EyeLink Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2024 (with some early 2025s) 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 |
Kacey L. Wochna; Barbara J. Juhasz Context length and reading novel words: An eye-movement investigation Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 104, no. 3, pp. 347–363, 2013. @article{Wochna2013,The current study investigated the effects of context length on the processing of novel words. Participants read real adjectives or novel words embedded in either sentence or paragraph contexts while their eye movements were recorded. The results extend the literature on novel word reading by exploring the time-course of word processing using realistic contexts derived from existing sources. Eye-movement measures demonstrated that readers were very sensitive to the presence of novel words. Novel words were more likely to be fixated and had longer reading times than real words. In addition, words in sentence contexts had longer gaze durations than words in paragraphs. The effect of novelty on reading the target word did not vary as a function of the context length. While performance on the surprise post-test did not demonstrate significant word learning, participants did report higher confidence in correct responses than incorrect, suggesting that some learning took place. |
Christiane Wotschack; Reinhold Kliegl Reading strategy modulates parafoveal-on-foveal effects in sentence reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 548–562, 2013. @article{Wotschack2013,Task demands and individual differences have been linked reliably to word skipping during reading. Such differences in fixation probability may imply a selection effect for multivariate analyses of eye-movement corpora if selection effects correlate with word properties of skipped words. For example, with fewer fixations on short and highly frequent words the power to detect parafoveal-on-foveal effects is reduced. We demonstrate that increasing the fixation probability on function words with a manipulation of the expected difficulty and frequency of questions reduces an age difference in skipping probability (i.e., old adults become comparable to young adults) and helps to uncover significant parafoveal-on-foveal effects in this group of old adults. We discuss implications for the comparison of results of eye-movement research based on multivariate analysis of corpus data with those from display-contingent manipulations of target words. |
Yan Jing Wu; Filipe Cristino; Charles Leek; Guillaume Thierry Non-selective lexical access in bilinguals is spontaneous and independent of input monitoring: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 129, no. 2, pp. 418–425, 2013. @article{Wu2013b,Language non-selective lexical access in bilinguals has been established mainly using tasks requiring explicit language processing. Here, we show that bilinguals activate native language translations even when words presented in their second language are incidentally processed in a nonverbal, visual search task. Chinese-English bilinguals searched for strings of circles or squares presented together with three English words (i.e., distracters) within a 4-item grid. In the experimental trials, all four locations were occupied by English words, including a critical word that phonologically overlapped with the Chinese word for circle or square when translated into Chinese. The eye-tracking results show that, in the experimental trials, bilinguals looked more frequently and longer at critical than control words, a pattern that was absent in English monolingual controls. We conclude that incidental word processing activates lexical representations of both languages of bilinguals, even when the task does not require explicit language processing. |
Wei Zhou; Reinhold Kliegl; Ming Yan A validation of parafoveal semantic information extraction in reading Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 36, no. SUPPL.1, pp. S51–S63, 2013. @article{Zhou2013a,Parafoveal semantic processing has recently been well documented in reading Chinese sentences, presumably because of language-specific features. However, because of a large variation of fixation landing positions on pretarget words, some preview words actually were located in foveal vision when readers' eyes landed close to the end of the pretarget words. None of the previous studies has completely ruled out a possibility that the semantic preview effects might mainly arise from these foveally processed preview words. This case, whether previously observed positive evidence for parafoveal semantic processing can still hold, has been called into question. Using linear mixed models, we demonstrate in this study that semantic preview benefit from word N+1 decreased if fixation on pretarget word N was close to the preview. We argue that parafoveal semantic processing is not a consequence of foveally processed preview words. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Joseph C. Toscano; Bob McMurray Cue-integration and context effects in speech: Evidence against speaking-rate normalization Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & 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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
André Krügel; Françoise Vitu; Ralf Engbert Fixation positions after skipping saccades: A single space makes a large difference Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & 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. |
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. |
Antje S. Meyer; Linda Wheeldon; Femke Meulen; Agnieszka E. Konopka Effects of speech rate and practice on the allocation of visual attention in multiple object naming Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 3, pp. 39, 2012. @article{Meyer2012,Earlier studies had shown that speakers naming several objects typically look at each object until they have retrieved the phonological form of its name and therefore look longer at objects with long names than at objects with shorter names. We examined whether this tight eye-to-speech coordination was maintained at different speech rates and after increasing amounts of practice. Participants named the same set of objects with monosyllabic or disyllabic names on up to 20 successive trials. In Experiment 1, they spoke as fast as they could, whereas in Experiment 2 they had to maintain a fixed moderate or faster speech rate. In both experiments, the durations of the gazes to the objects decreased with increasing speech rate, indicating that at higher speech rates, the speakers spent less time planning the object names. The eye-speech lag (the time interval between the shift of gaze away from an object and the onset of its name) was independent of the speech rate but became shorter with increasing practice. Consistent word length effects on the durations of the gazes to the objects and the eye-speech lags were only found in Experiment 2. The results indicate that shifts of eye gaze are often linked to the completion of phonological encoding, but that speakers can deviate from this default coordination of eye gaze and speech, for instance when the descriptive task is easy and they aim to speak fast. |
Daniel Mirman; Kristen M. Graziano Damage to temporo-parietal cortex decreases incidental activation of thematic relations during spoken word comprehension Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 50, no. 8, pp. 1990–1997, 2012. @article{Mirman2012,Both taxonomic and thematic semantic relations have been studied extensively in behavioral studies and there is an emerging consensus that the anterior temporal lobe plays a particularly important role in the representation and processing of taxonomic relations, but the neural basis of thematic semantics is less clear. We used eye tracking to examine incidental activation of taxonomic and thematic relations during spoken word comprehension in participants with aphasia. Three groups of participants were tested: neurologically intact control participants (N=14), individuals with aphasia resulting from lesions in left hemisphere BA 39 and surrounding temporo-parietal cortex regions (N=7), and individuals with the same degree of aphasia severity and semantic impairment and anterior left hemisphere lesions (primarily inferior frontal gyrus and anterior temporal lobe) that spared BA 39 (N=6). The posterior lesion group showed reduced and delayed activation of thematic relations, but not taxonomic relations. In contrast, the anterior lesion group exhibited longer-lasting activation of taxonomic relations and did not differ from control participants in terms of activation of thematic relations. These results suggest that taxonomic and thematic semantic knowledge are functionally and neuroanatomically distinct, with the temporo-parietal cortex playing a particularly important role in thematic semantics. |
