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!
2013 |
Manabu Arai; Frank Keller The use of verb-specific information for prediction in sentence processing Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 525–560, 2013. @article{Arai2013,Recent research has shown that language comprehenders make predictions about upcoming linguistic information. These studies demonstrate that the processor not only analyses the input that it received but also predicts upcoming unseen elements. Two visual world experiments were conducted to examine the type of syntactic information this prediction process has access to. Experiment 1 examined whether the verb's subcategorization information is used for predicting a direct object, by comparing transitive verbs (e.g., punish) to intransitive verbs (e.g., disagree). Experiment 2 examined whether verb frequency information is used for predicting a reduced relative clause by contrasting verbs that are infrequent in the past participle form (e.g., watch) with ones that are frequent in that form (e.g., record). Both experiments showed that comprehenders used lexically specific syntactic information to predict upcoming syntactic structure; this information can be used to avoid garden paths in certain cases, as Experiment 2 demonstrated. |
Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder; Andrea M. Zawoyski; Tori E. Foster; Leslie A. Blevins Using eye-tracking procedures to evaluate generalization effects: Practicing target words during repeated readings within versus across texts Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 477–495, 2013. @article{Ardoin2013,Repeated readings is a frequently studied and recommended intervention for improving reading fluency. Typically, researchers investigate generalization of repeated readings interventions by assessing students' accuracy and rate on researcher-developed high word overlap passages. Unfortunately, this methodology may mask intervention effects given that the dependent measure is reflective of time spent by students reading both practiced and unpracticed words. Eye-tracking procedures have the potential to overcome this limitation. The current study examined the eye movements of participants who were (a) not provided with any intervention (n = 28), (b) provided with repeated readings on a single passage containing a set of target words (n = 28), or (c) provided the opportunity to read four different passages each containing the same set of target words (n = 28). Students' reading of a novel passage containing the target words provides evidence to support recommendations that schools use repeated readings. Copyright 2013 by the National Association of School Psychologists. |
Jane Ashby; Heather Dix; Morgan Bontrager Phonemic awareness contributes to text reading fluency: Evidence from eye movements. Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 157–170, 2013. @article{Ashby2013,Although phonemic awareness is a known predictor of early decoding and word recognition, less is known about relationships between phonemic awareness and text reading fluency. This longitudinal study is the first to inves-tigate this relationship by measuring eye movements during picture matching tasks and during silent sentence reading. Time spent looking at the correct target during phonemic awareness and receptive spelling tasks gauged the efficiency of phonological and orthographic processes. Children's eye movements during sen-tence reading provided a direct measure of silent reading fluency for compre-hended text. Results indicate that children who processed the phonemic awareness targets more slowly in Grade 2 tended to be slower readers in Grade 3. Processing difficulty during a receptive spelling task was related to reading fluency within Grade 2. Findings suggest that inefficient phonemic processing contributes to poor silent reading fluency after second grade. |
Xuejun Bai; Feifei Liang; Hazel I. Blythe; Chuanli Zang; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Interword spacing effects on the acquisition of new vocabulary for readers of Chinese as a second language Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 36, pp. S4–S17, 2013. @article{Bai2013,We examined whether interword spacing would facilitate acquisition of new vocabulary for second language learners of Chinese. Participants' eye movements were measured as they read new vocabulary embedded in sentences during a learning session and a test session. In the learning session, participants read sentences in traditional unspaced format and half-read sentences with interword spacing. In the test session, all participants read unspaced sentences. Participants in the spaced learning group read the target words more quickly than those in the unspaced learning group. This benefit was maintained at test, indicating that the manipulation enhanced learning of the novel words and was not a transient effect limited to occasions when interword spacing was present in the printed text. The insertion of interword spaces may allow readers to form a more fully specified representation of the novel word, or to strengthen connections between representations of the constituent characters and the multi-character word. |
Patrice Speeter Beddor; Kevin B. McGowan; Julie E. Boland; Andries W. Coetzee; Anthony Brasher The time course of perception of coarticulation Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 133, no. 4, pp. 2350–2366, 2013. @article{Beddor2013,The perception of coarticulated speech as it unfolds over time was investigated by monitoring eye movements of participants as they listened to words with oral vowels or with late or early onset of anticipatory vowel nasalization. When listeners heard [CVNC] and had visual choices of images of CVNC (e.g., send) and CVC (said) words, they fixated more quickly and more often on the CVNC image when onset of nasalization began early in the vowel compared to when the coarticulatory information occurred later. Moreover, when a standard eye movement programming delay is factored in, fixations on the CVNC image began to occur before listeners heard the nasal consonant. Listeners' attention to coarticulatory cues for velum lowering was selective in two respects: (a) listeners assigned greater perceptual weight to coarticulatory information in phonetic contexts in which [V] but not N is an especially robust property, and (b) individual listeners differed in their perceptual weights. Overall, the time course of perception of velum lowering in American English indicates that the dynamics of perception parallel the dynamics of the gestural information encoded in the acoustic signal. In real-time processing, listeners closely track unfolding coarticulatory information in ways that speed lexical activation. |
Nathalie N. Bélanger; Rachel I. Mayberry; Keith Rayner Orthographic and phonological preview benefits: Parafoveal processing in skilled and less-skilled deaf readers Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 11, pp. 2237–2252, 2013. @article{Belanger2013a,Many deaf individuals do not develop the high-level reading skills that will allow them to fully take part into society. To attempt to explain this widespread difficulty in the deaf population, much research has honed in on the use of phonological codes during reading. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers, though not well supported, still lingers in the literature. We investigated skilled and less-skilled adult deaf readers' processing of orthographic and phonological codes in parafoveal vision during reading by monitoring their eye movements and using the boundary paradigm. Orthographic preview benefits were found in early measures of reading for skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers, but only skilled hearing readers processed phonological codes in parafoveal vision. Crucially, skilled and less-skilled deaf readers showed a very similar pattern of preview benefits during reading. These results support the notion that reading difficulties in deaf adults are not linked to their failure to activate phonological codes during reading. |
Nathalie N. Bélanger; Keith Rayner Frequency and predictability effects in eye fixations for skilled and less-skilled deaf readers Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 477–497, 2013. @article{Belanger2013,The illiteracy rate in the deaf population has been alarmingly high for several decades, despite the fact that deaf children go through the standard stages of schooling. Much research addressing this issue has focused on word-level processes, but in the recent years, little research has focused on sentence-levels processes. Previous research (Fischler, 1985) investigated word integration within context in college-level deaf and hearing readers in a lexical decision task following incomplete sentences with targets that were congruous or incongruous relative to the preceding context; it was found that deaf readers, as a group, were more dependent on contextual information than their hearing counterparts. The present experiment extended Fischler's results and investigated the relationship between frequency, predictability, and reading skill in skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers. Results suggest that only less-skilled deaf readers, and not all deaf readers, rely more on contextual cues to boost word processing. Additionally, early effects of frequency and predictability were found for all three groups of readers, without any evidence for an interaction between frequency and predictability. |
Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Girish Kumar; Jasmine Junge; Susana T. L. Chung The effect of letter-stroke boldness on reading speed in central and peripheral vision Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 84, pp. 33–42, 2013. @article{Bernard2013,People with central vision loss often prefer boldface print over normal print for reading. However, little is known about how reading speed is influenced by the letter-stroke boldness of font. In this study, we examined the reliance of reading speed on stroke boldness, and determined whether this reliance differs between the normal central and peripheral vision. Reading speed was measured using the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm, where observers with normal vision read aloud short single sentences presented on a computer monitor, one word at a time. Text was rendered in Courier at six levels of boldness, defined as the stroke-width normalized to that of the standard Courier font: 0.27, 0.72, 1, 1.48, 1.89 and 3.04× the standard. Testings were conducted at the fovea and 10° in the inferior visual field. Print sizes used were 0.8× and 1.4× the critical print size (smallest print size that can be read at the maximum reading speed). At the fovea, reading speed was invariant for the middle four levels of boldness, but dropped by 23.3% for the least and the most bold text. At 10° eccentricity, reading speed was virtually the same for all boldness <1, but showed a poorer tolerance to bolder text, dropping by 21.5% for 1.89× boldness and 51% for the most bold (3.04×) text. These results could not be accounted for by the changes in print size or the RMS contrast of text associated with changes in stroke boldness. Our results suggest that contrary to the popular belief, reading speed does not benefit from bold text in the normal fovea and periphery. Excessive increase in stroke boldness may even impair reading speed, especially in the periphery. |
Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä The role of hyphens at the constituent boundary in compound word identification: Facilitative for long, detrimental for short compound words Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 60, no. 3, pp. 157–163, 2013. @article{Bertram2013a,The current eye-movement study investigated whether a salient segmentation cue like the hyphen facilitates the identification of long and short compound words. The study was conducted in Finnish, where compound words exist in great abundance. The results showed that long hyphenated compounds (musiikki-ilta) are identified faster than concatenated ones (yllätystulos), but short hyphenated compounds (ilta-asu) are identified slower than their concatenated counterparts (kesäsää). This pattern of results is explained by the visual acuity principle (<citationReference id="cr1-1" rid="c1">Bertram & Hyönä, 2003</citationReference>): A long compound word does not fully fit in the foveal area, where visual acuity is at its best. Therefore, its identification begins with the access of the initial constituent and this sequential processing is facilitated by the hyphen. However, a short compound word fits in the foveal area, and consequently the hyphen slows down processing by encouraging sequential processing in cases where it is possible to extract and use information of the second constituent as well. |
Robert W. Booth; Ulrich W. Weger The function of regressions in reading: Backward eye movements allow rereading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 82–97, 2013. @article{Booth2013,Standard text reading involves frequent eye movements that go against normal reading order. The function of these "regressions" is still largely unknown. The most obvious explanation is that regressions allow for the rereading of previously fixated words. Alternatively, physically returning the eyes to a word's location could cue the reader's memory for that word, effectively aiding the comprehension process via location priming (the "deictic pointer hypothesis"). In Experiment 1, regression frequency was reduced when readers knew that information was no longer available for rereading. In Experiment 2, readers listened to auditorily presented text while moving their eyes across visual placeholders on the screen. Here, rereading was impossible, but deictic pointers remained available, yet the readers did not make targeted regressions in this experiment. In Experiment 3, target words in normal sentences were changed after reading. Where the eyes later regressed to these words, participants generally remained unaware of the change, and their answers to comprehension questions indicated that the new meaning of the changed word was what determined their sentence representations. These results suggest that readers use regressions to reread words and not to cue their memory for previously read words. |
Arielle Borovsky; Erin Burns; Jeffrey L. Elman; Julia L. Evans Lexical activation during sentence comprehension in adolescents with history of specific language impairment Journal Article In: Journal of Communication Disorders, vol. 46, no. 5-6, pp. 413–427, 2013. @article{Borovsky2013,One remarkable characteristic of speech comprehension in typically developing (TD) children and adults is the speed with which the listener can integrate information across multiple lexical items to anticipate upcoming referents. Although children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show lexical deficits (Sheng & McGregor, 2010) and slower speed of processing (Leonard et al., 2007), relatively little is known about how these deficits manifest in real-time sentence comprehension. In this study, we examine lexical activation in the comprehension of simple transitive sentences in adolescents with a history of SLI and age-matched, TD peers. Participants listened to sentences that consisted of the form, Article-Agent-Action-Article-Theme, (e.g., The pirate chases the ship) while viewing pictures of four objects that varied in their relationship to the Agent and Action of the sentence (e.g., Target, Agent-Related, Action-Related, and Unrelated). Adolescents with SLI were as fast as their TD peers to fixate on the sentence's final item (the Target) but differed in their post-action onset visual fixations to the Action-Related item. Additional exploratory analyses of the spatial distribution of their visual fixations revealed that the SLI group had a qualitatively different pattern of fixations to object images than did the control group. The findings indicate that adolescents with SLI integrate lexical information across words to anticipate likely or expected meanings with the same relative fluency and speed as do their TD peers. However, the failure of the SLI group to show increased fixations to Action-Related items after the onset of the action suggests lexical integration deficits that result in failure to consider alternate sentence interpretations.Learning outcomes: As a result of this paper, the reader will be able to describe several benefits of using eye-tracking methods to study populations with language disorders. They should also recognize several potential explanations for lexical deficits in SLI, including possible reduced speed of processing, and degraded lexical representations. Finally, they should recall the main outcomes of this study, including that adolescents with SLI show different timing and location of eye-fixations while interpreting sentences than their age-matched peers. © 2013. |
Oliver Bott The processing domain of aspectual interpretation Journal Article In: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 93, pp. 195–229, 2013. @article{Bott2013,In the semantic literature lexical aspect is often treated as a property of VPs or even of whole sentences. Does the interpretation of lexical aspect – contrary to the incrementality assumption commonly made in psycholinguistics – have to wait until the verb and all its arguments are present? To address this issue, we conducted an offline study, two self-paced reading experiments and an eyetracking experiment to investigate aspectual mismatch and aspectual coercion in German sentences while manipulating the position of the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Our findings provide evidence that mismatch detection and aspectual repair depend on a complete verb-argument structure. When the verb didn't receive all its (minimally required) arguments no mismatch or coercion effects showed up at the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Effects were delayed until a later point after all the arguments had been encountered. These findings have important consequences for semantic theory and for processing accounts of aspectual semantics. As far as semantic theory is concerned, it has to model lexical aspect as a supralexical property coming only into play at the sentence level. For theories of semantic processing the results are even more striking because they indicate that (at least some) semantic phenomena are processed on a more global level than it would be expected assuming incremental semantic interpretation. |
