EyeLink Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2023 (with some early 2024s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Visual World, Comprehension, Speech Production, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink reading or language articles, please email us!
2013 |
Xingshan Li; Junjuan Gu; Pingping Liu; Keith Rayner The advantage of word-based processing in chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 879–889, 2013. @article{Li2013, In 2 experiments, we tested the prediction that reading is more efficient when characters belonging to a word are presented simultaneously than when they are not in Chinese reading using a novel variation of the moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). In Experiment 1, we found that reading was slowed down when Chinese readers could not see characters belonging to a word simultaneously compared to when they could do so. In Experiment 2, when Chinese readers could choose whether the 2 characters in the moving window contained a word or 2 characters that did not constitute a word, they had a clear tendency to look at 2 characters belonging to a word simultaneously. The results of the current study provide strong evidence that character processing is affected by word knowledge and the processing of other characters belonging to the same word in Chinese reading, and add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that words do have psychological reality for Chinese readers. The results also suggest that the eye movement control strategy of Chinese readers is rather flexible in that it can be adjusted online to modify the characteristics of the window. |
Shane Lindsay; Christoph Scheepers; Yuki Kamide To dash or to dawdle: Verb-associated speed of motion influences eye movements during spoken sentence comprehension Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 6, pp. e67187, 2013. @article{Lindsay2013, In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast ("dash") or slow ("dawdle") movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events. |
Silvia Primativo; Lisa S. Arduino; Maria De Luca; Roberta Daini; Marialuisa Martelli Neglect dyslexia: A matter of "good looking" Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 51, no. 11, pp. 2109–2119, 2013. @article{Primativo2013, Brain-damaged patients with right-sided unilateral spatial neglect (USN) often make left-sided errors in reading single words or pseudowords (neglect dyslexia, ND). We propose that both left neglect and low fixation accuracy account for reading errors in neglect dyslexia.Eye movements were recorded in USN patients with (ND+) and without (ND-) neglect dyslexia and in a matched control group of right brain-damaged patients without neglect (USN-). Unlike ND- and controls, ND+ patients showed left lateralized omission errors and a distorted eye movement pattern in both a reading aloud task and a non-verbal saccadic task. During reading, the total number of fixations was larger in these patients independent of visual hemispace, and most fixations were inaccurate. Similarly, in the saccadic task only ND+ patients were unable to reach the moving dot. A third experiment addressed the nature of the left lateralization in reading error distribution by simulating neglect dyslexia in ND- patients. ND- and USN- patients had to perform a speeded reading-at-threshold task that did not allow for eye movements. When stimulus exploration was prevented, ND- patients, but not controls, produced a pattern of errors similar to that of ND+ with unlimited exposure time (e.g., left-sided errors).We conclude that neglect dyslexia reading errors may arise in USN patients as a consequence of an additional and independent deficit unrelated to the orthographic material. In particular, the presence of an altered oculo-motor pattern, preventing the automatic execution of the fine saccadic eye movements involved in reading, uncovers, in USN patients, the attentional bias also in reading single centrally presented words. |
Ralph Radach Monitoring local comprehension monitoring in sentence reading Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 191–206, 2013. @article{Radach2013, Comprehension monitoring is considered a key issue in current debates on ways to improve children' reading comprehension. However, processes and mechanisms underlying this skill are currently not well understood. This article describes one of the first attempts to study comprehension monitoring using eye-tracking methodology. Students in fifth grade were asked to read sentences for comprehension while also checking whether the meaning of the sentence was generally correct or incorrect. Items required the processing of conjunctive relations between two clauses that were either causally consistent or inconsistent. In addition, the polarity of the relation was varied by replacing the conjunction “because” with “although, ” creating an additional level of processing difficulty. Inconsistency played a minor role and was dominated by polarity effects that were also modulated by the correctness of the answer. The present task represents an effective tool to study local comprehension monitoring and highlights the importance of conjunctive relations for maintaining textual coherence during reading. |
Ralph Radach; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Lisa Glover; Christian Vorstius Contextual constraint and N+2 preview effects in reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 619–633, 2013. @article{Radach2013a, Extracting linguistic information from locations beyond the currently fixated word is a core component of skilled reading. Recent debate on this topic is focused on the question of whether useful linguistic information can be extracted from more than one (parafoveally visible) word to the right of a fixated word (N). The current study examined this issue through the use parafoveal previews with a short and high-frequency next (N + 1) word, as this should increase the opportunity for the extraction of useful information from the subsequent (N + 2) word. Pairs of N + 2 words were selected so that contextual constraint was either high or low. Using saccade contingent display manipulations, preview of a N + 2 target word during word N viewing consisted of either a visually dissimilar nonword or a word. The results revealed a substantial drop in fixation probability for word N + 1 when the N + 2 preview was masked with a nonword. Furthermore, the masking of word N + 2 influenced its viewing duration even when word N + 1 was fixated prior to word N + 2 viewing. These results provide compelling evidence for the view that the linguistic processing can encompass more than one word at a time. |
Keith Rayner; Bernhard Angele; Elizabeth R. Schotter; Klinton Bicknell On the processing of canonical word order during eye fixations in reading: Do readers process transposed word previews? Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 353–381, 2013. @article{Rayner2013, Whether readers always identify words in the order they are printed is subject to considerable debate. In the present study, we used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to manipulate the preview for a two-word target region (e.g. white walls in My neighbor painted the white walls black). Readers received an identical (white walls), transposed (walls white), or unrelated preview (vodka clubs). We found that there was a clear cost of having a transposed preview compared to an identical preview, indicating that readers cannot or do not identify words out of order. However, on some measures, the transposed preview condition did lead to faster processing than the unrelated preview condition, suggesting that readers may be able to obtain some useful information from a transposed preview. Implications of the results for models of eye movement control in reading are discussed. |
Keith Rayner; Jinmian Yang; Susanne Schuett; Timothy J. Slattery Eye movements of older and younger readers when reading unspaced text Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 60, no. 5, pp. 354–361, 2013. @article{Rayner2013a, Older and younger readers read normal and unspaced text as their eye movements were monitored. A high or low frequency word was embedded in each sentence. Global analyses yielded large effects of spacing with unspaced text leading to much longer reading times for both groups, but the older readers had much more difficulty with unspaced text than younger readers. Local analyses of the target word revealed large main effects due to age, spacing, and frequency. In general, the older readers had more difficulty with the unspaced text than younger readers and some reasons why they did so are suggested. |
Eva Reinisch; Matthias J. Sjerps The uptake of spectral and temporal cues in vowel perception is rapidly influenced by context Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 101–116, 2013. @article{Reinisch2013, Speech perception is dependent on auditory information within phonemes such as spectral or temporal cues. The perception of those cues, however, is affected by auditory information in surrounding context (e.g., a fast context sentence can make a target vowel sound subjectively longer). In a two-by-two design the current experiments investigated when these different factors influence vowel perception. Dutch listeners categorized minimal word pairs such as /tak/-/ta:k/ ("branch"-"task") embedded in a context sentence. Critically, the Dutch /a/-/a:/ contrast is cued by spectral and temporal information. We varied the second formant (F2) frequencies and durations of the target vowels. Independently, we also varied the F2 and duration of all segments in the context sentence. The timecourse of cue uptake on the targets was measured in a printed-word eye-tracking paradigm. Results show that the uptake of spectral cues slightly precedes the uptake of temporal cues. Furthermore, acoustic manipulations of the context sentences influenced the uptake of cues in the target vowel immediately. That is, listeners did not need additional time to integrate spectral or temporal cues of a target sound with auditory information in the context. These findings argue for an early locus of contextual influences in speech perception. |
Eryl O. Roberts; Frank A. Proudlock; Kate Martin; Michael A. Reveley; Mohammed Al-Uzri; Irene Gottlob Reading in schizophrenic subjects and their nonsymptomatic first-degree relatives Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 896–907, 2013. @article{Roberts2013, Previous studies have demonstrated eye movement abnormalities during smooth pursuit and antisaccadic tasks in schizophrenia. However, eye movements have not been investigated during reading. The purpose of this study was to determine whether schizophrenic subjects and their nonsymptomatic first-degree relatives show eye movement abnormalities during reading. Reading rate, number of saccades per line, amplitudes of saccades, percentage regressions (reverse saccades), and fixation durations were measured using an eye tracker (EyeLink, SensoMotoric Instruments, Germany) in 38 schizophrenic volunteers, 14 nonaffected first-degree relatives, and 57 control volunteers matched for age and National Adult Reading Test scores. Parameters were examined when volunteers read full pages of text and text was limited to progressively smaller viewing areas around the point of fixation using a gaze-contingent window. Schizophrenic volunteers showed significantly slower reading rates (P = .004), increase in total number of saccades (P ≤ .001), and a decrease in saccadic amplitude (P = .025) while reading. Relatives showed a significant increase in total number of saccades (P = .013) and decrease in saccadic amplitude (P = .020). Limitation of parafoveal information by reducing the amount of visible characters did not change the reading rate of schizophrenics but controls showed a significant decrease in reading rate with reduced parafoveal information (P < .001). Eye movement abnormalities during reading of schizophrenic volunteers and their first-degree relatives suggest that visual integration of foveal and parafoveal information may be reduced in schizophrenia. Reading abnormalities in relatives suggest a genetic influence in reading ability in schizophrenia and rule out confounding effects of medication. |
Leah Roberts; Ayumi Matsuo; Nigel Duffield Processing VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora with structurally parallel and nonparallel antecedents: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 1-2, pp. 29–47, 2013. @article{Roberts2013b, In this paper, we report on an eye-tracking study investigating the processing of English VP-ellipsis (John took the rubbish out. Fred did [] too) (VPE) and VP- anaphora (John took the rubbish out. Fred did it too) (VPA) constructions, with syntactically parallel versus nonparallel antecedent clauses (e.g., The rubbish was taken out by John. Fred did [] too/Fred did it too). The results show first that VPE involves greater processing costs than VPA overall. Second, although the structural nonparallelism of the antecedent clause elicited a processing cost for both anaphor types, there was a difference in the timing and the strength of this parallelism effect: it was earlier and more fleeting for VPA, as evidenced by regression path times, whereas the effect occurred later with VPE completions, showing up in second and total fixation times measures, and continuing on into the reading of the adjacent text. Taking the observed differences between the processing of the two anaphor types together with other research findings in the literature, we argue that our data support the idea that in the case of VPE, the VP from the antecedent clause necessitates more computation at the elision site before it is linked to its antecedent than is the case for VPA. |
Joost Rommers; Antje S. Meyer; Peter Praamstra; Falk Huettig The contents of predictions in sentence comprehension: Activation of the shape of objects before they are referred to Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 437–447, 2013. @article{Rommers2013, When comprehending concrete words, listeners and readers can activate specific visual information such as the shape of the words' referents. In two experiments we examined whether such information can be activated in an anticipatory fashion. In Experiment 1, listeners' eye movements were tracked while they were listening to sentences that were predictive of a specific critical word (e.g., "moon" in "In 1969 Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon"). 500. ms before the acoustic onset of the critical word, participants were shown four-object displays featuring three unrelated distractor objects and a critical object, which was either the target object (e.g., moon), an object with a similar shape (e.g., tomato), or an unrelated control object (e.g., rice). In a time window before shape information from the spoken target word could be retrieved, participants already tended to fixate both the target and the shape competitors more often than they fixated the control objects, indicating that they had anticipatorily activated the shape of the upcoming word's referent. This was confirmed in Experiment 2, which was an ERP experiment without picture displays. Participants listened to the same lead-in sentences as in Experiment 1. The sentence-final words corresponded to the predictable target, the shape competitor, or the unrelated control object (yielding, for instance, "In 1969 Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon/tomato/rice"). N400 amplitude in response to the final words was significantly attenuated in the shape-related compared to the unrelated condition. Taken together, these results suggest that listeners can activate perceptual attributes of objects before they are referred to in an utterance. |
Nicholas M. Ross; Eileen Kowler Eye movements while viewing narrated, captioned, and silent videos Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 1–19, 2013. @article{Ross2013, Videos are often accompanied by narration delivered either by an audio stream or by captions, yet little is known about saccadic patterns while viewing narrated video displays. Eye movements were recorded while viewing video clips with (a) audio narration, (b) captions, (c) no narration, or (d) concurrent captions and audio. A surprisingly large proportion of time (>40%) was spent reading captions even in the presence of a redundant audio stream. Redundant audio did not affect the saccadic reading patterns but did lead to skipping of some portions of the captions and to delays of saccades made into the caption region. In the absence of captions, fixations were drawn to regions with a high density of information, such as the central region of the display, and to regions with high levels of temporal change (actions and events), regardless of the presence of narration. The strong attraction to captions, with or without redundant audio, raises the question of what determines how time is apportioned between captions and video regions so as to minimize information loss. The strategies of apportioning time may be based on several factors, including the inherent attraction of the line of sight to any available text, the moment by moment impressions of the relative importance of the information in the caption and the video, and the drive to integrate visual text accompanied by audio into a single narrative stream. |
Nuria Sagarra; Nick C. Ellis From seeing adverbs to seeing verbal morphology Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 261–290, 2013. @article{Sagarra2013, Adult learners have persistent difficulty processing second language (L2) inflectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the first language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., proficiency). Sagarra (2008 ) and Ellis and Sagarra (2010b ) found that, unlike Spanish monolinguals, intermediate English-Spanish learners rely more on salient adverbs than on less salient verb inflections, but it is not clear whether this preference is a result of a default or a L1-based strategy. To address this question, 120 English (poor morphology) and Romanian (rich morphology) learners of Spanish (rich morphology) and 98 English, Romanian, and Spanish monolinguals read sentences in L2 Spanish (or their L1 in the case of the monolinguals) containing adverb-verb and verb-adverb congruencies or incongruencies and chose one of four pictures after each sentence (i.e., two that competed for meaning and two for form). Eye-tracking data revealed signifi cant effects for (a) sensitivity (all participants were sensitive to tense incongruencies), (b) cue location in the sentence (participants spent more time at their preferred cue, regardless of its position), (c) L1 experience (morphologically rich L1 learners and monolinguals looked longer at verbs than morphologically poor L1 learners and monolinguals), and (d) L2 experience (low-proficiency learners read more slowly and regressed longer than high-proficiency learners). We conclude that intermediate and advanced learners are sensitive to tense incongruencies and—like native speakers—tend to rely more heavily on verbs if their L1 is morphologically rich. These findings reinforce theories that support transfer effects such as the unifi ed competition model and the associative learning model but do not contradict Clahsen and Felser's ( 2006a ) shallow structure hypothesis because the target structure was morphological agreement rather than syntactic agreement. |