Andriy Myachykov; Simon Garrod; Christoph Scheepers Determinants of structural choice in visually situated sentence production Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 141, no. 3, pp. 304–315, 2012. @article{Myachykov2012,Three experiments investigated how perceptual, structural, and lexical cues affect structural choices during English transitive sentence production. Participants described transitive events under combinations of visual cueing of attention (toward either agent or patient) and structural priming with and without semantic match between the notional verb in the prime and the target event. Speakers had a stronger preference for passive-voice sentences (1) when their attention was directed to the patient, (2) upon reading a passive-voice prime, and (3) when the verb in the prime matched the target event. The verb-match effect was the by-product of an interaction between visual cueing and verb match: the increase in the proportion of passive-voice responses with matching verbs was limited to the agent-cued condition. Persistence of visual cueing effects in the presence of both structural and lexical cues suggests a strong coupling between referent-directed visual attention and Subject assignment in a spoken sentence. |
Andriy Myachykov; Dominic Thompson; Simon Garrod; Christoph Scheepers Referential and visual cues to structural choice in visually situated sentence production Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 2, pp. 396, 2012. @article{Myachykov2012a,We investigated how conceptually informative (referent preview) and conceptually uninformative (pointer to referent's location) visual cues affect structural choice during production of English transitive sentences. Cueing the Agent or the Patient prior to presenting the target-event reliably predicted the likelihood of selecting this referent as the sentential Subject, triggering, correspondingly, the choice between active and passive voice. Importantly, there was no difference in the magnitude of the general Cueing effect between the informative and uninformative cueing conditions, suggesting that attentionally driven structural selection relies on a direct automatic mapping mechanism from attentional focus to the Subject's position in a sentence. This mechanism is, therefore, independent of accessing conceptual, and possibly lexical, information about the cued referent provided by referent preview. |
Chie Nakamura; Manabu Arai; Reiko Mazuka Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 125, no. 2, pp. 317–323, 2012. @article{Nakamura2012,Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese. Our results showed that listeners used the prosodic cue to make a structural prediction before hearing disambiguating information. Importantly, the effect was limited to cases where the visual scene provided an appropriate context for the prosodic cue, thus eliminating the explanation that listeners have simply associated marked prosodic information with a less frequent structure. Furthermore, the influence of the prosodic information was also evident following disambiguating information, in a way that reflected the initial analysis. The current study demonstrates that prosody, when provided with an appropriate context, influences the initial syntactic analysis and also the subsequent cost at disambiguating information. The results also provide first evidence for pre-head structural prediction driven by prosodic and contextual information with a head-final construction. |
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. |
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. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon The pistol that injured the cowboy: Difficulty with inanimate subject-verb integration is reduced by structural separation Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 819–832, 2012. @article{Lowder2012,Previous work has suggested that the difficulty normally associated with processing an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) compared to a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) is increased when the head noun phrase (NP1) is animate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is inanimate, compared to the reverse animacy configuration. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to determine whether the apparent effects of NP animacy on the ORC-SRC asymmetry reflect distinct processes of interpretation that operate at NP2 and NP1. Experiment 1 revealed a localized difficulty interpreting the embedded action verb when the preceding NP2 was inanimate as compared to animate, but this difficulty in subject-verb integration did not extend to the broader region of words in the RC and matrix verb where difficulty was observed in processing ORCs as compared to SRCs. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the difficulty associated with integrating an inanimate NP with an action verb is reduced when the two appear in separate clauses, as in the case of an SRC. |
Marco Marelli; Claudio Luzzatti Frequency effects in the processing of Italian nominal compounds: Modulation of headedness and semantic transparency Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 644–664, 2012. @article{Marelli2012,There is a general debate as to whether constituent representations are accessed in compound processing. The present study addresses this issue, exploiting the properties of Italian compounds to test the role of headedness and semantic transparency in constituent access. In a first experiment, a lexical decision task was run on nominal compounds. Significant interactions between constituent-frequencies, headedness and semantic transparency emerged, indicating facilitatory frequency effects for transparent and head-final compounds, thus highlighting the importance of the semantic and structural properties of the compounds in lexical access. In a second experiment, converging evidence was sought in an eye-tracking study. The compounds were embedded into sentence contexts, and fixation durations were measured. The results did in fact confirm the effect observed in the first experiment. The results are consistent with a multi-route model of compound processing, but also indicate the importance of a semantic route dedicated to the conceptual combination of constituent meanings. |
Kathleen M. Masserang; Alexander Pollatsek Transposed letter effects in prefixed words: Implications for morphological decomposition Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 476–495, 2012. @article{Masserang2012,Acrucial issue in word encoding is whether morphemes are involved in early stages. One paradigm that tests for this employs the transposed letter (TL) effect the difference in the times to process a word (misfile) when it is preceded by a transposed letter (TL) prime (mifsile) and when it is preceded by a substitute letter (SL) prime (mintile) and examines whether the TL effect is smaller when the two adjacent letters cross a morpheme boundary. The evidence from prior studies is not consistent. Experiments 1 and 2 employed a parafoveal preview paradigm in which the transposed letters either crossed the prefix-stem boundary or did not, and found a clear TL effect regardless of whether the two letters crossed the morpheme boundary. Experiment 3 replicated this finding employing a masked priming lexical-decision paradigm. It thus appears that morphemes are not involved in early processes in English that are sensitive to letter order. There is some evidence for morphemicmodulation of the TL effect in other languages; thus, the properties of the language may modulate when morphemes influence early letter position encoding. |