Mara Breen; Charles Clifton Stress matters revisited: A boundary change experiment Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 10, pp. 1896–1909, 2013. @article{Breen2013,Breen and Clifton (Stress matters: Effects of anticipated lexical stress on silent reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 2011, 64, 153-170) argued that readers' eye movements during silent reading are influenced by the stress patterns of words. This claim was supported by the observation that syntactic reanalysis that required concurrent metrical reanalysis (e.g., a change from the noun form of abstract to the verb form) resulted in longer reading times than syntactic reanalysis that did not require metrical reanalysis (e.g., a change from the noun form of report to the verb form). However, the data contained a puzzle: The disruption appeared on the critical word (abstract, report) itself, although the material that forced the part of speech change did not appear until the next region. Breen and Clifton argued that parafoveal preview of the disambiguating material triggered the revision and that the eyes did not move on until a fully specified lexical representation of the critical word was achieved. The present experiment used a boundary change paradigm in which parafoveal preview of the disambiguating region was prevented. Once again, an interaction was observed: Syntactic reanalysis resulted in particularly long reading times when it also required metrical reanalysis. However, now the interaction did not appear on the critical word, but only following the disambiguating region. This pattern of results supports Breen and Clifton's claim that readers form an implicit metrical representation of text during silent reading. |
Jon Brock; Samantha Bzishvili Deconstructing Frith and Snowling's homograph-reading task: Implications for autism spectrum disorders Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 9, pp. 1764–1773, 2013. @article{Brock2013,The poor performance of autistic individuals on a test of homograph reading is widely interpreted as evidence for a reduction in sensitivity to context termed "weak central coherence". To better understand the cognitive processes involved in completing the homograph-reading task, we monitored the eye movements of nonautistic adults as they completed the task. Using single trial analysis, we determined that the time between fixating and producing the homograph (eye-to-voice span) increased significantly across the experiment and predicted accuracy of homograph pronunciation, suggesting that participants adapted their reading strategy to minimize pronunciation errors. Additionally, we found evidence for interference from previous trials involving the same homograph. This progressively reduced the initial advantage for dominant homograph pronunciations as the experiment progressed. Our results identify several additional factors that contribute to performance on the homograph reading task and may help to reconcile the findings of poor performance on the test with contradictory findings from other studies using different measures of context sensitivity in autism. The results also undermine some of the broader theoretical inferences that have been drawn from studies of autism using the homograph task. Finally, we suggest that this approach to task deconstruction might have wider applications in experimental psychology. |
Susanne Brouwer; Holger Mitterer; Falk Huettig Discourse context and the recognition of reduced and canonical spoken words Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 519–539, 2013. @article{Brouwer2013,In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., 'puter') more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., 'computer'). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words. Target word recognition was assessed by measuring eye fixation proportions to four printed words on a visual display: the target, a "reduced form" competitor, a "canonical form" competitor and an unrelated distractor. Target sentences were presented in isolation or with a wider discourse context. Experiment 1 revealed that target recognition was facilitated by wider discourse information. Importantly, the recognition of reduced forms improved significantly when preceded by strongly rather than by weakly supportive discourse contexts. This was not the case for canonical forms: listeners' target word recognition was not dependent on the degree of supportive context. Experiment 2 showed that the differential context effects in Experiment 1 were not due to an additional amount of speaker information. Thus, these data suggest that in natural settings a strongly supportive discourse context is more important for the recognition of reduced forms than the recognition of canonical forms. |
Anneloes R. Canestrelli; Willem M. Mak; Ted J. M. Sanders Causal connectives in discourse processing: How differences in subjectivity are reflected in eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 9, pp. 1394–1413, 2013. @article{Canestrelli2013,Causal connectives are often considered to provide crucial information about the discourse structure; they signal a causal relation between two text segments. However, in many languages of the world causal connectives specialise in either subjective or objective causal relations. We investigate whether this type of (discourse) information is used during the online processing of causal connectives by focusing on the Dutch connectives want and omdat, both translated by because. In three eye-tracking studies we demonstrate that the Dutch connective want, which is a prototypical marker of subjective CLAIM-ARGUMENT relations, leads to an immediate processing disadvantage compared to omdat, a prototypical marker of objective CONSEQUENCE-CAUSE relations. This effect was observed at the words immediately following the connective, at which point readers cannot yet establish the causal relation on the basis of the content, which means that the effect is solely induced by the connectives. In Experiment 2 we demonstrate that this effect is related to the representation of the first clause of a want relation as a mental state. In Experiment 3, we show that the use of omdat in relations that do not allow for a CONSEQUENCE-CAUSE interpretation leads to serious processing difficulties at the end of those relations. On the basis of these results, we argue that want triggers a subjective mental state interpretation of S1, whereas omdat triggers the construction of an objective CONSEQUENCE-CAUSE relation. These results illustrate that causal connectives provide subtle information about semantic-pragmatic distinctions between types of causal relations, which immediately influences online processing. |
Maria Nella Carminati; Pia Knoeferle Effects of speaker emotional facial expression and listener age on incremental sentence processing Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 9, pp. e72559, 2013. @article{Carminati2013,We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated how and with which time course emotional information from a speaker's face affects younger (N = 32, Mean age = 23) and older (N = 32, Mean age = 64) listeners' visual attention and language comprehension as they processed emotional sentences in a visual context. The age manipulation tested predictions by socio-emotional selectivity theory of a positivity effect in older adults. After viewing the emotional face of a speaker (happy or sad) on a computer display, participants were presented simultaneously with two pictures depicting opposite-valence events (positive and negative; IAPS database) while they listened to a sentence referring to one of the events. Participants' eye fixations on the pictures while processing the sentence were increased when the speaker's face was (vs. wasn't) emotionally congruent with the sentence. The enhancement occurred from the early stages of referential disambiguation and was modulated by age. For the older adults it was more pronounced with positive faces, and for the younger ones with negative faces. These findings demonstrate for the first time that emotional facial expressions, similarly to previously-studied speaker cues such as eye gaze and gestures, are rapidly integrated into sentence processing. They also provide new evidence for positivity effects in older adults during situated sentence processing. |
Cindy Chamberland; Jean Saint-Aubin; Marie Andrée Légère The impact of text repetition on content and function words during reading: Further evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 94–99, 2013. @article{Chamberland2013,There is ample evidence that reading speed increases when participants read the same text more than once. However, less is known about the impact of text repetition as a function of word class. Some authors suggested that text repetition would mostly benefit content words with little or no effect on function words. In the present study, we examined the effect of multiple readings on the processing of content and function words. Participants were asked to read a short text two times in direct succession. Eye movement analyses revealed the typical multiple readings effect: Repetition decreased the time readers spent fixating words and the probability of fixating critical words. Most importantly, we found that the effect of multiple readings was of the same magnitude for content and function words, and for low- and high-frequency words. Such findings suggest that lexical variables have additive effects on eye movement measures in reading. |
Wonil Choi; Peter C. Gordon Coordination of word recognition and oculomotor control during reading: The role of implicit lexical decisions Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 1032–1046, 2013. @article{Choi2013,The coordination of word-recognition and oculomotor processes during reading was evaluated in eye-tracking experiments that examined how word skipping, where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading, is affected by the lexical status of a letter string in the parafovea and ease of recognizing that string. Ease of lexical recognition was manipulated through target-word frequency (Experiment 1) and through repetition priming between prime-target pairs embedded in a sentence (Experiment 2). Using the gaze-contingent boundary technique the target word appeared in the parafovea either with full preview or with transposed-letter (TL) preview. The TL preview strings were nonwords in Experiment 1 (e.g., bilnk created from the target blink), but were words in Experiment 2 (e.g., sacred created from the target scared). Experiment 1 showed greater skipping for high-frequency than low-frequency target words in the full preview condition, but not in the TL preview (nonword) condition. Experiment 2 showed greater skipping for target words that repeated an earlier prime word than for those that did not, with this repetition priming occurring both with preview of the full target and with preview of the target's TL neighbor word. However, time to progress from the word after the target was greater following skips of the TL preview word, whose meaning was anomalous in the sentence context, than following skips of the full preview word whose meaning fit sensibly into the sentence context. Together, the results support the idea that coordination between word-recognition and oculomotor processes occurs at the level of implicit lexical decisions. |
Harald Clahsen; Loay Balkhair; John Sebastian Schutter; Ian Cunnings The time course of morphological processing in a second language Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 7–31, 2013. @article{Clahsen2013,We report findings from psycholinguistic experiments investigating the detailed timing of processing morphologically complex words by proficient adult second (L2) language learners of English in comparison to adult native (L1) speakers of English. The first study employed the masked priming technique to investigate -ed forms with a group of advanced Arabic-speaking learners of English. The results replicate previously found L1/L2 differences in morphological priming, even though in the present experiment an extra temporal delay was offered after the presentation of the prime words.$backslash$nThe second study examined the timing of constraints against inflected forms inside derived words in English using the eye-movement monitoring technique and an additional acceptability judgment task with highly advanced Dutch L2 learners of English in comparison to adult L1 English controls. Whilst offline the L2 learners performed native-like, the eye-movement data showed that their online processing was not affected by the morphological constraint against regular plurals inside derived words in the same way as in native speakers. Taken together, these findings indicate that L2 learners are not just slower than native speakers in processing morphologically complex words, but that the L2 comprehension system employs real-time grammatical analysis (in this case, morphological information) less than the L1 system. |
Alasdair D. F. Clarke; Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller The impact of attentional, linguistic, and visual features during object naming Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 4, pp. 927, 2013. @article{Clarke2013,Object detection and identification are fundamental to human vision, and there is mounting evidence that objects guide the allocation of visual attention. However, the role of objects in tasks involving multiple modalities is less clear. To address this question, we investigate object naming, a task in which participants have to verbally identify objects they see in photorealistic scenes. We report an eye-tracking study that investigates which features (attentional, visual, and linguistic) influence object naming. We find that the amount of visual attention directed toward an object, its position and saliency, along with linguistic factors such as word frequency, animacy, and semantic proximity, significantly influence whether the object will be named or not. We then ask how features from different modalities are combined during naming, and find significant interactions between saliency and position, saliency and linguistic features, and attention and position. We conclude that when the cognitive system performs tasks such as object naming, it uses input from one modality to constraint or enhance the processing of other modalities, rather than processing each input modality independently. |
Charles Clifton Situational context affects definiteness preferences: Accommodation of presuppositions Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 487–501, 2013. @article{Clifton2013,In 4 experiments, we used self-paced reading and eye tracking to demonstrate that readers are, under some conditions, sensitive to the presuppositions of definite versus indefinite determiner phrases (DPs). Reading was faster when the context stereotypically provided a single possible referent for a definite DP or multiple possible referents for an indefinite DP than when context and DP definiteness were mismatched. This finding goes beyond previous evidence that definite DPs are processed more rapidly than are indefinite DPs when there is a unique or familiar referent in the context, showing that readers are sensitive to the semantics and pragmatics of (in)definiteness. However, the finding was obtained only when readers had to perform a simple arithmetic task between reading a sentence and seeing a question about it. The intervening task may have encouraged them to process the sentence more deeply in order to form a representation that would persist while doing the arithmetic. The methodological implications of this observation are discussed. |
Lei Cui; Denis Drieghe; Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Hui Chi; Simon P. Liversedge Parafoveal processing across different lexical constituents in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 2, pp. 403–416, 2013. @article{Cui2013a,We report a boundary paradigm eye movement experiment to investigate whether the linguistic category of a two-character Chinese string affects how the second character of that string is processed in the parafovea during reading. We obtained clear preview effects in all conditions but, more impor- tantly, found parafoveal-on-foveal effects whereby a nonsense preview of the second character influ- enced fixations on the first character. This effect occurred for monomorphemic words, but not for compound words or phrases. Also, in a word boundary demarcation experiment, we demonstrate that Chinese readers are not always consistent in their judgements of which characters in a sentence constitute words. We conclude that information regarding the combinatorial properties of characters in Chinese is used online to moderate the extent to which parafoveal characters are processed. |
