total time. The results suggest that TP reflects an early stage of lexical processing while LSA reflects a later stage. |
Ming Yan; Reinhold Kliegl; Eike M. Richter; Antje Nuthmann; Hua Shu Flexible saccade-target selection in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 705–725, 2010. @article{Yan2010,As Chinese is written without orthographical word boundaries (i.e., spaces), it is unclear whether saccade targets are selected on the basis of characters or words and whether saccades are aimed at the beginning or the centre of words. Here, we report an experiment where 30 Chinese readers read 150 sentences while their eye movements were monitored. They exhibited a strong tendency to fixate at the word centre in single-fixation cases and at the word beginning in multiple-fixation cases. Different from spaced alphabetic script, initial fixations falling at the end of words were no more likely to be followed by a refixation than initial fixations at word centre. Further, single fixations were shorter than first fixations in two-fixation cases, which is opposite to what is found in Roman script. We propose that Chinese readers dynamically select the beginning or centre of words as saccade targets depending on failure or success with segmentation of parafoveal word boundaries. |
Ming Yan; Reinhold Kliegl; Hua Shu; Jinger Pan; Xiaolin Zhou Parafoveal load of word n+1 modulates preprocessing effectiveness of word n+2 in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 1669–1676, 2010. @article{Yan2010a,Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N + 2) and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N + 2-word preview with low- and high-frequency words N + 1. The main findings were (a) an identity PB for word N + 2 that was (b) primarily observed when word N + 1 was of high frequency (i.e., an interaction between frequency of word N + 1 and PB for word N + 2), and (c) a parafoveal-on-foveal frequency effect of word N + 1 for fixation durations on word N. We discuss implications for theories of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading. |
Adrian Staub Eye movements and processing difficulty in object relative clauses Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 71–86, 2010. @article{Staub2010,It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error) are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error). Two major accounts of this phenomenon make different predictions about where, in the course of incremental processing of an object relative, difficulty should first appear. An account emphasizing memory processes (Gibson, 1998; Grodner & Gibson, 2005) predicts difficulty at the relative clause verb, while an account emphasizing experience-based expectations (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) predicts earlier difficulty, at the relative clause subject. Two eye movement experiments tested these predictions. Regressive saccades were much more likely from the subject noun phrase of an object relative than from the same noun phrase occurring within a subject relative (Experiment 1) or within a verbal complement clause (Experiment 2). This effect was further amplified when the relative pronoun that was omitted. However, reading time was also inflated on the object relative clause verb in both experiments. These results suggest that the violation of expectations and the difficulty of memory retrieval both contribute to the difficulty of object relative clauses, but that these two sources of difficulty have qualitatively distinct behavioral consequences in normal reading. |
Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow; Matthew C. Shake; Joseph R. Miles; Kenton Lee; Xuefei Gao; George W. McConkie Pay now or pay later: Aging and the role of boundary salience in self-regulation of conceptual Iintegration in sentence processing Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 168–176, 2010. @article{StineMorrow2010,Previous research has suggested that older readers may self-regulate input during reading differently from the way younger readers do, so as to accommodate age-graded change in processing capacity. For example, older adults may pause more frequently for conceptual integration. Presumably, such an allocation policy would enable older readers to manage the cognitive demands of constructing a semantic representation of the text by off-loading the products of intermediate computations to long-term memory, thus decreasing memory demands as conceptual load increases. This was explicitly tested in 2 experiments measuring word-by-word reading time for sentences in which boundary salience was manipulated but in which semantic content was controlled. With both a computer-based moving-window paradigm that permits only forward eye movements, and an eye-tracking paradigm that allows measurement of regressive eye movements, we found evidence for the proposed tradeoff between early and late wrap-up. Across the 2 experiments, age groups were more similar than different in regulating processing time. However, older adults showed evidence of exaggerated early wrap-up in both experiments. These data are consistent with the notion that readers opportunistically regulate effort and that older readers can use this to good advantage to maintain comprehension. |
Patrick Sturt; Frank Keller; Amit Dubey Syntactic priming in comprehension: Parallelism effects with and without coordination Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 333–351, 2010. @article{Sturt2010,Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this parallelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordination, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three eye-tracking experiments that test for parallelism effects both in coordinated noun phrases and in subordinate clauses. The first experiment replicated previous findings, showing that the second conjunct of a coordinated noun phrase was read more quickly when it had the same structure as the first conjunct, compared with when it did not. Experiment 2 examined parallelism effects in noun phrases that were not linked by coordination. Again, a reading time advantage was found when the second noun phrase had the same structure as the first. Experiment 3 compared parallelism effects in coordinated and non-coordinated syntactic environments. The parallelism effect was replicated for both environments, and was statistically equivalent whether or not coordination was involved. This demonstrated that parallelism effects can be found outside the environment of coordination, suggesting a general syntactic priming mechanism as the underlying explanation. |
Bob Mcmurray; Vicki M. Samelson; Sung H. Lee; J. Bruce Tomblin Individual differences in spoken word recognition: A processing approach with implications for SLI Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 1–39, 2010. @article{Mcmurray2010,Thirty years of research has uncovered the broad principles that characterize spoken word processing across listeners. However, there have been few systematic investigations of individual differences. Such an investigation could help refine models of word recognition by indicating which processing parameters are likely to vary, and could also have important implications for work on language impairment. The present study begins to fill this gap by relating individual differences in overall language ability to variation in online word recognition processes. Using the visual world paradigm, we evaluated online spoken word recognition in adolescents who varied in both basic language abilities and non-verbal cognitive abilities. Eye movements to target, cohort and rhyme objects were monitored during spoken word recognition, as an index of lexical activation. Adolescents with poor language skills showed fewer looks to the target and more fixations to the cohort and rhyme competitors. These results were compared to a number of variants of the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986) that were constructed to test a range of theoretical approaches to language impairment: impairments at sensory and phonological levels; vocabulary size, and generalized slowing. None of the existing approaches were strongly supported, and variation in lexical decay offered the best fit. Thus, basic word recognition processes like lexical decay may offer a new way to characterize processing differences in language impairment. |
Bob McMurray; Vicki M. Samelson; Sung Hee Lee; J. Bruce Tomblin Individual differences in online spoken word recognition: Implications for SLI Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 1–39, 2010. @article{McMurray2010b,Thirty years of research has uncovered the broad principles that characterize spoken word processing across listeners. However, there have been few systematic investigations of individual differences. Such an investigation could help refine models of word recognition by indicating which processing parameters are likely to vary, and could also have important implications for work on language impairment. The present study begins to fill this gap by relating individual differences in overall language ability to variation in online word recognition processes. Using the visual world paradigm, we evaluated online spoken word recognition in adolescents who varied in both basic language abilities and non-verbal cognitive abilities. Eye movements to target, cohort and rhyme objects were monitored during spoken word recognition, as an index of lexical activation. Adolescents with poor language skills showed fewer looks to the target and more fixations to the cohort and rhyme competitors. These results were compared to a number of variants of the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986) that were constructed to test a range of theoretical approaches to language impairment: impairments at sensory and phonological levels; vocabulary size, and generalized slowing. None of the existing approaches were strongly supported, and variation in lexical decay offered the best fit. Thus, basic word recognition processes like lexical decay may offer a new way to characterize processing differences in language impairment. |
Linda M. Moxey; Ruth Filik The effects of character desire on focus patterns and pronominal reference following quantified statements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 588–616, 2010. @article{Moxey2010,Following a positively quantified statement such as, oA few of the children sang the chorus,o a plural pronoun is likely to refer to the set of children who sang (the reference set). Negative natural language quantifiers (NLQs) such as few or not many, on the other hand, are more likely to be followed by reference to the complement set of children who did not sing. According to the presupposition-denial account of negative NLQs, the complement set is available for pronominal reference following these expressions because they imply a shortfall between the amount denoted and a presupposed larger amount. Focus on the shortfall set is effectively focus on the complement set. Previous support for this account is largely based on a series of experiments which show that complement set focus is also possible following positive NLQs if a previously mentioned character expects a larger amount, thereby creating a shortfall between the character's expectations and the amount denoted by the NLQ. It is not clear, however, whether the shortfall implied by a negative NLQ must be based on expectation per se, or whether the NLQ-based implication is more general. This article reports 3 experiments which show that a shortfall can also be created between an NLQ and a character's desire for a particular quantity. Results suggest that the implication of negative NLQs that a larger amount is denied need not be based on expectation, but may be less specific. |
Jong-yoon Myung; Sheila E. Blumstein; Eiling Yee; Julie C. Sedivy; Sharon L. Thompson-Schill; Laurel J. Buxbaum Impaired access to manipulation features in Apraxia: Evidence from eyetracking and semantic judgment tasks Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 112, no. 2, pp. 101–112, 2010. @article{Myung2010,Apraxic patients are known for deficits in producing and comprehending skilled movements. Two experiments tested their implicit and explicit knowledge about manipulable objects in order to examine whether such deficits accompany impairment in the conceptual representation of manipulation features. An eyetracking method was used to test implicit knowledge (Experiment 1): participants viewed a visual display on a computer screen and touched the corresponding object in response to an auditory input. Manipulation relationship among objects was not task-relevant, and thus the assessment of manipulation knowledge was implicit. Like the non-apraxic control patients, apraxic patients fixated on an object picture (e.g., " typewriter" ) that was manipulation-related to a target word (e.g., 'piano') significantly more often than an unrelated object picture (e.g., " bucket" ) as well as a visual control (e.g., " couch" ). However, this effect emerged later than in the non-apraxic control group, suggesting impaired access to manipulation features in the apraxic group. In the semantic judgment task (Experiment 2), participants were asked to make an explicit judgment about the relationship of picture triplets of manipulable objects by choosing the pair with similar manipulation features. Apraxic patients performed significantly worse on this task than the non-apraxic control group. Both implicit and explicit measures of manipulation knowledge show that apraxia is not merely a perceptuomotor deficit of skilled movements, but results in a concomitant impairment in representing manipulation features and accessing them for cognitive processing. |
Mariko Nakayama; Christopher R. Sears; Stephen J. Lupker Testing for lexical competition during reading: Fast priming with orthographic neighbors Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 477–492, 2010. @article{Nakayama2010,Recent studies have found that masked word primes that are orthographic neighbors of the target inhibit lexical decision latencies (Davis & Lupker, 2006; Nakayama, Sears, & Lupker, 2008), consistent with the predictions of lexical competition models of visual word identification (e.g., Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). In contrast, using the fast priming paradigm (Sereno & Rayner, 1992), orthographically similar primes produced facilitation in a reading task (H. Lee, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1999; Y. Lee, Binder, Kim, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 1999). Experiment 1 replicated this facilitation effect using orthographic neighbor primes. In Experiment 2, neighbor primes and targets were presented in different cases (e.g., SIDE-tide); in this situation, the facilitation effect disappeared. However, nonword neighbor primes (e.g., KIDE-tide) still significantly facilitated reading of targets (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results suggest that it is possible to explain the priming effects from word neighbor primes in fast priming experiments in terms of the interactions between the inhibitory and facilitory processes embodied in lexical competition models. |