Ulrike Hochpöchler; Wolfgang Schnotz; Thorsten Rasch; Mark Ullrich; Holger Horz; Nele McElvany; Jürgen Baumert Dynamics of mental model construction from text and graphics Journal Article In: European Journal of Psychology of Education, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 1105–1126, 2013. @article{Hochpoechler2013, When students read for learning, they frequently are required to integrate text and graphics information into coherent knowledge structures. The following study aimed at analyzing how students deal with texts and how they deal with graphics when they try to integrate the two sources of information. Furthermore, the study investigated differences between students from different school types and grades. Forty students from grades 5 and 8 from higher track and lower track of the German school system were asked to process and integrate texts and graphics in order to answer items from different levels of a text-picture integration taxonomy. Students' eye movements were recorded and analyzed. Results suggest fundamentally different functions of text and graphics, which are associated with different processing strategies. Texts are more likely to be used according to a coherence-formation strategy, whereas graphics are more likely to be used on demand as visual cognitive tools according to an information-selection strategy. Students from different tracks of schooling revealed different adaptivity with regard to the requirements of combining text and graphic information. |
Edward Holsinger Representing idioms: Syntactic and contextual effects on idiom processing Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 373–394, 2013. @article{Holsinger2013, Recent work on the processing of idiomatic expressions argues against the idea that idioms are simply big words. For example, hybrid models of idiom representation, originally investigated in the context of idiom production, propose a priority of literal computation, and a principled relationship between the conceptual meaning of an idiom, its literal lemmas and its syntactic structure. We examined the predictions of the hybrid representation hypothesis in the domain of idiom comprehension. We conducted two experiments to examine the role of syntactic, lexical and contextual factors on the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Experiment I examines the role of syntactic compatibility and lexical compatibility on the real-time processing of potentially idiomatic strings. Experiment 2 examines the role of contextual information on idiom processing and how context interacts with lexical information during processing. We find evidence that literal computation plays a causal role in the retrieval of idiomatic meaning and that contextual, lexical and structural information influence the processing of idiomatic strings at early stages during processing, which provide support for the hybrid model of idiom representation in the domain of idiom comprehension. |
Yueh-Nu Hung "What are you looking at?" An eye movement exploration in science text reading Journal Article In: International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, vol. 12, pp. 241–260, 2013. @article{Hung2013, The main purpose of this research was to investigate how Taiwanese grade 6 readers selected and used information from different print (main text, headings, captions) and visual elements (decorational, representational, interpretational) to comprehend a science text through tracking their eye movement behaviors. Six grade 6 students read a double page of science text written in Chinese during which their eye movements were documented and analyzed using an EyeLink 1000 eye tracker. The results suggest that illustrations received less attention than print; however, readers who had more fixations on illustrations had better comprehension. While both headings and captions were in the print category, the headings received much less attention than did the captions. The article concludes with implications for teaching science reading and suggestions for future research beyond this exploratory case study. |
Bipin Indurkhya; Amitash Ojha An empirical study on the role of perceptual similarity in visual metaphors and creativity Journal Article In: Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 233–253, 2013. @article{Indurkhya2013, We investigate the role of perceptual similarity in visual metaphor comprehension process. In visual metaphors, perceptual features of the source and the target are objectively present as images. Moreover, to determine perceptual similarity, we use an image-based search system that computes similarity based on low-level perceptual features. We hypothesize that perceptual similarity at the level of color, shape, texture, orientation, and the like, between the source and the target image facilitates metaphorical comprehension and aids creative interpretation. We present three experiments, two of which are eye-movement studies, to demonstrate that in the interpretation and generation of visual metaphors, perceptual similarity between the two images is recognized at a subconscious level, and facilitates the search for creative conceptual associations in terms of emergent features. We argue that the capacity to recognize perceptual similarity-considered to be a hallmark of creativity-plays a major role in the creative understanding of metaphors. |
Yu-Cin Jian; Ming-Lei Chen; Hwa-Wei Ko Context effects in processing of Chinese academic words: An eye-tracking investigation Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 403–413, 2013. @article{Jian2013, This study investigated context effects of online processing of Chinese academic words during text reading. Undergraduate participants were asked to read Chinese texts that were familiar or unfamiliar (containing physics terminology) to them. Physics texts were selected first, and then we replaced the physics terminology with familiar words; other common words remained the same in both text versions. Our results indicate that readers experienced longer rereading times and total fixation durations for the same common words in the physics texts than for the corresponding texts. Shorter gaze durations were observed for the replaced words than the physics terminology; however, the duration of participants' first fixations on these two word types did not differ from each other. Furthermore, although the participants performed similar reading paths after encountering the target words of the physics terminology and replaced words, their processing duration of the current sentences was very different. They reread the physics terminology more times and spent more reading time on the current sentences containing the physics terminology, searching for more information to aid comprehension. This study showed that adult readers seemed to successfully access each Chinese character's meaning but initially failed to access the meaning of the physics terminology. This could be attributable to the nature of the formation of Chinese words; however, the use of contextual information to comprehend unfamiliar words is a universal phenomenon. |
Jinger Pan; Ming Yan; Jochen Laubrock; Hua Shu; Reinhold Kliegl Eye-voice span during rapid automatized naming of digits and dice in Chinese normal and dyslexic children Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 967–979, 2013. @article{Pan2013, We measured Chinese dyslexic and control children's eye movements during rapid automatized naming (RAN) with alphanumeric (digits) and symbolic (dice surfaces) stimuli. Both types of stimuli required identical oral responses, controlling for effects associated with speech production. Results showed that naming dice was much slower than naming digits for both groups, but group differences in eye-movement measures and in the eye-voice span (i.e. the distance between the currently fixated item and the voiced item) were generally larger in digit-RAN than in dice-RAN. In addition, dyslexics were less efficient in parafoveal processing in these RAN tasks. Since the two RAN tasks required the same phonological output and on the assumption that naming dice is less practiced than naming digits in general, the results suggest that the translation of alphanumeric visual symbols into phonological codes is less efficient in dyslexic children. The dissociation of the print-to-sound conversion and phonological representation suggests that the degree of automaticity in translation from visual symbols to phonological codes in addition to phonological processing per se is also critical to understanding dyslexia. |
Kevin B. Paterson; Victoria A. McGowan; Timothy R. Jordan Filtered text reveals adult age differences in reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 352–364, 2013. @article{Paterson2013, Sensitivity to certain spatial frequencies declines with age and this may have profound effects on reading performance. However, the spatial frequency content of text actually used by older adults (aged 65+), and how this differs from that used by young adults (aged 18-30), remains to be determined. To investigate this issue, the eye movement behavior of young and older adult readers was assessed using a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm in which text was shown normally within a region centered at the point of gaze, whereas text outside this region was filtered to contain only low, medium, or high spatial frequencies. For young adults, reading times were affected by spatial frequency content when windows of normal text extended up to nine characters wide. Within this processing region, the reading performance of young adults was affected little when text outside the window contained either only high or medium spatial frequencies, but was disrupted substantially when text contained only low spatial frequencies. By contrast, the reading performance of older adults was affected by spatial frequency content when windows extended up to 18 characters wide. Moreover, within this extended processing region, reading performance was disrupted when text contained any one band of spatial frequencies, but was disrupted most of all when text contained only high spatial frequencies. These findings indicate that older adults are sensitive to the spatial frequency content of text from a much wider region than young adults, and rely much more than young adults on coarse-scale components of text when reading. |
Manuel Perea Why does the APA recommend the use of serif fonts? Journal Article In: Psicothema, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 13–17, 2013. @article{Perea2013, Background: The publication norms of the American Psychological Association recommend the use of a serif font in the manuscripts (Times New Roman). However, there seems to be no well-substantiated reason why serif fonts would produce any advantage during letter/word processing. Method: This study presents an experiment in which sentences were presented either with a serif or sans serif font from the same family while participants' eye movements were monitored. Results: Results did not reveal any differences of type of font in eye movement measures –except for a minimal effect in the number of progressive saccades. Conclusions: There is no reason why the APA publication norms recommend the use of serif fonts other than uniformity in the elaboration/presentation of the manuscripts. |
Pingping Liu; Xingshan Li Optimal viewing position effects in the processing of isolated Chinese words Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 81, pp. 45–57, 2013. @article{Liu2013a, Previous studies have found that words are identified most quickly when the eyes fixate near the word center (the Optimal Viewing Position, OVP) in alphabetic languages. Two experiments were performed to determine the presence of OVP effects during the processing of isolated Chinese words. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they performed a lexical decision task. The results suggest that Chinese readers exhibit OVP effects and that the OVP tends to be the first character for 2-character words. For 3- and 4-character words, the OVP effects appear as a U-shaped curve with a minimum towards the second character. As fixations deviate from the OVP, word processing times increase at a rate of 30-70. ms per character, and fixation duration is strongly influenced by the initial viewing position. Moreover, the present study did not observe an I-OVP effect for first fixation durations nor a fixation-duration trade-off in two-fixation cases in the case of isolated Chinese words processing. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Wonil Choi; Peter C. Gordon Word recognition during reading: The interaction between lexical repetition and frequency Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 738–751, 2013. @article{Lowder2013a, Memory studies utilizing long-term repetition priming have generally demonstrated that priming is greater for low-frequency than for high-frequency words and that this effect persists if words intervene between the prime and the target. In contrast, word-recognition studies utilizing masked short-term repetition priming have typically shown that the magnitude of repetition priming does not differ as a function of word frequency and does not persist across intervening words. We conducted an eyetracking-while-reading experiment to determine which of these patterns more closely resembles the relationship between frequency and repetition during the natural reading of a text. Frequency was manipulated using proper names that were either high-frequency (e.g., Stephen) or low-frequency (e.g., Dominic). The critical name was later repeated in the sentence, or a new name was introduced. First-pass reading times and skipping rates on the critical name revealed robust repetition-by-frequency interactions, such that the magnitude of the repetition-priming effect was greater for low-frequency than for high-frequency names. In contrast, measures of later processing showed effects of repetition that did not depend on lexical frequency. These results are interpreted within a framework that conceptualizes eye-movement control as being influenced in different ways by lexical- and discourse-level factors. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon It's hard to offend the college: Effects of sentence structure on figurative-language processing Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 993–1011, 2013. @article{Lowder2013, Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar place-for-institution metonyms (e.g., college) when they were an argument of the main verb and showed that they are more difficult to process in a figurative context (e.g., offended the college) than in a literal context (e.g., photographed the college). Experiment 2 demonstrated that when they are arguments of the main verb, familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than frequency-and-length-matched nouns that refer to people (e.g., offended the leader), but that this difficulty was reduced when the metonym appeared as part of an adjunct phrase (e.g., offended the honor of the college). The results support the view that figurative-language processing is moderated by sentence structure. When the metonym was an argument of the verb, the results were consistent with the pattern predicted by the indirect-access model of figurative-language comprehension. In contrast, when the metonym was part of an adjunct phrase, the results were consistent with the pattern predicted by the direct-access model. |
Steven G. Luke; Kiel Christianson The influence of frequency across the time course of morphological processing: Evidence from the transposed-letter effect Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 25, no. 7, pp. 781–799, 2013. @article{Luke2013, The role that morphology plays in lexical access has been the subject of much debate, as has the influence of word frequency on morphological processing. The effect of frequency on morphological processing across the time course of lexical access was investigated using the transposed-letter effect. The results of two experiments (one masked-priming experiment and one eye-tracking experiment) outline a process in which morphological structure can be detected quickly and independently of frequency. The present study is also the first to show that transpositions that cross morpheme boundaries can be as disruptive as letter substitutions in inflected words, replicating earlier results with derived and compound words. |
Steven G. Luke; John M. Henderson Oculomotor and cognitive control of eye movements in reading: Evidence from mindless reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 75, no. 6, pp. 1230–1242, 2013. @article{Luke2013a, In the present study, we investigated the influence of cognitive factors on eye-movement behaviors in reading. Participants performed two tasks: a normal-reading task, as well as a mindless-reading task in which letters were replaced with unreadable block shapes. This mindless-reading task served as an oculomotor control condition, simulating the visual aspects of reading but removing higher-level linguistic processing. Fixation durations, word skipping, and some regressions were influenced by cognitive factors, whereas eye movements within words appeared to be less open to cognitive control. Implications for models of eye-movement control in reading are discussed. |
