Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink eye tracker reading and language research publications up until 2025 (with some early 2026s) are listed below by year. You can search the eye-tracking publications using keywords such as Visual World, Comprehension, Speech Production, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink reading or language research articles, please email us!
2014 |
Gerardo Fernández; Diego E. Shalom; Reinhold Kliegl; Mariano Sigman Eye movements during reading proverbs and regular sentences: The incoming word predictability effect Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 260–273, 2014. @article{Fernandez2014b,Reading is an everyday activity requiring the efficient integration of several central cognitive subsystems ranging from attention and oculomotor control to word identification and language comprehension. Effects of frequency, length and cloze predictability of words on reading times reliably indicate local processing difficulty of fixated words; also, a reader's expectation about an upcoming word apparently influences fixation duration even before the eyes reach this word. Moreover, this effect has been reported as noncanonical (i.e., longer fixation durations on word N when word N1 is of high cloze predictability). However, this effect is difficult to observe because in natural sentences the fluctuations in predictability in content words are very small. To overcome this difficulty we investigated eye movements while reading proverbs as well as sentences constructed for high- and low-average cloze predictability. We also determined for each sentence a word at which predictability of words jumps from a low to high value. Fixation durations while reading proverbs and high-predictable sentences exhibited significant effects of the change in predictability along the sentence (when the successive word is more predictable than the fixated word). Results are in agreement with the proposal that cloze predictability of upcoming words exerts an influence on fixation durations via memory retrieval. |
Ruth Filik; Hartmut Leuthold; Katie Wallington; Jemma Page Testing theories of irony processing using eye-tracking and ERPs Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 811–828, 2014. @article{Filik2014,Not much is known about how people comprehend ironic utterances, and to date, most studies have simply compared processing of ironic versus non-ironic statements. A key aspect of the graded salience hypothesis, distinguishing it from other accounts (such as the standard pragmatic view and direct access view), is that it predicts differences between processing of familiar and unfamiliar ironies. Specifically, if an ironic utterance is familiar, then the ironic interpretation should be available without the need for extra inferential processes, whereas for unfamiliar ironies, the literal interpretation would be computed first, and a mismatch with context would lead to a re-interpretation of the statement as being ironic. We recorded participants' eye movements while they were reading (Experiment 1), and electrical brain activity while they were listening to (Experiment 2), familiar and unfamiliar ironies compared to non-ironic controls. Results show disruption to eye movements and an N400-like effect for unfamiliar ironies only, supporting the predictions of the graded salience hypothesis. In addition, in Experiment 2, a late positivity was found for both familiar and unfamiliar ironic materials, compared to non-ironic controls. We interpret this positivity as reflecting ongoing conflict between the literal and ironic interpretations of the utterance. |
Joel Fishbein; Jesse A. Harris Making sense of Kafka: Structural biases induce early sense commitment for metonyms Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 76, pp. 94–112, 2014. @article{Fishbein2014,Prior research suggests that the language processor initially activates an underspecified representation of a metonym consistent with all its senses, potentially selecting a specific sense if supported by contextual and lexical information. We explored whether a structural heuristic, the Subject as Agent Principle, which provisionally assigns an agent theta role to canonical subjects, would prompt immediate sense selection. In Experiment 1, we found initial evidence that this principle is active during offline and online processing of metonymic names like Kafka. Reading time results from Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that previous context biasing towards the metonymic sense of the name reduced, but did not remove, the agent preference, consistent with Frazier's (1999) proposal that the processor may avoid selecting a specific sense, unless grammatically required. |
Steven Frisson; Nathalie N. Bélanger; Keith Rayner Phonological and orthographic overlap effects in fast and masked priming Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 9, pp. 1742–1767, 2014. @article{Frisson2014,We investigated how orthographic and phonological information is activated during reading, using a fast priming task, and during single word recognition, using masked priming. Specifically, different types of overlap between prime and target were contrasted: high orthographic and high phonological overlap (track-crack), high orthographic and low phonological overlap (bear-gear), or low orthographic and high phonological overlap (fruit-chute). In addition, we examined whether (orthographic) beginning overlap (swoop-swoon) yielded the same priming pattern as end (rhyme) overlap (track-crack). Prime durations were 32 and 50ms in the fast priming version, and 50ms in the masked priming version, and mode of presentation (prime and target in lower case) was identical. The fast priming experiment showed facilitatory priming effects when both orthography and phonology overlapped, with no apparent differences between beginning and end overlap pairs. Facilitation was also found when prime and target only overlapped orthographically. In contrast, the masked priming experiment showed inhibition for both types of end overlap pairs (with and without phonological overlap), and no difference for begin overlap items. When prime and target only shared principally phonological information, facilitation was only found with a long prime duration in the fast priming experiment, while no differences were found in the masked priming version. These contrasting results suggest that fast priming and masked priming do not necessarily tap into the same type of processing. |
Steven Frisson; Hannah Koole; Louisa Hughes; Andrew Olson; Linda Wheeldon Competition between orthographically and phonologically similar words during sentence reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 73, no. 1, pp. 148–173, 2014. @article{Frisson2014a,Two eye movement experiments tested the effect of orthographic and/or phonological overlap between prime and target words embedded in a sentence. In Experiment 1, four types of overlap were tested: phonological and orthographic overlap (O+P+) occurring word initially .strain-strait) or word finally .wings-kings), orthographic overlap alone (O+P-, bear-gear) and phonological overlap alone (O-P+, smile-aisle). Only O+P+ overlap resulted in inhibition, with the rhyming condition showing an immediate inhibition effect on the target word and the non-rhyming condition on the spillover region. No priming effects were found on any eye movement measure for the O+P- or the O-P+ conditions. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the size of this inhibition effect is affected by both the distance between the prime and target words and by syntactic structure. Inhibition was again observed when primes and targets appeared close together (approximately 3 words). In contrast, no inhibition was observed when the separation was nine words on average, with the prime and target either appearing in the same sentence or separated by a sentence break. However, when the target was delayed but still in the same sentence, the size of the inhibitory effect was affected by the participants' level of reading comprehension. Skilled comprehenders were more negatively impacted by related primes than less skilled comprehenders. This suggests that good readers keep lexical representations active across larger chunks of text, and that they discard this activation at the end of the sentence. This pattern of results is difficult to accommodate in existing competition or episodic memory models of priming. |
Benjamin Gagl; Stefan Hawelka; Florian Hutzler A similar correction mechanism in slow and fluent readers after suboptimal landing positions Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 8, pp. 355, 2014. @article{Gagl2014,The present eye movements study investigated the optimal viewing position (OVP) and inverted-optimal viewing position (I-OVP) effects in slow readers. The basis of these effects is a phenomenon called corrective re-fixations, which describes a short saccade from a suboptimal landing position (word beginning or end) to the center of the word. The present study found corrective re-fixations in slow readers, which was evident from the I-OVP effects in first fixation durations, the OVP effect in number of fixations and the OVP effect in re-fixation probability. The main result is that slow readers, despite being characterized by a fragmented eye movement pattern during reading, nevertheless share an intact mechanism for performing corrective re-fixations. This correction mechanism is not linked to linguistic processing, but to visual and oculomotor processes, which suggests the integrity of oculomotor and visual processes in slow readers. |
Benjamin Gagl; Stefan Hawelka; Fabio Richlan; Sarah Schuster; Florian Hutzler Parafoveal preprocessing in reading revisited: Evidence from a novel preview manipulation Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 588–595, 2014. @article{Gagl2014a,The study investigated parafoveal preprocessing by the means of the classical invisible boundary paradigm and a novel manipulation of the parafoveal previews (i.e., visual degradation). Eye movements were investigated on 5-letter target words with constraining (i.e., highly informative) initial letters or similarly constraining final letters. Visual degradation was administered to all, no, the initial, or the final 2 letters of the parafoveal preview of the target words. Critically, the manipulation of the parafoveal previews did not interfere with foveal processing. Thus, we had a proper baseline to which we could relate our main findings, which were as follows: First, the valid (i.e., nondegraded) preview of the target words' final letters led to shorter fixation times compared to the baseline condition (i.e., the degradation of all letters). Second, this preview benefit for the final letters was comparable to the benefit of previewing the initial letters. Third, the preview of a constraining initial letter sequence, however, yielded a larger preview benefit than the preview of an unconstraining initial letter sequence. The latter finding indicates that preprocessing constraining initial letters is particularly conducive to foveal word recognition. |
Lesya Y. Ganushchak; Agnieszka E. Konopka; Yiya Chen What the eyes say about planning of focused referents during sentence formulation: A cross-linguistic investigation Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5, pp. 1124, 2014. @article{Ganushchak2014,This study investigated how sentence formulation is influenced by a preceding discourse context. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants described pictures of two-character transitive events in Dutch (Experiment 1) and Chinese (Experiment 2). Focus was manipulated by presenting questions before each picture. In the Neutral condition, participants first heard "What is happening here?" In the Object or Subject Focus conditions, the questions asked about the Object or Subject character (What is the policeman stopping? Who is stopping the truck?). The target response was the same in all conditions (The policeman is stopping the truck). In both experiments, sentence formulation in the Neutral condition showed the expected pattern of speakers fixating the subject character (policeman) before the object character (truck). In contrast, in the focus conditions speakers rapidly directed their gaze preferentially only to the character they needed to encode to answer the question (the new, or focused, character). The timing of gaze shifts to the new character varied by language group (Dutch vs. Chinese): shifts to the new character occurred earlier when information in the question can be repeated in the response with the same syntactic structure (in Chinese but not in Dutch). The results show that discourse affects the timecourse of linguistic formulation in simple sentences and that these effects can be modulated by language-specific linguistic structures such as parallels in the syntax of questions and declarative sentences. |
Mackenzie G. Glaholt; Keith Rayner; Eyal M. Reingold A rapid effect of stimulus quality on the durations of individual fixations during reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 3-4, pp. 377–389, 2014. @article{Glaholt2014,We developed a variant of the single fixation replacement paradigm (Yang & McConkie, 2001, 2004) in order to examine the effect of stimulus quality on fixation duration during reading. Subjects' eye movements were monitored while they read passages of text for comprehension. During critical fixations, equal changes to the luminance of the background produced either an increase (Up-Contrast) or a decrease (Down-Contrast) of the contrast of the text. The durations of critical fixations were found to be lengthened in the Down-Contrast but not the Up-Contrast condition. Ex-Gaussian modelling of the distributions of fixation durations showed that the reduction in stimulus quality lengthened the majority of fixations, and a survival analysis estimated the onset of this effect to be approximately 141 ms following fixation onset. Because the stimulus quality of the text during critical fixations could not be predicted or parafoveally previewed prior to foveation, the present effect can be attributed to an immediate effect of stimulus quality on fixation duration. |
Tamar H. Gollan; Elizabeth R. Schotter; Joanne Gomez; Mayra Murillo; Keith Rayner Multiple levels of bilingual language control: Evidence from language intrusions in reading aloud Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 585–595, 2014. @article{Gollan2014,Bilinguals rarely produce words in an unintended language. However, we induced such intrusion errors (e.g., saying el instead of he) in 32 Spanish-English bilinguals who read aloud single-language (English or Spanish) and mixed-language (haphazard mix of English and Spanish) paragraphs with English or Spanish word order. These bilinguals produced language intrusions almost exclusively in mixed-language paragraphs, and most often when attempting to produce dominant-language targets (accent-only errors also exhibited reversed language-dominance effects). Most intrusion errors occurred for function words, especially when they were not from the language that determined the word order in the paragraph. Eye movements showed that fixating a word in the nontarget language increased intrusion errors only for function words. Together, these results imply multiple mechanisms of language control, including (a) inhibition of the dominant language at both lexical and sublexical processing levels, (b) special retrieval mechanisms for function words in mixed-language utterances, and (c) attentional monitoring of the target word for its match with the intended language. |
Katherine Guérard; Jean Saint-Aubin; Marilyne Maltais; Hugo Lavoie The role of verbal memory in regressions during reading is modulated by the target word's recency in memory Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 42, no. 7, pp. 1155–1170, 2014. @article{Guerard2014,During reading, a number of eye movements are made backward, on words that have already been read. Recent evidence suggests that such eye movements, called regressions, are guided by memory. Several studies point to the role of spatial memory, but evidence for the role of verbal memory is more limited. In the present study, we examined the factors that modulate the role of verbal memory in regressions. Participants were required to make regressions on target words located in sentences displayed on one or two lines. Verbal interference was shown to affect regressions, but only when participants executed a regression on a word located in the first part of the sentence, irrespective of the number of lines on which the sentence was displayed. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the effect of verbal interference on words located in the first part of the sentence disappeared when participants initiated the regression from the middle of the sentence. Our results suggest that verbal memory is recruited to guide regressions, but only for words read a longer time ago. |
Ernesto Guerra; Pia Knoeferle Spatial distance effects on incremental semantic interpretation of abstract sentences: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 133, no. 3, pp. 535–552, 2014. @article{Guerra2014,A large body of evidence has shown that visual context information can rapidly modulate language comprehension for concrete sentences and when it is mediated by a referential or a lexical-semantic link. What has not yet been examined is whether visual context can also modulate comprehension of abstract sentences incrementally when it is neither referenced by, nor lexically associated with, the sentence. Three eye-tracking reading experiments examined the effects of spatial distance between words (Experiment 1) and objects (Experiment 2 and 3) on participants' reading times for sentences that convey similarity or difference between two abstract nouns (e.g., 'Peace and war are certainly different...'). Before reading the sentence, participants inspected a visual context with two playing cards that moved either far apart or close together. In Experiment 1, the cards turned and showed the first two nouns of the sentence (e.g., 'peace', 'war'). In Experiments 2 and 3, they turned but remained blank. Participants' reading times at the adjective (Experiment 1: first-pass reading time; Experiment 2: total times) and at the second noun phrase (Experiment 3: first-pass times) were faster for sentences that expressed similarity when the preceding words/objects were close together (vs. far apart) and for sentences that expressed dissimilarity when the preceding words/objects were far apart (vs. close together). Thus, spatial distance between words or entirely unrelated objects can rapidly and incrementally modulate the semantic interpretation of abstract sentences. |