Nayoung Kwon; Peter C. Gordon; Yoonhyoung Lee; Robert Kluender Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting subject/object asymmetry: An eye-tracking study of prenominal relative clauses in Korean Journal Article In: Language, vol. 86, no. 3, pp. 546–582, 2010. @article{NayoungKwon2010,The morphology of the telencephalon displays great diversity among different vertebrate lineages. Particularly, the everted telencephalon of ray-finned fishes shows a noticeably different morphology to the evaginated telencephalon of non-ray-finned fishes and other vertebrates. This makes the comparison between the different parts of the telencephalon of ray-finned fishes and other vertebrates difficult. Based on neuroanatomical, neurochemical and connectional data no consensus on the subdivisions of the adult telencephalon of ray-finned fishes and their relation to nuclei in the telencephalon of other vertebrates has been reached yet. For tetrapods, comparative expression pattern analysis of homologous developmental genes has been a successful approach to clarify homologies between different parts of the telencephalon. In the larval zebrafish, subdivisions of the subpallium have been proposed using conserved developmental genes expression. In this study, we investigate the subdivisions of the adult zebrafish telencephalon by analyzing the expression pattern of conserved molecular marker genes. We identify the boundary between the pallium and subpallium based on the complementary expression of dlx2a, dlx5a in the subpallium and tbr1, neurod in the pallium. Furthermore, combinatorial expression of Isl, nkx2.1b, lhx1b, tbr1, eomesa, emx1, emx2 and emx3 identifies striatal-like, pallidal-like and septal-like subdivisions within the subpallium. In contrast to previous models, we propose that the striatum and pallidum are stretched along the rostro-caudal axis of the telencephalon. Further, the septal nuclei derive from both the pallium and subpallium. On this basis, we present a new model for the subdivisions of the subpallium in teleost fish. |
Pirita Pyykkönen; Jukka Hyönä; Roger P. G. Van Gompel Activating gender stereotypes during online spoken language processing: Evidence from visual world eye tracking Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 126–133, 2010. @article{Pyykkoenen2010a,This study used the visual world eye-tracking method to investigate activation of general world knowledge related to gender-stereotypical role names in online spoken language comprehension in Finnish. The results showed that listeners activated gender stereotypes elaboratively in story contexts where this information was not needed to build coherence. Furthermore, listeners made additional inferences based on gender stereotypes to revise an already established coherence relation. Both results are consistent with mental models theory (e.g., Garnham, 2001). They are harder to explain by the minimalist account (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992) which suggests that people limit inferences to those needed to establish coherence in discourse. |
Pirita Pyykkönen; Juhani Jarvikivi Activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 5–16, 2010. @article{Pyykkoenen2010,A visual world eye-tracking study investigated the activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. We showed that people infer the implicit causality of verbs as soon as they encounter such verbs in discourse, as is predicted by proponents of the immediate focusing account (Greene & McKoon, 1995; Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006; Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, & Nieuwland, 2007). Interestingly, we observed activation of implicit causality information even before people encountered the causal conjunction. However, while implicit causality information was persistent as the discourse unfolded, it did not have a privileged role as a focusing cue immediately at the ambiguous pronoun when people were resolving its antecedent. Instead, our study indicated that implicit causality does not affect all referents to the same extent, rather it interacts with other cues in the discourse, especially when one of the referents is already prominently in focus. |
Keith Rayner; Monica S. Castelhano; Jinmian Yang Preview benefit during eye fixations in reading for older and younger readers Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 714–718, 2010. @article{Rayner2010,Older and younger readers read sentences as their eye movements were recorded, and the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to present either a valid or an invalid parafoveal preview of a target word. During the saccade to the target word, the preview word changed to the target word. For early measures of processing time (first fixation duration and single fixation duration), the standard preview benefit effect (shorter fixation times on the target word with a valid preview than an invalid preview) was obtained for both older and younger readers. However, for gaze duration and go-past time, the preview benefit was somewhat attenuated in the older readers in comparison to the younger readers, suggesting that on some fixations older readers obtain less preview benefit from the word to the right of fixation. |
Keith Rayner; Timothy J. Slattery; Nathalie N. Bélanger Eye movements, the perceptual span, and reading speed Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 834–839, 2010. @article{Rayner2010a,The perceptual span or region of effective vision during eye fixations in reading was examined as a function of reading speed (fast readers were compared with slow readers), font characteristics (fixed width vs. proportional width), and intraword spacing (normal or reduced). The main findings were that fast readers (reading at about 330 wpm) had a larger perceptual span than did slow readers (reading about 200 wpm) and that the span was not affected by whether or not the text was fixed width or proportional width. In addition, there were interesting font and intraword spacing effects that have important implications for the optimal use of space in a line of text. |
Erik D. Reichle; Andrew E. Reineberg; Jonathan W. Schooler Eye movements during mindless reading Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 21, no. 9, pp. 1300–1310, 2010. @article{Reichle2010,Mindless reading occurs when the eyes continue moving across the page even though the mind is thinking about something unrelated to the text. Despite how commonly it occurs, very little is known about mindless reading. The present experiment examined eye movements during mindless reading. Comparisons of fixation-duration measures collected during intervals of normal reading and intervals of mindless reading indicate that fixations during the latter were longer and less affected by lexical and linguistic variables than fixations during the former. Also, eye movements immediately preceding self-caught mind wandering were especially erratic. These results suggest that the cognitive processes that guide eye movements during normal reading are not engaged during mindless reading. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of eye movement control in reading, for the distinction between experiential awareness and meta-awareness, and for reading comprehension. |
Eyal M. Reingold; Jinmian Yang; Keith Rayner The time course of word frequency and case alternation effects on fixation times in reading: Evidence for lexical control of eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 1677–1683, 2010. @article{Reingold2010,Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences in which high-frequency and low-frequency target words were presented either in normal font (e.g., account) or case alternated (e.g., aCcOuNt). The influence of the word frequency and case alternation manipulations on fixation times was examined. Although both manipulations had comparable effects on standard first-pass fixation measures, word frequency, but not case alternation was found to influence the duration of the first fixation in trials with multiple first-pass fixations. Assuming that lexical processing is more often incomplete at the termination of the first in multiple first-pass fixations than at the end of single first-pass fixations, the present findings provide strong evidence for an influence of word frequency on early lexical processing. Importantly, such a demonstration of a fast acting influence of a lexical variable on fixation times satisfies a critical prerequisite for establishing lexical control of eye movements in reading. |
Eva Reinisch; Alexandra Jesse; James M. McQueen Early use of phonetic information in spoken word recognition: Lexical stress drives eye movements immediately Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 772–783, 2010. @article{Reinisch2010,For optimal word recognition listeners should use all relevant acoustic information as soon as it comes available. Using printed-word eye tracking we investigated when during word processing Dutch listeners use suprasegmental lexical stress information to recognize words. Fixations on targets such as "OCtopus" (capitals indicate stress) were more frequent than fixations on segmentally overlapping but differently stressed competitors ("okTOber") before segmental information could disambiguate the words. Furthermore, prior to segmental disambiguation, initially stressed words were stronger lexical competitors than noninitially stressed words. Listeners recognize words by immediately using all relevant information in the speech signal. |
Gui Qin Ren; Yufang Yang Syntactic boundaries and comma placement during silent reading of Chinese text: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 168–177, 2010. @article{Ren2010,In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether and how a comma influences the reading of Chinese sentences comprised of different types of syntactic constituent such as word, phrase and clause. Participants read Chinese sentences that did or did not insert a comma at the end of a syntactic constituent. The results showed that the fixation times were shorter for the target word followed by a comma than for that followed by no comma, which suggests that a comma facilitated word identification during the reading of Chinese sentences. Furthermore, the insertion of commas shortened the total fixation times in the post-target region only for the clause condition. The data are consistent with previous findings concerning the role of segmentation cues in reading, and compatible with the implicit prosody hypothesis. |
Jean Saint-Aubin The long range parafoveal processing ofsyntactic information is impossible: A reply to Foucambert (2008) Journal Article In: Psychologie Francaise, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 211–222, 2010. @article{SaintAubin2010,Based on results with a new method, Foucambert (2008) argued that syntactic processing can occur as far as 27 characters to the right of the fixation point. In this reply, we demonstrate that the method used by Foucambert was not appropriate. In addition, Foucambert's results did not support his conclusion. We replicate Foucambert's study while monitoring eye movements. Results revealed that subjects' eye movements were biased to the right of the fixation point. In addition, subjects were unable to engage in syntactic processing of words far in periphery. Taken together, results fit well with current models of eye movements and of the missing-letter effect. |
Jean Saint-Aubin; Sophie Kenny; Annie Roy-Charland The role of eye movements in the missing-letter effect revisited with the rapid serial visual presentation procedure Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 47–52, 2010. @article{SaintAubin2010a,When participants read a text while searching for a target letter, they are more likely to miss the target letter embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This effect is usually observed with a text displayed normally, for which it has been found that frequent function words are fixated for a smaller amount of time than less frequent content words. However, similar pattern of omissions have been observed with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure in which words appear one at a time. These parallel results would demonstrate that fixation duration per se is not the proximal cause of the missing-letter effect only if eye movements are not made during the rapid serial visual presentation procedure. Therefore, the authors performed eye monitoring during the rapid serial visual presentation procedure. Results revealed that, with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure, participants fixated function and content words for almost the entire presentation duration. It is concluded that eye movements are not the proximal cause of the missing-letter effect. |
Anne Pier Salverda; Michael K. Tanenhaus Tracking the time course of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 1108–1117, 2010. @article{Salverda2010,Two visual-world experiments evaluated the time course and use of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition using printed words as referents. Participants saw 4 words on a computer screen and listened to spoken sentences instructing them to click on one of the words (e.g., Click on the word bead). The printed words appeared 200 ms before the onset of the spoken target word. In Experiment 1, the display included the target word and a competitor with either a lower degree (e.g., bear) or a higher degree (e.g., bean) of phonological overlap with the target. Both competitors had the same degree of orthographic overlap with the target. There were more fixations to the competitors than to unrelated distractors. Crucially, the likelihood of fixating a competitor did not vary as a function of the amount of phonological overlap between target and competitor. In Experiment 2, the display included the target word and a competitor with either a lower degree (e.g., bare) or a higher degree (e.g., bear) of orthographic overlap with the target. Competitors were homophonous and thus had the same degree of phonological overlap with the target. There were more fixations to higher overlap competitors than to lower overlap competitors, beginning during the temporal interval where initial fixations driven by the vowel are expected to occur. The authors conclude that orthographic information is rapidly activated as a spoken word unfolds and is immediately used in mapping spoken words onto potential printed referents. |
Daniel J. Schad; Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert Eye movements during reading of randomly shuffled text Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 50, no. 23, pp. 2600–2616, 2010. @article{Schad2010,In research on eye-movement control during reading, the importance of cognitive processes related to language comprehension relative to visuomotor aspects of saccade generation is the topic of an ongoing debate. Here we investigate various eye-movement measures during reading of randomly shuffled meaningless text as compared to normal meaningful text. To ensure processing of the material, readers were occasionally probed for words occurring in normal or shuffled text. For reading of shuffled text we observed longer fixation times, less word skippings, and more refixations than in normal reading. Shuffled-text reading further differed from normal reading in that low-frequency words were not overall fixated longer than high-frequency words. However, the frequency effect was present on long words, but was reversed for short words. Also, consistent with our prior research we found distinct experimental effects of spatially distributed processing over several words at a time, indicating how lexical word processing affected eye movements. Based on analyses of statistical linear mixed-effect models we argue that the results are compatible with the hypothesis that the perceptual span is more strongly modulated by foveal load in the shuffled reading task than in normal reading. Results are discussed in the context of computational models of reading. |