Yingyi Luo; Ming Yan; Xiaolin Zhou Prosodic boundaries delay the processing of upcoming lexical information during silent sentence reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 915–930, 2013. @article{Luo2013, Prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing in both spoken and written sentence comprehension, but it is unknown whether the processing of prosodic boundaries affects the processing of upcoming lexical information. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants read silently sentences that allow for 2 possible syntactic interpretations when there is no comma or other cue specifying which interpretation should be taken. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants heard a low-pass filtered auditory version of the sentence, which provided a prosodic boundary cue prior to each sentence. In Experiment 1, we found that the boundary cue helped syntactic disambiguation after the cue and led to longer fixation durations on regions right before the cue than on identical regions without prosodic boundary information. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a gaze-contingent display-change paradigm to manipulate the parafoveal visibility of the first constituent character of the target word after the disambiguating position. Results of Experiment 2 showed that previewing the first character significantly reduced the reading time of the target word, but this preview benefit was greatly reduced when the prosodic boundary cue was introduced at this position. In Experiment 3, instead of the acoustic cues, a visually presented comma was inserted at the disambiguating position in each sentence. Results showed that the comma effect on lexical processing was essentially the same as the effect of prosodic boundary cue. These findings demonstrate that processing a prosodic boundary could impair the processing of parafoveal information during sentence reading. |
Willem M. Mak; Ted J. M. Sanders The role of causality in discourse processing: Effects of expectation and coherence relations Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 9, pp. 1414–1437, 2013. @article{Mak2013, Research on the processing of causality has shown that causally related sentences lead to faster reading, better recall, and better comprehension than sentences that are not causally related. In this study, we investigate two ways in which causality can influence processing: through the expectation that readers may have of a causal relation and the ease with which the sentences can be related in a causal way on the basis of their content. We ran two eye tracking experiments to investigate the online effects of these factors. In the experiments we looked at the influence of these factors on the process of establishing referential and relational coherence. Experiment 1 shows that immediate effects of causal relatedness on referential processing occur even with a connective that is not explicitly causal (when). Moreover, the results show that the early effect only occurs when readers expect a causal relation. Experiment 1 also shows that causal expectations facilitate the processing of causally related sentences. Experiment 2 shows that this is only the case when the content of the second clause actually allows a causal interpretation. The data show that causal expectations have differential effects on the processing of referential and relational coherence. Referential coherence is influenced proactively by the focusing of one of the referents in the context. Relational coherence, on the other hand, is influenced retroactively: only when there turns out to be a causal link between the sentences is processing facilitated by causal expectation. |
Marco Marelli; Simona Amenta; Elena Angela Morone; Davide Crepaldi Meaning is in the beholder's eye: Morpho-semantic effects in masked priming Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 534–541, 2013. @article{Marelli2013, A substantial body of literature indicates that, at least at some level of processing, complex words are broken down into their morphemes solely on the basis of their orthographic form (e.g., Rastle, Davis, & New, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 11:1090-1098, 2004). Recent evidence has shown that this process might not be obligatory, as indicated by the fact that morpho-orthographic effects were not found in a cross-case same-different task-that is, when lexical access was not necessarily required (Duñabeitia, Kinoshita, Carreiras, & Norris, Language and Cognitive Processes 26:509-529, 2011). In this study, we employed a task that required understanding a series of words and, thus, implied lexical access. Masked primes were shown very briefly right before the appearance of the target word; prime-target pairs entertained a morpho-semantic (dealer-DEAL), a morpho-orthographic (corner-CORN), or a purely orthographic (brothel-BROTH) relationship. Eye fixation times clearly indicated facilitation for transparent pairs, but not for opaque pairs (or for orthographic pairs, which were used as a baseline). Conversely, the usual morpho-orthographic pattern was found in a control experiment, employing a lexical decision task. These results indicate that the access to a morpho-orthographic level of representation is not always necessary for lexical identification, which challenges models of visual word identification that cannot account for task-induced effects. |
Christoph Scheepers; Sibylle Mohr; Martin H. Fischer; Andrew M. Roberts Listening to limericks: A pupillometry investigation of perceivers' expectancy Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 9, pp. e74986, 2013. @article{Scheepers2013, What features of a poem make it captivating, and which cognitive mechanisms are sensitive to these features? We addressed these questions experimentally by measuring pupillary responses of 40 participants who listened to a series of Limericks. The Limericks ended with either a semantic, syntactic, rhyme or metric violation. Compared to a control condition without violations, only the rhyme violation condition induced a reliable pupillary response. An anomaly-rating study on the same stimuli showed that all violations were reliably detectable relative to the control condition, but the anomaly induced by rhyme violations was perceived as most severe. Together, our data suggest that rhyme violations in Limericks may induce an emotional response beyond mere anomaly detection. |
Matthew H. Schneps; Jenny M. Thomson; Gerhard Sonnert; Marc Pomplun; Chen Chen; Amanda Heffner-Wong Shorter lines facilitate reading in those who struggle Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. e71161, 2013. @article{Schneps2013, People with dyslexia, who ordinarily struggle to read, sometimes remark that reading is easier when e-readers are used. Here, we used eye tracking to observe high school students with dyslexia as they read using these devices. Among the factors investigated, we found that reading using a small device resulted in substantial benefits, improving reading speeds by 27%, reducing the number of fixations by 11%, and importantly, reducing the number of regressive saccades by more than a factor of 2, with no cost to comprehension. Given that an expected trade-off between horizontal and vertical regression was not observed when line lengths were altered, we speculate that these effects occur because sluggish attention spreads perception to the left as the gaze shifts during reading. Short lines eliminate crowded text to the left, reducing regression. The effects of attention modulation by the hand, and of increased letter spacing to reduce crowding, were also found to modulate the oculomotor dynamics in reading, but whether these factors resulted in benefits or costs depended on characteristics, such as visual attention span, that varied within our sample. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter Synonyms provide semantic preview benefit in English Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 4, pp. 619–633, 2013. @article{Schotter2013a, While orthographic and phonological preview benefits in reading are uncontroversial (see Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012 for a review), researchers have debated the existence of semantic preview benefit with positive evidence in Chinese and German, but no support in English. Two experiments, using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), show that semantic preview benefit can be observed in English when the preview and target are synonyms (share the same or highly similar meaning, e.g., curlers-rollers). However, no semantic preview benefit was observed for semantic associates (e.g., curlers-styling). These different preview conditions represent different degrees to which the meaning of the sentence changes when the preview is replaced by the target. When this continuous variable (determined by a norming procedure) was used as the predictor in the analyses, there was a significant relationship between it and all reading time measures, suggesting that similarity in meaning between what is accessed parafoveally and what is processed foveally may be an important influence on the presence of semantic preview benefit. Why synonyms provide semantic preview benefit in reading English is discussed in relation to (1) previous failures to find semantic preview benefit in English and (2) the fact that semantic preview benefit is observed in other languages even for non-synonymous words. Semantic preview benefit is argued to depend on several factors-attentional resources, depth of orthography, and degree of similarity between preview and target. |
Naveed A. Sheikh; Debra A. Titone Sensorimotor and linguistic information attenuate emotional word processing benefits: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Emotion, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 1107–1121, 2013. @article{Sheikh2013, Recent studies have reported that emotional words are processed faster than neutral words, though emotional benefits may not depend solely on words' emotionality. Drawing on an embodied approach to representation, we examined interactions between emotional, sensorimotor, and linguistic sources of information for target words embedded in sentential contexts. Using eye-movement measures for 43 native English speakers, we observed emotional benefits for negative and positive words and sensorimotor benefits for words high in concreteness, but only when target words were low in frequency. Moreover, emotional words were maximally faster than neutral words when words were low in concreteness (i.e., highly abstract), and sensorimotor benefits occurred only when words were not emotionally charged (i.e., emotionally neutral). Furthermore, emotional and concreteness benefits were attenuated by individual differences that attenuate and amplify emotional and sensorimotor information, respectively. Our results suggest that behavior is functionally modulated by embodied information (i.e., emotional and sensorimotor) when linguistic contributions to representation are not enhanced by high frequency. Furthermore, emotional benefits are maximal when words are not already embodied by sensorimotor contributions to representation (and vice versa). Our work is consistent with recent studies that have suggested that abstract words are grounded in emotional experiences, analogous to how concrete words are grounded in sensorimotor experiences. |
Jing Shen; Diana Deutsch; Keith Rayner On-line perception of Mandarin Tones 2 and 3: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 133, no. 5, pp. 3016–3029, 2013. @article{Shen2013, Using the visual world paradigm, the present study investigated on-line processing of fine-grained pitch information prior to lexical access in a tone language; specifically how lexical tone perception of Mandarin Tones 2 and 3 was influenced by the pitch height of the tone at onset, turning point, and offset. Native speakers of Mandarin listened to manipulated tone tokens and selected the corresponding word from four visually presented words (objects in Experiment 1 and characters in Experiment 2) while their eye movements were monitored. The results showed that 87% of ultimate tone judgments were made according to offset pitch height. Tokens with high offset pitch were identified as Tone 2, and low offset pitch as Tone 3. A low turning point pitch served as a pivotal cue for Tone 3, and prompted more eye fixations on Tone 3 items, until the offset pitch directed significantly more fixations to the final tone choice. The findings support the view that lexical tone perception is an incremental process, in which pitch height at critical points serves as an important cue. |
Heather Sheridan; Keith Rayner; Eyal M. Reingold Unsegmented text delays word identification: Evidence from a survival analysis of fixation durations Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 38–60, 2013. @article{Sheridan2013b, The present study employed distributional analyses of fixation times to examine the impact of removing spaces between words during reading. Specifically, we presented high and low frequency target words in a normal text condition that contained spaces (e.g., "John decided to sell the table in the garage sale") and in an unsegmented text condition that contained random numbers instead of spaces (e.g., "John4decided8to5sell9the7table2in3the9garage6sale"). The unsegmented text con- dition produced larger word frequency effects relative to the normal text condition for the gaze duration and total time measures (for similar findings, see Rayner, Fischer, & Pollatsek, 1998), which indicates that removing spaces can impact the word identification stage of reading. To further examine the effect of spacing on word identification, we used distributional analyses of first-fixation durations to contrast the time course of word frequency effects in the normal versus the unsegmented text conditions. In replication of prior findings (Reingold, Reichle, Glaholt, & Sheridan, 2012; Staub, White, Drieghe, Hollway, & Rayner, 2010), ex-Gaussian fitting revealed that the word frequency variable impacted both the shift and the skew of the distributions, and this pattern of results occurred for both the normal and unsegmented text conditions. In addition, a survival analysis technique revealed a later time course ofword frequency effects in the unsegmented relative to the normal condition, such that the earliest discernible influence of word frequency was 112 ms from the start of fixation in the normal text condition, and 152 ms in the unsegmented text condition. This delay in the temporal onset of word frequency effects in the unsegmented text condition strongly suggests that removing spaces delays the word identification stage of reading. Possible underlying mechanisms are discussed, including lateral masking and word segmentation. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold A further examination of the lexical-processing stages hypothesized by the E-Z Reader model Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 407–414, 2013. @article{Sheridan2013, Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences in which high- and low-frequency target words were presented normally (i.e., the normal condition) or with either reduced stimulus quality (i.e., the faint condition) or alternating lower- and uppercase letters (i.e., the case-alternated condition). Both the stimulus quality and case alternation manipulations interacted with word frequency for the gaze duration measure, such that the magnitude of word frequency effects was increased relative to the normal condition. However, stimulus quality (but not case alternation) interacted with word frequency for the early fixation time measures (i.e., first fixation, single fixation), whereas case alternation (but not stimulus quality) interacted with word frequency for the later fixation time measures (i.e., total time, go-past time). We interpret this pattern of results as evidence that stimulus quality influences an earlier stage of lexical processing than does case alternation, and we discuss the implications of our results for models of eye movement control during reading. |
Timothy J. Slattery; Keith Rayner Effects of intraword and interword spacing on eye movements during reading: Exploring the optimal use of space in a line of text Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 75, no. 6, pp. 1275–1292, 2013. @article{Slattery2013, Two eye movement experiments investigated intraword spacing (the space between letters within words) and interword spacing (the space between words) to explore the influence these variables have on eye movement control during reading. Both variables are important factors in determining the optimal use of space in a line of text, and fonts differ widely in how they employ these spaces. Prior research suggests that the proximity of flanking letters influences the identification of a central letter via lateral inhibition or crowding. If so, decrements in intraword spacing may produce inhibition in word processing. Still other research suggests that increases in intraword spacing can disrupt the integrity of word units. In English, interword spacing has a large influence on word segmentation and is important for saccade target selection. The results indicate an interplay between intra- and interword spacing that influences a font's readability. Additionally, these studies highlight the importance of word segmentation processes and have implications for the nature of lexical processing (serial vs. parallel). |
Timothy J. Slattery; Patrick Sturt; Kiel Christianson; Masaya Yoshida; Fernanda Ferreira Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 104–120, 2013. @article{Slattery2013a, Recent work has suggested that readers' initial and incorrect interpretation of temporarily ambiguous ("garden path") sentences (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001) sometimes lingers even after attempts at reanalysis. These lingering effects have been attributed to incomplete reanalysis. In two eye tracking experiments, we distinguish between two types of incompleteness: the language comprehension system might not build a faithful syntactic structure, or it might not fully erase the structure built during an initial misparse. The first experiment used reflexive binding and the gender mismatch paradigm to show that a complete and faithful structure is built following processing of the garden-path. The second experiment used two-sentence texts to examine the extent to which the garden-path meaning from the first sentence interferes with reading of the second. Together, the results indicate that misinterpretation effects are attributable not to failure in building a proper structure, but rather to failure in cleaning up all remnants of earlier attempts to build that syntactic representation. |