Lei Cui; Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Jukka Hyönä; Suiping Wang; Simon P. Liversedge Processing of compound word characters in reading chinese: An eye movement contingent display change study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 527–547, 2013. @article{Cui2013b,Readers' eyemovements weremonitored as they read Chinese two-constituent compound words in sentence contexts. The first compound-word constituent was either an infrequent character with a highly predictable second constituent or a frequent character with an unpredictable second constituent. The parafoveal preview of the second constituent was manipulated, with four preview conditions: identical to the correct form; a semantically related character to the second constituent; a semantically unrelated character to the second constituent; and a pseudocharacter. An invisible boundary was set between the two constituents; when the eyes moved across the boundary, the previewed character was changed to its intended form. The main findings were that preview effects occurred for the second constituent of the compound word. Providing an incorrect preview of the second constituent affected fixations on the first constituent, but only when the second constituent was predictable from the first. The frequency of the initial character of the compound constrained the identity of the second character, and this in turnmodulated the extent to which the semantic characteristics of the preview influenced processing of the second constituent and the compound word as a whole. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of Chinese compound-word recognition and the constraint hypothesis of Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek (2004). We conclude that word identification in Chinese is flexible, and parafoveal processing of upcoming characters is influenced both by the characteristics of the fixated character and by its relationship with the characters in the parafovea. |
Lei Cui; Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Jukka Hyönä; Suiping Wang; Simon P. Liversedge Processing of compound-word characters in reading Chinese: An eye-movement-contingent display change study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 527–547, 2013. @article{Cui2013,Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read Chinese two-constituent compound words in sentence contexts. The first compound-word constituent was either an infrequent character with a highly predictable second constituent or a frequent character with an unpredictable second constituent. The parafoveal preview of the second constituent was manipulated, with four preview conditions: identical to the correct form; a semantically related character to the second constituent; a semantically unrelated character to the second constituent; and a pseudocharacter. An invisible boundary was set between the two constituents; when the eyes moved across the boundary, the previewed character was changed to its intended form. The main findings were that preview effects occurred for the second constituent of the compound word. Providing an incorrect preview of the second constituent affected fixations on the first constituent, but only when the second constituent was predictable from the first. The frequency of the initial character of the compound constrained the identity of the second character, and this in turn modulated the extent to which the semantic characteristics of the preview influenced processing of the second constituent and the compound word as a whole. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of Chinese compound-word recognition and the constraint hypothesis of Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek ( 2004 ). We conclude that word identification in Chinese is flexible, and parafoveal processing of upcoming characters is influenced both by the characteristics of the fixated character and by its relationship with the characters in the parafovea. |
Ian Cunnings; Claudia Felser The role of working memory in the processing of reflexives Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 9, pp. 188–219, 2013. @article{Cunnings2013,We report results from two eye-movement experiments that examined how differences in working memory (WM) capacity affect readers' application of structural constraints on reflexive anaphor resolution during sentence comprehension. We examined whether binding Principle A, a syntactic constraint on the interpretation of reflexives, is reducible to a memory friendly ‘‘recency'' strategy, and whether WM capacity influences the degree to which readers create anaphoric dependencies ruled out by binding theory. Our results indicate that low and high WM span readers applied Principle A early during processing. However, contrary to previous findings, low span readers also showed immediate intrusion effects of a linearly closer but structurally inaccessible competitor antecedent. We interpret these findings as indicating that although the relative prominence of potential antecedents in WM can affect online anaphor resolution, Principle A is not reducible to a processing or linear distance based ‘‘least effort'' constraint. |
Roberta Daini; Andrea Albonico; Manuela Malaspina; Marialuisa Martelli; Silvia Primativo; Lisa S. Arduino Dissociation in optokinetic stimulation sensitivity between omission and substitution reading errors in neglect dyslexia Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 7, pp. 581, 2013. @article{Daini2013,Although omission and substitution errors in neglect dyslexia (ND) patients have always been considered as different manifestations of the same acquired reading disorder, recently, we proposed a new dual mechanism model. While omissions are related to the exploratory disorder which characterizes unilateral spatial neglect (USN), substitutions are due to a perceptual integration mechanism. A consequence of this hypothesis is that specific training for omission-type ND patients would aim at restoring the oculo-motor scanning and should not improve reading in substitution-type ND. With this aim we administered an optokinetic stimulation (OKS) to two brain-damaged patients with both USN and ND, MA and EP, who showed ND mainly characterized by omissions and substitutions, respectively. MA also showed an impairment in oculo-motor behavior with a non-reading task, while EP did not. The two patients presented a dissociation with respect to their sensitivity to OKS, so that, as expected, MA was positively affected, while EP was not. Our results confirm a dissociation between the two mechanisms underlying omission and substitution reading errors in ND patients. Moreover, they suggest that such a dissociation could possibly be extended to the effectiveness of rehabilitative procedures, and that patients who mainly omit contralesional-sided letters would benefit from OKS. |
Michael Dambacher; Timothy J. Slattery; Jinmian Yang; Reinhold Kliegl; Keith Rayner Evidence for direct control of eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 1468–1484, 2013. @article{Dambacher2013,It is well established that fixation durations during reading vary with processing difficulty, but there are different views on how oculomotor control, visual perception, shifts of attention, and lexical (and higher cognitive) processing are coordinated. Evidence for a one-to-one translation of input delay into saccadic latency would provide a much needed constraint for current theoretical proposals. Here, we tested predictions of such a direct-control perspective using the stimulus-onset delay (SOD) paradigm. Words in sentences were initially masked and, on fixation, were individually unmasked with a delay (0-, 33-, 66-, 99-ms SODs). In Experiment 1, SODs were constant for all words in a sentence; in Experiment 2, SODs were manipulated on target words, while nontargets were unmasked without delay. In accordance with predictions of direct control, nonzero SODs entailed equivalent increases in fixation durations in both experiments. Yet, a population of short fixations pointed to rapid saccades as a consequence of low-level information at nonoptimal viewing positions rather than of lexical processing. Implications of these results for theoretical accounts of oculomotor control are discussed. |
Natasha Dare; Richard C. Shillcock Serial and parallel processing in reading: Investigating the effects of parafoveal orthographic information on nonisolated word recognition Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 487–504, 2013. @article{Dare2013,We present a novel lexical decision task and three boundary paradigm eye-tracking experiments that clarify the picture of parallel processing in word recognition in context. First, we show that lexical decision is facilitated by associated letter information to the left and right of the word, with no apparent hemispheric specificity. Second, we show that parafoveal preview of a repeat of word n at word n + 1 facilitates reading of word n relative to a control condition with an unrelated word at word n + 1. Third, using a version of the boundary paradigm that allowed for a regressive eye movement, we show no parafoveal ``postview'' effect on reading word n of repeating word n at word n - 1. Fourth, we repeat the second experiment but compare the effects of parafoveal previews consisting of a repeated word n with a transposed central bigram (e.g., caot for coat) and a substituted central bigram (e.g., ceit for coat), showing the latter to have a deleterious effect on processing word n, thereby demonstrating that the parafoveal preview effect is at least orthographic and not purely visual. |
Maria De Luca; Maria Pontillo; Silvia Primativo; Donatella Spinelli; Pierluigi Zoccolotti The eye-voice lead during oral reading in developmental dyslexia Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 7, pp. 696, 2013. @article{DeLuca2013,In reading aloud, the eye typically leads over voice position. In the present study, eye movements and voice utterances were simultaneously recorded and tracked during the reading of a meaningful text to evaluate the eye-voice lead in 16 dyslexic and 16 same-age control readers. Dyslexic children were slower than control peers in reading texts. Their slowness was characterized by a great number of silent pauses and sounding-out behaviors and a small lengthening of word articulation times. Regarding eye movements, dyslexic readers made many more eye fixations (and generally smaller rightward saccades) than controls. Eye movements and voice (which were shifted in time because of the eye-voice lead) were synchronized in dyslexic readers as well as controls. As expected, the eye-voice lead was significantly smaller in dyslexic than control readers, confirming early observations by Buswell (1921) and Fairbanks (1937). The eye-voice lead was significantly correlated with several eye movements and voice parameters, particularly number of fixations and silent pauses. The difference in performance between dyslexic and control readers across several eye and voice parameters was expressed by a ratio of about 2. We propose that referring to proportional differences allows for a parsimonious interpretation of the reading deficit in terms of a single deficit in word decoding. The possible source of this deficit may call for visual or phonological mechanisms, including Goswami's temporal sampling framework. |
Brian W. Dillon; Alan Mishler; Shayne Sloggett; Colin Phillips Contrasting interference profiles for agreement and anaphora: Experimental and modeling evidence Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 85–103, 2013. @article{Dillon2013,We investigated the relationship between linguistic representation and memory access by comparing the processing of two linguistic dependencies that require comprehenders to check that the subject of the current clause has the correct morphological features: subject–verb agreement and reflexive anaphors in English. In two eye-tracking experiments we examined the impact of structurally illicit noun phrases on the computation of reflexive and subject–verb agreement. Experiment 1 directly compared the two dependencies within participants. Results show a clear difference in the intrusion profile associated with each dependency: agreement resolution displays clear intrusion effects in comprehension (as found by Pearlmutter et al., 1999, Wagers et al., 2009), but reflexives show no such intrusion effect from illicit antecedents (Sturt, 2003, Xiang et al., 2009). Experiment 2 replicated the lack of intrusion for reflexives, confirming the reliability of the pattern and examining a wider range of feature combinations. In addition, we present modeling evidence that suggests that the reflexive results are best captured by a memory retrieval mechanism that uses primarily syntactic information to guide retrievals for the anaphor's antecedent, in contrast to the mixed morphological and syntactic cues used resolve subject–verb agreement dependencies. Despite the fact that agreement and reflexive dependencies are subject to a similar morphological agreement constraint, in online processing comprehenders appear to implement this constraint in distinct ways for the two dependencies. |
Stéphanie Ducrot; Joël Pynte; Alain Ghio; Bernard Lété Visual and linguistic determinants of the eyes' initial fixation position in reading development Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 142, no. 3, pp. 287–298, 2013. @article{Ducrot2013,Two eye-movement experiments with one hundred and seven first- through fifth-grade children were conducted to examine the effects of visuomotor and linguistic factors on the recognition of words and pseudowords presented in central vision (using a variable-viewing-position technique) and in parafoveal vision (shifted to the left or right of a central fixation point). For all groups of children, we found a strong effect of stimulus location, in both central and parafoveal vision. This effect corresponds to the children's apparent tendency, for peripherally located targets, to reach a position located halfway between the middle and the left edge of the stimulus (preferred viewing location, PVL), whether saccading to the right or left. For centrally presented targets, refixation probability and lexical-decision time were the lowest near the word's center, suggesting an optimal viewing position (OVP). The viewing-position effects found here were modulated (1) by print exposure, both in central and parafoveal vision; and (2) by the intrinsic qualities of the stimulus (lexicality and word frequency) for targets in central vision but not for parafoveally presented targets. |
Carolin Dudschig; Jan L. Souman; Martin Lachmair; Irmgard Vega; Barbara Kaup Reading "sun" and looking up: The influence of language on saccadic eye movements in the vertical dimension Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. e56872, 2013. @article{Dudschig2013,Traditionally, language processing has been attributed to a separate system in the brain, which supposedly works in an abstract propositional manner. However, there is increasing evidence suggesting that language processing is strongly interrelated with sensorimotor processing. Evidence for such an interrelation is typically drawn from interactions between language and perception or action. In the current study, the effect of words that refer to entities in the world with a typical location (e.g., sun, worm) on the planning of saccadic eye movements was investigated. Participants had to perform a lexical decision task on visually presented words and non-words. They responded by moving their eyes to a target in an upper (lower) screen position for a word (non-word) or vice versa. Eye movements were faster to locations compatible with the word's referent in the real world. These results provide evidence for the importance of linguistic stimuli in directing eye movements, even if the words do not directly transfer directional information. |
Magda L. Dumitru; Gitte H. Joergensen; Alice G. Cruickshank; Gerry T. M. Altmann Language-guided visual processing affects reasoning: The role of referential and spatial anchoring Journal Article In: Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 562–571, 2013. @article{Dumitru2013,Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene. The consequences of this atypical visual processing are yet to be determined. Here, we investigated the integration of visual and linguistic input during a reasoning task. Participants listened to sentences containing conjunctions or disjunctions (Nancy examined an ant and/. or a cloud) and looked at visual scenes containing two pictures that either matched or mismatched the nouns. Degree of match between nouns and pictures (referential anchoring) and between their expected and actual spatial positions (spatial anchoring) affected fixations as well as judgments. We conclude that language induces incremental processing of visual scenes, which in turn becomes susceptible to reasoning errors during the language-meaning verification process. |
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia; María Dimitropoulou; Adelina Estévez; Manuel Carreiras The influence of reading expertise in mirror-letter perception: Evidence from beginning and expert readers Journal Article In: Mind, Brain, and Education, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 124–135, 2013. @article{Dunabeitia2013,The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently discriminate letters and words. Therefore, it is supposed that this unlearning process takes place in a gradual way and that reading expertise modulates mirror-letter discrimination. However, to date no supporting evidence for this has been obtained. We present data from an eye-movement study that investigated the degree of sensitivity to mirror-letters in a group of beginning readers and a group of expert readers. Participants had to decide which of the two strings presented on a screen corresponded to an auditorily presented word. Visual displays always included the correct target word and one distractor word. Results showed that those distractors that were the same as the target word except for the mirror lateralization of two internal letters attracted participants' attention more than distractors created by replacement of two internal letters. Interestingly, the time course of the effects was found to be different for the two groups, with beginning readers showing a greater tolerance (decreased sensitivity) to mirror-letters than expert readers. Implications of these findings are discussed within the framework of preceding evidence showing how reading expertise modulates letter identification. |