Kerstin I. Schattka; Ralph Radach; Walter Huber Eye movement correlates of acquired central dyslexia Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 48, no. 10, pp. 2959–2973, 2010. @article{Schattka2010,Based on recent progress in theory and measurement techniques, the analysis of eye movements has become one of the major methodological tools in experimental reading research. Our work uses this approach to advance the understanding of impaired information processing in acquired central dyslexia of stroke patients with aphasia. Up to now there has been no research attempting to analyze both word-based viewing time measures and local fixation patterns in dyslexic readers. The goal of the study was to find out whether specific eye movement parameters reflect pathologically preferred segmental reading in contrast to lexical reading.We compared oral reading of single words of normal controls (n=11) with six aphasic participants (two cases of deep, surface and residual dyslexia each). Participants were asked to read aloud lines of target words differing in length and frequency. Segmental reading was characterized by deviant spatial distribution of saccadic landing positions with initial fixations located mainly at the beginning of the word, while lexical readers showed the normative 'preferred landing positions' left to the center of the words. Contrary to expectation, word length did not distinguish between segmental and lexical readers, while word frequency showed the expected effect for lexical readers only. Their mean fixation duration was already prolonged during first pass reading reflecting their attempts of immediate access to lexical information. After first pass reading, re-reading time was significantly increased in all participants with acquired central dyslexia due to their exceedingly higher monitoring demands for oral reading. |
Francesca Delogu; Francesco Vespignani; Anthony J. Sanford Effects of intensionality on sentence and discourse processing: Evidence from eye-movements Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 352–379, 2010. @article{Delogu2010,Intensional verbs like want select for clausal complements expressing propositions, though they can be perfectly natural when combined with a direct object. There are two interesting phenomena associated with intensional transitive expressions. First, it has been suggested that their interpretation requires enriched compositional operations, similarly to expressions like began the book (e.g., Pustejovsky, 1995). Secondly, when the object position is filled by an indefinite NP, it preferentially receives an unspecific reading, under which definite anaphora is not supported (e.g., Moltmann, 1997). We report three eye-tracking experiments investigating the time-course of processing of sentence pairs like John wanted a beer. The beer was warm. Consistent with the enriched composition hypothesis, results showed that intensional transitive constructions (e.g., wanted a beer) take longer to process than control expressions (e.g., drank/wanted to drink a beer). However, contrary to previous findings, the processing of the continuation sentence appears to be not affected by whether the definite NP (the beer) can be interpreted as coreferential with the indefinite or not. We interpret the results with respect to accounts of semantic processing relying on the notions of enriched composition and non-actuality implicature. |
Denis Drieghe; Alexander Pollatsek; Barbara J. Juhasz; Keith Rayner Parafoveal processing during reading is reduced across a morphological boundary Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 136–142, 2010. @article{Drieghe2010,A boundary change manipulation was implemented within a monomorphemic word (e.g., fountaom as a preview for fountain), where parallel processing should occur given adequate visual acuity, and within an unspaced compound (bathroan as a preview for bathroom), where some serial processing of the constituents is likely. Consistent with that hypothesis, there was no effect of the preview manipulation on fixation time on the 1st constituent of the compound, whereas there was on the corresponding letters of the monomorphemic word. There was also a larger preview disruption on gaze duration on the whole monomorphemic word than on the compound, suggesting more parallel processing within monomorphemic words. |
Brianna M. Eiter; Albrecht W. Inhoff Visual word recognition during reading is followed by subvocal articulation Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 457–470, 2010. @article{Eiter2010,Three experiments examined whether the identification of a visual word is followed by its subvocal articulation during reading. An irrelevant spoken word (ISW) that was identical, phonologically similar, or dissimilar to a visual target word was presented when the eyes moved to the target in the course of sentence reading. Sentence reading was further accompanied by either a sequential finger tapping task (Experiment 1) or an articulatory suppression task (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 revealed sound-specific interference from a phonologically similar ISW during posttarget viewing. This interference was absent in Experiment 2, where similar and dissimilar ISWs impeded target and posttarget reading equally. Experiment 3 showed that articulatory suppression left the lexical processing of visual words intact and that it did not diminish the influence of visual word recognition on eye guidance. The presence of sound-specific interference during posttarget reading in Experiment 1 is attributed to deleterious effects of a phonologically similar ISW on the subvocal articulation of a target. Its absence in Experiment 2 is attributed to the suppression of a target's subvocal articulation. |
Paul E. Engelhardt; Fernanda Ferreira; Elena G. Patsenko Pupillometry reveals processing load during spoken language comprehension Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 639–645, 2010. @article{Engelhardt2010,This study investigated processing effort by measuring peoples' pupil diameter as they listened to sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. In the first experiment, we manipulated prosody. The results showed that when prosodic structure conflicted with syntactic structure, pupil diameter reliably increased. In the second experiment, we manipulated both prosody and visual context. The results showed that when visual context was consistent with the correct interpretation, prosody had very little effect on processing effort. However, when visual context was inconsistent with the correct interpretation, prosody had a large effect on processing effort. The interaction between visual context and prosody shows that visual context has an effect on online processing and that it can modulate the influence of linguistic sources of information, such as prosody. Pupillometry is a sensitive measure of processing effort during spoken language comprehension. |
Cara R. Featherstone; Patrick Sturt Because there was a cause for concern: An investigation into a word-specific prediction account of the implicit-causality effect Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 3–15, 2010. @article{Featherstone2010,In Koornneef and Van Berkum's (2006) eye-tracking study of implicit causality (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates, 1977), midsentence delays were observed in the processing of sentences such as "David blamed Linda because she(bias-congruent)/he(bias-incongruent) . . . " when the pronoun following because was incongruent with the bias of the implicit-causality verb. The authors suggested that these immediate delays could be attributed to participants predicting a bias-congruent pronoun after because. According to this explanation, any other word placed after because should cause processing delays. The present investigation aimed to test this explanation by using sentences of the form "David blamed Linda because she(bias-congruent)/he(bias-incongruent)/there(bias-neutral) . . . ". Since significant immediate delays were observed in sentences containing a bias-incongruent pronoun (relative to a bias-congruent pronoun) but not in sentences containing there, the results of this study support an immediate integration effect but pose a problem to the word-specific prediction account of the implicit causality effect. |
Heather J. Ferguson; Christoph Scheepers; Anthony J. Sanford Expectations in counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 297–346, 2010. @article{Ferguson2010,During language comprehension, information about the world is exchanged and processed. Two essential ingredients of everyday cognition that are employed during language comprehension are the ability to reason counterfactually, and the ability to understand and predict other peoples' behaviour by attributing independent mental states to them (theory of mind).We report two visual-world studies investigating the extent to which the constraints of world knowledge and prior context, as established by a counterfactual (Exp. 1) or a false belief situation (Exp. 2), influence eye-movements directed towards objects in a visual field. Proportions of anticipatory eye-movements indicated an initial visual bias towards contextually supported referents in both studies. Thus, we propose that when visual information is available to reinforce linguistic input, participants expect a context-relevant continuation. Shortly after the critical word onset, the linguistically supported referent was visually favoured, with counterfactual (but not false belief) contexts revealing a temporal delay in integrating factually inconsistent language input. Results are discussed in relation to accounts of discourse processing and the processing relationship between counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning. Finally, we compare findings across different experimental paradigms and propose a novel cluster-analytic procedure to identify time-windows of interest in visual-world data. |
Ruth Filik; Linda M. Moxey The on-line processing of written irony Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 116, no. 3, pp. 421–436, 2010. @article{Filik2010,We report an eye-tracking study in which we investigate the on-line processing of written irony. Specifically, participants' eye movements were recorded while they read sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic (or non-ironic) phrase. Results showed longer reading times for ironic comments compared to a non-ironic baseline, suggesting that additional processing was required in ironic compared to non-ironic conditions. Reading times for subsequent pronominal reference indicated that for ironic materials, both the ironic and literal interpretations of the text were equally accessible during on-line language comprehension. This finding is most in-line with predictions of the graded salience hypothesis, which, in conjunction with the retention hypothesis, states that readers represent both the literal and ironic interpretation of an ironic utterance. |
David Caplan Task effects on BOLD signal correlates of implicit syntactic processing Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 866–901, 2010. @article{Caplan2010,BOLD signal was measured in sixteen participants who made timed font change detection judgments in visually presented sentences that varied in syntactic structure and the order of animate and inanimate nouns. Behavioral data indicated that sentences were processed to the level of syntactic structure. BOLD signal increased in visual association areas bilaterally and left supramarginal gyrus in the contrast of sentences with object- and subject-extracted relative clauses without font changes in which the animacy order of the nouns biased against the syntactically determined meaning of the sentence. This result differs from the findings in a non-word detection task (Caplan et al, 2008a), in which the same contrast led to increased BOLD signal in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The difference in areas of activation indicates that the sentences were processed differently in the two tasks. These differences were further explored in an eye tracking study using the materials in the two tasks. Issues pertaining to how parsing and interpretive operations are affected by a task that is being performed, and how this might affect BOLD signal correlates of syntactic contrasts, are discussed. |
Stefan Hawelka; Benjamin Gagl; Heinz Wimmer A dual-route perspective on eye movements of dyslexic readers Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 115, no. 3, pp. 367–379, 2010. @article{Hawelka2010,This study assessed eye movement abnormalities of adolescent dyslexic readers and interpreted the findings by linking the dual-route model of single word reading with the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control during silent sentence reading. A dysfunction of the lexical route was assumed to account for a reduced number of words which received only a single fixation or which were skipped and for the increased number of words with multiple fixations and a marked effect of word length on gaze duration. This pattern was interpreted as a frequent failure of orthographic whole-word recognition (based on orthographic lexicon entries) and on reliance on serial sublexical processing instead. Inefficiency of the lexical route was inferred from prolonged gaze durations for singly fixated words. These findings were related to the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control. Slow activation of word phonology accounted for the low skipping rate of dyslexic readers. Frequent reliance on sublexical decoding was inferred from a tendency to fixate word beginnings and from short forward saccades. Overall, the linkage of the dual-route model of single word reading and a model of eye movement control led to a useful framework for understanding eye movement abnormalities of dyslexic readers. |
Sven Hohenstein; Jochen Laubrock; Reinhold Kliegl Semantic preview benefit in eye movements during reading: A parafoveal fast-priming study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 1150–1170, 2010. @article{Hohenstein2010,Eye movements in reading are sensitive to foveal and parafoveal word features. Whereas the influence of orthographic or phonological parafoveal information on gaze control is undisputed, there has been no reliable evidence for early parafoveal extraction of semantic information in alphabetic script. Using a novel combination of the gaze-contingent fast-priming and boundary paradigms, we demonstrate semantic preview benefit when a semantically related parafoveal word was available during the initial 125 ms of a fixation on the pretarget word (Experiments 1 and 2). When the target location was made more salient, significant parafoveal semantic priming occurred only at 80 ms (Experiment 3). Finally, with short primes only (20, 40, 60 ms), effects were not significant but were numerically in the expected direction for 40 and 60 ms (Experiment 4). In all experiments, fixation durations on the target word increased with prime durations under all conditions. The evidence for extraction of semantic information from the parafoveal word favors an explanation in terms of parallel word processing in reading. |
Lynn Huestegge Effects of vowel length on gaze durations in silent and oral reading Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 1–18, 2010. @article{Huestegge2010a,Vowel length is known to affect reaction times in single word reading. Eye movement studies involving silent sentence reading showed that phonological information of a word can be acquired even before it is fixated. However, it remained an open question whether vowel length directly influences oculomotor control in sentence reading. In the present eye tracking study, subjects read sentences that included target words of varying vowel length and frequency. In Experiment 1, subjects read silently for comprehension, whereas Experiment 2 involved oral reading. Experiments 3 and 4 additionally included an articulatory suppression task and a foot tapping task. Results indicated that in conditions that did not require additional articulation (Experiments 1 and 4) gaze durations were increased for words with long vowels compared to words with short vowels. Conditions that required simultaneous articulation (Experiments 2 and 3) did not yield a vowel length effect. The results point to an influence of phonetic properties on oculomotor control during silent reading around the time of the completion of lexical access. |