Matthew Haigh; Heather J. Ferguson; Andrew J. Stewart An eye-tracking investigation into readers' sensitivity to actual versus expected utility in the comprehension of conditionals Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 1, pp. 166–185, 2014. @article{Haigh2014,The successful comprehension of a utility conditional (i.e., an "if p, then q" statement where p and/or q is valued by one or more agents) requires the construction of a mental representation of the situation described by that conditional and integration of this representation with prior context. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the time course of integrating conditional utility information into the broader discourse model. Specifically, the experiment determined whether readers were sensitive, during rapid heuristic processing, to the congruency between the utility of the consequent clause of a conditional (positive or negative) and a reader's subjective expectations based on prior context. On a number of eye-tracking measures we found that readers were sensitive to conditional utility-conditionals for which the consequent utility mismatched the utility that would be anticipated on the basis of prior context resulted in processing disruption. Crucially, this sensitivity emerged on measures that are accepted to indicate early processing within the language comprehension system and suggests that the evaluation of a conditional's utility informs the early stages of conditional processing. |
Hannah Harvey; Robin Walker Reading with peripheral vision: A comparison of reading dynamic scrolling and static text with a simulated central scotoma Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 98, pp. 54–60, 2014. @article{Harvey2014a,Horizontally scrolling text is, in theory, ideally suited to enhance viewing strategies recommended to improve reading performance under conditions of central vision loss such as macular disease, although it is largely unproven in this regard. This study investigated if the use of scrolling text produced an observable improvement in reading performed under conditions of eccentric viewing in an artificial scotoma paradigm. Participants (n=17) read scrolling and static text with a central artificial scotoma controlled by an eye-tracker. There was an improvement in measures of reading accuracy, and adherence to eccentric viewing strategies with scrolling, compared to static, text. These findings illustrate the potential benefits of scrolling text as a potential reading aid for those with central vision loss. |
Anna Hatzidaki; Manon W. Jones; M. Santesteban; H. P. Branigan It's not what you see: It's the language you say it in Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 10, pp. 1233–1239, 2014. @article{Hatzidaki2014,In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the interplay between visual and linguistic information processing during time-telling, and how this is affected by speaking in a non-native language. We compared time-telling in Greek and English, which differ in time-telling word order (hour vs. minute mentioned first), by contrasting Greek-English bilinguals speaking in their L1-Greek or their L2-English, and English monolingual speakers. All three groups were faster when telling the time for digital than for analogue clocks, and when telling the time for the first half-hour than the second half-hour. Critically, first fixation and gaze duration analyses for the hour and minute regions showed a different pattern for Greek-English bilinguals when speaking in their L1 versus L2, with the latter resembling that of English monolinguals. Our results suggest that bilingual speakers' eye-movement programming was influenced by the type of time-telling utterance specific to the language of production currently in use.$backslash$nIn an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the interplay between visual and linguistic information processing during time-telling, and how this is affected by speaking in a non-native language. We compared time-telling in Greek and English, which differ in time-telling word order (hour vs. minute mentioned first), by contrasting Greek-English bilinguals speaking in their L1-Greek or their L2-English, and English monolingual speakers. All three groups were faster when telling the time for digital than for analogue clocks, and when telling the time for the first half-hour than the second half-hour. Critically, first fixation and gaze duration analyses for the hour and minute regions showed a different pattern for Greek-English bilinguals when speaking in their L1 versus L2, with the latter resembling that of English monolinguals. Our results suggest that bilingual speakers' eye-movement programming was influenced by the type of time-telling utterance specific to the language of production currently in use. |
Daphna Heller; Craig G. Chambers Would a blue kite by any other name be just as blue? Effects of descriptive choices on subsequent referential behavior Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 70, no. 1, pp. 53–67, 2014. @article{Heller2014,Using objects that contrast along multiple dimensions, we examined how the earlier description of an object using one dimension (size/color) influences reference to as-yet unmentioned objects, and how this depends on whether the two objects contrast with each other (i.e., whether they belong to the same nominal category). The dimensions of size and color were used because of their different sensitivity, with size adjectives being more closely tied to the presence of a contrasting object from the same category in the situational context. Experiment 1 elicited speakers' descriptions for an object following an earlier description of another object, and Experiment 2 investigated the real-time comprehension of the second description in a two-utterance sequence. Although the priming of linguistic forms may play a role in explaining some of the observed referential patterns, the full set of data suggests that precedence effects in referential descriptions are best explained in terms of a representation that maps those forms onto a mental representation of entities, namely, a discourse model that encodes relationships between entities. The results also highlight how color and size adjectives are processed differently from the earliest moments in comprehension. |
Renske S. Hoedemaker; Peter C. Gordon Embodied language comprehension: Encoding-based and goal-driven processes Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 143, no. 2, pp. 914–929, 2014. @article{Hoedemaker2014,Theories of embodied language comprehension have proposed that language is understood through perceptual simulation of the sensorimotor characteristics of its meaning. Strong support for this claim requires demonstration of encoding-based activation of sensorimotor representations that is distinct from task-related or goal-driven processes. Participants in 3 eye-tracking experiments were presented with triplets of either numbers or object and animal names. In Experiment 1, participants indicated whether the size of the referent of the middle object or animal name was in between the size of the 2 outer items. In Experiment 2, the object and animal names were encoded for an immediate recognition memory task. In Experiment 3, participants completed the same comparison task of Experiment 1 for both words and numbers. During the comparison tasks, word and number decision times showed a symbolic distance effect, such that response time was inversely related to the size difference between the items. A symbolic distance effect was also observed for animal and object encoding times in cases where encoding time likely reflected some goal-driven processes as well. When semantic size was irrelevant to the task (Experiment 2), it had no effect on word encoding times. Number encoding times showed a numerical distance priming effect: Encoding time increased with numerical difference between items. Together these results suggest that while activation of numerical magnitude representations is encoding-based as well as goal-driven, activation of size information associated with words is goal-driven and does not occur automatically during encoding. This conclusion challenges strong theories of embodied cognition which claim that language comprehension consists of activation of analog sensorimotor representations irrespective of higher level processes related to context or task-specific goals. |
Sven Hohenstein; Reinhold Klieg Semantic preview benefit during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 166–190, 2014. @article{Hohenstein2014,Word features in parafoveal vision influence eye movements during reading. The question of whether readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words was studied in 3 experiments by using a gaze-contingent display change technique. Subjects read German sentences containing 1 of several preview words that were replaced by a target word during the saccade to the preview (boundary paradigm). In the 1st experiment the preview word was semantically related or unrelated to the target. Fixation durations on the target were shorter for semantically related than unrelated previews, consistent with a semantic preview benefit. In the 2nd experiment, half the sentences were presented following the rules of German spelling (i.e., previews and targets were printed with an initial capital letter), and the other half were presented completely in lowercase. A semantic preview benefit was obtained under both conditions. In the 3rd experiment, we introduced 2 further preview conditions, an identical word and a pronounceable nonword, while also manipulating the text contrast. Whereas the contrast had negligible effects, fixation durations on the target were reliably different for all 4 types of preview. Semantic preview benefits were greater for pretarget fixations closer to the boundary (large preview space) and, although not as consistently, for long pretarget fixation durations (long preview time). The results constrain theoretical proposals about eye movement control in reading. |
Stephanie Huette; Bodo Winter; Teenie Matlock; David H. Ardell; Michael J. Spivey Eye movements during listening reveal spontaneous grammatical processing Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5, pp. 410, 2014. @article{Huette2014,Recent research using eye-tracking typically relies on constrained visual contexts in particular goal-oriented contexts, viewing a small array of objects on a computer screen and performing some overt decision or identification. Eyetracking paradigms that use pictures as a measure of word or sentence comprehension are sometimes touted as ecologically invalid because pictures and explicit tasks are not always present during language comprehension. This study compared the comprehension of sentences with two different grammatical forms: the past progressive (e.g., was walking), which emphasizes the ongoing nature of actions, and the simple past (e.g., walked), which emphasizes the end-state of an action. The results showed that the distribution and timing of eye movements mirrors the underlying conceptual structure of this linguistic difference in the absence of any visual stimuli or task constraint: Fixations were shorter and saccades were more dispersed across the screen, as if thinking about more dynamic events when listening to the past progressive stories. Thus, eye movement data suggest that visual inputs or an explicit task are unnecessary to solicit analog representations of features such as movement, that could be a key perceptual component to grammatical comprehension. |
Heeju Hwang; Elsi Kaiser The role of the verb in grammatical function assignment in English and Korean Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 5, pp. 1363–1376, 2014. @article{Hwang2014,One of the central questions in speech production is how speakers decide which entity to assign to which grammatical function. According to the lexical hypothesis (e. g., Bock & Levelt, 1994), verbs play a key role in this process (e. g., "send" and "receive" result in different entities being assigned to the subject position). In contrast, according to the structural hypothesis (e. g., Bock, Irwin, & Davidson, 2004), grammatical functions can be assigned based on a speaker's conceptual representation of an event, even before a particular verb is chosen. In order to examine the role of the verb in grammatical function assignment, we investigated whether English and Korean speakers exhibit semantic interference effects for verbs during a scene description task. We also analyzed speakers' eye movements during production. We found that English speakers exhibited verb interference effects and also fixated the action/verb region before the subject region. In contrast, Korean speakers did not show any verb interference effects and did not fixate the action/verb region before the subject region. Rather, in Korean, looks to the action/verb region sharply increased following looks to the object region. The findings provide evidence for the lexical hypothesis for English and are compatible with the structural hypothesis for Korean. We suggest that whether the verb is retrieved before speech onset depends on the role that the verb plays in grammatical function assignment or structural choice in a particular language. |
Joanne Ingram; Christopher J. Hand; Linda M. Moxey Processing inferences drawn from the logically equivalent frames half full and half empty Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 26, no. 7, pp. 799–817, 2014. @article{Ingram2014,Choice-based experiments indicate that readers draw sophisticated inferences from logically equivalent frames. Readers may infer that a glass was previously full if described as currently half empty, and previously empty if described as currently half full. The information leakage framework suggests these inferences are made because information about a previous state is leaked from speaker' s choice of frame. We examine if similar inferences are made during reading in two eye-tracking experiments. In Experiment 1, participants read a passage where a character describes a glass as currently half full or half empty before making a statement about the previous volume. We hypothesised that participants would infer that the glass was previously empty or full, respectively. Results suggest processing a previous volume of full is simpler regardless of the frame provided. In Experiment 2, materials were constructed to ensure inferences were based on participants' beliefs as opposed to characters'. Results support the information leakage framework; previous volumes of full and empty were processed more easily after current volumes of half empty and half full, respectively. We suggest that processing discrepancies between the two experiments are driven by word-related factors (e.g., markedness) or by participants' integration of characters' expectations. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Ralph Radach Parafoveal preview benefits during silent and oral reading: Testing the parafoveal information extraction hypothesis Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 3-4, pp. 354–376, 2014. @article{Inhoff2014,The preview of a parafoveally visible word conveys benefits when it is subsequently fixated. The current study examined whether these benefits are determined by the effectiveness of parafoveal information extraction, as implied by current models of eye movement control during reading, or by the effectiveness with which extracted information is integrated when a previewed word is fixated. For this, the boundary technique was used to manipulate the extent to which parafoveal information could be extracted, and text was read silently or orally. Consistent with prior work, a parafoveal target word preview conveyed fewer benefits when less parafoveal information could be extracted, target viewing durations were longer during oral than during silent reading, and the two factors interacted in the target fixation data, with smaller preview benefits during oral than during silent reading. Survival analyses indicated that this occurred because parafoveal information use occurred at later point in time during oral reading. Diminished opportunity for parafoveal information extraction also diminished target skipping rate, and it resulted in smaller saccades to target words, but these effects were not influenced by reading mode. Parafoveally extracted information was thus used less effectively during oral reading only when it involved the integration of parafoveally extracted information during subsequent target viewing. The dissociation of extraction from integration challenges current models of eye movement control.$backslash$nThe preview of a parafoveally visible word conveys benefits when it is subsequently fixated. The current study examined whether these benefits are determined by the effectiveness of parafoveal information extraction, as implied by current models of eye movement control during reading, or by the effectiveness with which extracted information is integrated when a previewed word is fixated. For this, the boundary technique was used to manipulate the extent to which parafoveal information could be extracted, and text was read silently or orally. Consistent with prior work, a parafoveal target word preview conveyed fewer benefits when less parafoveal information could be extracted, target viewing durations were longer during oral than during silent reading, and the two factors interacted in the target fixation data, with smaller preview benefits during oral than during silent reading. Survival analyses indicated that this occurred because parafoveal information use occurred at later point in time during oral reading. Diminished opportunity for parafoveal information extraction also diminished target skipping rate, and it resulted in smaller saccades to target words, but these effects were not influenced by reading mode. Parafoveally extracted information was thus used less effectively during oral reading only when it involved the integration of parafoveally extracted information during subsequent target viewing. The dissociation of extraction from integration challenges current models of eye movement control. |
Yu-Cin Jian; Hwa-Wei Ko Investigating the effects of background knowledge on Chinese word processing during text reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 37, pp. S71–S86, 2014. @article{Jian2014a,This study investigates the effects of background knowledge on Chinese word processing during silent reading by monitoring adult readers' eye movements. Both higher knowledge (physics major) and lower knowledge (nonphysics major) graduate students were given physics texts to read. Higher knowledge readers spent less time rereading and had lower regression rates on unfamiliar physics words and common words in physics texts than did lower knowledge readers; they also had shorter gaze durations and fewer first-pass fixations on familiar physics words than on unfamiliar physics words. For unfamiliar physics words and common words, both groups predominantly fixated first on the beginnings of words when they made multiple fixations on a word and on a left-of-centre location when they fixated only once on a word. These findings suggest that both groups comprise mature readers with strong language concepts. However, differences in background knowledge led to different reading processes at different stages of reading. |