Sebastiaan Mathôt; Jan Theeuwes It's all about the transient: Intra-saccadic onset stimuli do not capture attention Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1–12, 2012. @article{Mathot2012,An abrupt onset stimulus was presented while the participants' eyes were in motion. Be- cause of saccadic suppression, participants did not perceive the visual transient that nor- mally accompanies the sudden appearance of a stimulus. In contrast to the typical finding that the presentation of an abrupt onset captures attention and interferes with the parti - cipants' responses, we found that an intra-saccadic abrupt onset does not capture attention: It has no effect beyond that of increasing the set-size of the search array by one item. This finding favours the local transient account of attentional capture over the novel object hypothesis. |
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). |
Patrick Plummer; Keith Rayner Effects of parafoveal word length and orthographic features on initial fixation landing positions in reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 74, no. 5, pp. 950–963, 2012. @article{Plummer2012,Previous research has demonstrated that readers use word length and word boundary information in targeting saccades into upcoming words while reading. Previous studies have also revealed that the initial landing positions for fixations on words are affected by parafoveal processing. In the present study, we examined the effects of word length and orthographic legality on targeting saccades into parafoveal words. Long (8-9 letters) and short (4-5 letters) target words, which were matched on lexical frequency and initial letter trigram, were paired and embedded into identical sentence frames. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to manipulate the parafoveal information available to the reader before direct fixation on the target word. The parafoveal preview was either identical to the target word or was a visually similar nonword. The nonword previews contained orthographically legal or orthographically illegal initial letters. The results showed that orthographic preprocessing of the word to the right of fixation affected eye movement targeting, regardless of word length. Additionally, the lexical status of an upcoming saccade target in the parafovea generally did not influence preprocessing. |
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. |
Nathalie N. Bélanger; Timothy J. Slattery; Rachel I. Mayberry; Keith Rayner Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 23, no. 7, pp. 816–823, 2012. @article{Belanger2012,Recent evidence suggests that deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli in the parafovea in comparison to hearing people. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to pre-process upcoming words and decide where to look next. We investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading, and compared the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less skilled readers to that of skilled hearing readers. Compared to hearing readers, deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected by their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during a complex cognitive task such as reading |
Valerie Benson; Magdalena Ietswaart; David Milner Eye movements and verbal report in a single case of visual neglect Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 8, pp. e43743, 2012. @article{Benson2012b,In this single case study, visuospatial neglect patient P1 demonstrated a dissociation between an intact ability to make appropriate reflexive eye movements to targets in the neglected field with latencies of <400 ms, while failing to report targets presented at such durations in a separate verbal detection task. In contrast, there was a failure to evoke the usually robust Remote Distractor Effect in P1, even though distractors in the neglected field were presented at above threshold durations. Together those data indicate that the tight coupling that is normally shown between attention and eye movements appears to be disrupted for low-level orienting in P1. A comparable disruption was also found for high-level cognitive processing tasks, namely reading and scene scanning. The findings are discussed in relation to sampling, attention and awareness in neglect. |
Arielle Borovsky; Jeffrey L. Elman; Anne Fernald In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 112, no. 4, pp. 417–436, 2012. @article{Borovsky2012,Adults can incrementally combine information from speech with astonishing speed to anticipate future words. Concurrently, a growing body of work suggests that vocabulary ability is crucially related to lexical processing skills in children. However, little is known about this relationship with predictive sentence processing in children or adults. We explore this question by comparing the degree to which an upcoming sentential theme is anticipated by combining information from a prior agent and action. 48 children, aged of 3 to 10, and 48 college-aged adults' eye-movements were recorded as they heard a sentence (e.g., The pirate hides the treasure) in which the object referred to one of four images that included an agent-related, action-related and unrelated distractor image. Pictures were rotated so that, across all versions of the study, each picture appeared in all conditions, yielding a completely balanced within-subjects design. Adults and children quickly made use of combinatory information available at the action to generate anticipatory looks to the target object. Speed of anticipatory fixations did not vary with age. When controlling for age, individuals with higher vocabularies were faster to look to the target than those with lower vocabulary scores. Together, these results support and extend current views of incremental processing in which adults and children make use of linguistic information to continuously update their mental representation of ongoing language. |
Susanne Brouwer; Holger Mitterer; Falk Huettig Speech reductions change the dynamics of competition during spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 539–571, 2012. @article{Brouwer2012,Three eye-tracking experiments investigated how phonological reductions (e.g., ‘‘puter'' for ‘‘computer'') modulate phonological competition. Participants listened to sentences extracted from a pontaneous speech corpus and saw four printed words: a target (e.g., ‘‘computer''), a competitor similar to the canonical form (e.g., ‘‘companion''), one similar to the reduced form (e.g., ‘‘pupil''), and an unrelated distractor. In Experiment 1, we presented canonical and reduced forms in a syllabic and in a sentence context. Listeners directed their attention to a similar degree to both competitors independent of the target's spoken form. In Experiment 2, we excluded reduced forms and presented canonical forms only. In such a listening situation, participants showed a clear preference for the ‘‘canonical form'' competitor. In Experiment 3, we presented canonical forms intermixed with reduced forms in a sentence context and replicated the competition pattern of Experiment 1. These data suggest that listeners penalize acoustic mismatches less strongly when listeningto reduced speech than when listening to fully articulated speech. We conclude that flexibility to adjust to speech-intrinsic factors is a key feature of the spoken word recognition system. |