Lynn Huestegge; Diana Bocianski Effects of syntactic context on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Advances in Cognitive Psychology, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 79–87, 2010. @article{Huestegge2010b,Previous research has demonstrated that properties of a currently fixated word and of adjacent words influence eye movement control in reading. In contrast to such local effects, little is known about the global effects on eye movement control, for example global adjustments caused by processing difficulty of previous sentences. In the present study, participants read text passages in which voice (active vs. passive) and sentence structure (embedded vs. non-embedded) were manipulated. These passages were followed by identical target sentences. The results revealed effects of previous sentence structure on gaze durations in the target sentence, implying that syntactic properties of previously read sentences may lead to a global adjustment of eye movement control. |
Lynn Huestegge; Hanns Jürgen Kunert; Ralph Radach Long-term effects of cannabis on eye movement control in reading Journal Article In: Psychopharmacology, vol. 209, no. 1, pp. 77–84, 2010. @article{Huestegge2010d,INTRODUCTION: Cannabis is known to produce substantial acute effects on human cognition and visuomotor skills. Many recent studies additionally revealed rather long-lasting effects on basic oculomotor control, especially after chronic use. However, it is still unknown to what extent these deficits play a role in everyday tasks that strongly rely on an efficient saccade system, such as reading. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In the present study, eye movements during sentence reading of 20 healthy long-term cannabis users (without acute tetrahydrocannabinol-intoxication) and 20 control participants were compared. Analyses focused on both spatial and temporal parameters of oculomotor control during reading. RESULTS: Long-term cannabis users exhibited increased fixation durations, more revisiting of previously inspected text, and a substantial prolongation of word viewing times, which were highly inflated for longer and less frequent words. DISCUSSION: The results indicate that relatively subtle performance deficits on the level of basic oculomotor control scale up as task complexity and cognitive demands increase. |
Falk Huettig; Jidong Chen; Melissa Bowerman; Asifa Majid In: Journal of Cognition and Culture, vol. 10, no. 1-2, pp. 39–58, 2010. @article{Huettig2010a,In two eye-tracking studies we investigated the influence of Mandarin numeral classifiers – a grammatical category in the language – on online overt attention. Mandarin speakers were presented with simple sentences through headphones while their eye-movements to objects presented on a computer screen were monitored. The crucial question is what participants look at while listening to a pre-specified target noun. If classifier categories influence Mandarin speakers' general conceptual processing, then on hearing the target noun they should look at objects that are members of the same classifier category – even when the classifier is not explicitly present (cf., Huettig and Altmann, 2005). The data show that when participants heard a classifier (e.g., ba3, Experiment 1) they shifted overt attention significantly more to classifiermatch objects (e.g., chair) than to distractor objects, but when the classifier was not explicitly presented in speech, overt attention to classifier-match objects and distractor objects did not differ (Experiment 2). This suggests that although classifier distinctions do influence eye-gaze behavior, they do so only during linguistic processing of that distinction and not in moment-to-moment general conceptual processing. |
Falk Huettig; Robert J. Hartsuiker Listening to yourself is like listening to others: External, but not internal, verbal self-monitoring is based on speech perception Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 347–374, 2010. @article{Huettig2010,Theories of verbal self-monitoring generally assume an internal (pre-articu- latory) monitoring channel, but there is debate about whether this channel relies on speech perception or on production-internal mechanisms. Perception- based theories predict that listening to one's own inner speech has similar behavioural consequences as listening to someone else's speech. Our experi- ment therefore registered eye-movements while speakers named objects accompanied by phonologically related or unrelated written words. The data showed that listening to one's own speech drives eye-movements to phonolo- gically related words, just as listening to someone else's speech does in perception experiments. The time-course of these eye-movements was very similar to that in other-perception (starting 300 ms post-articulation), which demonstrates that these eye-movements were driven by the perception of overt speech, not inner speech. We conclude that external, but not internal monitoring, is based on speech perception. |
Jukka Hyönä; Raymond Bertram Do frequency characteristics of nonfixated words influence the processing of fixated words during reading? Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 104–127, 2010. @article{Hyoenae2010,Are readers capable of lexically processing more than one word at a time? In five eye movement experiments, we examined to what extent lexical characteristics of the nonfixated word to the right of fixation influenced readers' eye behavior on the fixated word. In three experiments, we varied the frequency of the initial constituent of two-noun compounds, while in two experiments the whole-word frequency was manipulated. The results showed that frequency characteristics of the parafoveal word sometimes affected eye behavior prior to fixating it, but the direction of effects was not consistent & the effects were not replicated across all experiments. Follow-up regression analyses suggested that foveal & parafoveal word length as well as the frequency of the word-initial trigram of the parafoveal word may modulate the parafoveal-on-foveal effects. It is concluded that low-frequency words or lexemes may under certain circumstances serve as a magnet to attract an early eye movement to them. However, further corroborative evidence is clearly needed. |
Cheryl Frenck-Mestre; Nathalie Zardan; Annie Colas; Alain Ghio Eye-movement patterns of readers with down syndrome during sentence-processing: An exploratory study Journal Article In: American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, vol. 115, no. 3, pp. 193–206, 2010. @article{FrenckMestre2010,Eye movements were examined to determine how readers with Down syndrome process sentences online. Participants were 9 individuals with Down syndrome ranging in reading level from Grades 1 to 3 and a reading-level-matched control group. For syntactically simple sentences, the pattern of reading times was similar for the two groups, with longer reading times found at sentence end. This "wrap-up" effect was also found in the first reading of more complex sentences for the control group, whereas it only emerged later for the readers with Down syndrome. Our results provide evidence that eye movements can be used to investigate reading in individuals with Down syndrome and underline the need for future studies. |
Daniel J. Grodner; Natalie M. Klein; Kathleen M. Carbary; Michael K. Tanenhaus "Some," and possibly all, scalar inferences are not delayed: Evidence for immediate pragmatic enrichment Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 42–55, 2010. @article{Grodner2010,Scalar inferences are commonly generated when a speaker uses a weaker expression rather than a stronger alternative, e.g., John ate some of the apples implies that he did not eat them all. This article describes a visual-world study investigating how and when perceivers compute these inferences. Participants followed spoken instructions containing the scalar quantifier some directing them to interact with one of several referential targets (e.g., Click on the girl who has some of the balloons). Participants fixated on the target compatible with the implicated meaning of some and avoided a competitor compatible with the literal meaning prior to a disambiguating noun. Further, convergence on the target was as fast for some as for the non-scalar quantifiers none and all. These findings indicate that the scalar inference is computed immediately and is not delayed relative to the literal interpretation of some. It is argued that previous demonstrations that scalar inferences increase processing time are not necessarily due to delays in generating the inference itself, but rather arise because integrating the interpretation of the inference with relevant information in the context may require additional time. With sufficient contextual support, processing delays disappear. |
Tuomo Häikiö; Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä Development of parafoveal processing within and across words in reading: Evidence from the boundary paradigm Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 10, pp. 1982–1998, 2010. @article{Haeikioe2010,In this study we used the boundary paradigm to examine whether readers extract more parafoveal information within than across words. More specifically, we examined whether readers extract more parafoveal information from a compound word's second constituent than from the same word when it is the noun in an adjective-noun phrase (kummitustarina "ghost story" vs. lennokas tarina "vivid story"). We also examined whether the processing of compound word constituents is serial or parallel and how parafoveal word processing develops over the elementary school years. Participants were Finnish adults and 8-year-old second-, 10-year-old fourth-, and 12-year-old sixth-graders. The results showed that for all age groups more parafoveal information is extracted from the second constituent within compounds than from the noun in adjective-noun phrases. Moreover, for all age groups we found evidence for parallel processing of constituents within compounds, but only when the compounds were of high frequency. In sum, the present study shows that attentional allocation extends further to the right and is more simultaneous when words are linguistically and spatially unified, providing evidence that attention in text processing is flexible in nature. |
Denis Alamargot; Sylvie Plane; Eric Lambert; David Chesnet In: Reading and Writing, vol. 23, no. 7, pp. 853–888, 2010. @article{Alamargot2010,This study was designed to enhance our understanding of the changing relationship between low- and high-level writing processes in the course of development. A dual description of writing processes was undertaken, based on (a) the respective time courses of these processes, as assessed by an analysis of eye and pen movements, and (b) the semantic characteristics of the writers' scripts. To conduct a more fine-grained description of processing strategies, a ‘‘case study'' approach was adopted, whereby a comprehensive range of measures was used to assess processes within five writers with different levels of expertise. The task was to continue writing a story based on excerpt from a source document (incipit). The main results showed two developmental patterns linked to expertise: (a) a gradual acceleration in low- and high-level processing (pauses, flow), associated with (b) changes in the way the previous text was (re)read. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Bradley A. Seymour; Daniel J. Schad; Seth N. Greenberg The size and direction of saccadic curvatures during reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 50, no. 12, pp. 1117–1130, 2010. @article{Inhoff2010,Eye movements during the reading of multi-line pages of texts were analyzed to determine the trajectory of reading saccades. The results of two experiments showed that the trajectory of the majority of forward-directed saccades was negatively biased, i.e., the trajectory fell below the start and end location of the saccadic movement. This is attributed to a global top-to-bottom orienting of attention. The curvature size and the proportion of negative trajectories were diminished when linguistic processing demands were high and when the beginning lines of a page were read. Longer pre-saccadic fixations also yielded smaller saccadic curvatures, and they resulted in fewer negatively curved forward-directed saccades in Experiment 1 although not in Experiment 2. These findings indicate that the top-to-bottom pull of saccadic trajectories is modulated by processing demands and processing opportunities. The results are in general agreement with a time-locked attraction–inhibition hypothesis, according to which the horizontal movement component of a saccade is initially subject to an automatic top-to-bottom orienting of attention that is subsequently inhibited. |
Angela M. Isaacs; Duane G. Watson Accent detection is a slippery slope: Direction and rate of F0 change drives listeners' comprehension Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 7-9, pp. 1178–1200, 2010. @article{Isaacs2010,The present study tests whether listeners use F0, duration, or some combination of the two to identify the presence of an accented word in a short discourse. Participants' eye movements to previously mentioned and new objects were monitored as participants listened to instructions to move objects in a display. The name of the target object on critical trials was resynthesized from naturally-produced utterances so that it had either high or low F0 and either long or short duration. Fixations to the new object were highest when there was a steep rise in F0. Fixations to the previously mentioned object were highest when there was a steep drop in F0. These results suggest that listeners use F0 slope to make decisions about the presence of an accent, and that F0 and duration by themselves do not solely determine accent interpretation. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Jukka Hyönä Task effects on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 1561–1566, 2010. @article{Kaakinen2010,The present study examined how proofreading and reading-for-comprehension instructions influence eye movements during reading. Thirty-seven participants silently read sentences containing compound words as target words while their eye movements were being recorded. We manipulated word length and frequency to examine how task instructions influence orthographic versus lexical-semantic processing during reading. Task instructions influenced both temporal and spatial aspects of eye movements: The initial landing position in words was shifted leftward, the saccade length was shorter, first fixation and gaze duration were longer, and refixation probability was higher during proofreading than during reading for comprehension. Moreover, in comparison to instructions for reading for comprehension, proofreading instructions increased both orthographic and lexical-semantic processing. This became apparent in a greater word length and word frequency effect in gaze duration during proofreading than during reading for comprehension. The present study suggests that the allocation of attentional resources during reading is significantly modulated by task demands. |
Martin Corley Making predictions from speech with repairs: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 706–727, 2010. @article{Corley2010,When listeners hear a spoken utterance, they are able to predict upcoming information on the basis of what they have already heard. But what happens when the speaker changes his or her mind mid-utterance? The present paper investigates the immediate effects of repairs on listeners' linguistic predictions. Participants listened to sentences like the boy will eat/move the cake while viewing scenes depicting the agent, the theme, and distractor objects (which were not edible). Over 25% of items included conjoined verbs (eat and move) and 25% included repairs (eat- uh, move). Participants were sensitive to repairs: where eat was overridden by move, fixations on the theme patterned with the plain move condition, but where there was a conjunct, fixations patterned with eat. However, once the theme had been heard, there were more fixations to the cake in all conditions including eat, showing that the first verb maintained an influence on prediction, even following a repair. The results are compatible with the view that prediction during comprehension is updated incrementally, but not completely, as the linguistic input unfolds. |