Paola E. Dussias; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff; Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo; Chip Gerfen When gender and looking go hand in hand Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 353–387, 2013. @article{Dussias2013,In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald ( 2007 ) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether gram- matical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2) processing. Sixteen monolingual Spanish participants (control group) The and 18 English-speaking learners of Spanish (evenly divided into high and low Spanish profi ciency) saw two-picture visual scenes in which items matched or did not match in gender. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they listened to 28 sentences in which masculine and feminine target items were preceded by an article that agreed in gender with the two pictures or agreed only with one of the pictures. An additional group of 15 Italian learners of Spanish was tested to examine whether the presence of gender in the fi rst language (L1) modulates the degree to which gender is used during L2 processing. Data were analyzed by comparing the proportion of eye fi xations on the objects in each condition. Monolingual Spanish speakers looked sooner at the referent on different-gender trials than on same-gender trials, replicating results reported in past literature. Italian-Spanish bilinguals exhibited a gender anticipatory effect, but only for the feminine condition. For the masculine condition, partici- pants waited to hear the noun before identifying the referent. Like the Spanish monolinguals, the highly profi cient English-Spanish speakers showed evidence of using gender information during online process- ing, whereas the less profi cient learners did not. The results suggest that both profi ciency in the L2 and similarities between the L1 and the L2 modulate the usefulness of morphosyntactic information during speech processing. |
Miriam Ellert Resolving ambiguous pronouns in a second language: A visual-world eye-tracking study with dutch learners of German Journal Article In: International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 171–197, 2013. @article{Ellert2013,This study examined whether resolving ambiguous pronouns in a second language is guided by the L1 preferences of the learners. Given the fact that the typologically closely related languages, German and Dutch, have both been found to use personal pronouns (German er, Dutch hij; ‘he') to refer to topical antecedents, and d-pronouns (German der,Dutch die; ‘he') for non-topical co- reference (Ellert 2010; Kaiser 2011; Kaiser and Trueswell 2004), it was asked whether Dutch L2 learners of German would exhibit similar preferences when resolving the two pronominal forms in their L2. This was examined with the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm and an off-line referent assignment task. The results showed differences in resolution patterns: the Dutch learners of German showed an overall topic preference across pronouns which became more target-like at higher proficiency levels. This suggests that L2 information organization cannot be merely explained by L1 influences, but needs to take more more general L2 learner effects into account. |
Ashley Farris-Trimble; Bob McMurray Test–retest reliability of eye tracking in the visual world paradigm for the study of real-time spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 1328, 2013. @article{FarrisTrimble2013,Purpose: Researchers have begun to use eye tracking in the visual world paradigm (VWP) to study clinical differences in language processing, but the reliability of such laboratory tests has rarely been assessed. In this article, the authors assess test-retest reliability of the VWP for spoken word recognition. Methods: Participants performed an auditory VWP task in repeated sessions and a visual-only VWP task in a third session. The authors performed correlation and regression analyses on several parameters to determine which reflect reliable behavior and which are predictive of behavior in later sessions. Results: Results showed that the fixation parameters most closely related to timing and degree of fixations were moderately-to-strongly correlated across days, whereas the parameters related to rate of increase or decrease of fixations to particular items were less strongly correlated. Moreover, when including factors derived from the visual-only task, the performance of the regression model was at least moderately correlated with Day 2 performance on all parameters (R > .30). Conclusion: The VWP is stable enough (with some caveats) to serve as an individual measure. These findings suggest guidelines for future use of the paradigm and for areas of improvement in both methodology and analysis. |
Fernanda Ferreira; Alice Foucart; Paul E. Engelhardt Language processing in the visual world: Effects of preview, visual complexity, and prediction Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 165–182, 2013. @article{Ferreira2013,This study investigates how people interpret spoken sentences in the context of a relevant visual world by focusing on garden-path sentences, such as Put the book on the chair in the bucket, in which the prepositional phrase on the chair is temporarily ambiguous between a goal and modifier interpretation. In three comprehension experiments, listeners heard these types of sentences (along with disambiguated controls) while viewing arrays of objects. These experiments demonstrate that a classic garden-path effect is obtained only when listeners have a preview of the display and when the visual context contains relatively few objects. Results from a production experiment suggest that listeners accrue knowledge that may allow them to have certain expectations of the upcoming utterance based on visual information. Taken together, these findings have theoretical implications for both the role of prediction as an adaptive comprehension strategy, and for how comprehension tendencies change under variable visual and temporal processing demands. |
Ruth Filik; Hartmut Leuthold The role of character-based knowledge in online narrative comprehension: Evidence from eye movements and ERPs Journal Article In: Brain Research, vol. 1506, pp. 94–104, 2013. @article{Filik2013,Little is known about the on-line evaluation of information relating to well-known story characters during text comprehension. For example, it is not clear in how much detail readers represent character-based information, and the time course over which this information is utilized during on-line language comprehension. We describe an event-related potential (ERP) study (Experiment 1) and an eye-tracking study (Experiment 2) investigating whether, and when, readers utilize their prior knowledge of a character in processing event information. Participants read materials in which an event was described that either did or did not fit with the character's typical behavior. ERPs elicited by the critical word revealed an N400 effect when the action described did not fit with the character's typical behavior. Results from early eye movement measures supported these findings, and later measures suggested that such violations were more easily accommodated for well-known fictional characters than real-world characters. |
Gemma Fitzsimmons How fast can predictability influence word skipping during reading? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 1054–1063, 2013. @article{Fitzsimmons2013,Participants' eye movements were tracked when reading sentences in which target word predictability was manipulated to being unpredictable from the preceding context, predictable from the sentence preceding the one in which the target word was embedded, or predictable from the adjective directly preceding the target word. Results show that there was no difference in skipping rates between the 2 predictability conditions, which were skipped more often than the neutral condition. This suggests that predictability can impact the decision of whether to skip a word to a similar degree irrespective of whether the predictability originated from the prior word or the entire preceding sentence context. This finding can only be explained by models of eye-movement control during reading that assume that word n is processed up to a high level before the decision to skip word n + 1 is made. |
Tori E. Foster; Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder Underlying changes in repeated reading: An eye movement study Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 140–156, 2013. @article{Foster2013,Past research supports the use of repeated reading but does not provide conclusive evidence as to the mechanisms through which RR takes effect. Eye movement studies allow for precise examination of intervention effects. The current study examined underlying changes in elementar>' students' (A'^^ 43) reading behavior across four consecutive readings of the same passage. Passage- level analyses revealed that rereading yielded significant decreases in measures thought to reflect early processing (i.e., first fixation duration, gaze duration) and higher level processing (i.e., total fixation time, number of regressions, average number of fixations per word). Analyses based on embedded high- and low- frequency target words suggested that repeated reading mainly facilitates reading of low-frequency words, but that children remain sensitive to word frequency after rereading. Finally, results indicated that children who have completed repeated reading continue to focus on word-level (vs. passage-level) reading but devote less overall attention to individual words with repeated practice. |
Tom Foulsham; James Farley; Alan Kingstone Mind wandering in sentence reading: Decoupling the link between mind and eye Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 1, pp. 51–59, 2013. @article{Foulsham2013,When people read, their thoughts sometimes drift away from the task at hand: They are "mind wandering." Recent research suggests that this change in task focus is reflected in eye movements and this was tested in an experiment using controlled stimuli. Participants were presented with a series of sentences containing high- and low-frequency words, which they read while being eye-tracked, and they were sometimes probed to indicate whether they were on task or mind wandering. The results showed multiple differences between reading prior to a mind-wandering response and reading when on task: Mind wandering led to slower reading times, longer average fixation duration, and an absence of the word frequency effect on gaze duration. Collectively, these findings confirm that task focus could be inferred from eye movements, and they indicate that the link between word identification and eye scanning is decoupled when the mind wanders. |
Stefan L. Frank; Irene Fernandez Monsalve; Robin L. Thompson; Gabriella Vigliocco Reading time data for evaluating broad-coverage models of English sentence processing Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 1182–1190, 2013. @article{Frank2013,We make available word-by-word self-paced reading times and eye-tracking data over a sample of English sentences from narrative sources. These data are intended to form a gold standard for the evaluation of computational psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in English. We describe stimuli selection and data collection and present descriptive statistics, as well as comparisons between the two sets of reading times. |
Lesya Y. Ganushchak; Andrea Krott; Steven Frisson; Antje S. Meyer Processing words and Short Message Service shortcuts in sentential contexts: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 163–179, 2013. @article{Ganushchak2013,The present study investigated whether ShortMessage Service shortcuts are more difficult to process in sentence context than the spelled-out word equivalent and, if so, how any additional processing difficulty arises. Twenty-four student participants read 37 Short Message Service shortcuts and word equivalents embedded in semantically plausible and implausible contexts (e.g., He left/drank u/you a note) while their eye movements were recorded. There were effects of plausibility and spelling on early measures of processing difficulty (first fixation durations, gaze durations, skipping, and first-pass regression rates for the targets), but there were no interactions of plausibility and spelling. Late measures of processing difficulty (second run gaze duration and total fixation duration) were only affected by plausibility but not by spelling. These results suggest that shortcuts are harder to recognize, but that, once recognized, they are integrated into the sentence context as easily as ordinary words. |
Hanna S. Gauvin; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Falk Huettig Speech monitoring and phonologically-mediated eye gaze in language perception and production: A comparison using printed word eye-tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 7, pp. 818, 2013. @article{Gauvin2013,The Perceptual Loop Theory of speech monitoring assumes that speakers routinely inspect their inner speech. In contrast, Huettig and Hartsuiker (2010) observed that listening to one's own speech during language production drives eye-movements to phonologically related printed words with a similar time-course as listening to someone else's speech does in speech perception experiments. This suggests that speakers use their speech perception system to listen to their own overt speech, but not to their inner speech. However, a direct comparison between production and perception with the same stimuli and participants is lacking so far. The current printed word eye-tracking experiment therefore used a within-subjects design, combining production and perception. Displays showed four words, of which one, the target, either had to be named or was presented auditorily. Accompanying words were phonologically related, semantically related, or unrelated to the target. There were small increases in looks to phonological competitors with a similar time-course in both production and perception. Phonological effects in perception however lasted longer and had a much larger magnitude. We conjecture that this difference is related to a difference in predictability of one's own and someone else's speech, which in turn has consequences for lexical competition in other-perception and possibly suppression of activation in self-perception. |
Saeideh Ghahghaei; Karina J. Linnell; Martin H. Fischer; Amit Dubey; Robert Davis Effects of load on the time course of attentional engagement, disengagement, and orienting in reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 453–470, 2013. @article{Ghahghaei2013,We examined how the frequency of the fixated word influences the spatiotemporal distribution of covert attention during reading. Participants discriminated gaze-contingent probes that occurred with different spatial and temporal offsets from randomly chosen fixation points during reading. We found that attention was initially focused at fixation and that subsequent defocusing was slower when the fixated word was lower in frequency. Later in a fixation, attention oriented more towards the next saccadic target for high- than for low-frequency words. These results constitute the first report of the time course of the effect of load on attentional engagement and orienting in reading. They are discussed in the context of serial and parallel models of reading. |
Aline Godfroid; Frank Boers; Alex Housen An eye for words: Gauging the role of attention in incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition by means of eye-tracking Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 483–517, 2013. @article{Godfroid2013,This eye-tracking study tests the hypothesis that more attention leads to more learning, following claims that attention to new language elements in the input results in their initial representation in long-term memory (i.e., intake; Robinson, 2003; Schmidt, 1990, 2001). Twenty-eight advanced learners of English read English texts that contained 12 targets for incidental word learning. The target was a known word (control condition), a matched pseudoword, or that pseudoword preceded or followed by the known word (with the latter being a cue to the pseudoword's meaning). Participants' eye-fixation durations on the targets during reading served as a measure of the amount of attention paid (see Rayner, 2009). Results indicate that participants spent more time processing the unknown pseudowords than their matched controls. The longer participants looked at a pseudoword during reading, the more likely they were to recognize that word in an unannounced vocabulary posttest. Finally, the known, appositive cues were fixated longer when they followed the pseudowords than when they preceded them; however, their presence did not lead to higher retention of the pseudowords. We discuss how eye-tracking may add to existing methodologies for studying attention and noticing (Schmidt, 1990) in SLA. |