Susanne Brouwer; Holger Mitterer; Falk Huettig Can hearing puter activate pupil? Phonological competition and the processing of reduced spoken words in spontaneous conversations Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 65, no. 11, pp. 2193–2220, 2012. @article{Brouwer2012a,In listeners' daily communicative exchanges, they most often hear casual speech, in which words are often produced with fewer segments, rather than the careful speech used in most psycholinguistic experiments. Three experiments examined phonological competition during the recognition of reduced forms such as [pjutər] for computer using a target-absent variant of the visual world paradigm. Listeners' eye movements were tracked upon hearing canonical and reduced forms as they looked at displays of four printed words. One of the words was phonologically similar to the canonical pronunciation of the target word, one word was similar to the reduced pronunciation, and two words served as unrelated distractors. When spoken targets were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and in sentential contexts (Experiment 2), competition was modulated as a function of the target word form. When reduced targets were presented in sentential contexts, listeners were probabilistically more likely to first fixate reduced-form competitors before shifting their eye gaze to canonical-form competitors. Experiment 3, in which the original /p/ from [pjutər] was replaced with a "real" onset /p/, showed an effect of cross-splicing in the late time window. We conjecture that these results fit best with the notion that speech reductions initially activate competitors that are similar to the phonological surface form of the reduction, but that listeners nevertheless can exploit fine phonetic detail to reconstruct strongly reduced forms to their canonical counterparts. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt Beyond common and privileged: Gradient representations of common ground in real-time language use Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 62–89, 2012. @article{BrownSchmidt2012,The present research tested the hypothesis that on-line language processing is guided by gradient representations of linguistic common ground that reflect details of how common ground was established, including the discourse context and partner feedback. This hypothesis was contrasted with a simpler hypothesis that interpretation processes are only sensitive to simple binary representations of whether a potential discourse referent is or is not common ground. In order to evaluate these hypotheses, participants engaged in a task-based conversation with an experimenter in which some of the participant's game-pieces were hidden from the experimenter. On critical trials, the participant revealed the identity of the hidden game-pieces. Critical utterances contained referring expressions temporarily ambiguous between a visually shared game-piece, and a hidden game-piece. Analysis of participant eye movements during interpretation of these utterances revealed that participants were more likely to consider the hidden game-piece a potential referent if the experimenter had initially asked about its identity; whether the experimenter provided clear feedback that s/he understood its identity modulated this effect somewhat. These results provide key evidence for the richness of common ground representations, and are discussed in terms of the implications for models of the underlying representations of common ground. |
Julie N. Buchan; Kevin G. Munhall The effect of a concurrent working memory task and temporal offsets on the integration of auditory and visual speech information Journal Article In: Seeing and Perceiving, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 87–106, 2012. @article{Buchan2012,Audiovisual speech perception is an everyday occurrence of multisensory integration. Conflicting visual speech information can influence the perception of acoustic speech (namely the McGurk effect), and auditory and visual speech are integrated over a rather wide range of temporal offsets. This research examined whether the addition of a concurrent cognitive load task would affect the audiovisual integration in a McGurk speech task and whether the cognitive load task would cause more interference at increasing offsets. The amount of integration was measured by the proportion of responses in incongruent trials that did not correspond to the audio (McGurk response). An eye-tracker was also used to examine whether the amount of temporal offset and the presence of a concurrent cognitive load task would influence gaze behavior. Results from this experiment show a very modest but statistically significant decrease in the number of McGurk responses when subjects also perform a cognitive load task, and that this effect is relatively constant across the various temporal offsets. Participant's gaze behavior was also influenced by the addition of a cognitive load task. Gaze was less centralized on the face, less time was spent looking at the mouth and more time was spent looking at the eyes, when a concurrent cognitive load task was added to the speech task. |
Robyn Burton; David P. Crabb; Nicholas D. Smith; Fiona C. Glen; David F. Garway-Heath Glaucoma and reading: Exploring the effects of contrast lowering of text Journal Article In: Optometry and Vision Science, vol. 89, no. 9, pp. 1282–1287, 2012. @article{Burton2012,PURPOSE: Past research has not fully ascertained the extent to which people with glaucoma have difficulties with reading. This study measures change in reading speed when letter contrast is reduced, to test the hypothesis that patients with glaucoma are more sensitive to letter contrast than age-similar visually healthy people. METHODS: Fifty-three patients with glaucoma [mean age: 66 years (standard deviation: 9)] with bilateral visual field (VF) defects and 40 age-similar visually healthy control subjects [mean age: 69 (standard deviation: 8) years] had reading speeds measured using sets of fixed size, non-scrolling texts on a computer setup that incorporated an eye tracking device. All participants had visual acuity ≥6/9, and they underwent standard tests of visual function including Humphrey 24-2 and 10-2 VFs. Potential non-visual confounders were also tested, including cognitive ability (Middlesex Elderly Assessment of Mental Status Test) and general reading ability. Individual average raw reading speeds were calculated from 8 trials (different passages of text) at both 100% and 20% letter contrast. RESULTS: Patients had an average 24-2 VF MD of -6.5 (range: 0.7 to -17.3) dB in the better eye. The overall median reduction in reading speed due to decreasing the contrast of the text in the patients was 20%, but with considerable between-individual variation (interquartile range, 8%-44%). This reduction was significantly greater (p = 0.01) than the controls [median: 11% (interquartile range, 6%-17%)]. Patients and controls had similar average performance on Middlesex Elderly Assessment of Mental Status Test (p = 0.71), a modified Burt Reading ability test (p = 0.33), and a computer-based lexical decision task (p = 0.53) and had similar self-reported day-to-day reading frequency (p = 0.12). CONCLUSIONS: Average reduction in reading speed caused by a difference in letter contrast between 100% and 20% is significantly more apparent in patients with glaucoma when compared with visually healthy people with a similar age and similar cognitive/reading ability. |
Steven Frisson; Mary Wakefield Psychological essentialist reasoning and perspective taking during reading: A donkey is not a zebra, but a plate can be a clock Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 297–310, 2012. @article{Frisson2012,In an eyetracking study, we examined whether readers use psychological essentialist reasoning and perspective taking online. Stories were presented in which an animal or an artifact was transformed into another animal (e.g., a donkey into a zebra) or artifact (e.g., a plate into a clock). According to psychological essentialism, the essence of the animal did not change in these stories, while the transformed artifact would be thought to have changed categories. We found evidence that readers use this kind of reasoning online: When reference was made to the transformed animal, the nontransformed term ("donkey") was preferred, but the opposite held for the transformed artifact ("clock" was read faster than "plate"). The immediacy of the effect suggests that this kind of reasoning is employed automatically. Perspective taking was examined within the same stories by the introduction of a novel story character. This character, who was naïve about the transformation, commented on the transformed animal or artifact. If the reader were to take this character's perspective immediately and exclusively for reference solving, then only the transformed term ("zebra" or "clock") would be felicitous. However, the results suggested that while this character's perspective could be taken into account, it seems difficult to completely discard one's own perspective at the same time. |