2009 |
Colin J. Davis; Manuel Perea; Joana Acha Re(de)fining the orthographic neighborhood: The role of addition and deletion neighbors in lexical decision and reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 1550–1570, 2009. @article{Davis2009,The influence of addition and deletion neighbors on visual word identification was investigated in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 used Spanish stimuli. In Experiment 1, lexical decision latencies were slower and less accurate for words and nonwords with higher-frequency deletion neighbors (e.g., jugar in juzgar), relative to control stimuli. Experiment 2 showed a similar interference effect for words and nonwords with higher-frequency addition neighbors (e.g., conejo, which has the addition neighbor consejo), relative to control stimuli. Experiment 3 replicated this addition neighbor interference effect in a lexical decision experiment with English stimuli. Across all three experiments, interference effects were always evident for addition/deletion neighbors with word-outer overlap, usually present for those with word-initial overlap, but never present for those with word-final overlap. Experiment 4 replicated the addition/deletion neighbor inhibitory effects in a Spanish sentence reading task in which the participants' eye movements were monitored. These findings suggest that conventional orthographic neighborhood metrics should be redefined. In addition to its methodological implications, this conclusion has significant theoretical implications for input coding schemes and the mechanisms underlying word recognition. |
Timothy L. Hodgson; Benjamin A. Parris; Nicola J. Gregory; Tracey Jarvis The saccadic Stroop effect: Evidence for involuntary programming of eye movements by linguistic cues Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 569–574, 2009. @article{Hodgson2009,The effect of automatic priming of behaviour by linguistic cues is well established. However, as yet these effects have not been directly demonstrated for eye movement responses. We investigated the effect of linguistic cues on eye movements using a modified version of the Stroop task in which a saccade was made to the location of a peripheral colour patch which matched the "ink" colour of a centrally presented word cue. The words were either colour words ("red", "green", "blue", "yellow") or location words ("up", "down", "left", "right"). As in the original version of the Stroop task the identity of the word could be either congruent or incongruent with the response location. The results showed that oculomotor programming was influenced by word identity, even though the written word provided no task relevant information. Saccade latency was increased on incongruent trials and an increased frequency of error saccades was observed in the direction congruent with the word identity. The results argue against traditional distinctions between reflexive and voluntary programming of saccades and suggest that linguistic cues can also influence eye movement programming in an automatic manner. |
Yufen Hsieh; Julie E. Boland; Yaxu Zhang; Ming Yan Limited syntactic parallelism in Chinese ambiguity resolution Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 24, no. 7-8, pp. 1227–1264, 2009. @article{Hsieh2009c,Using the stop-making-sense paradigm (Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlsen, 1995) and eye-tracking during reading, we examined the processing of the Chinese Verb NP1 de NP2 construction, which is temporarily ambiguous between a complement clause (CC) analysis and a relative clause (RC) analysis. resolving the ambiguity as the more complex, less preferred CC was costly under come conditions but not under others. We took this as evidence for a limited parallel processor, such as Tabor and Hutchins' (2004) SOPARSE, that maintains multiple syntaxctic analyses across several words of a sentence when the structures are each supported by the available constraints. |
Lynn Huestegge; Ralph Radach; Daniel Corbic; Sujata M. Huestegge Oculomotor and linguistic determinants of reading development: A longitudinal study Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 49, pp. 2948–2959, 2009. @article{Huestegge2009a,We longitudinally assessed the development of oculomotor control in reading from second to fourth grade by having children read sentences with embedded target words of varying length and frequency. Additionally, participants completed oculomotor (pro-/anti-saccades) and linguistic tasks (word/picture naming), the latter containing the same item material as the reading task. Results revealed a 36% increase of reading efficiency. Younger readers utilized a global refixation strategy to gain more time for word decoding. Linguistic rather than oculomotor skills determined the development of reading abilities, although naming latencies of fourth graders did not reliably reflect word decoding processes in normal sentence reading. |
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia; Alberto Avilés; Olivia Afonso; Christoph Scheepers; Manuel Carreiras Qualitative differences in the representation of abstract versus concrete words: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 110, no. 2, pp. 284–292, 2009. @article{Dunabeitia2009a,In the present visual-world experiment, participants were presented with visual displays that included a target item that was a semantic associate of an abstract or a concrete word. This manipulation allowed us to test a basic prediction derived from the qualitatively different representational framework that supports the view of different organizational principles for concrete and abstract words in semantic memory. Our results confirm the assumption of a primary organizational principle based on association for abstract words, different from the semantic similarity principle proposed for concrete words, and provide the first piece of evidence in support of this view obtained from healthy participants. The results shed light on the representational structure of abstract and concrete concepts. |
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia; Manuel Perea; Manuel Carreiras Eye movements when reading words with $YMbOL$ and NUM83R5: There is a cost Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 17, no. 5, pp. 617–631, 2009. @article{Dunabeitia2009,Recent evidence from masked priming experiments has revealed that readers regularize letter-like symbols and letter-like numbers into their corresponding base letters with minimal processing cost. However, one open question is whether the same pattern occurs when these items are presented during normal silent reading. In the present study, we respond to this question in an eye-movement experiment that included sentences with words that had symbols and numbers as letters, as in ‘‘YESTERDAY I SAW THE SECRE74RY WORKING VERY HARD''. Results revealed that there is a greater reading cost associated with letter-by-number replacements than with letter-by-symbol replacements, especially when the replaced letters occur at the beginning of the word. We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual word recognition and reading. |
Claudia Felser; Mikako Sato; Nicholas Bertenshaw The on-line application of binding principle A in english as a second language Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 485–502, 2009. @article{Felser2009,We report the results from two experiments investigating proficient Japanese-speaking learners' processing of reflexive object pronouns in English as a second language (L2). Experiment 1 used a timed grammaticality judgement task to assess learners' sensitivity to binding Principle A under processing pressure, and Experiment 2 investigated the time-course of reflexive anaphor resolution during L2 reading using the eye-movement monitoring technique. Taken together, our results show that despite having demonstrated native-like knowledge of reflexive binding in corresponding untimed tasks, the learners processed English reflexives differently from native speakers in that they took into consideration a matching discourse-prominent but binding-theoretically inappropriate antecedent when first encountering a reflexive. This suggests that unlike what has been reported in corresponding monolingual processing research (Sturt, 2003), initial antecedent search in L2 English is not constrained by binding Principle A. textcopyright 2009 Cambridge University Press. |
Gary Feng Mixed responses: Why readers spend less time at unfavorable landing positions Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 1–26, 2009. @article{Feng2009,This paper investigates why the average fixation duration tends to decrease from the center to the two ends of a word. Specifically, it examines (a) whether unfavorable landing positions trigger a corrective mechanism, (b) whether the triggering is based on the internal efference copy mechanism, and (c) whether the corrective mechanism is specific to fixations that missed their targeted words. To estimate the mean and proportion of the corrective fixations, a 3-parameter mixture model was fitted to distributions of first fixation duration from two large eye movement databases in studies 1 and 2. Study 3 experimentally created mislocated fixations using a gaze-contingent screen shift paradigm. There is little evidence for the efference copy mechanism and limited support for the mislocated fixations hypothesis. Overall, data suggest a process that terminates fixations sooner than would during normal reading; it is triggered by the visual input during a fixation, and is flexibly engaged at eccentric landing positions and in reading short words. Implications to theories of reading eye movements are discussed. |
Gary Feng; Kevin Miller; Hua Shu; Houcan Zhang Orthography and the development of reading processes: An eye-movement study of Chinese and English Journal Article In: Child Development, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 720–735, 2009. @article{Feng2009a,As children become proficient readers, there are substantial changes in the eye movements that subserve reading. Some of these changes reflect universal developmental factors while others may be specific to a particular writing system. This study attempts to disentangle effects of universal and script-dependent factors by comparing the development of eye movements of English and Chinese speakers. Third-grade (English: mean age = 9.1 years |
Jens Bölte; Andrea Böhl; Christian Dobel; Pienie Zwitserlood Effects of referential ambiguity, time constraints and addressee orientation on the production of morphologically complex words Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 21, no. 8, pp. 1166–1199, 2009. @article{Boelte2009,In five experiments, participants were asked to describe unambiguously a target picture in a picture-picture paradigm. In the same-category condition, target (e. g., water bucket) and distractor picture (e. g., ice bucket) had identical names when their preferred, morphologically simple, name was used (e. g., bucket). The ensuing lexical ambiguity could be resolved by compound use (e. g., water bucket). Simple names sufficed as means of specification in other conditions, with distractors identical to the target, completely unrelated, or geometric figures. With standard timing parameters, participants produced mainly ambiguous answers in Experiment 1. An increase in available processing time hardly improved unambiguous responding (Experiment 2). A referential communication instruction (Experiment 3) increased the number of compound responses considerably, but morphologically simple answers still prevailed. Unambiguous responses outweighed ambiguous ones in Experiment 4, when timing parameters were further relaxed. Finally, the requirement to name both objects resulted in a nearly perfect ambiguity resolution (Experiment 5). Together, the results showed that speakers overcome lexical ambiguity only when time permits, when an addressee perspective is given and, most importantly, when their own speech overtly signals the ambiguity. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt Partner-specific interpretation of maintained referential precedents during interactive dialog Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 171–190, 2009. @article{BrownSchmidt2009,In dialog settings, conversational partners converge on similar names for referents. These lexically entrained terms [Garrod, S., & Anderson, A. (1987). Saying what you mean in dialog: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination. Cognition, 27, 181-218] are part of the common ground between the particular individuals who established the entrained term [Brennan, S. E., & Clark, H. H. (1996). Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22, 1482-1493], and are thought to be encoded in memory with a partner-specific cue. Thus far, analyses of the time-course of interpretation suggest that partner-specific information may not constrain the initial interpretation of referring expressions [Barr, D. J., & Keysar, B. (2002). Anchoring comprehension in linguistic precedents. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 391-418; Kronmüller, E., & Barr, D. J. (2007). Perspective-free pragmatics: Broken precedents and the recovery-from-preemption hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 436-455]. However, these studies used non-interactive paradigms, which may limit the use of partner-specific representations. This article presents the results of three eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1a used an interactive conversation methodology in which the experimenter and participant jointly established entrained terms for various images. On critical trials, the same experimenter, or a new experimenter described a critical image using an entrained term, or a new term. The results demonstrated an early, on-line partner-specific effect for interpretation of entrained terms, as well as preliminary evidence for an early, partner-specific effect for new terms. Experiment 1b used a non-interactive paradigm in which participants completed the same task by listening to image descriptions recorded during Experiment 1a; the results showed that partner-specific effects were eliminated. Experiment 2 replicated the partner-specific findings of Experiment 1a with an interactive paradigm and scenes that contained previously unmentioned images. The results suggest that partner-specific interpretation is most likely to occur in interactive dialog settings; the number of critical trials and stimulus characteristics may also play a role. The results are consistent with a large body of work demonstrating that the language processing system uses a rich source of contextual and pragmatic representations to guide on-line processing decisions. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt The role of executive function in perspective taking during online language comprehension Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 893–900, 2009. @article{BrownSchmidt2009a,During conversation, interlocutors build on the set of shared beliefs known as common ground. Although there is general agreement that interlocutors maintain representations of common ground, there is no consensus regarding whether common-ground representations constrain initial language interpretation processes. Here, I propose that executive functioning--specifically, failures in inhibition control--can account for some occasional insensitivities to common-ground information. The present article presents the results of an experiment that demonstrates that individual differences in inhibition control determine the degree to which addressees successfully inhibit perspective-inappropriate interpretations of temporary referential ambiguities in their partner's speech. Whether mentioned information was grounded or not also played a role, suggesting that addressees may show sensitivity to common ground only when it is established collaboratively. The results suggest that, in conversation, perspective information routinely guides online language processing and that occasional insensitivities to perspective can be attributed partly to difficulties in inhibiting perspective-inappropriate interpretations. |