Aline Godfroid; Maren S. Uggen Attention to irregular verbs by beginning learners of German: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 291–322, 2013. @article{Godfroid2013a,This study focuses on beginning second language learners' attention to irregular verb morphology, an area of grammar that many adults fi nd diffi cult to acquire (e.g., DeKeyser, 2005 ; Larsen-Freeman, 2010 ). We measured beginning learners' eye movements during sentence processing to investigate whether or not they actually attend to irregular verb features and, if so, whether the amount of attention that they pay to these features predicts their acquisition. On the assumption that attention facilitates learning (e.g., Gass, 1997 ; Robinson, 2003 ; Schmidt, 2001 ), we expected more attention (i.e., longer fi xations or more frequent comparisons between verb forms) to lead to more learning of the irregular verbs. Forty beginning learners of German read 12 German sentence pairs with stem-changing verbs and 12 German sentence pairs with regular verbs while an Eyelink 1000. We recorded their eye movements. The stem-changing verbs consisted of six a → ä changing verbs and six e → i(e) changing verbs. Each verb appeared in a baseline sentence in the fi rst-person singular, which has no stem change, and a critical sentence in the second- or third-person singular, which have a stem change for the irregular but not the regular verbs, on the same screen. Productive pre- and posttests measured the effects of exposure on learning. Results indicate that learners looked longer overall at stem-changing verbs than regular verbs, revealing a late effect of verb irregularity on reading times. Longer total times had a modest, favorable effect on the subsequent production of the stem vowel. Finally, the production of only the a → ä verbs—not the e → i(e) verbs—benefi ted from direct visual comparisons during reading, possibly because of the umlaut in the former. We interpret the results with reference to recent theory and research on attention, noticing, and language learning and provide a more nuanced and empirically based understanding of the noticing construct. |
Peter C. Gordon; Patrick Plummer; Wonil Choi See before you jump: Full recognition of parafoveal words precedes skips during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 633–641, 2013. @article{Gordon2013,Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through prime-target pairs embedded within a sentence. The boundary technique (Rayner, 1975) was used to determine whether the target word was fully available during parafoveal preview or whether it was available with transposed letters (e.g., Herman changed to Hreman). With full parafoveal preview, the target word was skipped more frequently when it matched the earlier prime word (i.e., was repeated) than when it did not match the earlier prime word (i.e., was new). With transposed-letter (TL) preview, repetition had no effect on skipping rates despite the great similarity of the TL preview string to the target word and substantial evidence that TL strings activate the words from which they are derived (Perea & Lupker, 2003). These results show that lexically based skipping is based on full recognition of the letter string in parafoveal preview and does not involve using the contextual constraint to compensate for the reduced information available from the parafovea. These results are consistent with models of eye-movement control during reading in which successive words in a text are processed 1 at a time (serially) and in which word recognition strongly influences eye movements. |
Martin Groen; Jan Noyes Establishing goals and maintaining coherence in multiparty computer-mediated communication Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 85–106, 2013. @article{Groen2013,Communicating via text-only computer-mediated communication (CMC) channels is associated with a number of issues that would impair users in achieving dialogue coherence and goals. It has been suggested that humans have devised novel adaptive strategies to deal with those issues. However, it could be that humans rely on “classic” coherence devices too. In this study, we investigate whether relevancy markers, a subset of discourse markers, are relied on to assess dialogue coherence and goals. The results of two experiments showed that participants oriented systematically on the relevancy markers and that substitution of the original markers for other (dis)similar words affected eye movements and task performance. It appears that, despite the loosely connected dialogue contributions, the multiple concurrent dialogues, and the multiparty nature of text-only CMC dialogues, humans are able still to locate coherence- and goal-related information by relying on the presence of the relevancy markers. |
Katherine Guérard; Jean Saint-Aubin; Marilyne Maltais The role of verbal memory in regressions during reading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 122–136, 2013. @article{Guerard2013,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. |
Jesse A. Harris; Charles Clifton; Lyn Frazier Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 10, pp. 1519–1544, 2013. @article{Harris2013a,Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains, for example, The army was mostly in the capital, where mostly may quantify over individuals or parts (Most of the army was in the capital) or over times (The army was in the capital most of the time). It is proposed that a general conceptual economy principle, No Extra Times, discourages the postulation of potentially unnecessary times, and thus favours the interpretation quantifying over parts. Disambiguating an ambiguously quantified sentence to a quantification over times interpretation was rated as less natural than disambiguating it to a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 1). In an interpretation questionnaire, sentences with similar quantificational variability were constructed so that both interpretations of the sentence would require postulating multiple times; this resulted in the elimination of the preference for a quantification over parts interpretation, suggesting the parts preference observed in Experiment 1 is not reducible to a lexical bias of the adverb mostly (Experiment 2). An eye movement recording study showed that, in the absence of prior evidence for multiple times, readers exhibit greater difficulty when reading material that forces a quantification over times interpretation than when reading material that allows a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 3). These experiments contribute to understanding readers' default assumptions about the temporal properties of sentences, which is essential for understanding the selection of a domain for adverbial quantifiers and, more generally, for understanding how situational constraints influence sentence processing. |
Stefan Hawelka; Sarah Schuster; Benjamin Gagl; Florian Hutzler Beyond single syllables: The effect of first syllable frequency and orthographic similarity on eye movements during silent reading Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1134–1153, 2013. @article{Hawelka2013,The study assessed the eye movements of 60 adult German readers during silent reading of target words, consisting of two and three syllables, embedded in sentences. The first objective was to assess whether the inhibitory effect of first syllable frequency, which was up to now primarily shown for isolated words, generalises to natural reading. The second objective was to assess the effect of orthographic similarity. First syllable frequency was defined phonologically and was based on the SUBTLEX norms for spoken language [Brysbaert et al. (2011). The word frequency effect: A review of recent developments and implications for the choice of frequency estimates in German. Experimental Psychology, 58, 412?424]. Orthographic similarity was indexed by orthographic Levenshtein distance neighbourhood frequency (NF) [Yarkoni, T., Balota, D. & Yap, M. (2008). Moving beyond Coltheart's N: A new measure of orthographic similarity. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 971?979]. We found inhibitory effects for first syllable frequency and for orthographic NF. First syllable frequency affected first fixation duration which was considered as reflecting early effects in visual word recognition. Orthographic NF affected ?late? measures. These findings show that, first, the effect of first syllable frequency does generalise to silent reading. Second, the effect of orthographic NF, up to now investigated only for short words in the context of English, does generalise to multisyllabic words in the German orthography. Relating the effects to the individual reading rate of the participants revealed that the effects were consistent in fast readers but highly variable in slow readers.$backslash$nThe study assessed the eye movements of 60 adult German readers during silent reading of target words, consisting of two and three syllables, embedded in sentences. The first objective was to assess whether the inhibitory effect of first syllable frequency, which was up to now primarily shown for isolated words, generalises to natural reading. The second objective was to assess the effect of orthographic similarity. First syllable frequency was defined phonologically and was based on the SUBTLEX norms for spoken language [Brysbaert et al. (2011). The word frequency effect: A review of recent developments and implications for the choice of frequency estimates in German. Experimental Psychology, 58, 412?424]. Orthographic similarity was indexed by orthographic Levenshtein distance neighbourhood frequency (NF) [Yarkoni, T., Balota, D. & Yap, M. (2008). Moving beyond Coltheart's N: A new measure of orthographic similarity. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 971?979]. We found inhibitory effects for first syllable frequency and for orthographic NF. First syllable frequency affected first fixation duration which was considered as reflecting early effects in visual word recognition. Orthographic NF affected ?late? measures. These findings show that, first, the effect of first syllable frequency does generalise to silent reading. Second, the effect of orthographic NF, up to now investigated only for short words in the context of English, does generalise to multisyllabic words in the German orthography. Relating the effects to the individual reading rate of the participants revealed that the effects were consistent in fast readers but highly variable in slow readers. |
Ulrike Hochpöchler; Wolfgang Schnotz; Thorsten Rasch; Mark Ullrich; Holger Horz; Nele McElvany; Jürgen Baumert Dynamics of mental model construction from text and graphics Journal Article In: European Journal of Psychology of Education, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 1105–1126, 2013. @article{Hochpoechler2013,When students read for learning, they frequently are required to integrate text and graphics information into coherent knowledge structures. The following study aimed at analyzing how students deal with texts and how they deal with graphics when they try to integrate the two sources of information. Furthermore, the study investigated differences between students from different school types and grades. Forty students from grades 5 and 8 from higher track and lower track of the German school system were asked to process and integrate texts and graphics in order to answer items from different levels of a text-picture integration taxonomy. Students' eye movements were recorded and analyzed. Results suggest fundamentally different functions of text and graphics, which are associated with different processing strategies. Texts are more likely to be used according to a coherence-formation strategy, whereas graphics are more likely to be used on demand as visual cognitive tools according to an information-selection strategy. Students from different tracks of schooling revealed different adaptivity with regard to the requirements of combining text and graphic information. |
Edward Holsinger Representing idioms: Syntactic and contextual effects on idiom processing Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 373–394, 2013. @article{Holsinger2013,Recent work on the processing of idiomatic expressions argues against the idea that idioms are simply big words. For example, hybrid models of idiom representation, originally investigated in the context of idiom production, propose a priority of literal computation, and a principled relationship between the conceptual meaning of an idiom, its literal lemmas and its syntactic structure. We examined the predictions of the hybrid representation hypothesis in the domain of idiom comprehension. We conducted two experiments to examine the role of syntactic, lexical and contextual factors on the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Experiment I examines the role of syntactic compatibility and lexical compatibility on the real-time processing of potentially idiomatic strings. Experiment 2 examines the role of contextual information on idiom processing and how context interacts with lexical information during processing. We find evidence that literal computation plays a causal role in the retrieval of idiomatic meaning and that contextual, lexical and structural information influence the processing of idiomatic strings at early stages during processing, which provide support for the hybrid model of idiom representation in the domain of idiom comprehension. |
Yueh-Nu Hung "What are you looking at?" An eye movement exploration in science text reading Journal Article In: International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, vol. 12, pp. 241–260, 2013. @article{Hung2013,The main purpose of this research was to investigate how Taiwanese grade 6 readers selected and used information from different print (main text, headings, captions) and visual elements (decorational, representational, interpretational) to comprehend a science text through tracking their eye movement behaviors. Six grade 6 students read a double page of science text written in Chinese during which their eye movements were documented and analyzed using an EyeLink 1000 eye tracker. The results suggest that illustrations received less attention than print; however, readers who had more fixations on illustrations had better comprehension. While both headings and captions were in the print category, the headings received much less attention than did the captions. The article concludes with implications for teaching science reading and suggestions for future research beyond this exploratory case study. |
Bipin Indurkhya; Amitash Ojha An empirical study on the role of perceptual similarity in visual metaphors and creativity Journal Article In: Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 233–253, 2013. @article{Indurkhya2013,We investigate the role of perceptual similarity in visual metaphor comprehension process. In visual metaphors, perceptual features of the source and the target are objectively present as images. Moreover, to determine perceptual similarity, we use an image-based search system that computes similarity based on low-level perceptual features. We hypothesize that perceptual similarity at the level of color, shape, texture, orientation, and the like, between the source and the target image facilitates metaphorical comprehension and aids creative interpretation. We present three experiments, two of which are eye-movement studies, to demonstrate that in the interpretation and generation of visual metaphors, perceptual similarity between the two images is recognized at a subconscious level, and facilitates the search for creative conceptual associations in terms of emergent features. We argue that the capacity to recognize perceptual similarity-considered to be a hallmark of creativity-plays a major role in the creative understanding of metaphors. |
Yu-Cin Jian; Ming-Lei Chen; Hwa-Wei Ko Context effects in processing of Chinese academic words: An eye-tracking investigation Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 403–413, 2013. @article{Jian2013,This study investigated context effects of online processing of Chinese academic words during text reading. Undergraduate participants were asked to read Chinese texts that were familiar or unfamiliar (containing physics terminology) to them. Physics texts were selected first, and then we replaced the physics terminology with familiar words; other common words remained the same in both text versions. Our results indicate that readers experienced longer rereading times and total fixation durations for the same common words in the physics texts than for the corresponding texts. Shorter gaze durations were observed for the replaced words than the physics terminology; however, the duration of participants' first fixations on these two word types did not differ from each other. Furthermore, although the participants performed similar reading paths after encountering the target words of the physics terminology and replaced words, their processing duration of the current sentences was very different. They reread the physics terminology more times and spent more reading time on the current sentences containing the physics terminology, searching for more information to aid comprehension. This study showed that adult readers seemed to successfully access each Chinese character's meaning but initially failed to access the meaning of the physics terminology. This could be attributable to the nature of the formation of Chinese words; however, the use of contextual information to comprehend unfamiliar words is a universal phenomenon. |