Manon W. Jones; Jane Ashby; Holly P. Branigan Dyslexia and fluency: Parafoveal and foveal influences on rapid automatized naming Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 554–567, 2013. @article{Jones2013, The ability to coordinate serial processing of multiple items is crucial for fluent reading but is known to be impaired in dyslexia. To investigate this impairment, we manipulated the orthographic and phonological similarity of adjacent letters online as dyslexic and nondyslexic readers named letters in a serial naming (RAN) task. Eye movements and voice onsets were recorded. Letter arrays contained target item pairs in which the second letter was orthographically or phonologically similar to the first letter when viewed either parafoveally (Experiment 1a) or foveally (Experiment 1b). Relative to normal readers, dyslexic readers were more affected by orthographic confusability in Experiment 1a and phonological confusability in Experiment 1b. Normal readers were slower to process orthographically similar letters in Experiment 1b. Findings indicate that the phonological and orthographic processing problems of dyslexic readers manifest differently during parafoveal and foveal processing, with each contributing to slower RAN performance and impaired reading fluency. |
Timothy R. Jordan; Victoria A. McGowan; Kevin B. Paterson What's left? An eye movement study of the influence of interword spaces to the left of fixation during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 551–557, 2013. @article{Jordan2013, In English and other alphabetic systems read from left to right, the useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend 14-15 character spaces to the right of each fixation, but only 3-4 character spaces to the left, and certainly no farther than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is remarkably small and seems inconsistent with the general bilateral symmetry of vision. Accordingly, in the present study we investigated the influence of a fundamental component of text to the left of fixation-interword spaces-using a well-established eyetracking paradigm in which invisible boundaries were set up along individual sentence displays that were then read. Each boundary corresponded to the leftmost edge of a word in a sentence, so that as the eyes crossed a boundary, interword spaces in the text to the left of that word were obscured (by inserting a letter x). The proximity of the obscured text during each fixational pause was maintained at one, two, three, or four interword spaces from the left boundary of each fixated word. Normal fixations, regressions, and progressive saccades were disrupted when the obscured text was up to three interword spaces (an average of over 12 character spaces) away from the fixated word, while four interword spaces away produced no disruption. These findings suggest that influential information from text is acquired during each fixational pause from much farther leftward than is generally realized and that this information contributes to normal reading performance. Implications of these findings for reading are discussed. |
Holly S. S. L. Joseph; Simon P. Liversedge Children's and adults' on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences during reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. e54141, 2013. @article{Joseph2013, While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children's syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults' syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage' in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such as, ‘I think I'll wear the new skirt I bought tomorrow/yesterday. It's really nice' in which the attachment of an adverbial phrase was manipulated. Results showed that adults and children exhibited similar processing preferences, but that children were delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis. It is concluded that children and adults have the same sentence-parsing mechanism in place, but that it operates with a slightly different time course. In addition, the data support the hypothesis that the visual processing system develops at a different rate than the linguistic processing system in children. |
Holly S. S. L. Joseph; Kate Nation; Simon P. Liversedge Using eye movements to investigate word frequency effects in children's sentence reading Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 207–222, 2013. @article{Joseph2013a, Although eye movements have been used widely to investigate how skilled adult readers process written language, relatively little research has used this methodology with children. This is unfortunate as, as we discuss here, eye-movement studies have significant potential to inform our understanding of children's reading development. We consider some of the empirical and theoretical issues that arise when using this methodology with children, illustrating our points with data from an experiment examining word frequency effects in 8-year-old children's sentence reading. Children showed significantly longer gaze durations to low- than high-frequency words, demonstrating that linguistic characteristics of text drive children's eye movements as they read. We discuss these findings within the broader context of how eye-movement studies can inform our understanding of children's reading, and can assist with the development of appropriately targeted interventions to support children as they learn to read. |
Benjawan Kasisopa; Ronan G. Reilly; Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin; Denis Burnham Eye movements while reading an unspaced writing system: The case of Thai Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 86, pp. 71–80, 2013. @article{Kasisopa2013, Thai has an alphabetic script with a distinctive feature - it has no spaces between words. Since previous research with spaced alphabetic systems (e.g., English) has suggested that readers use spaces to guide eye movements, it is of interest to investigate what physical factors might guide Thai readers' eye movements. Here the effects of word-initial and word-final position-specific character frequency, word-boundary bigram frequency, and overall word frequency on 30 Thai adults' eye movements when reading unspaced and spaced text was investigated. Linear mixed-effects model analyses of viewing time measures (first fixation duration, single fixation duration, and gaze duration) and of landing sites were conducted. Thai readers tended to land their first fixation at or near the centre of words, just as readers of spaced texts do. A critical determinant of this was word boundary characters: higher position-specific frequency of initial and of final characters significantly facilitated landing sites closer to the word centre while word-boundary bigram frequency appeared to behave as a proxy for initial and final position-specific character frequency. It appears, therefore, that Thai readers make use of the position-specific frequencies of word boundary characters in targeting words and directing eye movements to an optimal landing site. |
Julie A. Kirkby; H. I. Blythe; Denis Drieghe; V. Benson; Simon P. Liversedge In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 664–678, 2013. @article{Kirkby2013, Previous studies examining binocular coordination during reading have reported conflicting results in terms of the nature of disparity (e.g. Kliegl, Nuthmann, & Engbert (Journal of Experimental Psychology General 135:12-35, 2006); Liversedge, White, Findlay, & Rayner (Vision Research 46:2363-2374, 2006). One potential cause of this inconsistency is differences in acquisition devices and associated analysis technologies. We tested this by directly comparing binocular eye movement recordings made using SR Research EyeLink 1000 and the Fourward Technologies Inc. DPI binocular eye-tracking systems. Participants read sentences or scanned horizontal rows of dot strings; for each participant, half the data were recorded with the EyeLink, and the other half with the DPIs. The viewing conditions in both testing laboratories were set to be very similar. Monocular calibrations were used. The majority of fixations recorded using either system were aligned, although data from the EyeLink system showed greater disparity magnitudes. Critically, for unaligned fixations, the data from both systems showed a majority of uncrossed fixations. These results suggest that variability in previous reports of binocular fixation alignment is attributable to the specific viewing conditions associated with a particular experiment (variables such as luminance and viewing distance), rather than acquisition and analysis software and hardware. |
Reinhold Kliegl; Sven Hohenstein; Ming Yan; Scott A. McDonald How preview space/time translates into preview cost/benefit for fixation durations during reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 581–600, 2013. @article{Kliegl2013, Eye-movement control during reading depends on foveal and parafoveal information. If the parafoveal preview of the next word is suppressed, reading is less efficient. A linear mixed model (LMM) reanalysis of McDonald (2006) confirmed his observation that preview benefit may be limited to parafoveal words that have been selected as the saccade target. Going beyond the original analyses, in the same LMM, we examined how the preview effect (i.e., the difference in single-fixation duration, SFD, between random-letter and identical preview) depends on the gaze duration on the pretarget word and on the amplitude of the saccade moving the eye onto the target word. There were two key results: (a) The shorter the saccade amplitude (i.e., the larger preview space), the shorter a subsequent SFD with an identical preview; this association was not observed with a random-letter preview. (b) However, the longer the gaze duration on the pretarget word, the longer the subsequent SFD on the target, with the difference between random-letter string and identical previews increasing with preview time. A third pattern-increasing cost of a random-letter string in the parafovea associated with shorter saccade amplitudes-was observed for target gaze durations. Thus, LMMs revealed that preview effects, which are typically summarized under "preview benefit", are a complex mixture of preview cost and preview benefit and vary with preview space and preview time. The consequence for reading is that parafoveal preview may not only facilitate, but also interfere with lexical access. |
Sungryong Koh; Nakyeong Yoon; Si On Yoon; Alexander Pollatsek Word frequency and root-morpheme frequency effects on processing of Korean particle-suffixed words Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 64–72, 2013. @article{Koh2013, Two experiments investigated the roles of the frequency of the root morpheme and the frequency of the whole word for a particular type of suffixed word in Korean in which the suffixed word can be thought of as a phrase (e.g., grandson-with). In both experiments, sentence frames were constructed so that they could have one of two target words that varied on frequency characteristics in the same location in the sentence. In Experiment 1, the frequency of the root morpheme was varied with the frequency of the word controlled, and in Experiment 2, the frequency of the word was varied with the frequency of the root morpheme controlled. Word frequency had a significant effect on fixation times, whereas root morpheme frequency did not. The results were surprising as native Korean speakers view the root morpheme as the ‘‘word'' (analogous to how English readers would view a noun followed by a prepositional phrase). |
Arnout W. Koornneef; Ted J. M. Sanders Establishing coherence relations in discourse: The influence of implicit causality and connectives on pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1169–1206, 2013. @article{Koornneef2013, Many studies have shown that readers and listeners recruit verb-based implicit causality information rapidly in the service of pronoun resolution. However, since most of these studies focused on constructions in which because connected the two critical clauses, it is unclear to what extent implicit causality information affects the processing of pronouns embedded in other types of coherence relations. In an eye-tracking and completion study we addressed this void by varying whether because, but, and and joined a primary clause containing the implicit causality verb, with a secondary clause containing a critical gender-marked pronoun. The results showed that the claims made for implicit causality hold if the connective because is present (i.e., a reading time delay following a pronoun that is inconsistent with the implicit causality bias of the verb), but do not generalise to other connectives like but and and. This shows that the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a pronoun resolution cue depends on the coherence relation in which the verb, the antecedent and the pronoun appear. Many studies have shown that readers and listeners recruit verb-based implicit causality information rapidly in the service of pronoun resolution. However, since most of these studies focused on constructions in which because connected the two critical clauses, it is unclear to what extent implicit causality information affects the processing of pronouns embedded in other types of coherence relations. In an eye-tracking and completion study we addressed this void by varying whether because, but, and and joined a primary clause containing the implicit causality verb, with a secondary clause containing a critical gender-marked pronoun. The results showed that the claims made for implicit causality hold if the connective because is present (i.e., a reading time delay following a pronoun that is inconsistent with the implicit causality bias of the verb), but do not generalise to other connectives like but and and. This shows that the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a pronoun resolution cue depends on the coherence relation in which the verb, the antecedent and the pronoun appear. |
2012 |
Hazel I. Blythe; Feifei Liang; Chuanli Zang; Jingxin Wang; Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Simon P. Liversedge Inserting spaces into Chinese text helps readers to learn new words: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 241–254, 2012. @article{Blythe2012, We examined whether inserting spaces between words in Chinese text would help children learn to read new vocabulary. We recorded adults' and 7- to 10-year-old children's eye movements as they read new 2-character words, each embedded in four explanatory sentences (the learning session). Participants were divided into learning subgroups - half read word spaced sentences, and half read unspaced sentences. In the test session participants read the new words again, each in one new sentence; here, all participants read unspaced text. In the learning session, participants in the spaced group read the new words more quickly than participants in the unspaced group. Further, children in the spaced group maintained this benefit in the test session (unspaced text). In relation to three different models of Chinese lexical identification, we argue that the spacing manipulation allowed the children to form either stronger connections between the two characters' representations and the corresponding, novel word representation, or to form a more fully specified representation of the word itself. |
Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Chuanli Zang; Qian Bian; Lei Cui; Wei Qi; Keith Rayner; Simon P. Liversedge Using stroke removal to investigate Chinese character identification during reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 951–979, 2012. @article{Yan2012, We explored the effect of stroke removal from Chinese characters on eye movements during reading to examine the role of stroke encoding in character identification. Experimental sentences were comprised of characters with different proportions of strokes removed (15, 30, and 50%), and different types of strokes removed (beginning, ending, and strokes that ensured the configuration of the character was retained). Reading times, number of fixations and regression measures all showed that Chinese characters with 15% of strokes removed were as easy to read as Chinese characters without any strokes removed. However, when 30%, or more of a character's strokes were removed, reading characters with their configuration retained was easiest, characters with ending strokes removed were more difficult, whilst characters with beginning strokes removed were most difficult to read. The results strongly suggest that not all strokes within a character have equal status during character identification, and a flexible stroke encoding system must underlie successful character identification during Chinese reading. |
Heather Winskel; Manuel Perea; Theeraporn Ratitamkul On the flexibility of letter position coding during lexical processing: Evidence from eye movements when reading Thai Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 65, no. 8, pp. 1522–1536, 2012. @article{Winskel2012, Previous research supports the view that initial letter position has a privileged role in comparison to internal letters for visual-word recognition in Roman script. The current study examines whether this is the case for Thai. Thai is an alphabetic script in which ordering of the letters does not necessarily correspond to the ordering of a word's phonemes. Furthermore, Thai does not normally have interword spaces. We examined whether the position of transposed letters (internal, e.g., porblem, vs. initial, e.g., rpoblem) within a word influences how readily those words are processed when interword spacing and demarcation of word boundaries (using alternating bold text) is manipulated. The eye movements of 54 participants were recorded while they were reading sentences silently. There was no apparent difference in degree of disruption caused when reading initial and internal transposed-letter nonwords. These findings give support to the view that letter position encoding in Thai is relatively flexible and that actual identity of the letter is more critical than letter position. This flexible encoding strategy is in line with the characteristics of Thai–that is, the flexibility in the ordering of the letters and the lack of interword spaces, which creates a certain level of ambiguity in relation to the demarcation of word boundaries. These findings point to script-specific effects operating in letter encoding in visual-word recognition and reading. |