Craig G. Chambers; Hilary Cooke Lexical competition during second-language listening: Sentence context, but not proficiency, constrains interference from the native lexicon Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 1029–1040, 2009. @article{Chambers2009,A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., Marie va décrire la poule [Marie will describe the chicken]). Displays depicted several objects including the final noun target (chicken) and an interlingual near-homophone (e.g., pool) whose name in English is phonologically similar to the French target (poule). Listeners' eye movements reflected temporary consideration of the interlingual competitor when hearing the target noun, demonstrating cross-language lexical competition. However, competitor fixations were dramatically reduced when prior sentence information was incompatible with the competitor (e.g., Marie va nourrir... [Marie will feed...]). In contrast, interlingual competition from English did not vary according to participants' rated proficiency in French, even though proficiency reliably predicted other aspects of processing behavior, suggesting higher proficiency in the active language does not provide a significant independent source of control over interlingual competition. The results provide new insights into the nature of parallel language activation in naturalistic sentential contexts. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Seth N. Greenberg; Matthew S. Solomon; Chin-An Wang Word integration and regression programming during reading: A test of the E-Z reader 10 model Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 1571–1584, 2009. @article{Inhoff2009,Participants read sentences with two types of target nouns, one that did and one that did not require a determiner to form a legal verb-noun phrase sequence. Sentences were presented with and without the critical determiner to create a local noun integration difficulty when a required determiner was missing. The absence of a required determiner did not influence 1st-pass reading of the verb, the noun, and the posttarget word. It did, however, have a profound effect on 2nd-pass reading. All three words were a likely target of a regression when a required determiner was missing, and the noun and the posttarget word were likely sources of a regression. These results are consistent with novel E-Z reader model assumptions, according to which identification of the noun should be followed by its integration, and integration difficulties can lead to the initiation of a regression to the noun. However, integration difficulties influenced eye movements earlier and later than predicted by the new model. |
Timo Järvilehto; Veli-Matti Nurkkala; Kyösti Koskela The role of anticipation in reading Journal Article In: Pragmatics & Cognition, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 509–526, 2009. @article{Jaervilehto2009,Learning in educational settings most o en emphasizes declarative and proce- dural knowledge. Studies of expertise, however, point to other, equally important components of learning, especially improvements produced by experience in the extraction of information: Perceptual learning. Here we describe research that combines principles of perceptual learning with computer technology to address persistent di culties in mathematics learning. We report three experiments in which we developed and tested perceptual learning modules (PLMs) to address issues of structure extraction and uency in relation to algebra and fractions. PLMs focus students' learning on recognizing and discriminating, or map- ping key structures across di erent representations or transformations. Results showed signi cant and persisting learning gains for students using PLMs. PLM technology o ers promise for addressing neglected components of learning: Pat- tern recognition, structural intuition, and uency. Using PLMs as a complement to other modes of instruction may allow students to overcome chronic problems in learning |
Rebecca L. Johnson The quiet clam is quite calm: Transposed-letter neighborhood effects on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 943–969, 2009. @article{Johnson2009,In responses time tasks, inhibitory neighborhood effects have been found for word pairs that differ in a transposition of two adjacent letters (e.g., clam/calm). Here, the author describes two eye-tracking experiments conducted to explore transposed-letter (TL) neighborhood effects within the context of normal silent reading. In Experiment 1, sentences contained a target word that either has a TL neighbor (e.g., angel, which has the TL neighbor angle) or does not (e.g., alien). In Experiment 2, the context was manipulated to examine whether semantic constraints attenuate neighborhood effects. Readers took longer to process words that have a TL neighbor than control words but only when either member of the TL pair was likely. Furthermore, this interference effect occurred very late in processing and was not affected by relative word frequency. These interference effects can be explained either by the spreading of activation from the target word to its TL neighbor or by the misidentification of target words for their TL neighbors. Implications for models of orthographic input coding and models of eye-movement control are discussed. |
Gregory D. Keating Sensitivity to violation of gender agreement in native and nonnative Spanish Journal Article In: Language Learning, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 503 – 535, 2009. @article{Keating2009,This article reports the results of an eye‐tracking experiment that investigated the effects of structural distance on readers' sensitivity to violations of Spanish gender agreement during online sentence comprehension. The study tracked the eye movements of native Spanish speakers and English‐speaking learners of Spanish as they read sentences that contained nouns modified by postnominal adjectives located in three syntactic domains: (a) in the DP, (b) in the VP, or (c) in a subordinate clause. In half of the sentences in each condition, adjectives agreed with the noun in gender, and in half, they did not. The results indicate that gender agreement is acquirable in adulthood, contra the failed functional features hypothesis, and that the distance that separates nouns and adjectives affects the detection of gender anomalies in the second language. The findings support Clahsen and Felser's (2006a) shallow structure hypothesis, as it pertains to morphological processing. |
Stefan Grondelaers; Dirk Speelman; Denis Drieghe; Marc Brysbaert; Dirk Geeraerts In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 130, no. 2, pp. 1–33, 2009. @article{Grondelaers2009,This paper reports on the ways in which new entities are introduced into discourse. First, we present the evidence in support of a model of indefinite reference processing based on three principles: the listener's ability to make predictive inferences in order to decrease the unexpectedness of upcoming words, the availability to the speaker of grammatical constructions that customize predictive inferences, and the use of "expectancy monitors" to signal and facilitate the introduction of highly unpredictable entities. We provide evidence that one of these expectancy monitors in Dutch is the post-verbal variant of existential er (the equivalent of the unstressed existential "there" in English). In an eye-tracking experiment we demonstrate that the presence of er decreases the processing difficulties caused by low subject expectancy. A corpus-based regression analysis subsequently confirms that the production of er is determined almost exclusively by seven parameters of low subject expectancy. Together, the comprehension and production data suggest that while existential er functions as an expectancy monitor in much the same way as speech disfluencies (hesitations, pauses and filled pauses), er is a higher-level expectancy monitor because it is available in spoken and written discourse and because it is produced more systematically than any disfluency. |
Tuomo Häikiö; Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä; Pekka Niemi Development of the letter identity span in reading: Evidence from the eye movement moving window paradigm Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 102, no. 2, pp. 167–181, 2009. @article{Haeikioe2009,By means of the moving window paradigm, we examined how many letters can be identified during a single eye fixation and whether this letter identity span changes as a function of reading skill. The results revealed that 8-year-old Finnish readers identify approximately 5 characters, 10-year-old readers identify approximately 7 characters, and 12-year-old and adult readers identify approximately 9 characters to the right of fixation. Comparison with earlier studies revealed that the letter identity span is smaller than the span for identifying letter features and that it is as wide in Finnish as in English. Furthermore, the letter identity span of faster readers of each age group was larger than that of slower readers, indicating that slower readers, unlike faster readers, allocate most of their processing resources to foveally fixated words. Finally, slower second graders were largely not disrupted by smaller windows, suggesting that their word decoding skill is not yet fully automatized. |
Gerry T. M. Altmann; Yuki Kamide Discourse-mediation of the mapping between language and the visual world: Eye movements and mental representation Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 111, no. 1, pp. 55–71, 2009. @article{Altmann2009,Two experiments explored the mapping between language and mental representations of visual scenes. In both experiments, participants viewed, for example, a scene depicting a woman, a wine glass and bottle on the floor, an empty table, and various other objects. In Experiment 1, participants concurrently heard either 'The woman will put the glass on the table' or 'The woman is too lazy to put the glass on the table'. Subsequently, with the scene unchanged, participants heard that the woman 'will pick up the bottle, and pour the wine carefully into the glass.' Experiment 2 was identical except that the scene was removed before the onset of the spoken language. In both cases, eye movements after 'pour' (anticipating the glass) and at 'glass' reflected the language-determined position of the glass, as either on the floor, or moved onto the table, even though the concurrent (Experiment 1) or prior (Experiment 2) scene showed the glass in its unmoved position on the floor. Language-mediated eye movements thus reflect the real-time mapping of language onto dynamically updateable event-based representations of concurrently or previously seen objects (and their locations). |
Keith Rayner; Monica S. Castelhano; Jinmian Yang Eye movements and the perceptual span in older and younger readers Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 755–760, 2009. @article{Rayner2009b,The size of the perceptual span (or the span of effective vision) in older readers was examined with the moving window paradigm (G. W. McConkie & K. Rayner, 1975). Two experiments demonstrated that older readers have a smaller and more symmetric span than that of younger readers. These 2 characteristics (smaller and more symmetric span) of older readers may be a consequence of their less efficient processing of nonfoveal information, which results in a riskier reading strategy. |
Annie Roy-Charland; Jean Saint-Aubin; Michael A. Lawrence; Raymond M. Klein Solving the chicken-and-egg problem of letter detection and fixation duration in reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 71, no. 7, pp. 1553–1562, 2009. @article{RoyCharland2009,When asked to detect target letters while reading a text, participants miss more letters in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. According to the truncation assumption that characterizes most models of this effect, misses occur when word-processing time is shorter than letter-processing time. Fixation durations for detections and omissions were compared with fixation durations from a baseline condition when participants were searching for a target letter embedded in different words. Although, as predicted by truncation, fixation durations were longer for detections than for omissions, fixation durations for detections were also longer than those for the same words in the baseline condition, demonstrating that longer fixation durations when targets are detected are more likely to be due to demands associated with producing a detection response than to truncation. Also, contrary to predictions from the truncation assumption, the standard deviation of fixation durations for detections was larger than that from the baseline condition. |
Pia Knoeferle; Matthew W. Crocker Constituent order and semantic parallelism in online comprehension Eye- tracking evidence from German Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 62, no. 12, pp. 2338–2371, 2009. @article{Knoeferle2009,Reading times for the second conjunct of and-coordinated clauses are faster when the second conjunct parallels the first conjunct in its syntactic or semantic (animacy) structure than when its structure differs (Frazier, Munn, & Clifton, 2000; Frazier, Taft, Roeper, & Clifton, 1984). What remains unclear, however, is the time course ofparallelism effects, their scope, and the kinds oflinguistic information to which they are sensitive. Findings from the first two eye-tracking experiments revealed incremental constituent order parallelism across the board -- both during structural disambiguation (Experiment 1) and in sentences with unambiguously case-marked constituent order (Experiment 2), as well as for both marked and unmarked constituent orders (Experiments 1 and 2). Findings from Experiment 3 revealed effects of both constituent order and subtle semantic (noun phrase similarity) parallelism. Together our findings provide evidence for an across-the-board account of parallelism for processing and coordinated clauses, in which both constituent order and semantic aspects of representations contribute towards incremental parallelism effects. We discuss our findings in the context ofexisting findings on parallelism and priming, as well as mechanisms ofsentence processing. |
Victor Kuperman; Robert Schreuder; Raymond Bertram; R. Harald Baayen Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: toward a multiple route model of lexical processing. Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 876–895, 2009. @article{Kuperman2009,This article reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2,500 polymorphemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision while readers' eye movements were registered. The authors found evidence that both full forms of compounds (dishwasher) and their constituent morphemes (e.g., dish, washer) and morphological families of constituents (sets of compounds with a shared constituent) played a role in compound processing. They observed simultaneous effects of compound frequency, left constituent frequency, and family size early (i.e., before the whole compound has been scanned) and also observed effects of right constituent frequency and family size that emerged after the compound frequency effect. The temporal order of these and other observed effects goes against assumptions of many models of lexical processing. The authors propose specifications for a new multiple-route model of polymorphemic compound processing that is based on time-locked, parallel, and interactive use of all morphological cues as soon as they become even partly available to the visual uptake system. |