Manon W. Jones; Jane Ashby; Holly P. Branigan Dyslexia and fluency: Parafoveal and foveal influences on rapid automatized naming Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 554–567, 2013. @article{Jones2013,The ability to coordinate serial processing of multiple items is crucial for fluent reading but is known to be impaired in dyslexia. To investigate this impairment, we manipulated the orthographic and phonological similarity of adjacent letters online as dyslexic and nondyslexic readers named letters in a serial naming (RAN) task. Eye movements and voice onsets were recorded. Letter arrays contained target item pairs in which the second letter was orthographically or phonologically similar to the first letter when viewed either parafoveally (Experiment 1a) or foveally (Experiment 1b). Relative to normal readers, dyslexic readers were more affected by orthographic confusability in Experiment 1a and phonological confusability in Experiment 1b. Normal readers were slower to process orthographically similar letters in Experiment 1b. Findings indicate that the phonological and orthographic processing problems of dyslexic readers manifest differently during parafoveal and foveal processing, with each contributing to slower RAN performance and impaired reading fluency. |
Timothy R. Jordan; Victoria A. McGowan; Kevin B. Paterson What's left? An eye movement study of the influence of interword spaces to the left of fixation during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 551–557, 2013. @article{Jordan2013,In English and other alphabetic systems read from left to right, the useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend 14-15 character spaces to the right of each fixation, but only 3-4 character spaces to the left, and certainly no farther than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is remarkably small and seems inconsistent with the general bilateral symmetry of vision. Accordingly, in the present study we investigated the influence of a fundamental component of text to the left of fixation-interword spaces-using a well-established eyetracking paradigm in which invisible boundaries were set up along individual sentence displays that were then read. Each boundary corresponded to the leftmost edge of a word in a sentence, so that as the eyes crossed a boundary, interword spaces in the text to the left of that word were obscured (by inserting a letter x). The proximity of the obscured text during each fixational pause was maintained at one, two, three, or four interword spaces from the left boundary of each fixated word. Normal fixations, regressions, and progressive saccades were disrupted when the obscured text was up to three interword spaces (an average of over 12 character spaces) away from the fixated word, while four interword spaces away produced no disruption. These findings suggest that influential information from text is acquired during each fixational pause from much farther leftward than is generally realized and that this information contributes to normal reading performance. Implications of these findings for reading are discussed. |
Holly S. S. L. Joseph; Simon P. Liversedge Children's and adults' on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences during reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. e54141, 2013. @article{Joseph2013,While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children's syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults' syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage' in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such as, ‘I think I'll wear the new skirt I bought tomorrow/yesterday. It's really nice' in which the attachment of an adverbial phrase was manipulated. Results showed that adults and children exhibited similar processing preferences, but that children were delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis. It is concluded that children and adults have the same sentence-parsing mechanism in place, but that it operates with a slightly different time course. In addition, the data support the hypothesis that the visual processing system develops at a different rate than the linguistic processing system in children. |
Holly S. S. L. Joseph; Kate Nation; Simon P. Liversedge Using eye movements to investigate word frequency effects in children's sentence reading Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 207–222, 2013. @article{Joseph2013a,Although eye movements have been used widely to investigate how skilled adult readers process written language, relatively little research has used this methodology with children. This is unfortunate as, as we discuss here, eye-movement studies have significant potential to inform our understanding of children's reading development. We consider some of the empirical and theoretical issues that arise when using this methodology with children, illustrating our points with data from an experiment examining word frequency effects in 8-year-old children's sentence reading. Children showed significantly longer gaze durations to low- than high-frequency words, demonstrating that linguistic characteristics of text drive children's eye movements as they read. We discuss these findings within the broader context of how eye-movement studies can inform our understanding of children's reading, and can assist with the development of appropriately targeted interventions to support children as they learn to read. |
Benjawan Kasisopa; Ronan G. Reilly; Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin; Denis Burnham Eye movements while reading an unspaced writing system: The case of Thai Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 86, pp. 71–80, 2013. @article{Kasisopa2013,Thai has an alphabetic script with a distinctive feature - it has no spaces between words. Since previous research with spaced alphabetic systems (e.g., English) has suggested that readers use spaces to guide eye movements, it is of interest to investigate what physical factors might guide Thai readers' eye movements. Here the effects of word-initial and word-final position-specific character frequency, word-boundary bigram frequency, and overall word frequency on 30 Thai adults' eye movements when reading unspaced and spaced text was investigated. Linear mixed-effects model analyses of viewing time measures (first fixation duration, single fixation duration, and gaze duration) and of landing sites were conducted. Thai readers tended to land their first fixation at or near the centre of words, just as readers of spaced texts do. A critical determinant of this was word boundary characters: higher position-specific frequency of initial and of final characters significantly facilitated landing sites closer to the word centre while word-boundary bigram frequency appeared to behave as a proxy for initial and final position-specific character frequency. It appears, therefore, that Thai readers make use of the position-specific frequencies of word boundary characters in targeting words and directing eye movements to an optimal landing site. |
Markku Kilpeläinen; Christian N. L. Olivers; Jan Theeuwes The eyes like their targets on a stable background Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 1–11, 2013. @article{Kilpelaeinen2013,In normal human visual behavior, our visual system is continuously exposed to abrupt changes in the local contrast and mean luminance in various parts of the visual field, as caused by actual changes in the environment, as well as by movements of our body, head, and eyes. Previous research has shown that both threshold and suprathreshold contrast percepts are attenuated by a co-occurring change in the mean luminance at the location of the target stimulus. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that contrast targets presented with a co-occurring change in local mean luminance receive fewer fixations than targets presented in a region with a steady mean luminance. To that end we performed an eye-tracking experiment involving eight observers. On each trial, after a 4 s adaptation period, an observer's task was to make a saccade to one of two target gratings, presented simultaneously at 78 eccentricity, separated by 308 in polar angle. When both targets were presented with a steady mean luminance, saccades landed mostly in the area between the two targets, signifying the classic global effect. However, when one of the targets was presented with a change in luminance, the saccade distribution was biased towards the target with the steady luminance. The results show that the attenuation of contrast signals by co-occurring, ecologically typical changes in mean luminance affects fixation selection and is therefore likely to affect eye movements in natural visual behavior. |
Julie A. Kirkby; H. I. Blythe; Denis Drieghe; V. Benson; Simon P. Liversedge In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 664–678, 2013. @article{Kirkby2013,Previous studies examining binocular coordination during reading have reported conflicting results in terms of the nature of disparity (e.g. Kliegl, Nuthmann, & Engbert (Journal of Experimental Psychology General 135:12-35, 2006); Liversedge, White, Findlay, & Rayner (Vision Research 46:2363-2374, 2006). One potential cause of this inconsistency is differences in acquisition devices and associated analysis technologies. We tested this by directly comparing binocular eye movement recordings made using SR Research EyeLink 1000 and the Fourward Technologies Inc. DPI binocular eye-tracking systems. Participants read sentences or scanned horizontal rows of dot strings; for each participant, half the data were recorded with the EyeLink, and the other half with the DPIs. The viewing conditions in both testing laboratories were set to be very similar. Monocular calibrations were used. The majority of fixations recorded using either system were aligned, although data from the EyeLink system showed greater disparity magnitudes. Critically, for unaligned fixations, the data from both systems showed a majority of uncrossed fixations. These results suggest that variability in previous reports of binocular fixation alignment is attributable to the specific viewing conditions associated with a particular experiment (variables such as luminance and viewing distance), rather than acquisition and analysis software and hardware. |
Reinhold Kliegl; Sven Hohenstein; Ming Yan; Scott A. McDonald How preview space/time translates into preview cost/benefit for fixation durations during reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 581–600, 2013. @article{Kliegl2013,Eye-movement control during reading depends on foveal and parafoveal information. If the parafoveal preview of the next word is suppressed, reading is less efficient. A linear mixed model (LMM) reanalysis of McDonald (2006) confirmed his observation that preview benefit may be limited to parafoveal words that have been selected as the saccade target. Going beyond the original analyses, in the same LMM, we examined how the preview effect (i.e., the difference in single-fixation duration, SFD, between random-letter and identical preview) depends on the gaze duration on the pretarget word and on the amplitude of the saccade moving the eye onto the target word. There were two key results: (a) The shorter the saccade amplitude (i.e., the larger preview space), the shorter a subsequent SFD with an identical preview; this association was not observed with a random-letter preview. (b) However, the longer the gaze duration on the pretarget word, the longer the subsequent SFD on the target, with the difference between random-letter string and identical previews increasing with preview time. A third pattern-increasing cost of a random-letter string in the parafovea associated with shorter saccade amplitudes-was observed for target gaze durations. Thus, LMMs revealed that preview effects, which are typically summarized under "preview benefit", are a complex mixture of preview cost and preview benefit and vary with preview space and preview time. The consequence for reading is that parafoveal preview may not only facilitate, but also interfere with lexical access. |
Sungryong Koh; Nakyeong Yoon; Si On Yoon; Alexander Pollatsek Word frequency and root-morpheme frequency effects on processing of Korean particle-suffixed words Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 64–72, 2013. @article{Koh2013,Two experiments investigated the roles of the frequency of the root morpheme and the frequency of the whole word for a particular type of suffixed word in Korean in which the suffixed word can be thought of as a phrase (e.g., grandson-with). In both experiments, sentence frames were constructed so that they could have one of two target words that varied on frequency characteristics in the same location in the sentence. In Experiment 1, the frequency of the root morpheme was varied with the frequency of the word controlled, and in Experiment 2, the frequency of the word was varied with the frequency of the root morpheme controlled. Word frequency had a significant effect on fixation times, whereas root morpheme frequency did not. The results were surprising as native Korean speakers view the root morpheme as the ‘‘word'' (analogous to how English readers would view a noun followed by a prepositional phrase). |
Arnout W. Koornneef; Ted J. M. Sanders Establishing coherence relations in discourse: The influence of implicit causality and connectives on pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1169–1206, 2013. @article{Koornneef2013,Many studies have shown that readers and listeners recruit verb-based implicit causality information rapidly in the service of pronoun resolution. However, since most of these studies focused on constructions in which because connected the two critical clauses, it is unclear to what extent implicit causality information affects the processing of pronouns embedded in other types of coherence relations. In an eye-tracking and completion study we addressed this void by varying whether because, but, and and joined a primary clause containing the implicit causality verb, with a secondary clause containing a critical gender-marked pronoun. The results showed that the claims made for implicit causality hold if the connective because is present (i.e., a reading time delay following a pronoun that is inconsistent with the implicit causality bias of the verb), but do not generalise to other connectives like but and and. This shows that the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a pronoun resolution cue depends on the coherence relation in which the verb, the antecedent and the pronoun appear. Many studies have shown that readers and listeners recruit verb-based implicit causality information rapidly in the service of pronoun resolution. However, since most of these studies focused on constructions in which because connected the two critical clauses, it is unclear to what extent implicit causality information affects the processing of pronouns embedded in other types of coherence relations. In an eye-tracking and completion study we addressed this void by varying whether because, but, and and joined a primary clause containing the implicit causality verb, with a secondary clause containing a critical gender-marked pronoun. The results showed that the claims made for implicit causality hold if the connective because is present (i.e., a reading time delay following a pronoun that is inconsistent with the implicit causality bias of the verb), but do not generalise to other connectives like but and and. This shows that the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a pronoun resolution cue depends on the coherence relation in which the verb, the antecedent and the pronoun appear. |
Hamutal Kreiner; Simon Garrod; Patrick Sturt Number agreement in sentence comprehension: The relationship between grammatical and conceptual factors Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 6, pp. 829–874, 2013. @article{Kreiner2013,Studies in theoretical linguistics argue that subject-verb agreement is more sensitive to grammatical number, while pronoun-antecedent agreement is more sensitive to conceptual number. This claim is robustly supported by speech production research, but few studies have examined this issue in comprehension. We investigated this dissociation between conceptual and grammatical number agreement in three eye-tracking reading experiments, using collective nouns like ?group?, which can be notionally interpreted as either singular or plural. Experiment 1 indicated that pronoun-antecedent agreement is conceptually driven; Experiment 2 indicated that subject-verb agreement is morpho-syntactically driven. Experiment 3 indicated that the morpho-grammatical processes that control the initial processing of subject-verb agreement do not bias later semantic processing of pronoun-antecedent number agreement, even when the anaphor and the verb occur in the same sentence, and the same collective noun is both the subject of the verb and antecedent of the pronoun. In view of these findings we propose that the processes that control number agreement in comprehension show a dissociation between semantic and morpho-syntactic processing that is similar to the dissociation demonstrated in speech-production. We discuss various theoretical frameworks that can account for this similarity.$backslash$nStudies in theoretical linguistics argue that subject-verb agreement is more sensitive to grammatical number, while pronoun-antecedent agreement is more sensitive to conceptual number. This claim is robustly supported by speech production research, but few studies have examined this issue in comprehension. We investigated this dissociation between conceptual and grammatical number agreement in three eye-tracking reading experiments, using collective nouns like ?group?, which can be notionally interpreted as either singular or plural. Experiment 1 indicated that pronoun-antecedent agreement is conceptually driven; Experiment 2 indicated that subject-verb agreement is morpho-syntactically driven. Experiment 3 indicated that the morpho-grammatical processes that control the initial processing of subject-verb agreement do not bias later semantic processing of pronoun-antecedent number agreement, even when the anaphor and the verb occur in the same sentence, and the same collective noun is both the subject of the verb and antecedent of the pronoun. In view of these findings we propose that the processes that control number agreement in comprehension show a dissociation between semantic and morpho-syntactic processing that is similar to the dissociation demonstrated in speech-production. We discuss various theoretical frameworks that can account for this similarity. |