Ming Yan; Sarah Risse; Xiaolin Zhou; Reinhold Kliegl Preview fixation duration modulates identical and semantic preview benefit in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1093–1111, 2012. @article{Yan2012a, Semantic preview benefit from parafoveal words is critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. Semantic preview benefit has been demonstrated for Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm in which unrelated or semantically related previews of a target word "N" + 1 are replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word "N" (Yan et al., 2009); for the target word in position "N" + 2, only identical compared to unrelated-word preview led to shorter fixation times on the target word (Yan et al., in press). A reanalysis of these data reveals that identical and semantic preview benefits depend on preview duration (i.e., the fixation duration on the preboundary word). Identical preview benefit from word "N" + 1 increased with preview duration. The identical preview benefit was also significant for "N" + 2, but did not significantly interact with preview duration. The previously reported semantic preview benefit from word "N" + 1 was mainly due to single- or first-fixation durations following short previews. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading. |
Ming Yan; Wei Zhou; Hua Shu; Reinhold Kliegl Lexical and sublexical semantic preview benefits in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 1069–1075, 2012. @article{Yan2012b, Semantic processing from parafoveal words is an elusive phenomenon in alphabetic languages, but it has been demonstrated only for a restricted set of noncompound Chinese characters. Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, this experiment examined whether parafoveal lexical and sublexical semantic information was extracted from compound preview characters. Results generalized parafoveal semantic processing to this representative set of Chinese characters and extended the parafoveal processing to radical (sublexical) level semantic information extraction. Implications for notions of parafoveal information extraction during Chinese reading are discussed. |
Jinmian Yang; Keith Rayner; Nan Li; Suiping Wang Is preview benefit from word n + 2 a common effect in reading Chinese? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1079–1091, 2012. @article{Yang2012, Although most studies of reading English (and other alphabetic languages) have indicated that readers do not obtain preview benefit from word n + 2, Yang, Wang, Xu, and Rayner (2009) reported evidence that Chinese readers obtain preview benefit from word n + 2. However, this effect may not be common in Chinese because the character prior to the target word in Yang et al.'s experiment was always a very high frequency function word. In the current experiment, we utilized a relatively low frequency word n + 1 to examine whether an n + 2 preview benefit effect would still exist and failed to find any preview benefit from word n + 2. These results are consistent with a recent study which indicated that foveal load modulates the perceptual span during Chinese reading (Yan, Kliegl, Shu, Pan, & Zhou, 2010). Implications of these results for models of eye movement control are discussed. |
Jinmian Yang; Adrian Staub; Nan Li; Suiping Wang; Keith Rayner Plausibility effects when reading one-and two-character words in Chinese: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 1801–1809, 2012. @article{Yang2012b, Eye movements of Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing a critical character that was either a 1-character word or the initial character of a 2-character word. Due to manipulation of the verb prior to the target word, the 1-character target word (or the first character of the 2-character target word) was either plausible or implausible, as an independent word, at the point at which it appeared, whereas the 2-character word was always plausible. The eye movement data showed that the plausibility manipulation did not exert an influence on the reading of the 2-character word or its component characters. However, plausibility significantly influenced reading of the 1-character target word. These results suggest that processes of semantic integration in reading Chinese are performed at a word level, instead of a character level, and that word segmentation must take place very early in the course of processing. |
Jinmian Yang; Suiping Wang; Xiuhong Tong; Keith Rayner Semantic and plausibility effects on preview benefit during eye fixations in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1031–1052, 2012. @article{Yang2012c, The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to examine whether high level information affects preview benefit during Chinese reading. In two experiments, readers read sentences with a 1-character target word while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, the semantic relatedness between the target word and the preview word was manipulated so that there were semantically related and unrelated preview words, both of which were not plausible in the sentence context. No significant differences between these two preview conditions were found, indicating no effect of semantic preview. In Experiment 2, we further examined semantic preview effects with plausible preview words. There were four types of previews: identical, related & plausible, unrelated & plausible, and unrelated & implausible. The results revealed a significant effect of plausibility as single fixation and gaze duration on the target region were shorter in the two plausible conditions than in the implausible condition. Moreover, there was some evidence for a semantic preview benefit as single fixation duration on the target region was shorter in the related & plausible condition than the unrelated & plausible condition. Implications of these results for processing of high level information during Chinese reading are discussed. |
Miao-Hsuan Yen; Ralph Radach; Ovid J. L. Tzeng; Jie-Li Tsai Usage of statistical cues for word boundary in reading Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1007–1029, 2012. @article{Yen2012, The present study examined the use of statistical cues for word boundaries during Chinese reading. Participants were instructed to read sentences for comprehension with their eye movements being recorded. A two-character target word was embedded in each sentence. The contrast between the probabilities of the ending character (C2) of the target word (C12) being used as word beginning and ending in all words containing it was manipulated. In addition, by using the boundary paradigm, parafoveal overlapping ambiguity in the string C123 was manipulated with three types of preview of the character C3, which was a single-character word in the identical condition. During preview, the combination of C23′ was a legal word in the ambiguous condition and was not a word in the control condition. Significant probability and preview effects were observed. In the low-probability condition, inconsistency in the frequent within-word position (word beginning) and the present position (word ending) lengthened gaze durations and increased refixation rate on the target word. Although benefits from the identical previews were apparent, effects of overlapping ambiguity were negligible. The results suggest that the probability of within-word positions had an influence during character-to-word assignment, which was mainly verified during foveal processing. Thus, the overlapping ambiguity between parafoveal words did not interfere with reading. Further investigation is necessary to examine whether current computational models of eye movement control should incorporate statistical cues for word boundaries together with other linguistic factors in their word processing system to account for Chinese reading. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. |
Adrian Staub; Matthew J. Abbott; Richard S. Bogartz Linguistically guided anticipatory eye movements in scene viewing Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 922–946, 2012. @article{Staub2012, The present study replicated the well-known demonstration by Altmann and Kamide (1999) that listeners make linguistically guided anticipatory eye movements, but used photographs of scenes rather than clip-art arrays as the visual stimuli. When listeners heard a verb for which a particular object in a visual scene was the likely theme, they made earlier looks to this object (e.g., looks to a cake upon hearing The boy will eat ?) than when they heard a control verb (The boy will move ?). New data analyses assessed whether these anticipatory effects are due to a linguistic effect on the targeting of saccades (i.e., the where parameter of eye movement control), the duration of fixations (i.e., the when parameter), or both. Participants made fewer fixations before reaching the target object when the verb was selectionally restricting (e.g., will eat). However, verb type had no effect on the duration of individual eye fixations. These results suggest an important constraint on the linkage between spoken language processing and eye movement control: Linguistic input may influence only the decision of where to move the eyes, not the decision of when to move them. |
Simone Sulpizio; James M. McQueen Italians use abstract knowledge about lexical stress during spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 177–193, 2012. @article{Sulpizio2012, In two eye-tracking experiments in Italian, we investigated how acoustic information and stored knowledge about lexical stress are used during the recognition of tri-syllabic spoken words. Experiment 1 showed that Italians use acoustic cues to a word's stress pattern rapidly in word recognition, but only for words with antepenultimate stress. Words with penultimate stress - the most common pattern - appeared to be recognized by default. In Experiment 2, listeners had to learn new words from which some stress cues had been removed, and then recognize reduced- and full-cue versions of those words. The acoustic manipulation affected recognition only of newly-learnt words with antepenultimate stress: Full-cue versions, even though they were never heard during training, were recognized earlier than reduced-cue versions. Newly-learnt words with penultimate stress were recognized earlier overall, but recognition of the two versions of these words did not differ. Abstract knowledge (i.e., knowledge generalized over the lexicon) about lexical stress - which pattern is the default and which cues signal the non-default pattern - appears to be used during the recognition of known and newly-learnt Italian words. |
Joseph C. Toscano; Bob McMurray Cue-integration and context effects in speech: Evidence against speaking-rate normalization Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 74, no. 6, pp. 1284–1301, 2012. @article{Toscano2012, Listeners are able to accurately recognize speech despite variation in acoustic cues across contexts, such as different speaking rates. Previous work has suggested that listeners use rate information (indicated by vowel length; VL) to modify their use of context-dependent acoustic cues, like voice-onset time (VOT), a primary cue to voicing. We present several experiments and simulations that offer an alternative explanation: that listeners treat VL as a phonetic cue rather than as an indicator of speaking rate, and that they rely on general cue-integration principles to combine information from VOT and VL. We demonstrate that listeners use the two cues independently, that VL is used in both naturally produced and synthetic speech, and that the effects of stimulus naturalness can be explained by a cue-integration model. Together, these results suggest that listeners do not interpret VOT relative to rate information provided by VL and that the effects of speaking rate can be explained by more general cue-integration principles. |
Alison M. Trude; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Talker-specific perceptual adaptation during online speech perception Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 27, no. 7-8, pp. 979–1001, 2012. @article{Trude2012, Despite the ubiquity of between-talker differences in accent and dialect, little is known about how listeners adjust to this source of variability as language is perceived in real time. In three experiments, we examined whether, and when, listeners can use specific knowledge of a particular talker's accent during on-line speech processing. Listeners were exposed to the speech of two talkers, a male who had an unfamiliar regional dialect of American English, in which the /æ/ vowel is raised to /ei/ only before /g/ (e.g., bag is pronounced /beig/), and a female talker without the dialect. In order to examine how knowledge of a particular talker's accent influenced language processing, we examined listeners' interpretation of unaccented words such as back and bake in contexts that included a competitor like bag. If interpretation processes are talker-specific, the pattern of competition from bag should vary depending on how that talker pronounces the competitor word. In all three experiments, listeners rapidly used their knowledge of how the talker would have pronounced bag to either rule out or include bag as a temporary competitor. Providing a cue to talker identity prior to the critical word strengthened these effects. These results are consistent with views of language processing in which multiple sources of information, including previous experience with the current talker and contextual cues, are rapidly integrated during lexical activation and selection processes.$backslash$nDespite the ubiquity of between-talker differences in accent and dialect, little is known about how listeners adjust to this source of variability as language is perceived in real time. In three experiments, we examined whether, and when, listeners can use specific knowledge of a particular talker's accent during on-line speech processing. Listeners were exposed to the speech of two talkers, a male who had an unfamiliar regional dialect of American English, in which the /æ/ vowel is raised to /ei/ only before /g/ (e.g., bag is pronounced /beig/), and a female talker without the dialect. In order to examine how knowledge of a particular talker's accent influenced language processing, we examined listeners' interpretation of unaccented words such as back and bake in contexts that included a competitor like bag. If interpretation processes are talker-specific, the pattern of competition from bag should vary depending on how that talker pronounces the competitor word. In all three experiments, listeners rapidly used their knowledge of how the talker would have pronounced bag to either rule out or include bag as a temporary competitor. Providing a cue to talker identity prior to the critical word strengthened these effects. These results are consistent with views of language processing in which multiple sources of information, including previous experience with the current talker and contextual cues, are rapidly integrated during lexical activation and selection processes. |
Jie-Li Tsai; Reinhold Kliegl; Ming Yan Parafoveal semantic information extraction in traditional Chinese reading Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 141, no. 1, pp. 17–23, 2012. @article{Tsai2012, Semantic information extraction from the parafovea has been reported only in simplified Chinese for a special subset of characters and its generalizability has been questioned. This study uses traditional Chinese, which differs from simplified Chinese in visual complexity and in mapping semantic forms, to demonstrate access to parafoveal semantic information during reading of this script. Preview duration modulates various types (identical, phonological, and unrelated) of parafoveal information extraction. Parafoveal semantic extraction is more elusive in English; therefore, we conclude that such effects in Chinese are presumably caused by substantial cross-language differences from alphabetic scripts. The property of Chinese characters carrying rich lexical information in a small region provides the possibility of semantic extraction in the parafovea. |
Annelie Tuinman; Holger Mitterer; Anne Cutler Resolving ambiguity in familiar and unfamiliar casual speech Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 530–544, 2012. @article{Tuinman2012, In British English, the phrase . Canada aided can sound like . Canada raided if the speaker links the two vowels at the word boundary with an intrusive /r/. There are subtle phonetic differences between an onset /r/ and an intrusive /r/, however. With cross-modal priming and eye-tracking, we examine how native British English listeners and non-native (Dutch) listeners deal with the lexical ambiguity arising from this language-specific connected speech process. Together the results indicate that the presence of /r/ initially activates competing words for both listener groups; however, the native listeners rapidly exploit the phonetic cues and achieve correct lexical selection. In contrast, The Dutch-native advanced L2 listeners to English failed to recover from the /r/-induced competition, and failed to match native performance in either task. The /r/-intrusion process, which adds a phoneme to speech input, thus causes greater difficulty for L2 listeners than connected-speech processes which alter or delete phonemes. |