Margaret Grant; Charles Clifton; Lyn Frazier The role of Non-Actuality Implicatures in processing elided constituents Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 326–343, 2012. @article{Grant2012,When an elided constituent and its antecedent do not match syntactically, the presence of a word implying the non-actuality of the state of affairs described in the antecedent seems to improve the example. (This information should be released but Gorbachev didn't. vs. This information was released but Gorbachev didn't.) We model this effect in terms of Non-Actuality Implicatures (NAIs) conveyed by non-epistemic modals like should and other words such as want to and be eager to that imply non-actuality. We report three studies. A rating and interpretation study showed that such implicatures are drawn and that they improve the acceptability of mismatch ellipsis examples. An interpretation study showed that adding a NAI trigger to ambiguous examples increases the likelihood of choosing an antecedent from the NAI clause. An eye movement study shows that a NAI trigger also speeds on-line reading of the ellipsis clause. By introducing alternatives (the desired state of affairs vs. the actual state of affairs), the NAI trigger introduces a potential Question Under Discussion (QUD). Processing an ellipsis clause is easier, the processor is more confident of its analysis, when the ellipsis clause comments on the QUD. |
Katherine Guérard; Jean Saint-Aubin; Marie Poirier Assessing the influence of letter position in reading normal and transposed texts using a letter detection task Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 227–238, 2012. @article{Guerard2012,During word recognition, some letters appear to play a more important role than others. Although some studies have suggested that the first and last letters of a word have a privileged status, there is no consensus with regards to the importance of the different letter positions when reading connected text. In the current experiments, we used a simple letter search task to examine the impact of letter position on word identification in connected text using a classic paper and pencil procedure (Experiment 1) and an eye movement monitoring procedure (Experiment 2). In Experiments 3 and 4, a condition with transposed letters was included. Our results show that the first letter of a word is detected more easily than the other letters, and transposing letters in a word revealed the importance of the final letter. It is concluded that both the initial and final letters play a special role in word identification during reading but that the underlying processes might differ. |
Christopher J. Hand; Patrick J. O'Donnell; Sara C. Sereno Word-initial letters influence fixation durations during fluent reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 3, pp. 85, 2012. @article{Hand2012,The present study examined how word-initial letters influence lexical access during reading. Eye movements were monitored as participants read sentences containing target words. Three factors were independently manipulated. First, target words had either high or low constraining word-initial letter sequences (e.g., dwarf or clown, respectively). Second, tar- gets were either high or low in frequency of occurrence (e.g., train or stain, respectively). Third, targetswere embedded in either biasing or neutral contexts (i.e., targetswere high or low in their predictability).This 2 (constraint)×2 (frequency)×2 (context) design allowed us to examine the conditions under which a word's initial letter sequence could facilitate processing. Analyses of fixation duration data revealed significant main effects of constraint, frequency, and context. Moreover, in measures taken to reflect “early” lexical processing (i.e., first and single fixation duration), there was a significant interaction between constraint and context. The overall pattern of findings suggests lexical access is facilitated by highly constraining word-initial letters. Results are discussed in comparison to recent studies of lexical features involved in word recognition during reading. |
Adriana Hanulíková; Andrea Weber Sink positive: Linguistic experience with th substitutions influences nonnative word recognition Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 74, no. 3, pp. 613–629, 2012. @article{Hanulikova2012,We used eyetracking, perceptual discrimination, and production tasks to examine the influences of perceptual similarity and linguistic experience on word recognition in nonnative (L2) speech. Eye movements to printed words were tracked while German and Dutch learners of English heard words containing one of three pronunciation variants (/t/, /s/, or /f/) of the interdental fricative /θ/. Irrespective of whether the speaker was Dutch or German, looking preferences for target words with /θ/ matched the preferences for producing /s/ variants in German speakers and /t/ variants in Dutch speakers (as determined via the production task), while a control group of English participants showed no such preferences. The perceptually most similar and most confusable /f/ variant (as determined via the discrimination task) was never preferred as a match for /θ/. These results suggest that linguistic experience with L2 pronunciations facilitates recognition of variants in an L2, with effects of frequency outweighing effects of perceptual similarity. |
Claudia Felser; Ian Cunnings Processing reflexives in a second language: The timing of structural and discourse-level constraints Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 571–603, 2012. @article{Felser2012,We report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results showthat the nonnative speakers initially tried to linkEnglish argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent, thereby violating binding condition A. Our native speaker controls, in contrast, showed evidence of applying conditionAimmediately during processing. Together, our findings show that L2 learners' initial focusing on a structurally inaccessible antecedent cannot be due to first language influence and is also independent of whether the inaccessible antecedent c-commands the reflexive. This suggests that unlike native speakers, nonnative speakers of English initially attempt to interpret reflexives through discourse-based coreference assignment rather than syntactic binding. |
Claudia Felser; Ian Cunnings; Claire Batterham; Harald Clahsen The timing of island effects in nonnative sentence processing Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 67–98, 2012. @article{Felser2012a,Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in fi rst-and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fi t versus fi lled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to fi lled gaps but not to lack of semantic fi t, profi cient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension. |