Timothy R. Jordan; Abubaker A. A. Almabruk; Eman A. Gadalla; Victoria A. McGowan; Sarah J. White; Lily Abedipour; Kevin B. Paterson Reading direction and the central perceptual span: Evidence from Arabic and English Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 505–511, 2014. @article{Jordan2014,In English and other alphabetic languages read from left to right, useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend much further to the right of each fixation than to the left. However, the asymmetry of the perceptual span for alphabetic languages read in the opposite direction (i.e., from right to left) has received very little attention in empirical research. Accordingly, we investigated the perceptual span for Arabic, which is one of the world's most widely read languages and is read from right to left, using a gaze-contingent window paradigm in which a region of text was displayed normally around each point of fixation, while text outside this region was obscured. Skilled Arabic readers who were bilingual in Arabic and English read Arabic and English sentences while a window of normal text extended symmetrically 0.5(o) to the left and right of fixation or asymmetrically, by increasing this window to 1.5(o) or 2.5(o) to either the left or the right. When English was read, performance across window conditions was superior when windows extended rightward. However, when Arabic was read, performance was superior when windows extended leftward and was essentially the reverse of that observed for English. These findings show for the first time that a leftward asymmetry in the central perceptual span occurs when Arabic is read and, for the first time in over 30 years, provide a new indication that the perceptual span for alphabetic languages is modified by the overall direction of reading. |
Holly S. S. L. Joseph; Elizabeth Wonnacott; Paul Forbes; Kate Nation Becoming a written word: Eye movements reveal order of acquisition effects following incidental exposure to new words during silent reading Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 133, no. 1, pp. 238–248, 2014. @article{Joseph2014,We know that from mid-childhood onwards most new words are learned implicitly via reading; however, most word learning studies have taught novel items explicitly. We examined incidental word learning during reading by focusing on the well-documented finding that words which are acquired early in life are processed more quickly than those acquired later. Novel words were embedded in meaningful sentences and were presented to adult readers early (day 1) or later (day 2) during a five-day exposure phase. At test adults read the novel words in semantically neutral sentences. Participants' eye movements were monitored throughout exposure and test. Adults also completed a surprise memory test in which they had to match each novel word with its definition. Results showed a decrease in reading times for all novel words over exposure, and significantly longer total reading times at test for early than late novel words. Early-presented novel words were also remembered better in the offline test. Our results show that order of presentation influences processing time early in the course of acquiring a new word, consistent with partial and incremental growth in knowledge occurring as a function of an individual's experience with each word. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Jukka Hyönä Task relevance induces momentary changes in the functional visual field during reading Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 626–632, 2014. @article{Kaakinen2014,In the research reported here, we examined whether task demands can induce momentary tunnel vision during reading. More specifically, we examined whether the size of the functional visual field depends on task relevance. Forty participants read an expository text with a specific task in mind while their eye movements were recorded. A display-change paradigm with random-letter strings as preview masks was used to study the size of the functional visual field within sentences that contained task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. The results showed that orthographic parafoveal-on-foveal effects and preview benefits were observed for words within task-irrelevant but not task-relevant sentences. The results indicate that the size of the functional visual field is flexible and depends on the momentary processing demands of a reading task. The higher cognitive processing requirements experienced when reading task-relevant text rather than task-irrelevant text induce momentary tunnel vision, which narrows the functional visual field. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Henri Olkoniemi; Taina Kinnari; Jukka Hyönä Processing of written irony: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 287–311, 2014. @article{Kaakinen2014a,We examined processing of written irony by recording readers' eye movements while they read target phrases embedded either in ironic or non-ironic story context. After reading each story, participants responded to a text memory question and an inference question tapping into the understanding of the meaning of the target phrase. The results of Experiment 1 (N ¼ 52) showed that readers were more likely to reread ironic than non-ironic target sentences during first-pass reading as well as during later look-backs. Experiment 2 (N ¼ 60) examined individual differences related to working memory capacity (WMC), Sarcasm Self-Report Scale (SSS), and need for cognition (NFC) in the processing of irony. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that WMC, but not SSS or NFC, plays a role in how readers resolve the meaning of ironic utterances. High WMC was related to increased probability of initiating first-pass rereadings in ironic compared with literal sentences. The results of these two experiments suggest that the processing of (unconventional) irony does require extra processing effort and that the effects are localized in the ironic utterances. |
Pia Knoeferle Conjunction meaning can modulate parallelism facilitation: Eye-tracking evidence from German clausal coordination Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 75, pp. 140–158, 2014. @article{Knoeferle2014,In and-coordinated clauses, the second conjunct elicits faster reading times when it parallels (vs. does not parallel) the first in constituent order. This paper examined whether such parallelism facilitation results from simple constituent order priming from the first to the second clause, or whether it can be modulated through the linguistic context (the conjunction and clausal relations). Three eye-tracking experiments on German assessed this issue by manipulating conjunction meaning and type within subjects (resemblance: 'and' vs. adversative: 'but' or 'while'; coordinating: 'and' and 'but'; subordinating: 'while'), and by varying the clausal relations between experiments. Clausal parallelism facilitation was reduced when syntactic dependence of the clauses from a superordinate verb reinforced their coherence, and semantic expectations for 'but' and 'while' were violated through the parallel constituent order and thematic role relations of noun phrases. By contrast, it was not reduced when the same expectations were satisfied through other sentence constituents (temporally contrastive adverbs) and when the coordination involved matrix clauses. The contextual modulation of parallelism facilitation rules out simple priming as the only underlying mechanism. The observed facilitation rather reflects compositional processing of the coordinands and the conjunction in the linguistic context. |
Agnieszka E. Konopka; Antje S. Meyer Priming sentence planning Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 73, pp. 1–40, 2014. @article{Konopka2014,Sentence production requires mapping preverbal messages onto linguistic structures. Because sentences are normally built incrementally, the information encoded in a sentence-initial increment is critical for explaining how the mapping process starts and for predicting its timecourse. Two experiments tested whether and when speakers prioritize encoding of different types of information at the outset of formulation by comparing production of descriptions of transitive events (e.g., A dog is chasing the mailman) that differed on two dimensions: the ease of naming individual characters and the ease of apprehending the event gist (i.e., encoding the relational structure of the event). To additionally manipulate ease of encoding, speakers described the target events after receiving lexical primes (facilitating naming; Experiment 1) or structural primes (facilitating generation of a linguistic structure; Experiment 2). Both properties of the pictured events and both types of primes influenced the form of target descriptions and the timecourse of formulation: character-specific variables increased the probability of speakers encoding one character with priority at the outset of formulation, while the ease of encoding event gist and of generating a syntactic structure increased the likelihood of early encoding of information about both characters. The results show that formulation is flexible and highlight some of the conditions under which speakers might employ different planning strategies. |
André Krügel; Ralf Engbert A model of saccadic landing positions in reading under the influence of sensory noise Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 334–353, 2014. @article{Kruegel2014,During reading, saccadic eye movements are produced to move the high acuity foveal region of the eye to words of interest for efficient word processing. Distributions of saccadic landing positions peak close to a word's centre but are relatively broad compared to simple oculomotor tasks. Moreover, landing-position distributions are modulated both by distance of the launch site and by saccade type (e.g., one-step saccade, word skipping, refixation). Here we present a mathematical model for the computation of a saccade intended for a given target word. Two fundamental assumptions are related to (1) the sensory computation of the word centre from inter- word spaces and (2) the integration of sensory information and a priori knowledge using Bayesian estimation. Our model was developed for data from a large corpus of eye movements from normal reading. We demonstrate that the model is able simultaneously to account for a systematic shift of saccadic mean landing position with increasing launch-site distance and for qualitative differences between one-step saccades (i.e., from a given word to the next word) and word-skipping saccades. |
Anuenue Kukona; Gerry T. M. Altmann; Yuki Kamide Knowing what, where, and when: Event comprehension in language processing Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 133, no. 1, pp. 25–31, 2014. @article{Kukona2014,We investigated the retrieval of location information, and the deployment of attention to these locations, following (described) event-related location changes. In two visual world experiments, listeners viewed arrays with containers like a bowl, jar, pan, and jug, while hearing sentences like "The boy will pour the sweetcorn from the bowl into the jar, and he will pour the gravy from the pan into the jug. And then, he will taste the sweetcorn". At the discourse-final "sweetcorn", listeners fixated context-relevant "Target" containers most (jar). Crucially, we also observed two forms of competition: listeners fixated containers that were not directly referred to but associated with "sweetcorn" (bowl), and containers that played the same role as Targets (goals of moving events; jug), more than distractors (pan). These results suggest that event-related location changes are encoded across representations that compete for comprehenders' attention, such that listeners retrieve, and fixate, locations that are not referred to in the unfolding language, but related to them via object or role information. |
Richard Kunert; Christoph Scheepers Speed and accuracy of dyslexic versus typical word recognition: An eye-movement investigation Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5, pp. 1129, 2014. @article{Kunert2014,Developmental dyslexia is often characterized by a dual deficit in both word recognition accuracy and general processing speed. While previous research into dyslexic word recognition may have suffered from speed-accuracy trade-off, the present study employed a novel eye-tracking task that is less prone to such confounds. Participants (10 dyslexics and 12 controls) were asked to look at real word stimuli, and to ignore simultaneously presented non-word stimuli, while their eye-movements were recorded. Improvements in word recognition accuracy over time were modeled in terms of a continuous non-linear function. The words' rhyme consistency and the non-words' lexicality (unpronounceable, pronounceable, pseudohomophone) were manipulated within-subjects. Speed-related measures derived from the model fits confirmed generally slower processing in dyslexics, and showed a rhyme consistency effect in both dyslexics and controls. In terms of overall error rate, dyslexics (but not controls) performed less accurately on rhyme-inconsistent words, suggesting a representational deficit for such words in dyslexics. Interestingly, neither group showed a pseudohomophone effect in speed or accuracy, which might call the task-independent pervasiveness of this effect into question. The present results illustrate the importance of distinguishing between speed- vs. accuracy-related effects for our understanding of dyslexic word recognition. |
Chigusa Kurumada; Meredith Brown; Sarah Bibyk; Daniel F. Pontillo; Michael K. Tanenhaus Is it or isn't it: Listeners make rapid use of prosody to infer speaker meanings Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 133, no. 2, pp. 335–342, 2014. @article{Kurumada2014,A visual world experiment examined the time course for pragmatic inferences derived from visual context and contrastive intonation contours. We used the construction It looks like an X pronounced with either (a) a H* pitch accent on the final noun and a low boundary tone, or (b) a contrastive L + H* pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support contrastive inference (e.g., It LOOKSL+H* like a zebraL-H%...(but it is not)). When the visual display contained a single related set of contrasting pictures (e.g. a zebra vs. a zebralike animal), effects of LOOKSL+H*emerged prior to the processing of phonemic information from the target noun. The results indicate that the prosodic processing is incremental and guided by contextually-supported expectations. Additional analyses ruled out explanations based on context-independent heuristics that might substitute for online computation of contrast. |
Nayoung Kwon; Patrick Sturt The use of control information in dependency formation: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 73, no. 1, pp. 59–80, 2014. @article{Kwon2014a,Recent research has shown much evidence that sentence comprehension can be extremely predictive. However, we currently know little about the limits of predictive processing. In the two eye-tracking experiments, we examined whether predictive information in dependency formation is inevitably given priority over a well-known structural preference in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 used sentences including control nouns like order (e.g. After Andrew's order to wash the kids came over to the house). If predictive dependency information is given priority over disambiguation preferences, then readers could immediately interpret the kids as the ones who have been ordered to wash, thus avoiding the garden path at the main verb came. However, garden path effects were found irrespective of control information, although the garden path difficulty was reduced when the lexical control information highlighted the globally correct analysis (as in the above example), relative to when it did not. Experiment 2 replicated these results with adjunct control, where the relevant dependency is obligatory (e.g. After refusing to wash the kids came over to the house). Again, control information did not influence initial disambiguation, but did affect the difficulty of garden path recovery. Overall, the results suggest that there are limitations on the influence of predictive dependency formation on on-line structural disambiguation. |
Chia-lin Lee; Daniel Mirman; Laurel J. Buxbaum Abnormal dynamics of activation of object use information in apraxia: Evidence from eyetracking Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 13–26, 2014. @article{Lee2014,Action representations associated with object use may be incidentally activated during visual object processing, and the time course of such activations may be influenced by lexical-semantic context (e.g., Lee, Middleton, Mirman, Kalénine, & Buxbaum (2012). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(1), 257-270). In this study we used the "visual world" eye-tracking paradigm to examine whether a deficit in producing skilled object-use actions (apraxia) is associated with abnormalities in incidental activation of action information, and assessed the neuroanatomical substrates of any such deficits. Twenty left hemisphere stroke patients, ten of whom were apraxic, performed a task requiring identification of a named object in a visual display containing manipulation-related and unrelated distractor objects. Manipulation relationships among objects were not relevant to the identification task. Objects were cued with neutral ("S/he saw the. . .."), or action-relevant ("S/he used the. . ..") sentences. Non-apraxic participants looked at use-related non-target objects significantly more than at unrelated non-target objects when cued both by neutral and action-relevant sentences, indicating that action information is incidentally activated. In contrast, apraxic participants showed delayed activation of manipulation-based action information during object identification when cued by neutral sentences. The magnitude of delayed activation in the neutral sentence condition was reliably predicted by lower scores on a test of gesture production to viewed objects, as well as by lesion loci in the inferior parietal and posterior temporal lobes. However, when cued by a sentence containing an action verb, apraxic participants showed fixation patterns that were statistically indistinguishable from non-apraxic controls. In support of grounded theories of cognition, these results suggest that apraxia and temporal-parietal lesions may be associated with abnormalities in incidental activation of action information from objects. Further, they suggest that the previously-observed facilitative role of action verbs in the retrieval of object-related action information extends to participants with apraxia. |
Chi Yui Leung; Masatoshi Sugiura; Daisuke Abe; Lisa Yoshikawa The perceptual span in second language reading: An eye-tracking study using a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm Journal Article In: Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, vol. 4, pp. 585–594, 2014. @article{Leung2014,The perceptual span, which is the visual area providing useful information to a reader during eye fixation, has been well investigated among native or first language (L1) readers, but not among second language (L2) readers. Our goal was to investigate the size of the perceptual span among Japanese university students who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) to investigate parafoveal processing during L2 reading. In an experiment using the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm, we compared perceptual span between Japanese EFL readers (N = 42) and native English L1 readers (N = 14). Our results showed that (1) the EFL readers had a smaller perceptual span than the L1 readers did, and (2) the facilitating effect of parafoveal information was greater for faster EFL readers than it was for slower EFL readers. These findings provide evidence that EFL readers can only utilize little parafoveal information during fixation when compared with L1 readers. |