Araceli Valle; Katherine S. Binder; Caitlin B. Walsh; Carolyn Nemier; Kathryn E. Bangs Eye movements, prosody, and word frequency among average-and high-skilled second-grade readers Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. October, pp. 171–190, 2012. @article{Valle2012, The present study explored how average-and high-skilled second-grade readers (as identified by their Woodcock-Johnson III Test of Academic Achieve-ment Broad Reading scores) differed on behavioral measures of reading related to comprehension: eye movements during silent reading and prosody during oral reading. Results from silent reading implicate word processing efficiency: high skilled readers had fewer fixations and intraword regressions, and shorter first fixation, gaze duration, and total word reading times. Their skipping and regres-sion patterns during silent reading were representative of a more systematic approach to passage reading, suggesting that meta-cognitive or motivational factors may also differentiate the groups. Compared to high-skilled readers, average readers' oral reading was characterized by longer pauses, less differen-tiation across pause types, and more intrusions. Counter to prior research, aspects of prosody associated with expressivity favored average readers: they had a sharper pitch declination at the end of declarative sentences and used a wider range of pitch within sentences. High-and low-frequency target words yielded frequency effects during both silent and oral reading. Interactions with skill level on the oral reading task are discussed in terms of potential differences in strategic approaches to reading challenges. |
Menno Schoot; Albert Reijntjes; Ernest C. D. M. Van Lieshout How do children deal with inconsistencies in text? An eye fixation and self-paced reading study in good and poor reading comprehenders Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 7, pp. 1665–1690, 2012. @article{Schoot2012, In two experiments, we investigated comprehension monitoring in 10-12 years old children differing in reading comprehension skill. The children's self-paced reading times (Experiment 1) and eye fixations and regressions (Experiment 2) were measured as they read narrative texts in which an action of the protagonist was consistent or inconsistent with a description of the protagonist's character given earlier. The character description and action were adjacent (local condition) or separated by a long filler paragraph (global condition). The self-paced reading data (Experiment 1), the initial reading and rereading data (Experiment 2), together with the comprehension question data (both experiments), are discussed within the situation model framework and suggest that poor comprehenders find difficulty in constructing a richly elaborated situation model. Poor comprehenders presumably fail to represent character information in the model as a consequence of which they are not able to detect inconsistencies in the global condition (in which the character information is lost from working memory). The patterns of results rule out an explanation in terms of impaired situation model updating ability. |
Jun-Yun Zhang; Gong-Liang Zhang; Lei Liu; Cong Yu Whole report uncovers correctly identified but incorrectly placed target information under visual crowding Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 1–11, 2012. @article{Zhang2012b, Multiletter identification studies often find correctly identified letters being reported in wrong positions. However, how position uncertainty impacts crowding in peripheral vision is not fully understood. The observation of a flanker being reported as the central target cannot be taken as unequivocal evidence for position misperception because the observers could be biased to report a more identifiable flanker when failing to identify the central target. In addition, it has never been reported whether a correctly identified central target can be perceived at a flanker position under crowding. Empirical investigation into this possibility holds the key to demonstrating letter-level position uncertainty in crowding, because the position errors of the least identifiable central target cannot be attributed to response bias. We asked normally-sighted observers to report either the central target of a trigram (partial report) or all three characters (whole report). The results showed that, for radially arranged trigrams, the rate of reporting the central target regardless of the reported position in the whole report was significantly higher than the partial report rate, and the extra target reports mostly ended up in flanker positions. Error analysis indicated that target-flanker position swapping and misalignment (lateral shift of the target and one flanker) underlay this target misplacement. Our results thus establish target misplacement as a source of crowding errors and ascertain the role of letter-level position uncertainty in crowding. |
Andrea Weber; Matthew W. Crocker On the nature of semantic constraints on lexical access Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 195–214, 2012. @article{Weber2012, We present two eye-tracking experiments that investigate lexical frequency and semantic context constraints in spoken-word recognition in German. In both experiments, the pivotal words were pairs of nouns overlapping at onset but varying in lexical frequency. In Experiment 1, German listeners showed an expected frequency bias towards high-frequency competitors (e.g., Blume, 'flower') when instructed to click on low-frequency targets (e.g., Bluse, 'blouse'). In Experiment 2, semantically constraining context increased the availability of appropriate low-frequency target words prior to word onset, but did not influence the availability of semantically inappropriate high-frequency competitors at the same time. Immediately after target word onset, however, the activation of high-frequency competitors was reduced in semantically constraining sentences, but still exceeded that of unrelated distractor words significantly. The results suggest that (1) semantic context acts to downgrade activation of inappropriate competitors rather than to exclude them from competition, and (2) semantic context influences spoken-word recognition, over and above anticipation of upcoming referents. |
Sarah J. White; Adrian Staub The distribution of fixation durations during reading: Effects of stimulus quality Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 603–617, 2012. @article{White2012, Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read single sentences presented normally, presented entirely in faint text, or presented normally except for a single faint word. Fixations were longer when the entire sentence was faint than when the sentence was presented normally. In addition, fixations were much longer on a single faint word embedded in normal text, compared to when the entire sentence was faint. The primary aim of the study was to examine the influence of stimulus quality on the distribution of fixation durations. Ex-Gaussian fitting revealed that stimulus quality affected the mean of the Normal component, but in contrast to results from single-word tasks (Plourde & Besner, 1997), stimulus quality did not affect the exponential component, regardless of whether one or all words were faint. The results also contrast with the finding (Staub, White, Drieghe, Hollway, & Rayner, 2010) that the word frequency effect on fixation durations is an effect on both of the critical distributional parameters. These findings are argued to have implications for the interpretation of the role of stimulus quality in word recognition, and for models of eye movement control in reading. |
Veronica Whitford; Debra Titone In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 73–80, 2012. @article{Whitford2012, We used eye movement measures of first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph reading to investigate whether the degree of current L2 exposure modulates the relative size of L1 and L2 frequency effects (FEs). The results showed that bilinguals displayed larger L2 than L1 FEs during both early-and late-stage eye movement measures, which are taken to reflect initial lexical access and postlexical access, respectively. More-over, the magnitude of L2 FEs was inversely related to current L2 exposure, such that lower levels of L2 exposure led to larger L2 FEs. In contrast, during early-stage reading measures, bilinguals with higher levels of current L2 exposure showed larger L1 FEs than did bilinguals with lower levels of L2 exposure, suggesting that increased L2 experience modifies the earliest stages of L1 lexical access. Taken together, the findings are consistent with implicit learning accounts (e.g., Monsell, 1991), the weaker links hypothesis (Gollan, Montoya, Cera, Sandoval, Journal of Memory and Language, 58:787–814, 2008), and current bilingual visual word recognition models (e.g., the bilingual interactive activation model plus [BIA+]; Dijkstra & van Heuven, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5:175– 197, 2002). Thus, amount of current L2 exposure is a key determinant of FEs and, thus, lexical activation, in both the L1 and L2. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Morgan E. Eisler The importance of the first and last letter in words during sentence reading Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 141, no. 3, pp. 336–351, 2012. @article{Johnson2012, Previous research suggests that the first and last letters of words are more important than the interior letters during reading. A question that has yet to be fully studied is why this is so. The current study reports four experiments in which participants read sentences containing words with transposed letters occurring at the beginning of the word, near the middle of the word, or at the end of the word. Experiments 1 and 2 also included some sentences where the spaces were removed and replaced with hash marks (#) to equate all letters on their degree of lateral interference from adjacent letter positions. In Experiment 3, equating was done by adding an additional space between all of the letters, so that no letter position received lateral interference from any letter. In Experiment 4, readers read sentences from right to left so that word-initial letters were presented furthest into the parafovea. The results indicate that although the first letter of a word has a privileged role over interior letters regardless of the degree of lateral interference it receives or its location in the parafovea (suggesting that it is intrinsically related to how we process, store, or access lexical information), the last letter of a word is more important than interior letters only when it receives less lateral interference or when its parafoveal location was close to the fovea (suggesting that it is privileged only due to low-level visual factors). These findings have important implications for current theories and computational models regarding the roles of various letter positions in reading. |
Timothy R. Jordan; Victoria A. McGowan; Kevin B. Paterson Reading with a filtered fovea: The influence of visual quality at the point of fixation during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 1078–1084, 2012. @article{Jordan2012, Reading relies critically on processing text in foveal vision during brief fixational pauses, and high-quality visual input from foveal text is fundamental to theories of reading. However, the quality of visual input from foveal text that is actually functional for reading and the effects of this input on reading performance are unclear. To investigate these issues, a moving, gaze-contingent foveal filtering technique was developed to display areas of text within foveal vision that provided only coarse, medium, or fine scale visual input during each fixational pause during reading. Normal reading times were unaffected when foveal text up to three characters wide at the point of fixation provided any one visual input (coarse, medium, or fine). Wider areas of coarse visual input lengthened reading times, but reading still occurred, and normal reading times were completely unaffected when only medium or fine visual input extended across the entire fovea. Further analyses revealed that each visual input had no effect on the number of fixations made when normal text was read, that adjusting fixation durations helped preserve reading efficiency for different visual inputs, and that each visual input had virtually no effect on normal saccades. These findings indicate that, despite the resolving power of foveal vision and the emphasis placed on high-quality foveal visual input by theories of reading, normal reading functions with similar success using a range of restricted visual inputs from foveal text, even at the point of fixation. Some implications of these findings for theories of reading are discussed. |
Yuki Kamide Learning individual talkers' structural preferences Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 66–71, 2012. @article{Kamide2012, Listeners are often capable of adjusting to the variability contained in individual talkers' (speakers') speech. The vast majority of findings on talker adaptation are concerned with learning the contingency between . phonological characteristics and talker identity. In contrast, the present study investigates representations at a more abstract level - the contingency between . syntactic attachment style and talker identity. In a 'visual-world' experiment, participants were exposed to semi-realistic scenes depicting several objects (e.g., an adult man, a young girl, a motorbike, a carousel, and other objects) accompanied by a spoken sentence with a structurally ambiguous relative clause (e.g., 'The uncle of the girl who will ride the motorbike/carousel is from France.' In the context of the scene, 'motorbike' suggested the uncle as the agent of the riding, whereas 'carousel' suggested the girl as the agent). For half the experimental items, one version of the sentence was read by one talker, who . always uttered sentences that resolved, pragmatically, to the high attachment (the uncle as the agent), and the other by another talker, who . always uttered sentences resolving to the low attachment (the girl as the agent). For the other half of the experimental items, both versions were read by a third talker who produced both high and low attachments. It was found that, after exposure to these stimuli, and for new sentences not heard previously, participants learnt to anticipate the 'appropriate' attachment depending on talker identity (with no attachment preference for the talker who produced both attachment types). The data suggest that listeners can learn the relationship between talker identity and abstract, structural, properties of their speech, and that syntactic attachment decisions in comprehension can reflect sensitivity to talker-specific syntactic style. |
Argyro Katsika; David Braze; Ashwini Deo; Maria Mercedes Piñango Complement Coercion: Distinguishing between type-shifting and pragmatic inferencing Journal Article In: The Mental Lexicon, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 58–76, 2012. @article{Katsika2012, Although Complement Coercion has been systematically associated with computational cost, there remains a serious confound in the experimental evidence built up in previous studies. The confound arises from the fact that lexico-semantic differences within the set of verbs assumed to involve coercion have not been taken into consideration. From among the set of verbs that have been reported to exhibit complement coercion effects we identified two clear semantic classes — aspectual verbs and psychological verbs. We hypothesize that the semantic difference between the two should result in differing processing profiles. Aspectual predicates ( begin ) trigger coercion and processing cost while psychological predicates ( enjoy ) do not. Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment supports our hypothesis. Coercion costs are restricted to aspectual predicates while no such effects are found with psychological predicates. These findings have implications for how these two kinds of predicates might be lexically encoded as well as for whether the observed interpolation of eventive meaning can be attributed to type-shifting (e.g., McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, & Jackendoff, 2001) or to pragmatic-inferential processes (e.g., De Almeida, 2004). |
Young-Suk Kim; Ralph Radach; Christian Vorstius Eye movements and parafoveal processing during reading in Korean Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1053–1078, 2012. @article{Kim2012a, Parafoveal word processing was examined during Korean reading. Twenty-four native speakers of Korean read sentences in two conditions while their eye movements were being monitored. The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to create a mismatch between characters displayed before and after an eye movement contingent display change. In the first condition, the critical previews were correct case markers in terms of syntactic category (e.g., object marker for an object noun) but with a phonologically incorrect form (e.g., using [Korean character omitted] instead of [Korean character omitted] when the preceding noun ends with a consonant). In the second condition, incorrect case markers in terms of syntactic category were used, creating a semantic mismatch between preview and target. Results include a small but significant parafovea-on-fovea effect on the preceding fixation, combined with a large effect on late measures of target word reading when a syntactically incorrect preview was presented. These results indicate that skilled Korean readers are quite sensitive to high-level linguistic information available in the parafovea. |
Pia Knoeferle; Helene Kreysa Can speaker gaze modulate syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment during spoken sentence comprehension? Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 3, pp. 538, 2012. @article{Knoeferle2012, During comprehension, a listener can rapidly follow a frontally seated speaker's gaze to an object before its mention, a behavior which can shorten latencies in speeded sentence verification. However, the robustness of gaze-following, its interaction with core comprehension processes such as syntactic structuring, and the persistence of its effects are unclear. In two "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments participants watched a video of a speaker, seated at an angle, describing transitive (non-depicted) actions between two of three Second Life characters on a computer screen. Sentences were in German and had either subject(NP1)-verb-object(NP2) or object(NP1)-verb-subject(NP2) structure; the speaker either shifted gaze to the NP2 character or was obscured. Several seconds later, participants verified either the sentence referents or their role relations. When participants had seen the speaker's gaze shift, they anticipated the NP2 character before its mention and earlier than when the speaker was obscured. This effect was more pronounced for SVO than OVS sentences in both tasks. Interactions of speaker gaze and sentence structure were more pervasive in role-relations verification: participants verified the role relations faster for SVO than OVS sentences, and faster when they had seen the speaker shift gaze than when the speaker was obscured. When sentence and template role-relations matched, gaze-following even eliminated the SVO-OVS response-time differences. Thus, gaze-following is robust even when the speaker is seated at an angle to the listener; it varies depending on the syntactic structure and thematic role relations conveyed by a sentence; and its effects can extend to delayed post-sentence comprehension processes. These results suggest that speaker gaze effects contribute pervasively to visual attention and comprehension processes and should thus be accommodated by accounts of situated language comprehension. |