Heather J. Ferguson Eye movements reveal rapid concurrent access to factual and counterfactual interpretations of the world Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 65, no. 5, pp. 939–961, 2012. @article{Ferguson2012,Imagining a counterfactual world using conditionals (e.g., If Joanne had remembered her umbrella . . .) is common in everyday language. However, such utterances are likely to involve fairly complex reasoning processes to represent both the explicit hypothetical conjecture and its implied factual meaning. Online research into these mechanisms has so far been limited. The present paper describes two eye movement studies that investigated the time-course with which comprehenders can set up and access factual inferences based on a realistic counterfactual context. Adult participants were eye-tracked while they read short narratives, in which a context sentence set up a counterfactual world (If . . . then . . .), and a subsequent critical sentence described an event that was either consistent or inconsistent with the implied factual world. A factual consistent condition (Because . . . then . . .) was included as a baseline of normal contextual integration. Results showed that within a counterfactual scenario, readers quickly inferred the implied factual meaning of the discourse. However, initial processing of the critical word led to clear, but distinct, anomaly detection responses for both contextually inconsistent and consistent conditions. These results provide evidence that readers can rapidly make a factual inference from a preceding counterfactual context, despite maintaining access to both counterfactual and factual interpretations of events. |
Stephani Foraker; Gregory L. Murphy Polysemy in sentence comprehension: Effects of meaning dominance Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 67, no. 4, pp. 407–425, 2012. @article{Foraker2012,Words like church are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another view, readers retrieve one or more specific senses. In a reading task, context that was neutral or biased towards a particular sense preceded a polysemous word. Disambiguating material consistent with only one sense followed, in a second sentence (Experiment 1) or the same sentence (Experiments 2 and 3). Reading the disambiguating material was faster when it was consistent with that context, and dominant senses were committed to more strongly than subordinate senses. Critically, following neutral context, the continuation was read more quickly when it selected the dominant sense, and the degree of sense dominance partially explained the reading time advantage. Similarity of the senses also affected reading times. Across experiments, we found that sense selection may not be completed immediately following a polysemous word but is completed at a sentence boundary. Overall, the results suggest that readers select an individual sense when reading a polysemous word, rather than a core meaning. |
Jens K. Apel; John M. Henderson; Fernanda Ferreira Targeting regressions: Do readers pay attention to the left? Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 1108–1113, 2012. @article{Apel2012a,The perceptual span during normal reading extends approximately 14 to 15 characters to the right and three to four characters to the left of a current fixation. In the present study, we investigated whether the perceptual span extends farther than three to four characters to the left immediately before readers execute a regression. We used a display-change paradigm in which we masked words beyond the three-to-four-character range to the left of a fixation. We hypothesized that if reading behavior was affected by this manipulation before regressions but not before progressions, we would have evidence that the perceptual span extends farther left before leftward eye movements. We observed significantly shorter regressive saccades and longer fixation and gaze durations in the masked condition when a regression was executed. Forward saccades were entirely unaffected by the manipulations. We concluded that the perceptual span during reading changes, depending on the direction of a following saccade. |
Jane Ashby; Jinmian Yang; Kris H. C. Evans; Keith Rayner Eye movements and the perceptual span in silent and oral reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 74, no. 4, pp. 634–640, 2012. @article{Ashby2012,Previous research has examined parafoveal processing during silent reading, but little is known about the role of these processes in oral reading. Given that masking parafoveal information slows down silent reading, we asked whether a similar effect also occurs in oral reading. To investigate the role of parafoveal processing in silent and oral reading, we manipulated the parafoveal information available to readers by changing the size of a gaze-contingent moving window. Participants read silently and orally in a one-word window and a three-word window condition as we monitored their eye movements. The lack of parafoveal information slowed reading speed in both oral and silent reading. However, the effects of parafoveal information were larger in silent reading than in oral reading, because of different effects of preview information on both when the eyes move and how often. Parafoveal information benefitted silent reading for faster readers more than for slower readers. |
John M. Henderson; Steven G. Luke Oculomotor inhibition of return in normal and mindless reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 1101–1107, 2012. @article{Henderson2012,Oculomotor inhibition of return (O-IOR) is an increase in saccade latency prior to an eye movement to a recently fixated location, as compared with other locations. To investigate O-IOR in reading, subjects participated in two conditions while their eye movements were recorded: normal reading and mindless reading with words replaced by geometric shapes. We investigated the manifestation of O-IOR in reading and whether it is related to extracting meaning from the text or is an oculomotor phenomenon. The results indicated that fixation durations prior to a saccade returning to the immediately preceding fixated word were longer than those to other words, consistent with O-IOR. Furthermore, fixation durations were longest prior to a saccade that returned the eyes to the specific character position in the word that had previously been fixated and dropped off as the distance between the previously fixated character and landing position increased. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that O-IOR is relatively precise in its application during reading and drops off as a gradient. Both of these results were found for text reading and for mindless reading, suggesting that they are consequences of oculomotor control, and not of language processing. Finally, although these temporal IOR effects were robust, no spatial consequences of IOR were observed: Previously fixated words and characters were as likely to be refixated as new words and characters. |
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. |
James E. Cane; Fabrice Cauchard; Ulrich W. Weger The time-course of recovery from interruption during reading: Eye movement evidence for the role of interruption lag and spatial memory Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 65, no. 7, pp. 1397–1413, 2012. @article{Cane2012,Two experiments examined how interruptions impact reading and how interruption lags and the reader's spatial memory affect the recovery from such interruptions. Participants read paragraphs of text and were interrupted unpredictably by a spoken news story while their eye movements were monitored. Time made available for consolidation prior to responding to the interruption did not aid reading resumption. However, providing readers with a visual cue that indicated the interruption location did aid task resumption substantially in Experiment 2. Taken together, the findings show that the recovery from interruptions during reading draws on spatial memory resources and can be aided by processes that support spatial memory. Practical implications are discussed. |