Xingshan Li; Klinton Bicknell; Pingping Liu; Wei Wei; Keith Rayner In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 143, no. 2, pp. 895–913, 2014. @article{Li2014,While much previous work on reading in languages with alphabetic scripts has suggested that reading is word-based, reading in Chinese has been argued to be less reliant on words. This is primarily because in the Chinese writing system words are not spatially segmented, and characters are themselves complex visual objects. Here, we present a systematic characterization of the effects of a wide range of word and character properties on eye movements in Chinese reading, using a set of mixed-effects regression models. The results reveal a rich pattern of effects of the properties of the current, previous, and next words on a range of reading measures, which is strikingly similar to the pattern of effects of word properties reported in spaced alphabetic languages. This finding provides evidence that reading shares a word-based core and may be fundamentally similar across languages with highly dissimilar scripts. We show that these findings are robust to the inclusion of character properties in the regression models and are equally reliable when dependent measures are defined in terms of characters rather than words, providing strong evidence that word properties have effects in Chinese reading above and beyond characters. This systematic characterization of the effects of word and character properties in Chinese advances our knowledge of the processes underlying reading and informs the future development of models of reading. More generally, however, this work suggests that differences in script may not alter the fundamental nature of reading. |
Pingping Liu; Weijun Li; Buxin Han; Xingshan Li Effects of anomalous characters and small stroke omissions on eye movements during the reading of Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Ergonomics, vol. 57, no. 11, pp. 1659–1669, 2014. @article{Liu2014,We investigated the influence of typographical errors (typos) on eye movements and word recognition in Chinese reading. Participants' eye movements were tracked as they read sentences in which the target words were presented (1) normally, (2) with the initial stroke of the first characters removed (the omitted stroke condition) or (3) the first characters replaced by anomalous characters (the anomalous character condition). The results indicated that anomalous characters caused longer fixation durations and shorter outgoing forward saccade lengths than the correct words. This finding is consistent with the prediction of the theory of the processing-based strategy. Additionally, anomalous characters strongly disrupted lexical processing and whole sentence comprehension, but small stroke omissions did not. Implications of the effect of processing difficulty on forward saccade targeting for models of eye movement control during Chinese reading are discussed. |
Pingping Liu; Xingshan Li Inserting spaces before and after words affects word processing differently in Chinese: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 105, no. 1, pp. 57–68, 2014. @article{Liu2014a,Unlike in English, there are no spaces between printed words in Chinese. In this study, we explored how inserting a space before or after a word affects the processing of that word in Chinese reading. Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences with different presentation conditions. The results show that inserting a space after a word facilitates its processing, but inserting a space before a word does not show this effect and inhibits the processing of that word in some cases. Our results are consistent with the prediction of a word segmentation and recognition model in Chinese Li et al., 2009, Cognit. Psychol., 58, 525. Additionally, we found that a space guides the initial landing position on the word: the initial landing position was further away from the space that inserted into the text, whether it was before or after a word. |
Simon P. Liversedge; Chuanli Zang; Manman Zhang; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Denis Drieghe The effect of visual complexity and word frequency on eye movements during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 3-4, pp. 441–457, 2014. @article{Liversedge2014,Eye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored when they read sentences containing single-character target words orthogonally manipulated for frequency and visual complexity (number of strokes). Both factors yielded strong main effects on skipping probability but no interaction, with readers skipping visually simple and high frequency words more often. However, an interaction between frequency and complexity was observed on the fixation times on the target words with longer fixations for the low frequency, visually complex words. The results demonstrate that visual complexity and frequency have independent influences on saccadic targeting behaviour during Chinese reading but jointly influence fixation durations and that these two factors differently impact fixation durations and saccade targeting during reading. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon Effects of animacy and noun-phrase relatedness on the processing of complex sentences Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 794–805, 2014. @article{Lowder2014,Previous work has suggested that syntactically complex object-extracted relative clauses are easier to process when the head noun phrase (NP1) is inanimate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is animate, as compared with the reverse animacy configuration, with differences in processing difficulty beginning as early as NP2 (e.g., The article that the senator . . . vs. The senator that the article . . .). Two eye-tracking-while-reading experiments were conducted to better understand the source of this effect. Experiment 1 showed that having an inanimate NP1 facilitated processing even when NP2 was held constant. Experiment 2 manipulated both animacy of NP1 and the degree of semantic relatedness between the critical NPs. When NP1 and NP2 were paired arbitrarily, the early animacy effect emerged at NP2. When NP1 and NP2 were semantically related, this effect disappeared, with effects of NP1 animacy emerging in later processing stages for both the related and arbitrary conditions. The results indicate that differences in the animacy of NP1 influence early processing of complex sentences only when the critical NPs share no meaningful relationship. |
Guojie Ma; Xingshan Li; Keith Rayner Word segmentation of overlapping ambiguous strings during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 1046–1059, 2014. @article{Ma2014,In 3 experiments, we tested 3 possible mechanisms for segmenting overlapping ambiguous strings in Chinese reading. The first 2 characters and the last 2 characters in a 3-character ambiguous string could both constitute a word in the reported studies. The left-priority hypothesis assumes that the word on the left has an advantage in the competition and the other word cannot be processed until the word on the left is recognized. The independent processing hypothesis assumes that words in different positions are processed simultaneously and independently, and the word segmentation ambiguity cannot be settled without the help of sentence context. The competition hypothesis assumes that all of the words compete for a single winner. The results support a competition account that the characters in the perceptual span activate all of the words they can constitute, and any word can win the competition if its activation is high enough. |
Michaela Mahlberg; Kathy Conklin; Marie-Josée Bisson Reading Dickens's characters: Employing psycholinguistic methods to investigate the cognitive reality of patterns in texts Journal Article In: Language and Literature, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 369–388, 2014. @article{Mahlberg2014,This article reports the findings of an empirical study that uses eye-tracking and follow-up interviews as methods to investigate how participants read body language clusters in novels by Charles Dickens. The study builds on previous corpus stylistic work that has identified patterns of body language presentation as techniques of characterisation in Dickens (Mahlberg, 2013). The article focuses on the reading of 'clusters', that is, repeated sequences of words. It is set in a research context that brings together observations from both corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics on the processing of repeated patterns. The results show that the body language clusters are read significantly faster than the overall sample extracts which suggests that the clusters are stored as units in the brain. This finding is complemented by the results of the follow-up questions which indicate that readers do not seem to refer to the clusters when talking about character information, although they are able to refer to clusters when biased prompts are used to elicit information. Beyond the specific results of the study, this article makes a contribution to the development of complementary methods in literary stylistics and it points to directions for further subclassifications of clusters that could not be achieved on the basis of corpus data alone. |
Simona Mancini; Nicola Molinaro; Douglas J. Davidson; Alberto Avilés; Manuel Carreiras Person and the syntax-discourse interface: An eye-tracking study of agreement Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 76, pp. 141–157, 2014. @article{Mancini2014,The time-course of agreement processing was investigated through three eye-tracking experiments and one grammaticality judgment task by making use of the Spanish Unagreement pattern, which allows the presence of a 3rd person plural subject followed by a 1st person plural verb, as in Los manifestantes anunciamos una huelga (The protesters3.plannounced1.pla strike). Grammaticality is ensured by re-interpreting the subject as 1st person plural, thereby changing the underlying discourse composition of the sentence (We protesters announced a strike). The comparison of Unagreement with structurally similar sentences (Experiment 1), truly person-anomalous sentences (Experiments 2 and 3) and discourse-incongruent sentences (Experiment 4) revealed a clear dissociation between morphosyntactic-related and discourse-related analysis in agreement comprehension. The constant first-pass effect elicited by Unagreement with respect to structurally similar (grammatical and ungrammatical) sentences across the four experiments evidences the sensitivity of early stages to morphosyntactic evaluation, while the differential effect for discourse-congruous and discourse-incongruous sentences in later measures suggests that discourse-related analyses are dealt with by the parser in subsequent stages of processing. |
Bob McMurray; Cheyenne Munson; J. Bruce Tomblin Individual differences in language ability are related to variation in word recognition, not speech perception: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 1344–1362, 2014. @article{McMurray2014,Purpose: The authors examined speech perception deficits associated with individual differences in language ability, contrasting auditory, phonological, or lexical accounts by asking whether lexical competition is differentially sensitive to fine-grained acoustic variation. Method: Adolescents with a range of language abilities (N = 74, including 35 impaired) participated in an experiment based on McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin (2002). Participants heard tokens from six 9-step voice onset time (VOT) continua spanning 2 words (beach/peach, beak/peak, etc.) while viewing a screen containing pictures of those words and 2 unrelated objects. Participants selected the referent while eye movements to each picture were monitored as a measure of lexical activation. Fixations were examined as a function of both VOT and language ability. Results: Eye movements were sensitive to within-category VOT differences: As VOT approached the boundary, listeners made more fixations to the competing word. This did not interact with language ability, suggesting that language impairment is not associated with differential auditory sensitivity or phonetic categorization. Listeners with poorer language skills showed heightened competitors fixations overall, suggesting a deficit in lexical processes. Conclusion: Language impairment may be better characterized by a deficit in lexical competition (inability to suppress competing words), rather than differences in phonological categorization or auditory abilities. |
Julie Mercier; Irina Pivneva; Debra Titone Individual differences in inhibitory control relate to bilingual spoken word processing Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 89–117, 2014. @article{Mercier2014,We investigated whether individual differences in inhibitory control relate to bilingual spoken word recognition. While their eye movements were monitored, native English and native French English-French bilinguals listened to English words (e.g., field) and looked at pictures corresponding to the target, a within-language competitor (feet), a French cross-language competitor (fille "girl"), or both, and unrelated filler pictures. We derived cognitive and oculomotor inhibitory control measures from a battery of inhibitory control tasks. Increased cognitive inhibitory control was linked to less within-language competition for all bilinguals, and less cross-language competition for native French low-English-exposure bilinguals. Increased oculomotor inhibitory control was linked to less within-language competition for all native French bilinguals, and less cross-language competition for native French low-English-exposure bilinguals. The results extend previous findings (Blumenfeld & Marian, 2011), and suggest that individual differences in inhibitory control relate to bilingual spoken word processing. © Cambridge University Press 2013. |
Stefanie Mueller; Katja Fiehler Effector movement triggers gaze-dependent spatial coding of tactile and proprioceptive-tactile reach targets Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 184–193, 2014. @article{Mueller2014,Reaching in space requires that the target and the hand are represented in the same coordinate system. While studies on visually-guided reaching consistently demonstrate the use of a gaze-dependent spatial reference frame, controversial results exist in the somatosensory domain. We investigated whether effector movement (eye or arm/hand) after target presentation and before reaching leads to gaze-dependent coding of somatosensory targets. Subjects reached to a felt target while directing gaze towards one of seven fixation locations. Touches were applied to the fingertip(s) of the left hand (proprioceptive-tactile targets) or to the dorsal surface of the left forearm (tactile targets). Effector movement was varied in terms of movement of the target limb or a gaze shift. Horizontal reach errors systematically varied as a function of gaze when a movement of either the target effector or gaze was introduced. However, we found no effect of gaze on horizontal reach errors when a movement was absent before the reach. These findings were comparable for tactile and proprioceptive-tactile targets. Our results suggest that effector movement promotes a switch from a gaze-independent to a gaze-dependent representation of somatosensory reach targets. |
Khanh Vy Nguyen; Katherine S. Binder; Carolyn Nemier; Scott P. Ardoin Gotcha! Catching kids during mindless reading Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 274–290, 2014. @article{Nguyen2014,The purpose of the current study was to examine the mindless reading behavior of children. Across two studies, 2nd-grade students read passages while their eye movements were monitored. Trained raters then identified mindless reading behaviors from the eye movement records. Several important findings emerged. We were able to reliably identify mindless reading behavior in children using eye-tracking methodology, which was characterized by shorter gaze durations and total time, more skipping, and in general a more erratic reading pattern than on-task reading behavior. On the other hand, on-task reading behavior was characterized by an increase in fixations and regressions, especially intraword regressions. Word frequency effects were attenuated during mindless reading. In addition, the children who engaged in mindless reading had weaker reading achievement profiles compared to children who read the entire passage.$backslash$nThe purpose of the current study was to examine the mindless reading behavior of children. Across two studies, 2nd-grade students read passages while their eye movements were monitored. Trained raters then identified mindless reading behaviors from the eye movement records. Several important findings emerged. We were able to reliably identify mindless reading behavior in children using eye-tracking methodology, which was characterized by shorter gaze durations and total time, more skipping, and in general a more erratic reading pattern than on-task reading behavior. On the other hand, on-task reading behavior was characterized by an increase in fixations and regressions, especially intraword regressions. Word frequency effects were attenuated during mindless reading. In addition, the children who engaged in mindless reading had weaker reading achievement profiles compared to children who read the entire passage. |
Jared M. Novick; Erika K. Hussey; Susan Teubner-Rhodes; J. Isaiah Harbison; Michael F. Bunting Clearing the garden-path: Improving sentence processing through cognitive control training Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 186–217, 2014. @article{Novick2014,How do general-purpose cognitive abilities affect language processing and comprehension? Recent research emphasises a role for cognitive control*also called executive function (EF)*when individuals must override early parsing decisions as new evidence conflicts with their developing interpretation. We tested if training on non-syntactic EF tasks improves readers' ability to recover from misanalysis during language processing. Participants completed pre/post-reading assessments containing temporarily ambiguous sentences susceptible to misinterpretation. Performance increases on a training task targeting conflict-resolution processes (n-back with ‘‘lures'') predicted improvements in garden-path recovery. N-back responders*those demonstrating reliable training gains* significantly increased their comprehension accuracy across assessments. Their posttest eye-movement patterns also revealed significantly improved real-time revision following entry into disambiguating sentence regions where cognitive control is hypothesised to engage. Untrained participants and n-back non-responders showed no performance changes. The results provide insight into how nonlinguistic functions contribute to parsing and interpretation and suggest that certain language skills are amenable to improvement via domain-general EF training. |