Yoonhyoung Lee; Kichun Nam; Peter C. Gordon Processing of the Korean Eojoel ambiguity Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 345–362, 2009. @article{Lee2009,Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to investigate mechanisms of ambiguity resolution during sentence comprehension. In experiments using eye-tracking and self-paced reading, we examined how readers resolve the Eojoel ambiguity, where the grouping of syllables is ambiguous with respect to whether a phrase-final syllable is a case marker or a part of a word. This Eojoel ambiguity offers an opportunity to test how relative frequency of the lexical entries and complexity of morphological decomposition affect ambiguity resolution. Overall, the results of the experiments presented here showed that readers noticed and processed the Eojoel ambiguity very rapidly using information about the relative frequency of alternative interpretations, while the complexity of the morphological decomposition had little effect. These results are discussed in terms of constraint-based accounts (MacDonald et al. Psychol Rev 101:676-703, 1994) of ambiguity resolution. |
Roger P. Levy; Klinton Bicknell; Timothy J. Slattery; Keith Rayner Eye movement evidence that readers maintain and act on uncertainty about past linguistic input Journal Article In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, no. 50, pp. 21086–21090, 2009. @article{Levy2009,In prevailing approaches to human sentence comprehension, the outcome of the word recognition process is assumed to be a categorical representation with no residual uncertainty. Yet perception is inevitably uncertain, and a system making optimal use of available information might retain this uncertainty and interactively recruit grammatical analysis and subsequent perceptual input to help resolve it. To test for the possibility of such an interaction, we tracked readers' eye movements as they read sentences constructed to vary in (i) whether an early word had near neighbors of a different grammatical category, and (ii) how strongly another word further downstream cohered grammatically with these potential near neighbors. Eye movements indicated that readers maintain uncertain beliefs about previously read word identities, revise these beliefs on the basis of relative grammatical consistency with subsequent input, and use these changing beliefs to guide saccadic behavior in ways consistent with principles of rational probabilistic inference. |
Maya R. Libben; Debra A. Titone Bilingual lexical access in context: Evidence from eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 381–390, 2009. @article{Libben2009,Current models of bilingualism (e.g., BIA+) posit that lexical access during reading is not language selective. However, much of this research is based on the comprehension of words in isolation. The authors investigated whether nonselective access occurs for words embedded in biased sentence contexts (e.g., A. I. Schwartz & J. F. Kroll, 2006). Eye movements were recorded as French-English bilinguals read English sentences containing cognates (e.g., piano), interlingual homographs (e.g., coin, meaning corner in French), or matched control words. Sentences provided a low or high semantic constraint for target-language meanings. Both early-stage comprehension measures (e.g., first fixation duration, gaze duration, and skipping) and late-stage comprehension measures (e.g., go-past time and total reading time) showed significant cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference for low-constraint sentences. For high-constraint sentences, however, only early-stage comprehension measures were consistent with nonselective access. There was no evidence of cognate facilitation or interlingual homograph interference for late-stage comprehension measures. Thus, nonselective bilingual lexical access at early stages of comprehension is rapidly resolved in semantically biased contexts at later stages of comprehension. |
Jinmian Yang; Suiping Wang; Yimin Xu; Keith Rayner Do Chinese readers obtain preview benefit from word n + 2? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 1192–1204, 2009. @article{Yang2009d,The boundary paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975) was used to determine the extent to which Chinese readers obtain information from the right of fixation during reading. As characters are the basic visual unit in written Chinese, they were used as targets in Experiment 1 to examine whether readers obtain preview information from character n + 1 and character n + 2. The results from Experiment 1 suggest they do. In Experiment 2, 2-character target words were used to determine whether readers obtain preview information from word n + 2 as well as word n + 1. Robust preview effects were obtained for word n + 1. There was also evidence from gaze duration (but not first fixation duration), suggesting preview effects for word n + 2. Moreover, there was evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Chinese reading in both experiments. Implications of these results for models of eye movement control are discussed. |
Shun-Nan Yang Effects of gaze-contingent text changes on fixation duration in reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 49, no. 23, pp. 2843–2855, 2009. @article{Yang2009a,In reading, a text change during an eye fixation can increase the duration of that fixation. This increased fixation duration could be the result of disrupted text processing, or from the effect of perceiving the brief visual change (a visual transient). The present study was designed to test those two hypotheses. Subjects read multiple-line text while their eye movements were monitored. During randomly selected saccades, the text was masked with an alternate page, which was then replaced with a second alternate page, 75 or 150 ms after the onset of the subsequent (critical) fixation. The effect of the initial masking page, the text change during fixation, and the content of the second page on the likelihood of saccade initiation during the critical fixation, was measured. Results showed that a text change during fixation resulted in similar bilateral (forward and regressive) saccade suppression regardless of the nature of the first and second pages, or the timing of text change. This result likely reflects the effect of a low-level visual transient caused by text change. In addition, there was delay effect reflecting the content of the initial masking. How the suppression dissipated after text change depended on the nature of the first and second pages. These effects are attributed to high-level text processing. The present results suggest that in reading, visual and cognitive processes both can disrupt saccade initiation. The combination of processing difficulty and visually-induced saccade suppression is responsible for the change in fixation duration when gaze-contingent display change is utilized. Therefore, it is prudent to consider both factors when interpreting the effect of text change on eye movement patterns. |
Kiyomi Yatabe; Martin J. Pickering; Scott A. McDonald Lexical processing during saccades in text comprehension Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 62–66, 2009. @article{Yatabe2009,We asked whether people process words during saccades when reading sentences. Irwin (1998) demonstrated that such processing occurs when words are presented in isolation. In our experiment, participants read part of a sentence ending in a high- or low-frequency target word and then made a long (40 degrees) or short (10 degrees) saccade to the rest of the sentence. We found a frequency effect on the target word and the first word after the saccade, but the effect was greater for short than for long saccades. Readers therefore performed more lexical processing during long saccades than during short ones. Hence, lexical processing takes place during saccades in text comprehension. |
Eiling Yee; Eve Overton; Sharon L. Thompson-Schill Looking for meaning: Eye movements are sensitive to overlapping semantic features, not association Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 869–874, 2009. @article{Yee2009,Theories of semantic memory differ in the extent to which relationships among concepts are captured via associative or via semantic relatedness. We examined the contributions of these two factors, using a visual world paradigm in which participants selected the named object from a four-picture display. We controlled for semantic relatedness while manipulating associative strength by using the visual world paradigm's analogue to presenting asymmetrically associated pairs in either their forward or backward associative direction (e.g., ham-eggs vs. eggs-ham). Semantically related objects were preferentially fixated regardless of the direction of presentation (and the effect size was unchanged by presentation direction). However, when pairs were associated but not semantically related (e.g., iceberg-lettuce), associated objects were not preferentially fixated in either direction. These findings lend support to theories in which semantic memory is organized according to semantic relatedness (e.g., distributed models) and suggest that association by itself has little effect on this organization. |
Miao-Hsuan Yen; Ralph Radach; Ovid J. L. Tzeng; Daisy L. Hung; Jie-Li Tsai Early parafoveal processing in reading Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 131, no. 1, pp. 24–33, 2009. @article{Yen2009,The possibility that during Chinese reading information is extracted at the beginning of the current fixation was examined in this study. Twenty-four participants read for comprehension while their eye movements were being recorded. A pretarget-target two-character word pair was embedded in each sentence and target word visibility was manipulated in two time intervals (initial 140 ms or after 140 ms) during pretarget viewing. Substantial beginning- and end-of-fixation preview effects were observed together with beginning-of-fixation effects on the pretarget. Apparently parafoveal information at least at the character level can be extracted relatively early during ongoing fixations. Results are highly relevant for ongoing debates on spatially distributed linguistic processing and address fundamental questions about how the human mind solves the task of reading within the constraints of different writing systems. |
Peng Zhou; Liqun Gao Scope processing in Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 11–24, 2009. @article{Zhou2009,The standard view maintains that quantifier scope interpretation results from an interaction between different modules: the syntax, the semantics as well as the pragmatics. Thus, by examining the mechanism of quantifier scope interpretation, we will certainly gain some insight into how these different modules interact with one another. To observe it, two experiments, an offline judgment task and an eye-tracking experiment, were conducted to investigate the interpretation of doubly quantified sentences in Chinese, like Mei-ge qiangdao dou qiang-le yi-ge yinhang (Every robber robbed a bank). According to current literature, doubly quantified sentences in Chinese like the above are unambiguous, which can only be interpreted as "for every robber x, there is a bank y, such that x robbed y"(surface scope reading), contrary to their ambiguous English counterparts, which also allow the interpretation that "there is a bank y, such that for every robber x, x robbed y"(inverse scope reading). Specifically, three questions were examined, that is, (i) What is the initial reading of doubly quantified sentences in Chinese? (ii) Whether inverse scope interpretation can be available if appropriate contexts are provided? (iii) What are the processing time courses engaged in quantifier scope interpretation? The results showed that (i) Initially, the language processor computes the surface scope representation and the inverse scope representation in parallel, thus, doubly quantified sentences in Chinese are ambiguous; (ii) The discourse information is not employed in initial processing of relative scope, it serves to evaluate the two representations in reanalysis; (iii) The lexical information of verbs affects their scope-taking patterns. We suggest that these findings provide evidence for the Modular Model, one of the major contenders in the literature on sentence processing. |
Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert Mindless reading revisited: An analysis based on the SWIFT model of eye-movement control Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 322–336, 2009. @article{Nuthmann2009,In this article, we revisit the mindless reading paradigm from the perspective of computational modeling. In the standard version of the paradigm, participants read sentences in both their normal version as well as the transformed (or mindless) version where each letter is replaced with a z. z-String scanning shares the oculomotor requirements with reading but none of the higher-level lexical and semantic processes. Here we use the z-string scanning task to validate the SWIFT model of saccade generation [Engbert, R., Nuthmann, A., Richter, E., & Kliegl, R. (2005). SWIFT: A dynamical model of saccade generation during reading. Psychological Review, 112(4), 777-813] as an example for an advanced theory of eye-movement control in reading. We test the central assumption of spatially distributed processing across an attentional gradient proposed by the SWIFT model. Key experimental results like prolonged average fixation durations in z-string scanning compared to normal reading and the existence of a string-length effect on fixation durations and probabilities were reproduced by the model, which lends support to the model's assumptions on visual processing. Moreover, simulation results for patterns of regressive saccades in z-string scanning confirm SWIFT's concept of activation field dynamics for the selection of saccade targets. |
Antje Nuthmann; Reinhold Kliegl An examination of binocular reading fixations based on sentence corpus data Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 31–31, 2009. @article{Nuthmann2009a,Binocular eye movements of normal adult readers were examined as they read single sentences. Analyses of horizontal and vertical fixation disparities indicated that the most prevalent type of disparate fixation is crossed (i.e., the left eye is located further to the right than the right eye) while the left eye frequently fixates somewhat above the right eye. The Gaussian distribution of the binocular fixation point peaked 2.6 cm in front of the plane of text, reflecting the prevalence of horizontally crossed fixations. Fixation disparity accumulates during the course of successive saccades and fixations within a line of text, but only to an extent that does not compromise single binocular vision. In reading, the version and vergence system interact in a way that is qualitatively similar to what has been observed in simple nonreading tasks. Finally, results presented here render it unlikely that vergence movements in reading aim at realigning the eyes at a given saccade target word. |
Daniele Panizza; Gennaro Chierchia; Charles Clifton On the role of entailment patterns and scalar implicatures in the processing of numerals Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 503–518, 2009. @article{Panizza2009,There has been much debate, in both the linguistics and the psycholinguistics literature, concerning numbers and the interpretation of number denoting determiners ('numerals'). Such debate concerns, in particular, the nature and distribution of upper-bounded ('exact') interpretations vs. lower-bounded ('at-least') construals. In the present paper we show that the interpretation and processing of numerals are affected by the entailment properties of the context in which they occur. Experiment 1 established off-line preferences using a questionnaire. Experiment 2 investigated the processing issue through an eye tracking experiment using a silent reading task. Our results show that the upper-bounded interpretation of numerals occurs more often in an upward entailing context than in a downward entailing context. Reading times of the numeral itself were longer when it was embedded in an upward entailing context than when it was not, indicating that processing resources were required when the context triggered an upper-bounded interpretation. However, reading of a following context that required an upper-bounded interpretation triggered more regressions towards the numeral when it had occurred in a downward entailing context than in an upward entailing one. Such findings show that speakers' interpretation and processing of numerals is systematically affected by the polarity of the sentence in which they occur, and support the hypothesis that the upper-bounded interpretation of numerals is due to a scalar implicature. |