Fabrice Cauchard; James E. Cane; Ulrich W. Weger Influence of background speech and nusic in Iinterrupted reading: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 381–390, 2012. @article{Cauchard2012,The current study examined the influence of interruption, background speech and music on reading, using an eye movement paradigm. Participants either read paragraphs while being exposed to background speech or music or read the texts in silence. On half of the trials, participants were interrupted by a 60-second audio story before resuming reading the paragraph. Interruptions increased overall reading time, but the reading of text following the interruption was quicker compared with baseline. Background speech and music did not modulate the interruption effects, but the background speech slowed down the reading rate compared with reading in the presence of music or reading in silence. The increase in reading time was primarily due to an increase in the time spent rereading previously read words. We argue that the observed interruption effects are in line with a theory of long-term working memory, and we present practical implications for the reported background speech effects. |
Charles Clifton; Lyn Frazier Discourse integration guided by the 'Question under Discussion' Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 352–379, 2012. @article{Clifton2012a,What makes a discourse coherent? One potential factor has been discussed in the linguistic literature in terms of a Question under Discussion (QUD). This approach claims that discourse proceeds by continually raising explicit or implicit questions, viewed as sets of alternatives, or competing descriptions of the world. If the interlocutor accepts the question, it becomes the QUD, a narrowed set of alternatives to be addressed (Roberts, in press). Three eye movement recording studies are reported that investigated the effect of a preceding explicit QUD (Experiment 1) or implicit QUD (Experiments 2 and 3) on the processing of following text. Experiment 1 revealed an effect of whether the question queried alternative propositions or alternative entities. Reading times in the answer were faster when the answer it provided was of the same semantic type as was queried. Experiment 2 tested QUDs implied by the alternative description of reality introduced by a non-actuality implicature trigger such as should X or want to X. The results, when combined with the results of Experiment 3 (which ruled out a possible alternative interpretation) showed disrupted reading of a following verb phrase that failed to resolve the implicit QUD (Did the discourse participant actually X?), compared to reading the same material in the absence of a clear QUD. The findings support an online role for QUDs in guiding readers' structuring and interpretation of discourse. |
Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller Scan patterns predict sentence production in the cross-modal processing of visual ccenes Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 1204–1223, 2012. @article{Coco2012,Most everyday tasks involve multiple modalities, which raises the question of how the processing of these modalities is coordinated by the cognitive system. In this paper, we focus on the coordination of visual attention and linguistic processing during speaking. Previous research has shown that objects in a visual scene are fixated before they are mentioned, leading us to hypothesize that the scan pattern of a participant can be used to predict what he or she will say. We test this hypothesis using a data set of cued scene descriptions of photo-realistic scenes. We demonstrate that similar scan patterns are correlated with similar sentences, within and between visual scenes; and that this correlation holds for three phases of the language production process (target identification, sentence planning, and speaking). We also present a simple algorithm that uses scan patterns to accurately predict associated sentences by utilizing similarity-based retrieval. |
2011 |
Minglei Chen; Hwawei Ko Exploring the eye-movement patterns as Chinese children read texts: A developmental perspective Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 232–246, 2011. @article{Chen2011,This study was to investigate Chinese children's eye patterns while reading different text genres from a developmental perspective. Eye movements were recorded while children in the second through sixth grades read two expository texts and two narrative texts. Across passages, overall word frequency was not significantly different between the two genres. Results showed that all children had longer fixation durations for low-frequency words. They also had longer fixation durations on content words. These results indicate that children adopted a word-based processing strategy like skilled readers do. However, only older children's rereading times were affected by genre. Overall, eye-movement patterns of older children reported in this study are in accordance with those of skilled Chinese readers, but younger children are more likely to be responsive to word characteristics than text level when reading a Chinese text. |
William S. Evans; David Caplan; Gloria Waters Effects of concurrent arithmetical and syntactic complexity on self-paced reaction times and eye fixations Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 1203–1211, 2011. @article{Evans2011,Two dual-task experiments (replications of Experiments 1 and 2 in Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 246-269 2007) were conducted to determine whether syntactic and arithmetical operations share working memory resources. Subjects read object- or subject-extracted relative clause sentences phrase by phrase in a self-paced task while simultaneously adding or subtracting numbers. Experiment 2 measured eye fixations as well as self-paced reaction times. In both experiments, there were main effects of syntax and of mathematical operation on self-paced reading times, but no interaction of the two. In the Experiment 2 eye-tracking results, there were main effects of syntax on first-pass reading time and total reading time and an interaction between syntax and math in total reading time on the noun phrase within the relative clause. The findings point to differences in the ways individuals process sentences under these dual-task conditions, as compared with viewing sentences during "normal" reading conditions, and do not support the view that arithmetical and syntactic integration operations share a working memory system. |
Ruth Filik; Emma Barber Inner speech during silent reading reflects the reader's regional accent Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 6, no. 10, pp. e25782, 2011. @article{Filik2011,While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech. However, there is currently little evidence regarding whether this inner voice resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. To investigate this issue, we compared reading behaviour of Northern and Southern English participants who have differing pronunciations for words like 'glass', in which the vowel duration is short in a Northern accent and long in a Southern accent. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they silently read limericks in which the end words of the first two lines (e.g., glass/class) would be pronounced differently by Northern and Southern participants. The final word of the limerick (e.g., mass/sparse) then either did or did not rhyme, depending on the reader's accent. Results showed disruption to eye movement behaviour when the final word did not rhyme, determined by the reader's accent, suggesting that inner speech resembles our own voice. |
Gemma Fitzsimmons; Denis Drieghe The influence of number of syllables on word skipping during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 736–741, 2011. @article{Fitzsimmons2011,In an eye-tracking experiment, participants read sentences containing a monosyllabic (e.g., grain) or a disyllabic (e.g., cargo) five-letter word. Monosyllabic target words were skipped more often than disyllabic target words, indicating that syllabic structure was extracted from the parafovea early enough to influence the decision of saccade target selection. Fixation times on the target word when it was fixated did not show an influence of number of syllables, demonstrating that number of syllables differentially impacts skipping rates and fixation durations during reading. |