Antje Nuthmann; Madeleine E. L. Beveridge; Richard C. Shillcock A binocular moving window technique to study the roles of the two eyes in reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 3-4, pp. 259–282, 2014. @article{Nuthmann2014b,Readers utilize parafoveal information about upcoming words and read less well when this information is denied. McConkie and Rayner (1975) enabled this issue to be explored by developing the moving window paradigm in which the experimenter varies the amount or the quality of the parafoveal information available around the current fixation point. We present a novel binocular version of the moving window technique to study the roles of the two eyes in reading, and we describe a basic experiment allowed by this technique. In the binocular moving window paradigm, each eye contributes its own window to a composite binocular window onto the text. We studied the reading of single lines of text in three conditions: no windows, a symmetrical 8-letters-left and 8-letters-right window for each eye, and a leftward-skewed 14-letters-left and 2-letters-right window for each eye. Note that both eyes saw the composite window onto the text. We tested the hypothesis that readers could be encouraged to generate a greater binocular disparity to augment their window onto the text and to provide a greater preview for one eye. The data offered limited support for this prediction. We observed considerable individual differences in both baseline fixation disparity and in readers' response to the critical asymmetric [14,2] window. |
Isabel Orenes; David Beltrán; Carlos Santamaría How negation is understood: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 74, pp. 36–45, 2014. @article{Orenes2014,This paper explores how negation (e.g., the figure is not red) is understood using the visual world paradigm. Our hypothesis is that people will switch to the alternative affirmative (e.g., a green figure) whenever possible, but will be able to maintain the negated argument (e.g., a non-red figure) when needed. To test this, we presented either a specific verbal context (binary: the figure could be red or green) or an unspecified verbal context (multary: the figure could be red or green or yellow or blue). Then, affirmative and negative sentences (e.g., the figure is (not) red) were heard while four figures were shown on the screen and eye movements were monitored. We found that people shifted their visual attention toward the alternative in the binary context, but focused on the negated argument in the multary context. Our findings corroborated our hypothesis and shed light on two issues that are currently under debate about how negation is represented and processed. Regarding representation, our results support the ideas that (1) the negative operator plays a role in the mental representation, and consequently a symbolic representation of negation is possible, and (2) it is not necessary to use a two-step process to represent and understand negation. |
Kevin B. Paterson; Victoria A. McGowan; Sarah J. White; Sameen Malik; Lily Abedipour; Timothy R. Jordan Reading direction and the central perceptual span in Urdu and English Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. e88358, 2014. @article{Paterson2014,BACKGROUND: Normal reading relies on the reader making a series of saccadic eye movements along lines of text, separated by brief fixational pauses during which visual information is acquired from a region of text. In English and other alphabetic languages read from left to right, the region from which useful information is acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend further to the right of each fixation than to the left. However, the asymmetry of the perceptual span for alphabetic languages read in the opposite direction (i.e., from right to left) has received much less attention. Accordingly, in order to more fully investigate the asymmetry in the perceptual span for these languages, the present research assessed the influence of reading direction on the perceptual span for bilingual readers of Urdu and English. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Text in Urdu and English was presented either entirely as normal or in a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm in which a region of text was displayed as normal at the reader's point of fixation and text outside this region was obscured. The windows of normal text extended symmetrically 0.5° of visual angle to the left and right of fixation, or asymmetrically by increasing the size of each window to 1.5° or 2.5° to either the left or right of fixation. When participants read English, performance for the window conditions was superior when windows extended to the right. However, when reading Urdu, performance was superior when windows extended to the left, and was essentially the reverse of that observed for English. CONCLUSION: These findings provide a novel indication that the perceptual span is modified by the language being read to produce an asymmetry in the direction of reading and show for the first time that such an asymmetry occurs for reading Urdu. |
Clare Patterson; Helena Trompelt; Claudia Felser The online application of binding condition B in native and non-native pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5, pp. 147, 2014. @article{Patterson2014a,Previous research has shown that anaphor resolution in a non-native language may be more vulnerable to interference from structurally inappropriate antecedents compared to native anaphor resolution. To test whether previous findings on reflexive anaphors generalize to non-reflexive pronouns, we carried out an eye-movement monitoring study investigating the application of binding condition B during native and non-native sentence processing. In two online reading experiments we examined when during processing local and/or non-local antecedents for pronouns were considered in different types of syntactic environment. Our results demonstrate that both native English speakers and native German-speaking learners of English showed online sensitivity to binding condition B in that they did not consider syntactically inappropriate antecedents. For pronouns thought to be exempt from condition B (so-called "short-distance pronouns"), the native readers showed a weak preference for the local antecedent during processing. The non-native readers, on the other hand, showed a preference for the matrix subject even where local coreference was permitted, and despite demonstrating awareness of short-distance pronouns' referential ambiguity in a complementary offline task. This indicates that non-native comprehenders are less sensitive during processing to structural cues that render pronouns exempt from condition B, and prefer to link a pronoun to a salient subject antecedent instead. |
Irina Pivneva; Julie Mercier; Debra Titone Executive control modulates cross-language lexical activation during L2 reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 787–796, 2014. @article{Pivneva2014,Models of bilingual reading such as Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002) do not predict a central role for domain-general executive control during bilingual reading, in contrast with bilingual models from other domains, such as production (e.g., the Inhibitory Control Model; Green, 1998). We thus investigated whether individual differences among bilinguals in domain-general executive control modulate cross-language activation during L2 sentence reading, over and above other factors such as L2 proficiency. Fifty French-English bilinguals read L2-English sentences while their eye movements were recorded, and they subsequently completed a battery of executive control and L2 proficiency tasks. High- and low-constraint sentences contained interlingual homographs (chat = "casual conversation" in English, "a cat" in French), cognates (piano in English and French), or L2-specific control words. The results showed that greater executive control among bilinguals but not L2 proficiency reduced cross-language activation in terms of interlingual homograph interference. In contrast, increased L2 proficiency but not executive control reduced cross-language activation in terms of cognate facilitation. These results suggest that models of bilingual reading must incorporate mechanisms by which domain-general executive control can alter the earliest stages of bilingual lexical activation. |
Patrick Plummer; Manuel Perea; Keith Rayner The influence of contextual diversity on eye movements in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 275–283, 2014. @article{Plummer2014,Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An eye-movement experiment was conducted wherein the effects of word-frePlummer, P., Perea, M., & Rayner, K. (2014). The influence of contextual diversity on eye movements in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 40(1), 275–283. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034058quency and contextual diversity were directly contrasted in a normal sentence reading scenario. Subjects read sentences with embedded target words that varied in word-frequency and contextual diversity. All 1st-pass and later reading times were significantly longer for words with lower contextual diversity compared to words with higher contextual diversity when controlling for word-frequency and other important lexical properties. Furthermore, there was no difference in reading times for higher frequency and lower frequency words when controlling for contextual diversity. The results confirm prior findings regarding contextual diversity and word-frequency effects and demonstrate that contextual diversity is a more accurate predictor of word processing speed than word-frequency within a normal reading task. |
Katja Poellmann; Hans Rutger Bosker; James M. McQueen; Holger Mitterer Perceptual adaptation to segmental and syllabic reductions in continuous spoken Dutch Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 101–127, 2014. @article{Poellmann2014a,This study investigates if and how listeners adapt to reductions in casual continuous speech. In a perceptual-learning variant of the visual-world paradigm, two groups of Dutch participants were exposed to either segmental (/b/ → [v]) or syllabic (ver- → [f:]) reductions in spoken Dutch sentences. In the test phase, both groups heard both kinds of reductions, but now applied to different words. In one of two experiments, the segmental reduction exposure group was better than the syllabic reduction exposure group in recognizing new reduced /b/-words. In both experiments, the syllabic reduction group showed a greater target preference for new reduced ver-words. Learning about reductions was thus applied to previously unheard words. This lexical generalization suggests that mechanisms compensating for segmental and syllabic reductions take place at a prelexical level, and hence that lexical access involves an abstractionist mode of processing. Existing abstractionist models need to be revised, however, as they do not include representations of sequences of segments (corresponding e.g. to ver-) at the prelexical level. |
Carolyn Quam; Daniel Swingley Processing of lexical stress cues by young children Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 123, no. 1, pp. 73–89, 2014. @article{Quam2014,Although infants learn an impressive amount about their native-language phonological system by the end of the first year of life, after the first year children still have much to learn about how acoustic dimensions cue linguistic categories in fluent speech. The current study investigated what children have learned about how the acoustic dimension of pitch indicates the location of the stressed syllable in familiar words. Preschoolers (2.5- to 5-year-olds) and adults were tested on their ability to use lexical-stress cues to identify familiar words. Both age groups saw pictures of a bunny and a banana and heard versions of "bunny" and "banana" in which stress either was indicated normally with convergent cues (pitch, duration, amplitude, and vowel quality) or was manipulated such that only pitch differentiated the words' initial syllables. Adults (n=48) used both the convergent cues and the isolated pitch cue to identify the target words as they unfolded. Children (n=206) used the convergent stress cues but not pitch alone in identifying words. We discuss potential reasons for children's difficulty in exploiting isolated pitch cues to stress despite children's early sensitivity to pitch in language. These findings contribute to a view in which phonological development progresses toward the adult state well past infancy. |
Gary E. Raney; Spencer J. Campbell; Joanna C. Bovee Using eye movements to evaluate the cognitive processes involved in text comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Visualized Experiments, no. 83, pp. 1–7, 2014. @article{Raney2014,The present article describes how to use eye tracking methodologies to study the cognitive processes involved in text comprehension. Measuring eye movements during reading is one of the most precise methods for measuring moment-by-moment (online) processing demands during text comprehension. Cognitive processing demands are reflected by several aspects of eye movement behavior, such as fixation duration, number of fixations, and number of regressions (returning to prior parts of a text). Important properties of eye tracking equipment that researchers need to consider are described, including how frequently the eye position is measured (sampling rate), accuracy of determining eye position, how much head movement is allowed, and ease of use. Also described are properties of stimuli that influence eye movements that need to be controlled in studies of text comprehension, such as the position, frequency, and length of target words. Procedural recommendations related to preparing the participant, setting up and calibrating the equipment, and running a study are given. Representative results are presented to illustrate how data can be evaluated. Although the methodology is described in terms of reading comprehension, much of the information presented can be applied to any study in which participants read verbal stimuli. |
Anne K. Rau; Korbinian Moeller; Karin Landerl The transition from sublexical to lexical processing in a consistent orthography: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 224–233, 2014. @article{rml14,We studied the transition in predominant reading strategy from serial sublexical processing to more parallel lexical processing as a function of word familiarity in German children of Grades 2, 3, 4, and adults. High-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords of differing length were embedded in sentences and presented in an eye-tracking paradigm. The size of the word length effect was used as an indicator of serial sublexical decoding. When controlling for the generally higher processing times in younger readers, the effect of length over reading development was not direct but modulated by familiarity: Length effects were comparable between items of differing familiarity for Grade 2, whereas from Grade 3, length effects increased with decreasing familiarity. These findings suggest that Grade 2 children apply serial sublexical decoding as a default reading strategy to most items, whereas reading by direct lexical access is increasingly dominant in more experienced readers. |
Keith Rayner The gaze-contingent moving window in reading: Development and review Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 3-4, pp. 242–258, 2014. @article{r14,The development of the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975, 1976) is discussed and the results of the earliest research are reviewed. The original work suggested that the region from which readers can obtain useful information during an eye fixation in reading, or the perceptual span, was asymmetric around the fixation point, and extended from 3?4 letter spaces to the left of fixation to about 14?15 letter spaces to the right of fixation. Subsequent research which substantiated these findings is discussed. Then more recent research using the moving window paradigm to investigate the following topics (1) effects of reading speed, (2) effects of reading skill, (3) effects of the writing system, (4) effects due to age, (5) effects related to deafness, and (5) effects related to schizophrenia is discussed. Finally, some extensions of gaze-contingent paradigms to areas other than reading are discussed.$backslash$nThe development of the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975, 1976) is discussed and the results of the earliest research are reviewed. The original work suggested that the region from which readers can obtain useful information during an eye fixation in reading, or the perceptual span, was asymmetric around the fixation point, and extended from 3?4 letter spaces to the left of fixation to about 14?15 letter spaces to the right of fixation. Subsequent research which substantiated these findings is discussed. Then more recent research using the moving window paradigm to investigate the following topics (1) effects of reading speed, (2) effects of reading skill, (3) effects of the writing system, (4) effects due to age, (5) effects related to deafness, and (5) effects related to schizophrenia is discussed. Finally, some extensions of gaze-contingent paradigms to areas other than reading are discussed. |
Keith Rayner; Elizabeth R. Schotter Semantic preview benefit in reading English: The effect of initial letter capitalization Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 1617–1628, 2014. @article{rs14,A major controversy in reading research is whether semantic information is obtained from the word to the right of the currently fixated word (word n ⫹ 1). Although most evidence has been negative in English, semantic preview benefit has been observed for readers of Chinese and German. In the present experiment, we investigated whether the discrepancy between English and German may be attributable to a difference in visual properties of the orthography: the first letter of a noun is always capitalized in German, but is only occasionally capitalized in English. This visually salient property may draw greater attention to the word during parafoveal preview and thus increase preview benefit generally (and lead to a greater opportunity for semantic preview benefit). We used English target nouns that can either be capitalized (e.g., We went to the critically acclaimed Ballet ofParis while on vacation.) or not (e.g., We went to the critically acclaimed ballet that was showing in Paris.) and manipulated the capitalization of the preview accordingly, to determine whether capitalization modulates preview benefit in English. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used with identical, semantically related, and unrelated pre- views. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found numerically larger preview benefits when the preview/ target was capitalized than when it was lowercase. Crucially, semantic preview benefit was not observed when the preview/target word was not capitalized, but was observed when the preview/target word was capitalized. |