Manuel Perea; Joana Acha Space information is important for reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 49, no. 15, pp. 1994–2000, 2009. @article{Perea2009,Reading a text without spaces in an alphabetic language causes disruption at the levels of word identification and eye movement control. In the present experiment, we examined how word discriminability affects the pattern of eye movements when reading unspaced text in an alphabetic language. More specifically, we designed an experiment in which participants read three types of sentences: normally written sentences, regular unspaced sentences, and alternatingbold unspaced sentences. Although there was a reading cost in the unspaced sentences relative to the normally written sentences, this cost was much smaller in alternatingbold unspaced sentences than in regular unspaced sentences. |
Manuel Perea; Joana Acha; Manuel Carreiras Eye movements when reading text messaging (txt msgng) Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 62, no. 8, pp. 1560–1567, 2009. @article{Perea2009a,The growing popularity of mobile-phone technology has led to changes in the way people--particularly younger people--communicate. A clear example of this is the advent of Short Message Service (SMS) language, which includes orthographic abbreviations (e.g., omitting vowels, as in wk, week) and phonetic respelling (e.g., using u instead of you). In the present study, we examined the pattern of eye movements during reading of SMS sentences (e.g., my hols wr gr8), relative to normally written sentences, in a sample of skilled "texters". SMS sentences were created by using (mostly) orthographic or phonological abbreviations. Results showed that there is a reading cost--both at a local level and at a global level--for individuals who are highly expert in SMS language. Furthermore, phonological abbreviations resulted in a greater cost than orthographic abbreviations. |
Tobias Pflugshaupt; Klemens Gutbrod; Pascal Wurtz; Roman Von Wartburg; Thomas Nyffeler; Bianca De Haan; Hans-Otto Karnath; René M. Mueri About the role of visual field defects in pure alexia Journal Article In: Brain, vol. 132, no. 7, pp. 1907–1917, 2009. @article{Pflugshaupt2009,Pure alexia is an acquired reading disorder characterized by a disproportionate prolongation of reading time as a function of word length. Although the vast majority of cases reported in the literature show a right-sided visual defect, little is known about the contribution of this low-level visual impairment to their reading difficulties. The present study was aimed at investigating this issue by comparing eye movement patterns during text reading in six patients with pure alexia with those of six patients with hemianopic dyslexia showing similar right-sided visual field defects. We found that the role of the field defect in the reading difficulties of pure alexics was highly deficit-specific. While the amplitude of rightward saccades during text reading seems largely determined by the restricted visual field, other visuo-motor impairments—particularly the pronounced increases in fixation frequency and viewing time as a function of word length—may have little to do with their visual field defect. In addition, subtracting the lesions of the hemianopic dyslexics from those found in pure alexics revealed the largest group differences in posterior parts of the left fusiform gyrus, occipito-temporal sulcus and inferior temporal gyrus. These regions included the coordinate assigned to the centre of the visual word form area in healthy adults, which provides further evidence for a relation between pure alexia and a damaged visual word form area. Finally, we propose a list of three criteria that may improve the differential diagnosis of pure alexia and allow appropriate therapy recommendations. |
Seppo Vainio; Jukka Hyönä; Anneli Pajunen Lexical predictability exerts robust effects on fixation duration, but not on initial landing position during reading Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 66–74, 2009. @article{Vainio2009,An eye movement experiment was conducted to examine effects of local lexical predictability on fixation durations and fixation locations during sentence reading. In the high-predictability condition, a verb strongly constrained the lexical identity of the following word, while in the low-predictability condition the target word could not be predicted on the basis of the verb. The results showed that first fixation and gaze duration on the target noun were reliably shorter in the high-predictability than in the low-predictability condition. However, initial fixation location was not affected by lexical predictability. As regards eye guidance in reading, the present study indicates that local lexical predictability influences when decisions but not where the initial fixation lands in a word. |
Eva Van Assche; Wouter Duyck; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Kevin Diependaele Does bilingualism change cognate effects in a sentence context Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 923–927, 2009. @article{VanAssche2009,Becoming a bilingual can change a person's cognitive functioning and language processing in a number of ways. This study focused on how knowledge of a second language influences how people read sentences written in their native language. We used the cognate-facilitation effect as a marker of cross-lingual activations in both languages. Cognates (e.g., Dutch-English schip [ship]) and controls were presented in a sentence context, and eye movements were monitored. Results showed faster reading times for cognates than for controls. Thus, this study shows that one of people's most automated skills, reading in one's native language, is changed by the knowledge of a second language. |
Menno Schoot; Alain L. Vasbinder; Tako M. Horsley; Albert Reijntjes; Ernest C. D. M. Lieshout Lexical ambiguity resolution in good and poor comprehenders: An eye fixation and self-paced reading study in primary school children Journal Article In: Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 101, no. 1, pp. 21–36, 2009. @article{Schoot2009a,To investigate the use of context and monitoring of comprehension in lexical ambiguity resolution in children, the authors asked 10- to 12-year-old good and poor comprehenders to read sentences consisting of 2 clauses, 1 containing the ambiguous word and the other the disambiguating information. The order of the clauses was reversed so that disambiguating information either preceded or followed the ambiguous word. Context use and comprehension monitoring were examined by measuring eye fixations (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading times (Experiment 2) on the ambiguous word and disambiguating region. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that poor comprehenders made use of prior context to facilitate lexical ambiguity resolution as effectively as good comprehenders but that they monitored their comprehension less effectively than good comprehenders. Good comprehenders corrected an initial interpretation error on an ambiguous word and restored comprehension once they encountered the disambiguating region. Poor comprehenders failed to deal with this type of comprehension failure. |
Marine Vernet Binocular motor coordination during saccades and fixations while reading: A magnitude and time analysis Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 9, no. 2009, pp. 1–13, 2009. @article{Vernet2009,Reading involves saccades and fixations. Misalignment of the eyes should be small enough to allow sensory fusion. Recent studies reported disparity of the eyes during fixations. This study examines disconjugacy, i.e. change in disparity over time, both during saccades and fixations. Text reading saccades and saccades to single targets of similar sizes (2.5-) are compared. Young subjects were screened to avoid problems of binocular vision and oculomotor vergence. The results show high quality of motor binocular coordination in both tasks: the amplitude difference between the saccade of the eyes was approximately 0.16-; during the fixation period, the drift difference was only 0.13-. The disconjugate drift occurred mainly during the first 48 ms of fixation, was equally distributed to the eyes and was often reducing the saccade disconjugacy. Quality of coordination regardless of the task is indicative of robust physiological mechanisms. We suggest the existence of active binocular control mechanisms in which vergence signals may have a central role. Even computation of saccades may be based on continuous interaction between saccade and vergence. |
Bob McMurray; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin Within-category VOT affects recovery from "lexical" garden-paths: Evidence against phoneme-level inhibition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 65–91, 2009. @article{McMurray2009,Spoken word recognition shows gradient sensitivity to within-category voice onset time (VOT), as predicted by several current models of spoken word recognition, including TRACE (McClelland, J., & Elman, J. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1-86). It remains unclear, however, whether this sensitivity is short-lived or whether it persists over multiple syllables. VOT continua were synthesized for pairs of words like barricade and parakeet, which differ in the voicing of their initial phoneme, but otherwise overlap for at least four phonemes, creating an opportunity for "lexical garden-paths" when listeners encounter the phonemic information consistent with only one member of the pair. Simulations established that phoneme-level inhibition in TRACE eliminates sensitivity to VOT too rapidly to influence recovery. However, in two Visual World experiments, look-contingent and response-contingent analyses demonstrated effects of word initial VOT on lexical garden-path recovery. These results are inconsistent with inhibition at the phoneme level and support models of spoken word recognition in which sub-phonetic detail is preserved throughout the processing system. |
Sébastien Miellet; Patrick J. O'Donnell; Sara C. Sereno Parafoveal magnification: Visual acuity does not modulate the perceptual span in reading Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 721–728, 2009. @article{Miellet2009,Models of eye guidance in reading rely on the concept of the perceptual span—the amount of information perceived during a single eye fixation, which is considered to be a consequence of visual and attentional constraints. To directly investigate attentional mechanisms underlying the perceptual span, we implemented a new reading paradigm—parafoveal magnification (PM)— that compensates for how visual acuity drops off as a function of retinal eccentricity. On each fixation and in real time, parafoveal text is magnified to equalize its perceptual impact with that of concurrent foveal text. Experiment 1 demonstrated that PM does not increase the amount of text that is processed, supporting an attentional-based account ofeye movements in reading. Experiment 2 explored a contentious issue that differentiates competing models of eye movement control and showed that, even when parafoveal information is enlarged, visual attention in reading is allocated in a serial fashion from word to word. |
Holger Mitterer; James M. McQueen Processing reduced word-forms in speech perception using probabilistic knowledge about speech production Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 244–263, 2009. @article{Mitterer2009,Two experiments examined how Dutch listeners deal with the effects of connected-speech processes, specifically those arising from word-final /t/ reduction (e.g., whether Dutch [tas] is tas, bag, or a reduced-/t/ version of tast, touch). Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays containing 4 printed words, each associated with a geometrical shape. Minimal pairs (e.g., tas/tast) were either both above (boven) or both next to (naast) different shapes. Spoken instructions (e.g., “Klik op het woordje tas boven de ster,” [Click on the word bag above the star]) thus became unambiguous only on their final words. Prior to disambiguation, listeners' fixations were drawn to /t/-final words more when boven than when naast followed the ambiguous sequences. This behavior reflects Dutch speech- production data: /t/ is reduced more before /b/ than before /n/. We thus argue that probabilistic knowledge about the effect of following context in speech production is used prelexically in perception to help resolve lexical ambiguities caused by continuous-speech processes. |
Chin-An Wang; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Ralph Radach Is attention confined to one word at a time? The spatial distribution of parafoveal preview benefits during reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 71, no. 7, pp. 1487–1494, 2009. @article{Wang2009a,Eye movements were recorded while participants read declarative sentences. Each sentence contained a criti- cal three-word sequence with a three-letter target word (n), a spatially adjacent post-target word (n+1), and a subsequent nonadjacent post-target word (n+2). The parafoveal previews of words n and n+2 were manipulated so that they were either fully visible or masked until they were fixated. The results revealed longer word n and word n+1 viewing durations when word n had been masked in the parafovea, and this occurred irrespective of whether the target was skipped or fixated. Furthermore, masking of word n diminished the usefulness of the preview of word n+2. These results indicate that the effect of a parafoveally available target preview was not strictly localized. Instead, it influenced target viewing and the viewing of the two subsequent words in the text. These results are difficult to reconcile with the assumption that attention is confined to one word at a time until that word is recognized and that attention is then shifted from the recognized word to the next. |
Chin-An Wang; Jie-Li Tsai; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Ovid J. L. Tzeng Acquisition of linguistic information to the left of fixation during the reading of Chinese text Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 24, no. 7-8, pp. 1097–1123, 2009. @article{Wang2009b,The linguistic properties of the first (critical) character of a two-character Chinese word were manipulated when the eyes moved to the right of the critical character during reading to determine whether character processing is strictly unidirectional. In Experiment 1, the critical character was replaced with a congruent or incongruent character or left unchanged. Critical character changes did not influence the fixation duration, but incongruent changes led to more regressions than congruent changes. In Experiment 2, the critical character was replaced with either a homophonic or a non-homophonic character when it was to the left of fixation. The fixation following the change was now longer when the replaced character and the critical character were homophones than when they were phonologically dissimilar. These results indicate that readers obtain phonological and semantic information to the left of a fixated character and that the recognition of consecutive Chinese characters is not strictly unidirectional. |