Victor Kuperman; Julie A. Van Dyke Reassessing word frequency as a determinant of word recognition for skilled and unskilled readers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 802–823, 2013. @article{Kuperman2013,The importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension emphasizes the need to accurately assess an individual's familiarity with words. The present article highlights problems with using occurrence counts in corpora as an index of word familiarity, especially when studying individuals varying in reading experience. We demonstrate via computational simulations and norming studies that corpus-based word frequencies systematically overestimate strengths of word representations, especially in the low-frequency range and in smaller-size vocabularies. Experience-driven differences in word familiarity prove to be faithfully captured by the subjective frequency ratings collected from responders at different experience levels. When matched on those levels, this lexical measure explains more variance than corpus-based frequencies in eye-movement and lexical decision latencies to English words, attested in populations with varied reading experience and skill. Furthermore, the use of subjective frequencies removes the widely reported (corpus) Frequency × Skill interaction, showing that more skilled readers are equally faster in processing any word than the less skilled readers, not disproportionally faster in processing lower frequency words. This finding challenges the view that the more skilled an individual is in generic mechanisms of word processing, the less reliant he or she will be on the actual lexical characteristics of that word. |
Evelyne Lagrou; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Wouter Duyck Interlingual lexical competition in a spoken sentence context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 963–972, 2013. @article{Lagrou2013,We used the visual world paradigm to examine interlingual lexical competition when Dutch-English bilinguals listened to low-constraining sentences in their nonnative (L2; Experiment 1) and native (L1; Experiment 2) languages. Additionally, we investigated the influence of the degree of cross-lingual phonological similarity. When listening in L2, participants fixated more on competitor pictures of which the onset of the name was phonologically related to the onset of the name of the target in the nontarget language (e.g., fles, "bottle", given target flower) than on phonologically unrelated distractor pictures. Even when they listened in L1, this effect was also observed when the onsets of the names of the target picture (in L1) and the competitor picture (in L2) were phonologically very similar. These findings provide evidence for interlingual competition during the comprehension of spoken sentences, both in L2 and in L1. |
Chia-lin Lee; Erica L. Middleton; Daniel Mirman; Solène Kalénine; Laurel J. Buxbaum Incidental and context-responsive activation of structure-and function-based action features during object identification Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 257–270, 2013. @article{Lee2013,Previous studies suggest that action representations are activated during object processing, even when task-irrelevant. In addition, there is evidence that lexical-semantic context may affect such activation during object processing. Finally, prior work from our laboratory and others indicates that function-based (“use”) and structure-based (“move”) action subtypes may differ in their activation characteristics. Most studies assessing such effects, however, have required manual object-relevant motor responses, thereby plausibly influencing the activation of action representations. The present work uses eyetracking and a Visual World Paradigm task without object-relevant actions to assess the time course of activation of action representations, as well as their responsiveness to lexical-semantic context. In two experiments, participants heard a target word and selected its referent from an array of four objects. Gaze fixations on nontarget objects signal activation of features shared between targets and nontargets. The experiments assessed activation of structure-based (Experiment 1) or function-based (Experiment 2) distractors, using neutral sentences (“S/he saw the... .”) or sentences with a relevant action verb (Experiment 1: “S/he picked up the... .”; Experiment 2: “S/he used the... .”). We observed task-irrelevant activations of action information in both experiments. In neutral contexts, structure-based activation was relatively faster-rising but more transient than function-based activation. Additionally, action verb contexts reliably modified patterns of activation in both Experiments. These data provide fine-grained information about the dynamics of activation of function-based and structure-based actions in neutral and action-relevant contexts, in support of the “Two Action System” model of object and action processing (e.g., Buxbaum & Kalénine, 2010). |
Mallorie Leinenger; Keith Rayner Eye movements while reading biased homographs: Effects of prior encounter and biasing context on reducing the subordinate bias effect Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 665–681, 2013. @article{Leinenger2013,Readers experience processing difficulties when reading biased homographs preceded by subordinate- biasing contexts. Attempts to overcome this processing deficit have often failed to reduce the subordinate bias effect (SBE). In the present studies, we examined the processing of biased homographs preceded by 10 single-sentence, subordinate-biasing contexts, and varied whether this preceding context contained a prior instance of the homograph or a control word/phrase. Having previously encountered the homograph earlier in the sentence reduced the SBE for the subsequent encounter, whereas simply instantiating the subordinate meaning produced processing difficulty. We compared these reductions in reading times to differences in processing time between dominant-biased repeated and nonrepeated 15 conditions in order to verify that the reductions observed in the subordinate cases did not simply reflect a general repetition benefit. Our results indicate that a strong, subordinate-biasing context can interact during lexical access to overcome the activation from meaning frequency and reduce the SBE during reading. |
Roger P. Levy; Frank Keller Expectation and locality effects in German verb-final structures Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 199–222, 2013. @article{Levy2013a,Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both locality effects, in which having more dependents preceding a governing verb increases processing difficulty at the verb, and anti-locality effects, in which having more preceding dependents facilitates processing at the verb. However, no controlled study has previously demonstrated both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation within the same language. Additionally, many previous demonstrations of anti-locality effects have been potentially confounded with lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. Here, we provide new evidence of both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation in a single language-verb-final constructions in German-while controlling for lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. In main clauses, we find clear anti-locality effects, with the presence of a preceding dative argument facilitating processing at the final verb; in subject-extracted relative clauses with identical linear ordering of verbal dependents, we find both anti-locality and locality effects, with processing facilitated when the verb is preceded by a dative argument alone, but hindered when the verb is preceded by both the dative argument and an adjunct. These results indicate that both expectations and memory limitations need to be accounted for in any complete theory of online syntactic comprehension. |
Richard L. Lewis; Michael Shvartsman; Satinder Singh The adaptive nature of eye movements in linguistic tasks: How payoff and architecture shape speed-accuracy trade-offs Journal Article In: Topics in Cognitive Science, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 581–610, 2013. @article{Lewis2013,We explore the idea that eye-movement strategies in reading are precisely adapted to the joint constraints of task structure, task payoff, and processing architecture. We present a model of saccadic control that separates a parametric control policy space from a parametric machine architecture, the latter based on a small set of assumptions derived from research on eye movements in reading (Engbert, Nuthmann, Richter, & Kliegl, 2005; Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009). The eye-control model is embedded in a decision architecture (a machine and policy space) that is capable of performing a simple linguistic task integrating information across saccades. Model predictions are derived by jointly optimizing the control of eye movements and task decisions under payoffs that quantitatively express different desired speed- accuracy trade-offs. The model yields distinct eye-movement predictions for the same task under different payoffs, including single-fixation durations, frequency effects, accuracy effects, and list position effects, and their modulation by task payoff. The predictions are compared to—and found to accord with—eye-movement data obtained from human participants performing the same task under the same payoffs, but they are found not to accord as well when the assumptions concerning payoff optimization and processing architecture are varied. These results extend work on rational analysis of oculomotor control and adaptation of reading strategy (Bicknell & Levy, ; McConkie, Rayner, & Wilson, 1973; Norris, 2009; Wotschack, 2009) by providing evidence for adaptation at low levels of saccadic control that is shaped by quantitatively varying task demands and the dynamics of processing architecture. |
Louise Ann Leyland; Julie A. Kirkby; Barbara J. Juhasz; Alexander Pollatsek; Simon P. Liversedge The influence of word shading and word length on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 471–486, 2013. @article{Leyland2013,An interesting issue in reading is how parafoveal information affects saccadic targeting and fixation durations. We investigated the influence of shading selected regions of text on eye movements during reading of long and short words within sentences. A target word, either four- or eight-letters long, was presented in one of four shading conditions: the whole target word shaded; the first half shaded; second half shaded; no shading. There was no evidence of a visually mediated parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Saccadic targeting was modulated by the shading on the first half of the word, such that fixations landed closer to the beginning of the word than in the other three shading conditions. Furthermore, partial word shading, resulting in visual non-uniformity of the target word, produced longer gaze durations than the other conditions. Finally, readers spent more time re-reading target words when they were partially shaded than in the other two conditions. We suggest that our effects are due to targeting of the optimal viewing location and revisits to check words that appear visually unusual. Together, the results indicate robust effects of low-level visual characteristics of the word on oculomotor decisions of where and when to move the eyes during reading. |
Xingshan Li; Junjuan Gu; Pingping Liu; Keith Rayner The advantage of word-based processing in chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 879–889, 2013. @article{Li2013,In 2 experiments, we tested the prediction that reading is more efficient when characters belonging to a word are presented simultaneously than when they are not in Chinese reading using a novel variation of the moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). In Experiment 1, we found that reading was slowed down when Chinese readers could not see characters belonging to a word simultaneously compared to when they could do so. In Experiment 2, when Chinese readers could choose whether the 2 characters in the moving window contained a word or 2 characters that did not constitute a word, they had a clear tendency to look at 2 characters belonging to a word simultaneously. The results of the current study provide strong evidence that character processing is affected by word knowledge and the processing of other characters belonging to the same word in Chinese reading, and add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that words do have psychological reality for Chinese readers. The results also suggest that the eye movement control strategy of Chinese readers is rather flexible in that it can be adjusted online to modify the characteristics of the window. |
Shane Lindsay; Christoph Scheepers; Yuki Kamide To dash or to dawdle: Verb-associated speed of motion influences eye movements during spoken sentence comprehension Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 6, pp. e67187, 2013. @article{Lindsay2013,In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast ("dash") or slow ("dawdle") movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events. |
Pingping Liu; Xingshan Li Optimal viewing position effects in the processing of isolated Chinese words Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 81, pp. 45–57, 2013. @article{Liu2013a,Previous studies have found that words are identified most quickly when the eyes fixate near the word center (the Optimal Viewing Position, OVP) in alphabetic languages. Two experiments were performed to determine the presence of OVP effects during the processing of isolated Chinese words. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they performed a lexical decision task. The results suggest that Chinese readers exhibit OVP effects and that the OVP tends to be the first character for 2-character words. For 3- and 4-character words, the OVP effects appear as a U-shaped curve with a minimum towards the second character. As fixations deviate from the OVP, word processing times increase at a rate of 30-70. ms per character, and fixation duration is strongly influenced by the initial viewing position. Moreover, the present study did not observe an I-OVP effect for first fixation durations nor a fixation-duration trade-off in two-fixation cases in the case of isolated Chinese words processing. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Wonil Choi; Peter C. Gordon Word recognition during reading: The interaction between lexical repetition and frequency Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 738–751, 2013. @article{Lowder2013a,Memory studies utilizing long-term repetition priming have generally demonstrated that priming is greater for low-frequency than for high-frequency words and that this effect persists if words intervene between the prime and the target. In contrast, word-recognition studies utilizing masked short-term repetition priming have typically shown that the magnitude of repetition priming does not differ as a function of word frequency and does not persist across intervening words. We conducted an eyetracking-while-reading experiment to determine which of these patterns more closely resembles the relationship between frequency and repetition during the natural reading of a text. Frequency was manipulated using proper names that were either high-frequency (e.g., Stephen) or low-frequency (e.g., Dominic). The critical name was later repeated in the sentence, or a new name was introduced. First-pass reading times and skipping rates on the critical name revealed robust repetition-by-frequency interactions, such that the magnitude of the repetition-priming effect was greater for low-frequency than for high-frequency names. In contrast, measures of later processing showed effects of repetition that did not depend on lexical frequency. These results are interpreted within a framework that conceptualizes eye-movement control as being influenced in different ways by lexical- and discourse-level factors. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon It's hard to offend the college: Effects of sentence structure on figurative-language processing Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 993–1011, 2013. @article{Lowder2013,Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar place-for-institution metonyms (e.g., college) when they were an argument of the main verb and showed that they are more difficult to process in a figurative context (e.g., offended the college) than in a literal context (e.g., photographed the college). Experiment 2 demonstrated that when they are arguments of the main verb, familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than frequency-and-length-matched nouns that refer to people (e.g., offended the leader), but that this difficulty was reduced when the metonym appeared as part of an adjunct phrase (e.g., offended the honor of the college). The results support the view that figurative-language processing is moderated by sentence structure. When the metonym was an argument of the verb, the results were consistent with the pattern predicted by the indirect-access model of figurative-language comprehension. In contrast, when the metonym was part of an adjunct phrase, the results were consistent with the pattern predicted by the direct-access model. |