Angélica Pérez Fornos; Jörg Sommerhalder; Marco Pelizzone Reading with a simulated 60-channel implant Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 5, pp. 57, 2011. @article{Fornos2011,First generation retinal prostheses containing 50-60 electrodes are currently in clinical trials. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the theoretical upper limit (best possible) reading performance attainable with a state-of-the-art 60-channel retinal implant and to find the optimum viewing conditions for the task. Four normal volunteers performed full-page text reading tasks with a low-resolution, 60-pixel viewing window that was stabilized in the central visual field. Two parameters were systematically varied: (1) spatial resolution (image magnification) and (2) the orientation of the rectangular viewing window. Performance was measured in terms of reading accuracy (% of correctly read words) and reading rates (words/min). Maximum reading performances were reached at spatial resolutions between 3.6 and 6 pixels/char. Performance declined outside this range for all subjects. In optimum viewing conditions (4.5 pixels/char), subjects achieved almost perfect reading accuracy and mean reading rates of 26 words/min for the vertical viewing window and of 34 words/min for the horizontal viewing window. These results suggest that, theoretically, some reading abilities can be restored with actual state-of-the-art retinal implant prototypes if "image magnification" is within an "optimum range." Future retinal implants providing higher pixel resolutions, thus allowing for a wider visual span might allow faster reading rates. |
Tom Foulsham; Geoffrey Underwood If visual saliency predicts search, then why? Evidence from normal and gaze-contingent search tasks in natural scenes Journal Article In: Cognitive Computation, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 48–63, 2011. @article{Foulsham2011a,The Itti and Koch (Vision Research 40: 14891506, 2000) saliency map model has inspired a wealth of research testing the claim that bottom-up saliency determines the placement of eye fixations in natural scenes. Although saliency seems to correlate with (although not necessarily cause) fixation in free-viewing or encoding tasks, it has been suggested that visual saliency can be overridden in a search task, with saccades being planned on the basis of target features, rather than being captured by saliency. Here, we find that target regions of a scene that are salient according to this model are found quicker than control regions (Experiment 1). However, this does not seem to be altered by filtering features in the periphery using a gaze-contingent display (Experiment 2), and a deeper analysis of the eye movements made suggests that the saliency effect is instead due to the meaning of the scene regions. Experiment 3 supports this interpretation, showing that scene inversion reduces the saliency effect. These results suggest that saliency effects on search may have nothing to do with bottom-up saccade guidance. |
Vanessa Baudiffier; David Caplan; Daniel Gaonac'h; David Chesnet The effect of noun animacy on the processing of unambiguous sentences: Evidence from French relative clauses Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 64, no. 10, pp. 1896–1905, 2011. @article{Baudiffier2011,Two experiments, one using self-paced reading and one using eye tracking, investigated the influence of noun animacy on the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses, object relative (OR) clauses, and object relative clauses with stylistic inversion (OR-SI) in French. Each sentence type was presented in two versions: either with an animate relative clause (RC) subject and an inanimate object (AS/IO), or with an inanimate RC subject and an animate object (IS/AO). There was an interaction between the RC structure and noun animacy. The advantage of SR sentences over OR and OR-SI sentences disappeared in AS/IO sentences. The interaction between animacy and structure occurred in self-paced reading times and in total fixation times on the RCs, but not in first-pass reading times. The results are consistent with a late interaction between animacy and structural processing during parsing and provide data relevant to several models of parsing. |
Boaz M. Ben-David; Craig G. Chambers; Meredyth Daneman; M. Kathleen Pichora-Fuller; Eyal M. Reingold; Bruce A. Schneider Effects of aging and noise on real-time spoken word recognition: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 54, pp. 243–262, 2011. @article{BenDavid2011,PURPOSE: To use eye tracking to investigate age differences in real-time lexical processing in quiet and in noise in light of the fact that older adults find it more difficult than younger adults to understand conversations in noisy situations. METHOD: Twenty-four younger and 24 older adults followed spoken instructions referring to depicted objects, for example, "Look at the candle." Eye movements captured listeners' ability to differentiate the target noun (candle) from a similar-sounding phonological competitor (e.g., candy or sandal). Manipulations included the presence/absence of noise, the type of phonological overlap in target-competitor pairs, and the number of syllables. RESULTS: Having controlled for age-related differences in word recognition accuracy (by tailoring noise levels), similar online processing profiles were found for younger and older adults when targets were discriminated from competitors that shared onset sounds. Age-related differences were found when target words were differentiated from rhyming competitors and were more extensive in noise. CONCLUSIONS: Real-time spoken word recognition processes appear similar for younger and older adults in most conditions; however, age-related differences may be found in the discrimination of rhyming words (especially in noise), even when there are no age differences in word recognition accuracy. These results highlight the utility of eye movement methodologies for studying speech processing across the life span. |
Raymond Bertram; Victor Kuperman; R. Harald Baayen; Jukka Hyönä The hyphen as a segmentation cue in triconstituent compound processing: It's getting better all the time Journal Article In: Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 530–544, 2011. @article{Bertram2011,Inserting a hyphen in Dutch and Finnish compounds is most often illegal given spelling conventions. However, the current two eye movement experiments on triconstituent Dutch compounds like voetbalbond "footballassociation" (Experiment 1) and triconstituent Finnish compounds like lentokenttätaksi "airporttaxi" (Experiment 2) show that inserting a hyphen at constituent boundaries does not have to be detrimental to compound processing. In fact, when hyphens were inserted at the major constituent boundary (voetbal-bond "football-association"; lentokenttä-taksi "airport-taxi"), processing of the first part (voetbal "football"; lentokenttä "airport") turns out to be faster when it is followed by a hyphen than when it is legally concatenated. Inserting a hyphen caused a delay in later eye movement measures, which is probably due to the illegality of inserting hyphens in normally concatenated compounds. However, in both Dutch and Finnish we found a learning effect in the course of the experiment, such that by the end of the experiments hyphenated compounds are read faster than in the beginning of the experiment. By the end of the experiment, compounds with a hyphen at the major constituent boundary were actually processed equally fast as (Dutch) or even faster than (Finnish) their concatenated counterparts. In contrast, hyphenation at the minor constituent boundary (voet-balbond "foot-ballassociation"; lento-kenttätaksi "air-porttaxi") was detrimental to compound processing speed throughout the experiment. The results imply that the hyphen may be an efficient segmentation cue and that spelling illegalities can be overcome easily, as long as they make sense. |