Katrin Riese; Mareike Bayer; Gerhard Lauer; Annekathrin Schacht In the eye of the recipient: Pupillary responses to suspense in literary classics Journal Article In: Scientific Study of Literature, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 211–232, 2014. @article{rbls14,<p>Plot suspense is one of the most important components of narrative fiction that motivate recipients to follow fictional characters through their worlds. The present study investigates the dynamic development of narrative suspense in excerpts of literary classics from the 19th century in a multi-methodological approach. For two texts, differing in suspense as judged by a large independent sample, we collected (a) data from questionnaires, indicating different affective and cognitive dimensions of receptive engagement, (b) continuous ratings of suspense during text reception from both experts and lay recipients, and (c) registration of pupil diameter as a physiological indicator of changes in emotional arousal and attention during reception. Data analyses confirmed differences between the two texts at different dimensions of receptive engagement and, importantly, revealed significant correlations of pupil diameter and the course of suspense over time. Our findings demonstrate that changes of the pupil diameter provide a reliable ‘online' indicator of suspense.</p> |
Sarah Risse Effects of visual span on reading speed and parafoveal processing in eye movements during sentence reading Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 14, no. 8, pp. 1–13, 2014. @article{r14c,The visual span (or ‘‘uncrowded window''), which limits the sensory information on each fixation, has been shown to determine reading speed in tasks involving rapid serial visual presentation of single words. The present study investigated whether this is also true for fixation durations during sentence reading when all words are presented at the same time and parafoveal preview of words prior to fixation typically reduces later word-recognition times. If so, a larger visual span may allow more efficient parafoveal processing and thus faster reading. In order to test this hypothesis, visual span profiles (VSPs) were collected from 60 participants and related to data from an eye-tracking reading experiment. The results confirmed a positive relationship between the readers' VSPs and fixation-based reading speed. However, this relationship was not determined by parafoveal processing. There was no evidence that individual differences in VSPs predicted differences in parafoveal preview benefit. Nevertheless, preview benefit correlated with reading speed, suggesting an independent effect on oculomotor control during reading. In summary, the present results indicate a more complex relationship between the visual span, parafoveal processing, and reading speed than initially assumed. |
Sarah Risse; Reinhold Kliegl Dissociating preview validity and preview difficulty in parafoveal processing of word n + 1 during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 653–668, 2014. @article{rk14,Many studies have shown that previewing the next word n + 1 during reading leads to substantial processing benefit (e.g., shorter word viewing times) when this word is eventually fixated. However, evidence of such preprocessing in fixations on the preceding word n when in fact the information about the preview is acquired is far less consistent. A recent study suggested that such effects may be delayed into fixations on the next word n + 1 (Risse & Kliegl, 2012). To investigate the time course of parafoveal information-acquisition on the control of eye movements during reading, we conducted 2 gaze-contingent display-change experiments and orthogonally manipulated the processing difficulty (i.e., word frequency) of an n + 1 preview word and its validity relative to the target word. Preview difficulty did not affect fixation durations on the pretarget word n but on the target word n + 1. In fact, the delayed preview-difficulty effect was almost of the same size as the preview benefit associated with the n + 1 preview validity. Based on additional results from quantile-regression analyses on the time course of the 2 preview effects, we discuss consequences as to the integration of foveal and parafoveal information and potential implications for computational models of eye guidance in reading. |
Ardi Roelofs Tracking eye movements to localize Stroop interference in naming: Word planning versus articulatory buffering Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 5, pp. 1332–1347, 2014. @article{Roelofs2014,Investigators have found no agreement on the functional locus of Stroop interference in vocal naming. Whereas it has long been assumed that the interference arises during spoken word planning, more recently some investigators have revived an account from the 1960s and 1970s holding that the interference occurs in an articulatory buffer after word planning. Here, 2 color-word Stroop experiments are reported that tested between these accounts using eye tracking. Previous research has indicated that the shifting of eye gaze from a stimulus to another occurs before the articulatory buffer is reached in spoken word planning. In the present experiments, participants were presented with color-word Stroop stimuli and left- or right-pointing arrows on different sides of a computer screen. They named the color attribute and shifted their gaze to the arrow to manually indicate its direction. If Stroop interference arises in the articulatory buffer, the interference should be present in the color-naming latencies but not in the gaze shift and manual response latencies. Contrary to these predictions, Stroop interference was present in all 3 behavioral measures. These results indicate that Stroop interference arises during spoken word planning rather than in articulatory buffering. |
Rachel A. Ryskin; Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez; Loretta K. Yiu; Elizabeth T. Nguyen Visuospatial perspective-taking in conversation and the role of bilingual experience Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 74, pp. 46–76, 2014. @article{Ryskin2014,Little is known about how listeners use spatial perspective information to guide comprehension. Perspective-taking abilities have been linked to executive function in both children and adults. Bilingual children excel at perspective-taking tasks compared to their monolingual counterparts (e.g., Greenberg, Bellana, & Bialystok, 2013), possibly due to the executive function benefits conferred by the experience of switching between languages. Here we examine the mechanisms of visuo-spatial perspective-taking in adults, and the effects of bilingualism on this process. We report novel results regarding the ability of listeners to appreciate the spatial perspective of another person in conversation: While spatial perspective-taking does pose challenges, listeners rapidly accommodated the speaker's perspective, in time to guide the on-line processing of the speaker's utterances. Moreover, once adopted, spatial perspectives were enduring, resulting in costs when switching to a different perspective, even when that perspective is one's own. In addition to these findings, direct comparison of monolingual and bilingual participants offer no support for the hypothesis that bilingualism improves the ability to appreciate the perspective of another person during language comprehension. In fact, in some cases adult bilinguals have significantly more difficulty with perspective-laden language. |
Stanislav M. Sajin; Cynthia M. Connine Semantic richness: The role of semantic features in processing spoken words Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 70, no. 1, pp. 13–35, 2014. @article{sc14,A lexical decision and two visual world paradigm experiments are reported that investigated the role of semantic representations in recognizing spoken words. Semantic richness (NOF: number of features) influenced lexical decision reaction times in that semantically rich words (high NOF) were processed faster than semantically impoverished words (low NOF). Processing in the VWP was faster for high NOF words but only when an onset competitor was present in the display (target BREAD, onset competitor BRICK). Adding background speech babble to the spoken stimuli resulted in an advantage for processing high NOF words with and without onset competitors in the display. The results suggest that semantic representations directly contribute to the recognition of spoken words and that sub-optimal listening conditions (e.g., background babble) enhance the role of semantics. |
Robert J. Sall; Timothy J. Wright; Walter R. Boot Driven to distraction? The effect of simulated red light running camera flashes on attention and oculomotor control Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 57–73, 2014. @article{Sall2014,Do similar factors influence the allocation of attention in visually sparse and abstract laboratory paradigms and complex real-world scenes? To explore this question we conducted a series of experiments that examined whether the flash that accompanies a Red Light Running Camera (RLRC) can capture observers' attention away from important roadway changes. Inhibition of Return (IOR) and eye movement direction served as indices of the spatial allocation of attention. In two experiments, participants were slower to respond to the brake lights of a vehicle in a driving scene when an RLRC flash occurred nearby or were slower to initiate eye movements to brake light signals (IOR effects). In a third experiment, we found evidence that less prevalent RLRC flashes disrupted eye movement control. Results suggest that attention can be misdirected as a result of RLRC flashes and provide additional evidence that findings from simple laboratory paradigms can predict the allocation of attention in complex settings that are more familiar to observers. |
Anne Pier Salverda; Dave Kleinschmidt; Michael K. Tanenhaus Immediate effects of anticipatory coarticulation in spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 145–163, 2014. @article{skt14,Two visual-world experiments examined listeners' use of pre word-onset anticipatory coarticulation in spoken-word recognition. Experiment 1 established the shortest lag with which information in the speech signal influences eye-movement control, using stimuli such as ". The ladder is the target". With a neutral token of the definite article preceding the target word, saccades to the referent were not more likely than saccades to an unrelated distractor until 200-240. ms after the onset of the target word. In Experiment 2, utterances contained definite articles which contained natural anticipatory coarticulation pertaining to the onset of the target word ("The ladder is the target"). A simple Gaussian classifier was able to predict the initial sound of the upcoming target word from formant information from the first few pitch periods of the article's vowel. With these stimuli, effects of speech on eye-movement control began about 70. ms earlier than in Experiment 1, suggesting rapid use of anticipatory coarticulation. The results are interpreted as support for "data explanation" approaches to spoken-word recognition. Methodological implications for visual-world studies are also discussed. |
Daniel J. Schad; Sarah Risse; Timothy J. Slattery; Keith Rayner Word frequency in fast priming: Evidence for immediate cognitive control of eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 3-4, pp. 390–414, 2014. @article{srsr14,Numerous studies have demonstrated effects of word frequency on eye movements during reading, but the precise timing of this influence has remained unclear. The fast priming paradigm (Sereno & Rayner, 1992) was previously used to study influences of related versus unrelated primes on the target word. Here, we used this procedure to investigate whether the frequency of the prime word has a direct influence on eye movements during reading when the prime-target relation is not manipulated. We found that with average prime intervals of 32 ms readers made longer single fixation durations on the target word in the low than in the high frequency prime condition. Distributional analyses demonstrated that the effect of prime frequency on single fixation durations occurred very early, supporting theories of immediate cognitive control of eye movements. Finding prime frequency effects only 207 ms after visibility of the prime and for prime durations of 32 ms yields new time constraints for cognitive processes controlling eye movements during reading. Our variant of the fast priming paradigm provides a new approach to test early influences of word processing on eye movement control during reading. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Klinton Bicknell; Ian Howard; Roger P. Levy; Keith Rayner Task effects reveal cognitive flexibility responding to frequency and predictability: Evidence from eye movements in reading and proofreading Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 131, no. 1, pp. 1–27, 2014. @article{sbhlr14,It is well-known that word frequency and predictability affect processing time. These effects change magnitude across tasks, but studies testing this use tasks with different response types (e.g., lexical decision, naming, and fixation time during reading; Schilling, Rayner, & Chumbley, 1998), preventing direct comparison. Recently, Kaakinen and Hyönä (2010) overcame this problem, comparing fixation times in reading for comprehension and proofreading, showing that the frequency effect was larger in proofreading than in reading. This result could be explained by readers exhibiting substantial cognitive flexibility, and qualitatively changing how they process words in the proofreading task in a way that magnifies effects of word frequency. Alternatively, readers may not change word processing so dramatically, and instead may perform more careful identification generally, increasing the magnitude of many word processing effects (e.g., both frequency and predictability). We tested these possibilities with two experiments: subjects read for comprehension and then proofread for spelling errors (letter transpositions) that produce nonwords (e.g., trcak for track as in Kaakinen & Hyönä) or that produce real but unintended words (e.g., trial for trail) to compare how the task changes these effects. Replicating Kaakinen and Hyönä, frequency effects increased during proofreading. However, predictability effects only increased when integration with the sentence context was necessary to detect errors (i.e., when spelling errors produced words that were inappropriate in the sentence; trial for trail). The results suggest that readers adopt sophisticated word processing strategies to accommodate task demands. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Annie Jia; Victor S. Ferreira; Keith Rayner Preview benefit in speaking occurs regardless of preview timing Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 755–762, 2014. @article{sjfr14,Speakers access information from objects they will name but have not looked at yet, indexed by preview benefit–faster processing of the target when a preview object previously occupying its location was related rather than unrelated to the target. This suggests that speakers distribute attention over multiple objects, but it does not reveal the time course of the processing of a current and a to-be-named object. Is the preview benefit a consequence of attention shifting to the next-to-be-named object shortly before the eyes move to that location, or does the benefit reflect a more unconstrained deployment of attention to upcoming objects? Using the multiple-object naming paradigm with a gaze-contingent display change manipulation, we addressed this issue by manipulating the latency of the onset of the preview (SOA) and whether the preview represented the same concept as (but a different visual token of) the target or an unrelated concept. The results revealed that the preview benefit was robust, regardless of the latency of the preview onset or the latency of the saccade to the target (the lag between preview offset and fixation on the target). Together, these data suggest that preview benefit is not restricted to the time during an attention shift preceding an eye movement, and that speakers are able to take advantage of information from nonfoveal objects whenever such objects are visually available. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Randy Tran; Keith Rayner Don't believe what you read (Only Once): Comprehension is supported by regressions during reading Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1218–1226, 2014. @article{Schotter2014,Recent Web apps have spurred excitement around the prospect of achieving speed reading by eliminating eye movements (i.e., with rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP, in which words are presented briefly one at a time and sequentially). Our experiment using a novel trailing-mask paradigm contradicts these claims. Subjects read normally or while the display of text was manipulated such that each word was masked once the reader's eyes moved past it. This manipulation created a scenario similar to RSVP: The reader could read each word only once; regressions (i.e., rereadings of words), which are a natural part of the reading process, were functionally eliminated. Crucially, the inability to regress affected comprehension negatively. Furthermore, this effect was not confined to ambiguous sentences. These data suggest that regressions contribute to the ability to understand what one has read and call into question the viability of speed-reading apps that eliminate eye movements (e.g., those that use RSVP). |
Daniel Schreij; Sander A. Los; Jan Theeuwes; James T. Enns; Christian N. L. Olivers The interaction between stimulus-driven and goal-driven orienting as revealed by eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 378–390, 2014. @article{Schreij2014,It is generally agreed that attention can be captured in a stimulus-driven or in a goal-driven fashion. In studies that investigated both types of capture, the effects on mean manual response time (reaction time [RT]) are generally additive, suggesting two independent underlying processes. However, potential interactions between the two types of capture may fail to be expressed in manual RT, as it likely reflects multiple processing steps. Here we measured saccadic eye movements along with manual responses. Participants searched a target display for a red letter. To assess contingent capture, this display was preceded by an irrelevant red cue. To assess stimulus-driven capture, the target display could be accompanied by the simultaneous onset of an irrelevant new object. At the level of eye movements, the results showed strong interactions between cue validity and onset presence on the spatiotemporal trajectories of the saccades. However, at the level of manual responses, these effects cancelled out, leading to additive effects on mean RT. We conclude that both types of capture influence a shared spatial orienting mechanism and we provide a descriptive computational model of their dynamics. |