Lynn Huestegge; Ralph Radach Visual and memory search in complex environments: Determinants of eye movements and search performance Journal Article In: Ergonomics, vol. 55, no. 9, pp. 1009–1027, 2012. @article{Huestegge2012b, Previous research on visual and memory search revealed various top down and bottom up factors influencing performance. However, utilising abstract stimuli (e.g. geometrical shapes or letters) and focussing on individual factors has often limited the applicability of research findings. Two experiments were designed to analyse which attributes of a product facilitate search in an applied environment. Participants scanned displays containing juice packages while their eye movements were recorded. The familiarity, saliency, and position of search targets were systematically varied. Experiment 1 involved a visual search task, whereas Experiment 2 focussed on memory search. The results showed that bottom up (target saliency) and top down (target familiarity) factors strongly interacted. Overt visual attention was influenced by cultural habits, purposes, and current task demands. The results provide a solid database for assessing the impact and interplay of fundamental top down and bottom up determinants of search processes in applied fields of psychology. |
Stephanie Huette; Bodo Winter; Teenie Matlock; Michael J. Spivey Processing motion implied in language: Eye-movement differences during aspect comprehension Journal Article In: Cognitive Processing, vol. 13, pp. S193–S197, 2012. @article{Huette2012, Previous research on language comprehension has used the eyes as a window into processing. However, these methods are entirely reliant upon using visual or orthographic stimuli that map onto the linguistic stimuli being used. The potential danger of this method is that the pictures used may not perfectly match the internal aspects of language processing. Thus, a method was developed in which participants listened to stories while wearing a head-mounted eyetracker. Preliminary results demonstrate that this method is uniquely suited to measure responses to stimuli in the absence of visual stimulation. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Bradley A. Seymour; Ralph Radach Use of colour for language processing during reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 20, no. 10, pp. 1254–1265, 2012. @article{Inhoff2012, The study examined whether literal correspondence is necessary for the use of visual features during word recognition and text comprehension. Eye movements were recorded during reading and used to change the colour of dialogue when it was fixated. In symbolically congruent colour conditions, dialogue of female and male characters was shown in orchid and blue, respectively. The reversed assignment was used in incongruent conditions, and no colouring was applied in a control condition. Analyses of oculomotor activity revealed Stroop-type congruency effects during dialogue reading, with shorter viewing durations in congruent than incongruent conditions. Colour influenced oculomotor measures that index the recognition and integration of words, indicating that it influenced multiple stages of language processing. |
Carrie N. Jackson; Paola E. Dussias; Adelina Hristova Using eye-tracking to study the on-line processing of case-marking information among intermediate L2 learners of German Journal Article In: International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 101–133, 2012. @article{Jackson2012, This study uses eye-tracking to examine the processing of case-marking information in ambiguous subject- and object-first wh-questions in German. The position of the lexical verb was also manipulated via verb tense to investigate whether verb location influences how intermediate L2 learners process L2 sentences. Results show that intermediate L2 German learners were sensitive to case-marking information, exhibiting longer processing times on subject-first than object-first sentences, regardless of verb location. German native speakers exhibited the opposite word order preference, with longer processing times on object-first than subject-first sentences, replicating previous findings. These results are discussed in light of current L2 processing research, highlighting how methodological constraints influence researchers' abilities to measure the on-line processing of morphosyntactic information among intermediate L2 learners. |
André Krügel; Françoise Vitu; Ralf Engbert Fixation positions after skipping saccades: A single space makes a large difference Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 74, no. 8, pp. 1556–1561, 2012. @article{Kruegel2012, During reading, saccadic eye movements are generated to shift words into the center of the visual field for lexical processing. Recently, Krügel and Engbert (Vision Research 50:1532-1539, 2010) demonstrated that within-word fixation positions are largely shifted to the left after skipped words. However, explanations of the origin of this effect cannot be drawn from normal reading data alone. Here we show that the large effect of skipped words on the distribution of within-word fixation positions is primarily based on rather subtle differences in the low-level visual information acquired before saccades. Using arrangements of "x" letter strings, we reproduced the effect of skipped character strings in a highly controlled single-saccade task. Our results demonstrate that the effect of skipped words in reading is the signature of a general visuomotor phenomenon. Moreover, our findings extend beyond the scope of the widely accepted range-error model, which posits that within-word fixation positions in reading depend solely on the distances of target words. We expect that our results will provide critical boundary conditions for the development of visuomotor models of saccade planning during reading. |
Monique Lamers; Wilbert Spooren Tracking referents in discourse Journal Article In: Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 59–79, 2012. @article{Lamers2012, <p>This reading study registered eye movements to investigate the influence of different discourse constructional factors on anaphor resolution in written discourse. More specifically, the study focused on the influence of the possible interplay of proximity between a possible referent and the anaphor and amount of elaboration on the time course of the different processes involved in anaphor resolution. Results at the anaphoric expression and the area immediately following the anaphoric expression reveal an effect of elaboration, but only in total reading times and second pass reading times. No effects were found at the reinstated referent. These results indicate that the difference in saliency between two possible referents almost directly influences anaphor resolution. We discuss these findings in relation to the time course of different processes in anaphor resolution such as bonding and resolution, in combination with a reading strategy that readers are satisfied with a superficial interpretation.</p> |
Mark Rose Lewis; Michael C. Mensink Prereading questions and online text comprehension Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 367–390, 2012. @article{Lewis2012, Prereading questions can be an effective tool for directing students' learning. However, it is not always clear what the online effects of a set of prereading questions will be. In two experiments, this study investigated whether readers direct additional attention to and learn more from sentences that are potentially relevant to a set of prereading questions. Eye-tracking data indicated that participants directed additional attention (as indicated by first-pass reinspection and lookback duration) to sentences that were potentially relevant to the prereading questions they had received. Participants also learned more information from these sentences (as indicated by free recall rates). Judgment data suggested that the featural similarity (both lexical and semantic) of a sentence to a prereading question can be a strong indicator that a sentence will be deemed potentially relevant by readers. Results are discussed with respect to an account of instructional effects in which featural similarity drives early attentional allocation through memory-based processes. |
Xingshan Li; Wenchan Zhao; Alexander Pollatsek Dividing lines at the word boundary position helps reading in Chinese Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 929–934, 2012. @article{Li2012, Unlike in English, the Chinese printing and writing systems usually do not respect a word boundary when they split lines; thus, characters belonging to a word can be on two different lines. In this study, we examined whether dividing a word across two lines interferes with Chinese reading and found that reading times were shorter when characters belonging to a word were on a single line rather than on adjacent lines. Eye movement data indicated that gaze durations in a region around the word boundary were longer and fixations were closer to the beginnings and ends of the lines when words were split across lines. These results suggest that words are processed as a whole in Chinese reading, so that word boundaries should be respected when deciding how to split lines in the Chinese writing system. They also suggest that the length of return sweeps in reading can be cognitively guided. |
Eva Reinisch; Andrea Weber Adapting to suprasegmental lexical stress errors in foreign-accented speech Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 132, no. 2, pp. 1165–1176, 2012. @article{Reinisch2012, Can native listeners rapidly adapt to suprasegmental mispronunciations in foreign-accented speech? To address this question, an exposure-test paradigm was used to test whether Dutch listeners can improve their understanding of non-canonical lexical stress in Hungarian-accented Dutch. During exposure, one group of listeners heard a Dutch story with only initially stressed words, whereas another group also heard 28 words with canonical second-syllable stress (e.g., EEKhorn, "squirrel" was replaced by koNIJN "rabbit"; capitals indicate stress). The 28 words, however, were non-canonically marked by the Hungarian speaker with high pitch and amplitude on the initial syllable, both of which are stress cues in Dutch. After exposure, listeners' eye movements were tracked to Dutch target-competitor pairs with segmental overlap but different stress patterns, while they listened to new words from the same Hungarian speaker (e.g., HERsens, herSTEL, "brain," "recovery"). Listeners who had previously heard non-canonically produced words distinguished target-competitor pairs better than listeners who had only been exposed to Hungarian accent with canonical forms of lexical stress. Even a short exposure thus allows listeners to tune into speaker-specific realizations of words' suprasegmental make-up, and use this information for word recognition. |
Kathleen Pirog Revill; Daniel H. Spieler The effect of lexical frequency on spoken word recognition in young and older listeners Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 80–87, 2012. @article{Revill2012, When identifying spoken words, older listeners may have difficulty resolving lexical competition or may place a greater weight on factors like lexical frequency. To obtain information about age differences in the time course of spoken word recognition, young and older adults' eye movements were monitored as they followed spoken instructions to click on objects displayed on a computer screen. Older listeners were more likely than younger listeners to fixate high-frequency displayed phonological competitors. However, degradation of auditory quality in younger listeners does not reproduce this result. These data are most consistent with an increased role for lexical frequency with age. |
Sarah Risse; Reinhold Kliegl Evidence for delayed parafoveal-on-foveal effects from word n+2 in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 1026–1042, 2012. @article{Risse2012, During reading information is acquired from word(s) beyond the word that is currently looked at. It is still an open question whether such parafoveal information can influence the current viewing of a word, and if so, whether such parafoveal-on-foveal effects are attributable to distributed processing or to mislocated fixations which occur when the eyes are directed at a parafoveal word but land on another word instead. In two display-change experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the preview and target difficulty of word n+2 to investigate the role of mislocated fixations on the previous word n+1. When the eyes left word n, an easy or difficult word n+2 preview was replaced by an easy or difficult n+2 target word. In Experiment 1, n+2 processing difficulty was manipulated by means of word frequency (i.e., easy high-frequency vs. difficult low-frequency word n+2). In Experiment 2, we varied the visual familiarity of word n+2 (i.e., easy lower-case vs. difficult alternating-case writing). Fixations on the short word n+1, which were likely to be mislocated, were nevertheless not influenced by the difficulty of the adjacent word n+2, the hypothesized target of the mislocated fixation. Instead word n+1 was influenced by the preview difficulty of word n+2, representing a delayed parafoveal-on-foveal effect. The results challenge the mislocated-fixation hypothesis as an explanation of parafoveal-on-foveal effects and provide new insight into the complex spatial and temporal effect structure of processing inside the perceptual span during reading. |
Annie Roy-Charland; Jean Saint-Aubin; Raymond M. Klein; Gregory H. MacLean; Amanda Lalande; Ashley Bélanger Eye movements when reading: The importance of the word to the left of fixation Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 328–355, 2012. @article{RoyCharland2012, In reading, it is well established that word processing can begin in the parafovea while the eyes are fixating the previous word. However, much less is known about the processing of information to the left of fixation. In two experiments, this issue was explored by combining a gaze-contingent display procedure preventing parafoveal preview and a letter detection task. All words were displayed as a series of xs until the reader fixated them, thereby preventing forward parafoveal processing, yet enabling backward parafoveal or postview processing. Results from both experiments revealed that readers were able to detect a target letter embedded in a word that was skipped. In those cases, the letter could only have been identified in postview (to the left of fixation), and detection rate decreased as the distance between the target letter and the eyes' landing position increased. Most importantly, for those skipped words, the typical missing-letter effect was observed with more omissions for target letters embedded in function than in content words. This can be taken as evidence that readers can extract basic prelexical information, such as the presence of a letter, in the parafoveal area to the left of fixation. Implications of these results are discussed in relation to models of eye movement control in reading and also in relation to models of the missing-letter effect. |
Daniel J. Schad; Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert Your mind wanders weakly, your mind wanders deeply: Objective measures reveal mindless reading at different levels Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 125, no. 2, pp. 179–194, 2012. @article{Schad2012, When the mind wanders, attention turns away from the external environment and cognitive processing is decoupled from perceptual information. Mind wandering is usually treated as a dichotomy (dichotomy-hypothesis), and is often measured using self-reports. Here, we propose the levels of inattention hypothesis, which postulates attentional decoupling to graded degrees at different hierarchical levels of cognitive processing. To measure graded levels of attentional decoupling during reading we introduce the sustained attention to stimulus task (SAST), which is based on psychophysics of error detection. Under experimental conditions likely to induce mind wandering, we found that subjects were less likely to notice errors that required high-level processing for their detection as opposed to errors that only required low-level processing. Eye tracking revealed that before errors were overlooked influences of high- and low-level linguistic variables on eye fixations were reduced in a graded fashion, indicating episodes of mindless reading at weak and deep levels. Individual fixation durations predicted overlooking of lexical errors 5s before they occurred. Our findings support the levels of inattention hypothesis and suggest that different levels of mindless reading can be measured behaviorally in the SAST. Using eye tracking to detect mind wandering online represents a promising approach for the development of new techniques to study mind wandering and to ameliorate its negative consequences. |
Kilian G. Seeber; Dirk Kerzel Cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting: Model meets data Journal Article In: International Journal of Bilingualism, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 228–242, 2012. @article{Seeber2012, Seeber (2011) recently introduced a series of analytical cognitive load models, providing a detailed illustration of conjectured cognitive resource allocation during simultaneous interpreting. In this article, the authors set out to compare these models with data gathered in an experiment using task-evoked pupillary responses to measure online cognitive load during simultaneous interpreting when embedded in single-sentence context and discourse context. Verb-final and verb-initial constructions were analysed in terms of the load they cause to an inherently capacity-limited system when interpreted simultaneously into a verb-initial language like English. The results show larger pupil dilation with verb-final than with verb-initial constructions, suggesting higher cognitive load with asymmetrical structures. A tendency for reduced cognitive load in the discourse context compared to the sentence context was also found. These data support the models' prediction of an increase in cognitive load towards (and beyond) the end of verb-final constructions. |