Yamila Sevilla; Mora Maldonado; Diego E. Shalom Pupillary dynamics reveal computational cost in sentence planning Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 6, pp. 1041–1052, 2014. @article{sms14,This study investigated the computational cost associated with grammatical planning in sentence production. We measured people's pupillary responses as they produced spoken descriptions of depicted events. We manipulated the syntactic structure of the target by training subjects to use different types of sentences following a colour cue. The results showed higher increase in pupil size for the production of passive and object dislocated sentences than for active canonical subject-verb-object sentences, indicating that more cognitive effort is associated with more complex noncanonical thematic order. We also manipulated the time at which the cue that triggered structure-building processes was presented. Differential increase in pupil diameter for more complex sentences was shown to rise earlier as the colour cue was presented earlier, suggesting that the observed pupillary changes are due to differential demands in relatively independent structure-building processes during grammatical planning. Task-evoked pupillary responses provide a reliable measure to study the cognitive processes involved in sentence production. |
Chandan Singh; Dhananjay Yadav; Jinho Lee Reader comprehension ranking by monitoring eye gaze using eye tracker Journal Article In: International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 294–307, 2014. @article{syl14,This paper concentrates on measuring comprehension ability of a reader by calculating reader ranking based on correct answer lines recorded by eye gaze tracker (mounted on reader's eye) and number of correct answers given by reader. Time is measured to find the answer line (page time T1) and time spent on the answer line (score time T2). The ratio (T2/T1) of both these time parameters plays vital role in evaluation of rank of reader. Score is calculated only if reader reads the answer line/s and after that gives the correct answer otherwise the score will be zero for same question. Finally, the reader gets score and rank among the existing readers on the basis of time ratio and correctness of answers. |
Laura J. Speed; Gabriella Vigliocco Eye movements reveal the dynamic simulation of speed in language Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 367–382, 2014. @article{sv14,This study investigates how speed of motion is processed in language. In three eye-tracking experiments, participants were presented with visual scenes and spoken sentences describing fast or slow events (e.g., The lion ambled/dashed to the balloon). Results showed that looking time to relevant objects in the visual scene was affected by the speed of verb of the sentence, speaking rate, and configuration of a supporting visual scene. The results provide novel evidence for the mental simulation of speed in language and show that internal dynamic simulations can be played out via eye movements toward a static visual scene. |
Maria Staudte; Matthew W. Crocker; Alexis Heloir; Michael Kipp The influence of speaker gaze on listener comprehension: Contrasting visual versus intentional accounts Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 133, no. 1, pp. 317–328, 2014. @article{Staudte2014,Previous research has shown that listeners follow speaker gaze to mentioned objects in a shared environment to ground referring expressions, both for human and robot speakers. What is less clear is whether the benefit of speaker gaze is due to the inference of referen- tial intentions (Staudte and Crocker, 2011) or simply the (reflexive) shifts in visual atten- tion. That is, is gaze special in how it affects simultaneous utterance comprehension? In four eye-tracking studies we directly contrast speech-aligned speaker gaze of a virtual agent with a non-gaze visual cue (arrow). Our findings show that both cues similarly direct listeners' attention and that listeners can benefit in utterance comprehension from both cues. Only when they are similarly precise, however, does this equality extend to incongru- ent cueing sequences: that is, even when the cue sequence does not match the concurrent sequence of spoken referents can listeners benefit from gaze as well as arrows. The results suggest that listeners are able to learn a counter-predictive mapping of both cues to the sequence of referents. Thus, gaze and arrows can in principle be applied with equal flexi- bility and efficiency during language comprehension. |
Benjamin Swets; Matthew E. Jacovina; Richard J. Gerrig Individual differences in the scope of speech planning: Evidence from eye-movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 12–44, 2014. @article{Swets2014,Previous research has demonstrated that the scope of speakers' planning in language production varies in response to external forces such as time pressure. This susceptibility to external pressures indicates a flexibly incremental production system: speakers plan utterances piece by piece, but external pressures affect the size of the pieces speakers buffer. In the current study, we explore internal constraints on speech planning. Specifi cally, we examine whether individual differences in working memory predict the scope and efficiency of advance planning. In our task, speakers described picture arrays to partners in a matching game. The arrays sometimes required speakers to note a contrast between a sentence-initial object (e.g., a four-legged cat) and a sentence-final object (e.g., a three-legged cat). Based on prior screening, we selected participants who differed on verbal working memory span. Eye-movement measures revealed that high-span speakers were more likely to gaze at the contrasting pictures prior to articulation than were low-span speakers. As a result, high-span speakers were also more likely to reference the contrast early in speech. We conclude that working memory plays a substantial role in the fl exibility of incremental speech planning. |
Annie Tremblay; Elsa Spinelli English listeners' use of distributional and acoustic-phonetic cues to liaison in French: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 310–337, 2014. @article{Tremblay2014,This study investigates English listeners' use of distributional and acoustic-phonetic cues to liaison in French. Liaison creates a misalignment of the syllable and word boundaries, but is signaled by distributional cues (/z/ is a frequent liaison but not a frequent word onset; /t/ is a frequent word onset but a less frequent liaison) and acoustic-phonetic cues (liaison consonants are 15 per cent shorter than word-initial consonants). English-speaking French learners completed a visual- world eye-tracking experiment in which they heard adjective-noun sequences where the pivotal consonant was /t/ (expected advantage for consonant-initial words) or /z/ (expected advantage for liaison-initial words). Their results were compared to those of native French speakers. Both groups showed an advantage for consonant-initial targets with /t/ but no advantage for consonant- or liaison-initial targets with /z/. Both groups' competitor fixations were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant, but only the learners' fixations to liaison-initial targets were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant. This suggests that English listeners use both top-down (distributional) and bottom-up (acoustic-phonetic) cues to liaison in French. Their greater reliance on acoustic-phonetic cues is hypothesized to stem in part from English, where such cues play an important role for locating word boundaries. |
Danijela Trenkic; Jelena Mirkovic; Gerry T. M. Altmann Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 237–257, 2014. @article{Trenkic2014,We investigated second language (L2) comprehension of grammatical structures that are unique to the L2, and which are known to cause persistent difficulties in production. A visual-world eye-tracking experiment focused on online comprehension of English articles by speakers of the article-lacking Mandarin, and a control group of English native speakers. The results show that non-native speakers from article-lacking backgrounds can incrementally utilise the information signalled by L2 articles in real time to constrain referential domains and resolve reference more efficiently. The findings support the hypothesis that L2 processing does not always over-rely on pragmatic affordances, and that some morphosyntactic structures unique to the target language can be processed in a targetlike manner in comprehension-despite persistent difficulties with their production. A novel proposal, based on multiple meaning-to-form, but consistent form-to-meaning mappings, is developed to account for such comprehension-production asymmetries. © 2013 Cambridge University Press. |
Maartje Velde; Antje S. Meyer; Agnieszka E. Konopka Message formulation and structural assembly: Describing "easy" and "hard" events with preferred and dispreferred syntactic structures Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 124–144, 2014. @article{Velde2014,When formulating simple sentences to describe pictured events, speakers look at the referents they are describing in the order of mention. Accounts of incrementality in sentence production rely heavily on analyses of this gaze-speech link. To identify systematic sources of variability in message and sentence formulation, two experiments evaluated differences in formulation for sentences describing "easy" and "hard" events (more codable and less codable events) with preferred and dispreferred structures (actives and passives). Experiment 1 employed a subliminal cuing manipulation and a cumulative priming manipulation to increase production of passive sentences. Experiment 2 examined the influence of event codability on formulation without a cuing manipulation. In both experiments, speakers showed an early preference for looking at the agent of the event when constructing active sentences. This preference was attenuated by event codability, suggesting that speakers were less likely to prioritize encoding of a single character at the outset of formulation in "easy" events than in "harder" events. Accessibility of the agent influenced formulation primarily when an event was "harder" to describe. Formulation of passive sentences in Experiment 1 also began with early fixations to the agent but changed with exposure to passive syntax: speakers were more likely to consider the patient as a suitable sentential starting point after cumulative priming. The results show that the message-to-language mapping in production can vary with the ease of encoding an event structure and of generating a suitable linguistic structure. |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Lexical quality and eye movements: Individual differences in the perceptual span of skilled adult readers Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 4, pp. 703–727, 2014. @article{Veldre2014,Two experiments used the gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm to investigate whether reading comprehension and spelling ability modulate the perceptual span of skilled adult readers during sentence reading. Highly proficient reading and spelling were both associated with increased use information to the right of fixation, but did not systematically modulate the extraction of information to the left of fixation. Individuals who were high in both reading and spelling ability showed the greatest benefit from window sizes larger than 11 characters, primarily because of increases in forward saccade length. They were also significantly more disrupted by being denied close parafoveal information than those poor in reading and/or spelling. These results suggest that, in addition to supporting rapid lexical retrieval of fixated words, the high quality lexical representations indexed by the combination of high reading and spelling ability support efficient processing of parafoveal information and effective saccadic targeting. |
Aiping Wang; Wei Zhou; Hua Shu; Ming Yan Reading proficiency modulates parafoveal processing efficiency: Evidence from reading Chinese as a second language Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 152, pp. 29–33, 2014. @article{Wang2014g,In the present study, we manipulated different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined how native Korean readers who learned Chinese as a second language make use of the parafoveal information. Results clearly indicate that, only identical and orthographically similar previews facilitated processing of the target words when they were subsequently fixated. More critically, more parafoveal information was obtained by subjects with higher reading proficiency. These results suggest that, mainly low-level features of the parafoveal words are obtained by the non-native Chinese readers and less attentional resources are available for the readers with lower reading proficiency, thereby causing a reduction of the perceptual span. |
Jingxin Wang; Jing Tian; Weijin Han; Simon P. Liversedge; Kevin B. Paterson Inhibitory stroke neighbour priming in character recognition and reading in Chinese Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 11, pp. 2149–2171, 2014. @article{Wang2014d,In alphabetic languages, prior exposure to a target word's orthographic neighbour influences word recognition in masked priming experiments and the process of word identification that occurs during normal reading. We investigated whether similar neighbour priming effects are observed in Chinese in 4 masked priming experiments (employing a forward mask and 33-ms, 50-ms, and 67-ms prime durations) and in an experiment that measured eye movements while reading. In these experiments, the stroke neighbour of a Chinese character was defined as any character that differed by the addition, deletion, or substitution of one or two strokes. Prime characters were either stroke neighbours or stroke non-neighbours of the target character, and each prime character had either a higher or a lower frequency of occurrence in the language than its corresponding target character. Frequency effects were observed in all experiments, demonstrating that the manipulation of character frequency was successful. In addition, a robust inhibitory priming effect was observed in response times for target characters in the masked priming experiments and in eye fixation durations for target characters in the reading experiment. This stroke neighbour priming was not modulated by the relative frequency of the prime and target characters. The present findings therefore provide a novel demonstration that inhibitory neighbour priming shown previously for alphabetic languages is also observed for nonalphabetic languages, and that neighbour priming (based on stroke overlap) occurs at the level of the character in Chinese. |
Dorothea Wendt; Thomas Brand; Birger Kollmeier An eye-tracking paradigm for analyzing the processing time of sentences with different linguistic complexities Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. e100186, 2014. @article{Wendt2014a,An eye-tracking paradigm was developed for use in audiology in order to enable online analysis of the speech comprehension process. This paradigm should be useful in assessing impediments in speech processing. In this paradigm, two scenes, a target picture and a competitor picture, were presented simultaneously with an aurally presented sentence that corresponded to the target picture. At the same time, eye fixations were recorded using an eye-tracking device. The effect of linguistic complexity on language processing time was assessed from eye fixation information by systematically varying linguistic complexity. This was achieved with a sentence corpus containing seven German sentence structures. A novel data analysis method computed the average tendency to fixate the target picture as a function of time during sentence processing. This allowed identification of the point in time at which the participant understood the sentence, referred to as the decision moment. Systematic differences in processing time were observed as a function of linguistic complexity. These differences in processing time may be used to assess the efficiency of cognitive processes involved in resolving linguistic complexity. Thus, the proposed method enables a temporal analysis of the speech comprehension process and has potential applications in speech audiology and psychoacoustics. |
Veronica Whitford; Debra Titone The effects of reading comprehension and launch site on frequency-predictability interactions during paragraph reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 6, pp. 1151–1165, 2014. @article{Whitford2014,We used eye movement measures of paragraph reading to examine whether word frequency and predictability interact during the earliest stages of lexical processing, with a specific focus on whether these effects are modulated by individual differences in reading comprehension or launch site (i.e., saccade length between the prior and currently fixated word–a proxy for the amount of parafoveal word processing). The joint impact of frequency and predictability on reading will elucidate whether these variables additively or multiplicatively affect the earliest stages of lexical access, which, in turn, has implications for computational models of eye movements during reading. Linear mixed effects models revealed additive effects during both early- and late-stage reading, where predictability effects were comparable for low- and high-frequency words. Moreover, less cautious readers (e.g., readers who engaged in skimming, scanning, mindless reading) demonstrated smaller frequency effects than more cautious readers. Taken together, our findings suggest that during extended reading, frequency and predictability exert additive influences on lexical and postlexical processing, and that individual differences in reading comprehension modulate sensitivity to the effects of word frequency. |
Heather Winskel; Manuel Perea Can parafoveal-on-foveal effects be obtained when reading an unspaced alphasyllabic script (Thai)? Journal Article In: Writing Systems Research, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 94–104, 2014. @article{Winskel2014,One controversial question in the field of eye movements and reading is whether there is evidence of parafoveal-on-foveal effects. This is an important issue because some models of eye movements in reading make quite different predictions in this respect (e.g., E-Z Reader vs. SWIFT models). The aim of the current study was to investigate if parafoveal-on-foveal effects occur when reading Thai, an unspaced, alphasyllabic orthography. Word frequency (high and low) of the word to the right of the currently fixated word was manipulated to examine if it would influence processing of the fixated word. Thirty-six participants read single sentences while having their eye movements monitored. There was no evidence of the effect of word frequency of the parafoveal word on fixation duration measures of the foveal word, as assessed by p(H0|D) values - except for a marginal effect in the skipping rates. Thus, the present data are in line with previous studies using spaced Indo-European languages which have found small/null results for parafoveal effects of word frequency during one-line sentence reading. © 2013 Taylor & Francis. |
Heather Winskel; Khazriyati Salehudding Morphological parafoveal preview benefit effects when reading derived words in Malay Journal Article In: Kajian Malaysia, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 23–40, 2014. @article{Winskel2014a,Eye-movement tracking is a method that is used to study reading across different languages and is increasingly being employed. Eye movements provide a window into the underlying cognitive processes and mechanisms while a person is reading (Rayner, 1998). The majority of research investigating eye movements during reading has been conducted on European languages such as English and German; relatively little work has been conducted on other writing systems such as Malay. Malay offers an interesting opportunity to investigate early morphological processing because Malay has a rich derivational morphology that is more structurally and semantically transparent than English. The current study investigates whether the morphological constituents of affixed words (prefixed and suffixed) in Malay influence early word processing during reading using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). The boundary paradigm involves the positioning of a preview word stimulus in place of the target word so that when the eyes move towards the preview word, they cross an invisible boundary that triggers a change from the preview word to the target word. Two commonly used affixes were used: a prefix pe- and a suffix -an, which both convert a verb into a nominal (e.g. lakon, "to act", with the prefix pe- becomes pelakon, "actor"; and makan, "to eat", with the suffix -an becomes makanan, "food"). Thirty participants read 72 single sentences that were identical in length (having the same number of letters) and contained affixed and pseudo-affixed words. Parafoveal previews consisted of identical affixed and control conditions. The dependent measures were first fixation duration and gaze duration. The results revealed a significant preview benefit for the identical condition compared with the affixed and control conditions and for the affixed condition compared with the control condition. This effect was not influenced by word type; hence, there was no evidence of morphological pre-processing. In conclusion, the results from the current study indicate that although Malay is a morphologically rich language with a relatively transparent orthography, readers do not necessarily utilise early morphological processes. The results are discussed in terms of language and orthography-specific differences in early morphological processing. |
Fuyun Wu; Yingyi Luo; Xiaolin Zhou Building Chinese relative clause structures with lexical and syntactic cues: Evidence from visual world eye-tracking and reading times Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 10, pp. 1205–1226, 2014. @article{Wu2014c,Relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese are prenominal. In object-modifying, object-extracted RCs (e.g. Click on [RC the ball broke] window, meaning 'Click on the window [RC that the ball broke]), the ambiguous status of the local noun ball and the long-distance attachment of the head noun window into the main verb appear to make online parsing of Chinese RCs particularly difficult. By interposing mismatching classifiers and the passive marker BEI into the RC sentences, we investigated whether the presence of incomplete heads would add storage costs, as predicted by the Dependency Locality Theory (DLT), or would serve as retrieval cues to help pre-build the RC structure, as predicted by the cue-based retrieval theory. Results from a visual world eye-tracking experiment and a self-paced reading showed that Chinese comprehenders are able to use BEI cues and the mismatching classifier (albeit to a less extent) to pre-build RC structure, providing support for the cue-based retrieval theory. |
Ming Yan; Yingyi Luo; Albrecht W. Inhoff Syllable articulation influences foveal and parafoveal processing of words during the silent reading of Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 75, pp. 93–103, 2014. @article{Yan2014,The current study examined effects of syllable articulation on eye movements during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, which contained two types of two-character target words whose second characters were subject to dialect-specific variation. In one condition the second syllable was articulated with a neutral tone for northern-dialect Chinese speakers and with a full tone for southern-dialect Chinese speakers (neutral-tone target words) and in the other condition the second syllable was articulated with a full tone irrespective of readers' dialect type (full-tone target words). Native speakers of northern and southern Chinese dialects were recruited in Experiment 1 to examine the effect of dialect-specific articulation on silent reading. Recordings of their eye movements revealed shorter viewing durations for neutral- than for full-tone target words only for speakers of northern but not for southern dialects, indicating that dialect-specific articulation of syllabic tone influenced visual word recognition. Experiment 2 replicated the syllabic tone effect for speakers of northern dialects, and the use of gaze-contingent display changes further revealed that these readers processed an upcoming parafoveal word less effectively when a neutral- than when a full-tone target was fixated. Shorter viewing duration for neutral-tone words thus cannot be attributed to their easier lexical processing; instead, tonal effects appear to reflect Chinese readers' simulated articulation of to-be-recognized words during silent reading. |
Ming Yan; Wei Zhou; Hua Shu; Rizwangul Yusupu; Dongxia Miao; André Krügel; Reinhold Kliegl Eye movements guided by morphological structure: Evidence from the Uighur language Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 132, no. 2, pp. 181–215, 2014. @article{Yan2014a,It is generally accepted that low-level features (e.g., inter-word spaces) are responsible for saccade-target selection in eye-movement control during reading. In two experiments using Uighur script known for its rich suffixes, we demonstrate that, in addition to word length and launch site, the number of suffixes influences initial landing positions. We also demonstrate an influence of word frequency. These results are difficult to explain purely by low-level guidance of eye movements and indicate that due to properties specific to Uighur script low-level visual information and high-level information such as morphological structure of parafoveal words jointly influence saccade programming. |
Jinmian Yang; Nan Li; Suiping Wang; Timothy J. Slattery; Keith Rayner Encoding the target or the plausible preview word? The nature of the plausibility preview benefit in reading Chinese Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 193–213, 2014. @article{Yang2014a,Previous studies have shown that a plausible preview word can facilitate the processing of a target word as compared to an implausible preview word (a plausibility preview benefit effect) when reading Chinese (Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012; Yang, 2013). Regarding the nature of this effect, it is possible that readers processed the meaning of the plausible preview word and did not actually encode the target word (given that the parafoveal preview word lies close to the fovea). The current experiment examined this possibility with three conditions wherein readers received a preview of a target word that was either (1) identical to the target word (identical preview), (2) a plausible continuation of the pre-target text, but the post-target text in the sentence was incompatible with it (initially plausible preview), or (3) not a plausible continuation of the pre-target text, nor compatible with the post-target text (implausible preview). Gaze durations on target words were longer in the initially plausible condition than the identical condition. Overall, the results showed a typical preview benefit, but also implied that readers did not encode the initially plausible preview. Also, a plausibility preview benefit was replicated: gaze durations were longer with implausible previews than the initially plausible ones. Furthermore, late eye movement measures did not reveal differences between the initially plausible and the implausible preview conditions, which argues against the possibility of misreading the plausible preview word as the target word. In sum, these results suggest that a plausible preview word provides benefit in processing the target word as compared to an implausible preview word, and this benefit is only present in early but not late eye movement measures. |
Xiaohong Yang; Lijing Chen; Yufang Yang The effect of discourse structure on depth of semantic integration in reading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 325–339, 2014. @article{Yang2014b,A coherent discourse exhibits certain structures in that subunits of discourses are related to one another in various ways and in that subunits that contribute to the same discourse purpose are joined to create a larger unit so as to produce an effect on the reader. To date, this crucial aspect of discourse has been largely neglected in the psycholinguistic literature. In two experiments, we examined whether semantic integration in discourse context was influenced by the difference of discourse structure. Readers read discourses in which the last sentence was locally congruent but either semantically congruent or incongruent when interpreted with the preceding sentence. Furthermore, the last sentence was either in the same discourse unit or not in the same discourse unit as the preceding sentence, depending on whether they shared the same discourse purpose. Results from self-paced reading (Experiment 1) and eye tracking (Experiment 2) showed that discourse-incongruous words were read longer than discourse-congruous words only when the critical sentence and the preceding sentence were in the same discourse unit, but not when they belonged to different discourse units. These results establish discourse structure as a new factor in semantic integration and suggest that discourse effects depend both on the content of what is being said and on the way that the contents are organized. |
Si On Yoon; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Adjusting conceptual pacts in three-party conversation Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 919–937, 2014. @article{Yoon2014,During conversation, partners develop representations of jointly known information-the common ground-and use this knowledge to guide subsequent linguistic exchanges. Extensive research on 2-party conversation has offered key insights into this process, in particular, its partner-specificity: Common ground that is shared with 1 partner is not always assumed to be shared with other partners. Conversation often involves multiple pairs of individuals who differ in common ground. Yet, little is known about common ground processes in multi-party conversation. Here, we take a 1st step toward understanding this problem by examining situations in which simple dyadic representations of common ground might cause difficulty-situations in which dialogue partners develop shared labels (entrained terms), and then a 3rd (naïve) party joins the conversation. Experiment 1 examined unscripted, task-based conversation in which 2 partners entrained on terms. At test, speakers referenced game-pieces in a dialogue with their partner, or in a 3-party conversation including a new, naïve listener. Speakers were sensitive to the 3rd party, using longer, disfluent expressions when additionally addressing the new partner. By contrast, analysis of listener eye-fixations did not suggest sensitivity. Experiment 2 provided a stronger test of sensitivity and revealed that listeners do cancel expectations for terms that had been entrained before when a 3rd, naïve party joins the conversation. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying common ground, showing that rather than a unitary construct, common ground is flexibly adapted to the needs of a naïve 3rd party. |
Peng Zhou; Stephen Crain; Likan Zhan Grammatical aspect and event recognition in children's online sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 133, no. 1, pp. 262–276, 2014. @article{Zhou2014,This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme -le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme -zhe. The perfective morpheme -le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme -zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing. We were interested to see whether young children are able to use the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes (i.e., completed versus ongoing) as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we tested 34 Mandarin-speaking adults and 99 Mandarin-speaking children (35 three-year-olds, 32 four-year-olds and 32 five-year-olds). On each trial, participants were presented with spoken sentences containing either of the two aspectual morphemes while viewing a visual image containing two pictures, one representing a completed event and one representing an ongoing event. Participants' eye movements were recorded from the onset of the spoken sentences. The results show that both the adults and the three age groups of children exhibited a facilitatory effect trigged by the aspectual morpheme: hearing the perfective morpheme -le triggered more eye movements to the completed event area, whereas hearing the durative morpheme -zhe triggered more eye movements to the ongoing event area. This effect occurred immediately after the onset of the aspectual morpheme, both for the adults and the three groups of children. This is evidence that young children are able to use the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition. Children's eye movement patterns reflect a rapid mapping of grammatical aspect onto the temporal structures of events depicted in the visual scene. |
2013 |
Holger Mitterer; Sahyang Kim; Taehong Cho Compensation for complete assimilation in speech perception: The case of Korean labial-to-velar assimilation Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 59–83, 2013. @article{Mitterer2013b,In connected speech, phonological assimilation to neighboring words can lead to pronunciation variants (e.g., 'garden bench'. →. " garde. m bench" ). A large body of literature suggests that listeners use the phonetic context to reconstruct the intended word for assimilation types that often lead to incomplete assimilations (e.g., a pronunciation of " garden" that carries cues for both a labial [m] and an alveolar [n]). In the current paper, we show that a similar context effect is observed for an assimilation that is often complete, Korean labial-to-velar place assimilation. In contrast to the context effects for partial assimilations, however, the context effects seem to rely completely on listeners' experience with the assimilation pattern in their native language. |
Irene Ablinger; Walter Huber; Kerstin I. Schattka; Ralph Radach Recovery in a letter-by-letter reader: More efficiency at the expense of normal reading strategy Journal Article In: Neurocase, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 236–255, 2013. @article{Ablinger2013,Although changes in reading performance of recovering letter-by-letter readers have been described in some detail, no prior research has provided an in-depth analysis of the underlying adaptive word processing strategies. Our work examined the reading performance of a letter-by-letter reader, FH, over a period of 15 months, using eye movement methodology to delineate the recovery process at two different time points (T1, T2). A central question is whether recovery is characterized either by moving back towards normal word processing or by refinement and possibly automatization of an existing pathological strategy that was developed in response to the impairment. More specifically, we hypothesized that letter-by-letter reading may be executed with at least four different strategies and our work sought to distinguish between these alternatives. During recovery significant improvements in reading performance were achieved. A shift of fixation positions from the far left to the extreme right of target words was combined with many small and very few longer regressive saccades. Apparently, ‘letter-by-letter reading' took the form of local clustering, most likely corresponding to the formation ofsublexical units ofanalysis. This pattern was more pronounced at T2, suggesting that improvements in reading efficiency may come at the expense of making it harder to eventually return to normal reading. |
Bernhard Angele; Keith Rayner Processing the in the parafovea: Are articles skipped automatically? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 649–662, 2013. @article{Angele2013,One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article the. Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string t-h-e automatically. We tested whether skipping of articles in English is sensitive to context information or whether it is truly automatic in the sense that any occurrence of the letter string the will trigger a skip. This was done using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to provide readers with false parafoveal previews of the article the. All experimental sentences contained a short target verb, the preview of which could be correct (i.e., identical to the actual subsequent word in the sentence; e.g., ace), a nonword (tda), or an infelicitous article preview (the). Our results indicated that readers tended to skip the infelicitous the previews frequently, suggesting that, in many cases, they seemed to be unable to detect the syntactic anomaly in the preview and based their skipping decision solely on the orthographic properties of the article. However, there was some evidence that readers sometimes detected the anomaly, as they also showed increased skipping of the pretarget word in the the preview condition. |
Bernhard Angele; Keith Rayner Eye movements and parafoveal preview of compound words: Does morpheme order matter? Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 505–526, 2013. @article{Angele2013a,Recently, there has been considerable debate about whether readers can identify multiple words in parallel or whether they are limited to a serial mode of word identification, processing one word at a time (see, e.g., Reichle, Liversedge, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2009). Similar questions can be applied to bimorphemic compound words: Do readers identify all the constituents of a compound word in parallel, and does it matter which of the morphemes is identified first? We asked subjects to read compound words embedded in sentences while monitoring their eye movements. Using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), we manipulated the preview that subjects received of the compound word before they fixated it. In particular, the morpheme order of the preview was either normal (cowboy) or reversed (boycow). Additionally, we manipulated the preview availability for each of the morphemes separately. Preview was thus available for the first morpheme only (cowtxg), for the second morpheme only (enzboy), or for neither of the morphemes (enztxg). We report three major findings: First, there was an effect of morpheme order on gaze durations measured on the compound word, indicating that, as expected, readers obtained a greater preview benefit when the preview presented the morphemes in the correct order than when their order was reversed. Second, gaze durations on the compound word were influenced not only by preview availability for the first, but also by that for the second morpheme. Finally, and most importantly, the results show that readers are able to extract some morpheme information even from a reverse order preview. In summary, readers obtain preview benefit from both constituents of a short compound word, even when the preview does not reflect the correct morpheme order. |