Deli Shen; Simon P. Liversedge; Jin Tian; Chuanli Zang; Lei Cui; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Keith Rayner Eye movements of second language learners when reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 192–202, 2012. @article{Shen2012, The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text. Also, participants' native languages were different in terms of their basic characteristics: English and Korean are spaced, whereas the other two are unspaced; Japanese is character based whereas the other three are alphabetic. Thus, we assessed whether any spacing effects were modulated by native language characteristics. Eye movement measures showed least disruption to reading for word-spaced text and longer reading times for unspaced than character-spaced text, with nonword-spaced text yielding the most disruption. These effects were uninfluenced by native language (though reading times differed between groups as a result of Chinese reading experience). Demarcation of word boundaries through spacing reduces non-native readers' uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby speeding lexical identification, and in turn, reading. More generally, the results indicate that words have psychological reality for those who are learning to read Chinese as a second language, and that segmentation of text into words is more beneficial to successful comprehension than is separating individual Chinese characters with spaces. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold The time course of contextual influences during lexical ambiguity resolution: Evidence from distributional analyses of fixation durations Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 40, no. 7, pp. 1122–1131, 2012. @article{Sheridan2012, In the lexical ambiguity literature, it is well-established that readers experience processing difficulties when they encounter biased homographs in a subordinate-instantiating prior context (i.e., the subordinate bias effect). To investigate the time course of this effect, the present study examined distributional analyses offirst-fixation durations on 60 biased homographs that were each read twice: once in a subordinate-instantiating context and once in a dominant-instantiating context. Ex-Gaussian fitting revealed that the subordinate context distribution was shifted to the right of the dominant context distribution, with no significant contextual differences in the degree of skew. In addition, a survival analysis technique showed a significant influence of the subordinate versus dominant contextual manipulation as early as 139 ms from the start of fixation. These results indicate that the contextual manipulation had a fast-acting influence on the majority of fixation durations, which is consistent with the reordered access model's assumption that prior context can affect the lexical access stage of reading. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold The time course of predictability effects in reading: Evidence from a survival analysis of fixation durations Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 733–745, 2012. @article{Sheridan2012a, To investigate the time course of predictability effects in reading, the present study examined distributions of first-fixation durations on target words in a low predictability versus a high predictability prior context. In a replication of Staub (2011), ex-Gaussian fitting demonstrated that the low predictability distribution was significantly shifted to the right of the high predictability distribution in the absence of any contextual differences in the degree of skew. Extending this finding, the present study used a survival analysis technique to demonstrate a significant influence of predictability on fixation duration as early as 140 ms from the start of fixation, which is similar to prior results obtained with the word frequency variable. These results provide convergent evidence that lexical variables have a fast acting influence on fixation durations during reading. Implications for models of eye- movement control are discussed. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold Perceptually specific and perceptually non-specific influences on rereading benefits for spatially transformed text: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 1739–1747, 2012. @article{Sheridan2012b, The present study used eye tracking methodology to examine rereading benefits for spatially transformed text. Eye movements were monitored while participants read the same target word twice, in two different low-constraint sentence frames. The congruency of perceptual processing was manipulated by either applying the same type of transformation to the word during the first and second presentations (i.e., the congruent condition), or employing two different types of transformations across the two presentations of the word (i.e., the incongruent condition). Perceptual specificity effects were demonstrated such that fixation times for the second presentation of the target word were shorter for the congruent condition compared to the incongruent condition. Moreover, we demonstrated an additional perceptually non-specific effect such that second reading fixation times were shorter for the incongruent condition relative to a baseline condition that employed a normal typography (i.e., non-transformed) during the first presentation and a transformation during the second presentation. Both of these effects (i.e., perceptually specific and perceptually non-specific) were similar in magnitude for high and low frequency words, and both effects persisted across a 1. week lag between the first and second readings. We discuss the present findings in the context of the distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, and the distinction between perceptually versus conceptually driven processing. |
Timothy J. Slattery; Adrian Staub; Keith Rayner Saccade launch site as a predictor of fixation durations in reading: Comments on Hand, Miellet, O'Donnell, and Sereno (2010) Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 251–261, 2012. @article{Slattery2012, An important question in research on eye movements in reading is whether word frequency and word predictability have additive or interactive effects on fixation durations. A fair number of studies have reported only additive effects of the frequency and predictability of a target word on reading times on that word, failing to show significant interactions. Recently, however, Hand, Miellet, O'Donnell, and Sereno (see record 2010-19099-001) reported interactive effects in a study that included the distance of the prior fixation from the target word (launch site). They reported that when the saccade into the target word was launched from very near to the word (within 3 characters), the predictability effect was larger for low frequency words, but when the saccade was launched from a medium distance (4-6 characters from the word) the predictability effect was larger for high frequency words. Hand et al. argued for the importance of including launch site in analyses of target word fixation durations. Here we describe several problems with Hand et al.'s use of analyses of variance in which launch site is divided into distinct ordinal levels. We describe a more appropriate way to analyze such data-linear mixed-effect models-and we use this method to show that launch site does not modulate the interaction between frequency and predictability in two other data sets. |
James M. McQueen; Falk Huettig Changing only the probability that spoken words will be distorted changes how they are recognized Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 131, no. 1, pp. 509–517, 2012. @article{McQueen2012, An eye-tracking experiment examined contextual flexibility in speech processing in response to distortions in spoken input. Dutch participants heard Dutch sentences containing critical words and saw four-picture displays. The name of one picture either had the same onset phonemes as the critical word or had a different first phoneme and rhymed. Participants fixated on onset-overlap more than rhyme-overlap pictures, but this tendency varied with speech quality. Relative to a baseline with noise-free sentences, participants looked less at onset-overlap and more at rhyme-overlap pictures when phonemes in the sentences (but not in the critical words) were replaced by noises like those heard on a badly tuned AM radio. The position of the noises (word-initial or word-medial) had no effect. Noises elsewhere in the sentences apparently made evidence about the critical word less reliable: Listeners became less confident of having heard the onset-overlap name but also less sure of having not heard the rhyme-overlap name. The same acoustic information has different effects on spoken-word recognition as the probability of distortion changes. © 2012 Acoustical Society of America. |
Kevin B. Paterson; Victoria A. McGowan; Timothy R. Jordan Eye movements reveal effects of visual content on eye guidance and lexical access during reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 8, pp. e41766, 2012. @article{Paterson2012, Background: Normal reading requires eye guidance and activation of lexical representations so that words in text can be identified accurately. However, little is known about how the visual content of text supports eye guidance and lexical activation, and thereby enables normal reading to take place. Methods and Findings: To investigate this issue, we investigated eye movement performance when reading sentences displayed as normal and when the spatial frequency content of text was filtered to contain just one of 5 types of visual content: very coarse, coarse, medium, fine, and very fine. The effect of each type of visual content specifically on lexical activation was assessed using a target word of either high or low lexical frequency embedded in each sentence Results: No type of visual content produced normal eye movement performance but eye movement performance was closest to normal for medium and fine visual content. However, effects of lexical frequency emerged early in the eye movement record for coarse, medium, fine, and very fine visual content, and were observed in total reading times for target words for all types of visual content. Conclusion: These findings suggest that while the orchestration of multiple scales of visual content is required for normal eye-guidance during reading, a broad range of visual content can activate processes of word identification independently. Implications for understanding the role of visual content in reading are discussed. |
Silke Paulmann; Debra Titone; Marc D. Pell How emotional prosody guides your way: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Speech Communication, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 92–107, 2012. @article{Paulmann2012, This study investigated cross-modal effects of emotional voice tone (prosody) on face processing during instructed visual search. Specifically, we evaluated whether emotional prosodic cues in speech have a rapid, mandatory influence on eye movements to an emotionally-related face, and whether these effects persist as semantic information unfolds. Participants viewed an array of six emotional faces while listening to instructions spoken in an emotionally congruent or incongruent prosody (e.g.; "Click on the happy face" spoken in a happy or angry voice). The duration and frequency of eye fixations were analyzed when only prosodic cues were emotionally meaningful (pre-emotional label window: "Click on the/..."), and after emotional semantic information was available (post-emotional label window: ".../happy face"). In the pre-emotional label window, results showed that participants made immediate use of emotional prosody, as reflected in significantly longer frequent fixations to emotionally congruent versus incongruent faces. However, when explicit semantic information in the instructions became available (post-emotional label window), the influence of prosody on measures of eye gaze was relatively minimal. Our data show that emotional prosody has a rapid impact on gaze behavior during social information processing, but that prosodic meanings can be overridden by semantic cues when linguistic information is task relevant. |
Brennan R. Payne; Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow Aging, parafoveal preview, and semantic integration in sentence processing: Testing the cognitive workload of wrap-up Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 638–649, 2012. @article{Payne2012, The current study investigated the degree to which semantic-integration processes (“wrap-up”) during sentence understanding demand attentional resources by examining the effects of clause and sentence wrap-up on the parafoveal preview benefit (PPB) in younger and older adults. The PPB is defined as facilitation in processing word N + 1, based on information extracted while the eyes are fixated on word N, and is known to be reduced by processing difficulty at word N. Participants read passages in which word N occurred in a sentence-internal, clause-final, or sentence-final position, and a gaze-contingent boundary-change paradigm was used to manipulate the information available in parafoveal vision for word N + 1. Wrap-up effects were found on word N for both younger and older adults. Early-pass measures (first-fixation duration and single-fixation duration) of the PPB on word N + 1 were reduced by clause wrap-up and sentence wrap-up on word N, with similar effects for younger and older adults. However, for intermediate (gaze duration) and later-pass measures (regression-path duration, and selective regression-path duration), sentence wrap-up (but not clause wrap-up) on word N differentially reduced the PPB of word N + 1 for older adults. These findings suggest that wrap-up is demanding and may be less efficient with advancing age, resulting in a greater cognitive processing load for older readers. |
Manuel Perea Revisiting Huey: On the importance of the upper part of words during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 1148–1153, 2012. @article{Perea2012, Recent research has shown that that the upper part of words enjoys an advantage over the lower part of words in the recognition of isolated words. The goal of the present article was to examine how removing the upper/lower part of the words influences eye movement control during silent normal reading. The participants' eye movements were monitored when reading intact sentences and when reading sentences in which the upper or the lower portion of the text was deleted. Results showed a greater reading cost (longer fixations) when the upper part of the text was removed than when the lower part of the text was removed (i.e., it influenced when to move the eyes). However, there was little influence on the initial landing position on a target word (i.e., on the decision as to where to move the eyes). In addition, lexical-processing difficulty (as inferred from the magnitude of the word frequency effect on a target word) was affected by text degradation. The implications of these findings for models of visual-word recognition and reading are discussed. |
Manuel Perea; Pablo Gomez Subtle increases in interletter spacing facilitate the encoding of words during normal reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 10, pp. e47568, 2012. @article{Perea2012a, BACKGROUND: Several recent studies have revealed that words presented with a small increase in interletter spacing are identified faster than words presented with the default interletter spacing (i.e., w a t e r faster than water). Modeling work has shown that this advantage occurs at an early encoding level. Given the implications of this finding for the ease of reading in the new digital era, here we examined whether the beneficial effect of small increases in interletter spacing can be generalized to a normal reading situation. METHODOLOGY: We conducted an experiment in which the participant's eyes were monitored when reading sentences varying in interletter spacing: i) sentences were presented with the default (0.0) interletter spacing; ii) sentences presented with a +1.0 interletter spacing; and iii) sentences presented with a +1.5 interletter spacing. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Results showed shorter fixation duration times as an inverse function of interletter spacing (i.e., fixation durations were briefest with +1.5 spacing and slowest with the default spacing). CONCLUSIONS: Subtle increases in interletter spacing facilitate the encoding of the fixated word during normal reading. Thus, interletter spacing is a parameter that may affect the ease of reading, and it could be adjustable in future implementations of e-book readers. |
Catherine I. Phillips; Christopher R. Sears; Penny M. Pexman An embodied semantic processing effect on eye gaze during sentence reading Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 99–114, 2012. @article{Phillips2012a, The present research examines the effects of body-object interaction (BOI) on eye gaze behaviour in a reading task. BOI measures perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. A set of high BOI words (e.g. cat) and a set of low BOI words (e.g. sun) were selected, matched on imageability and concreteness (as well as other lexical and semantic variables). Facilitatory BOI effects were observed: gaze durations and total fixation durations were shorter for high BOI words, and participants made fewer regressions to high BOI words. The results provide evidence of a BOI effect on non-manual responses and in a situation that taps normal reading processes. We discuss how the results (a) suggest that stored motor information (as measured by BOI ratings) is relevant to lexical semantics, and (b) are consistent with an embodied view of cognition (Wilson 2002). |