Steven G. Luke; Kiel Christianson The influence of frequency across the time course of morphological processing: Evidence from the transposed-letter effect Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 25, no. 7, pp. 781–799, 2013. @article{Luke2013,The role that morphology plays in lexical access has been the subject of much debate, as has the influence of word frequency on morphological processing. The effect of frequency on morphological processing across the time course of lexical access was investigated using the transposed-letter effect. The results of two experiments (one masked-priming experiment and one eye-tracking experiment) outline a process in which morphological structure can be detected quickly and independently of frequency. The present study is also the first to show that transpositions that cross morpheme boundaries can be as disruptive as letter substitutions in inflected words, replicating earlier results with derived and compound words. |
Steven G. Luke; John M. Henderson Oculomotor and cognitive control of eye movements in reading: Evidence from mindless reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 75, no. 6, pp. 1230–1242, 2013. @article{Luke2013a,In the present study, we investigated the influence of cognitive factors on eye-movement behaviors in reading. Participants performed two tasks: a normal-reading task, as well as a mindless-reading task in which letters were replaced with unreadable block shapes. This mindless-reading task served as an oculomotor control condition, simulating the visual aspects of reading but removing higher-level linguistic processing. Fixation durations, word skipping, and some regressions were influenced by cognitive factors, whereas eye movements within words appeared to be less open to cognitive control. Implications for models of eye-movement control in reading are discussed. |
Yingyi Luo; Ming Yan; Xiaolin Zhou Prosodic boundaries delay the processing of upcoming lexical information during silent sentence reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 915–930, 2013. @article{Luo2013,Prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing in both spoken and written sentence comprehension, but it is unknown whether the processing of prosodic boundaries affects the processing of upcoming lexical information. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants read silently sentences that allow for 2 possible syntactic interpretations when there is no comma or other cue specifying which interpretation should be taken. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants heard a low-pass filtered auditory version of the sentence, which provided a prosodic boundary cue prior to each sentence. In Experiment 1, we found that the boundary cue helped syntactic disambiguation after the cue and led to longer fixation durations on regions right before the cue than on identical regions without prosodic boundary information. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a gaze-contingent display-change paradigm to manipulate the parafoveal visibility of the first constituent character of the target word after the disambiguating position. Results of Experiment 2 showed that previewing the first character significantly reduced the reading time of the target word, but this preview benefit was greatly reduced when the prosodic boundary cue was introduced at this position. In Experiment 3, instead of the acoustic cues, a visually presented comma was inserted at the disambiguating position in each sentence. Results showed that the comma effect on lexical processing was essentially the same as the effect of prosodic boundary cue. These findings demonstrate that processing a prosodic boundary could impair the processing of parafoveal information during sentence reading. |
Willem M. Mak; Ted J. M. Sanders The role of causality in discourse processing: Effects of expectation and coherence relations Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 9, pp. 1414–1437, 2013. @article{Mak2013,Research on the processing of causality has shown that causally related sentences lead to faster reading, better recall, and better comprehension than sentences that are not causally related. In this study, we investigate two ways in which causality can influence processing: through the expectation that readers may have of a causal relation and the ease with which the sentences can be related in a causal way on the basis of their content. We ran two eye tracking experiments to investigate the online effects of these factors. In the experiments we looked at the influence of these factors on the process of establishing referential and relational coherence. Experiment 1 shows that immediate effects of causal relatedness on referential processing occur even with a connective that is not explicitly causal (when). Moreover, the results show that the early effect only occurs when readers expect a causal relation. Experiment 1 also shows that causal expectations facilitate the processing of causally related sentences. Experiment 2 shows that this is only the case when the content of the second clause actually allows a causal interpretation. The data show that causal expectations have differential effects on the processing of referential and relational coherence. Referential coherence is influenced proactively by the focusing of one of the referents in the context. Relational coherence, on the other hand, is influenced retroactively: only when there turns out to be a causal link between the sentences is processing facilitated by causal expectation. |
Marco Marelli; Simona Amenta; Elena Angela Morone; Davide Crepaldi Meaning is in the beholder's eye: Morpho-semantic effects in masked priming Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 534–541, 2013. @article{Marelli2013,A substantial body of literature indicates that, at least at some level of processing, complex words are broken down into their morphemes solely on the basis of their orthographic form (e.g., Rastle, Davis, & New, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 11:1090-1098, 2004). Recent evidence has shown that this process might not be obligatory, as indicated by the fact that morpho-orthographic effects were not found in a cross-case same-different task-that is, when lexical access was not necessarily required (Duñabeitia, Kinoshita, Carreiras, & Norris, Language and Cognitive Processes 26:509-529, 2011). In this study, we employed a task that required understanding a series of words and, thus, implied lexical access. Masked primes were shown very briefly right before the appearance of the target word; prime-target pairs entertained a morpho-semantic (dealer-DEAL), a morpho-orthographic (corner-CORN), or a purely orthographic (brothel-BROTH) relationship. Eye fixation times clearly indicated facilitation for transparent pairs, but not for opaque pairs (or for orthographic pairs, which were used as a baseline). Conversely, the usual morpho-orthographic pattern was found in a control experiment, employing a lexical decision task. These results indicate that the access to a morpho-orthographic level of representation is not always necessary for lexical identification, which challenges models of visual word identification that cannot account for task-induced effects. |
Daniel Mirman; Allison E. Britt; Qi Chen Effects of phonological and semantic deficits on facilitative and inhibitory consequences of item repetition in spoken word comprehension Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 51, no. 10, pp. 1848–1856, 2013. @article{Mirman2013,Repeating a word can have both facilitative and inhibitory effects on subsequent processing. The present study investigated these dynamics by examining the facilitative and inhibitory consequences of different kinds of item repetition in two individuals with aphasia and a group of neurologically intact control participants. The two individuals with aphasia were matched on overall aphasia severity, but had deficits at different levels of processing: one with a phonological deficit and spared semantic processing, the other with a semantic deficit and spared phonological processing. Participants completed a spoken word-to-picture matching task in which they had to pick which of four object images matched the spoken word. The trials were grouped into pairs such that exactly two objects from the first trial in a pair were present on screen during the second trial in the pair. When the second trial's target was the same as the first trial's target, compared to control participants, both participants with aphasia exhibited equally larger repetition priming effects. When the second trial's target was one of the new items, the participant with a phonological deficit exhibited a significantly more negative effect (i.e., second trial response slower than first trial response) than the control participants and the participant with a semantic deficit. Simulations of a computational model confirmed that this pattern of results could arise from (1) normal residual activation being functionally more significant when overall lexical processing is slower and (2) residual phonological activation of the previous trial's target having a particularly strong inhibitory effect specifically when phonological processing is impaired because the task was phonologically-driven (the spoken input specified the target). These results provide new insights into perseveration errors and lexical access deficits in aphasia. |
Holger Mitterer; Eva Reinisch No delays in application of perceptual learning in speech recognition: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 4, pp. 527–545, 2013. @article{Mitterer2013,Three eye-tracking experiments tested at what processing stage lexically-guided retuning of a fricative contrast affects perception. One group of participants heard an ambiguous fricative between /s/ and /f/ replace /s/ in s-final words, the other group heard the same ambiguous fricative replacing /f/ in f-final words. In a test phase, both groups of participants heard a range of ambiguous fricatives at the end of Dutch minimal pairs (e.g., roos-. roof, 'rose'-'robbery'). Participants who heard the ambiguous fricative replacing /f/ during exposure chose at test the f-final words more often than the other participants. During this test-phase, eye-tracking data showed that the effect of exposure exerted itself as soon as it could possibly have occurred, 200. ms after the onset of the fricative. This was at the same time as the onset of the effect of the fricative itself, showing that the perception of the fricative is changed by perceptual learning at an early level. Results converged in a time-window analysis and a Jackknife procedure testing the time at which effects reached a given proportion of their maxima. This indicates that perceptual learning affects early stages of speech processing, and supports the conclusion that perceptual learning is indeed perceptual rather than post-perceptual. |
Holger Mitterer; Kevin Russell How phonological reductions sometimes help the listener Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 977–984, 2013. @article{Mitterer2013a,In speech production, high-frequency words are more likely than low-frequency words to be phonologically reduced. We tested in an eye-tracking experiment whether listeners can make use of this correlation between lexical frequency and phonological realization of words. Participants heard prefixed verbs in which the prefix was either fully produced or reduced. Simultaneously, they saw a high-frequency verb and a low-frequency verb with this prefix-plus 2 distractors-on a computer screen. Participants were more likely to look at the high-frequency verb when they heard a reduced prefix than when they heard a fully produced prefix. Listeners hence exploit the correlation of lexical frequency and phonological reduction and assume that a reduced prefix is more likely to belong to a high-frequency word. This shows that reductions do not necessarily burden the listener but may in fact have a communicative function, in line with functional theories of phonology. |
Kristina Moll; Manon W. Jones Naming fluency in dyslexic and nondyslexic readers: Differential effects of visual crowding in foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral vision Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 11, pp. 2085–2091, 2013. @article{Moll2013,Reading fluency is often indexed by performance on rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks, which are known to reflect speed of access to lexical codes. We used eye tracking to investigate visual influences on naming fluency. Specifically, we examined how visual crowding affects fluency in a RAN-letters task on an item-by-item basis, by systematically manipulating the interletter spacing of items, such that upcoming letters in the array were viewed in the fovea, parafovea, or periphery relative to a given fixated letter. All lexical information was kept constant. Nondyslexic readers' gaze durations were longer in foveal than in parafoveal and peripheral trials, indicating that visual crowding slows processing even for fluent readers. Dyslexics' gaze durations were longer in foveal and parafoveal trials than in peripheral trials. Our results suggest that for dyslexic readers, influences of crowding on naming speed extend to a broader visual span (to parafoveal vision) than that for nondyslexic readers, but do not extend as far as peripheral vision. The findings extend previous research by elucidating the different visual spans within which crowding operates for dyslexic and nondyslexic readers in an online fluency task. |
Andriy Myachykov; Christoph Scheepers; Simon Garrod; Dominic Thompson; Olga Fedorova Syntactic flexibility and competition in sentence production: The case of English and Russian Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 8, pp. 1601–1619, 2013. @article{Myachykov2013,We analysed how syntactic flexibility influences sentence production in two different languages-English and Russian. In Experiment 1, speakers were instructed to produce as many structurally different descriptions of transitive-event pictures as possible. Consistent with the syntactically more flexible Russian grammar, Russian participants produced more descriptions and used a greater variety of structures than their English counterparts. In Experiment 2, a different sample of participants provided single-sentence descriptions of the same picture materials while their eye movements were recorded. In this task, English and Russian participants almost exclusively produced canonical subject-verb-object active-voice structures. However, Russian participants took longer to plan their sentences, as reflected in longer sentence onset latencies and eye-voice spans for the sentence-initial subject noun. This cross-linguistic difference in processing load diminished toward the end of the sentence. Stepwise generalized linear model analyses showed that the greater sentence-initial processing load registered in Experiment 2 corresponded to the greater amount of syntactic competition from available alternatives (Experiment 1), suggesting that syntactic flexibility is costly regardless of the language in use. |
Eun Ju Noh; Hyeree Choo; Sungryong Koh Processing metalinguistic negation: Evidence from eye-tracking experiments Journal Article In: Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 57, pp. 1–18, 2013. @article{Noh2013,This paper investigates the interpretative process of metalinguistic negation (MN), as opposed to descriptive negation (DN), by using eye-tracking experiments on negative sentences in Korean. It has been suggested that negation is interpreted as descriptive by default and that an MN interpretation is taken only after the DN interpretation turns out to be a semantic contradiction to the clarification clause (a semantic account). Another suggestion is that the type of negation is chosen by considering optimal relevance. That is, people take an interpretation that yields greater cognitive effects with less processing effort (a cognitive account). Eye-tracking experiments were conducted on MN-DN pairs that received similarly high ratings on sensicality: the first with external negation and the second with long-form negation. In each pair, the two negative clauses were followed by the same clarification clause. In the experiments, clarification clauses showed no significant differences in the processing time between MNs and DNs. The results provide no evidence of the semantic account that the participants interpreted negation as descriptive by default. We suggest that they decided on the type of negation when they read the clarification clause, so that their processing times at the clarification clauses were not different between MNs and DNs, which is consistent with the cognitive account. |
Antje Nuthmann Not fixating at the line of text comes at a cost Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 75, no. 8, pp. 1604–1609, 2013. @article{Nuthmann2013a,Previous research on eye guidance in reading has investigated systematic tendencies with respect to horizontal fixation locations on letters within words and the relationship between fixation location in a word and the duration of the fixation. The present study investigates where readers place their eyes vertically on the line of text and how vertical fixation location is related to fixation duration. Analyses were based on a large corpus of eye movement recordings from single-sentence reading. The vertical preferred viewing location was found to be within the vertical extent of the font, but fixations beyond the vertical boundaries of the text also frequently occurred. Analyzing fixation duration as a function of vertical fixation location revealed a vertical optimal viewing position (vOVP) effect: Fixations were shortest when placed optimally on the line of text, and fixation duration gradually increased for fixations that fell above or below the line of text. The vOVP effect can be explained by the limits of visual resolution along the vertical meridian. It is concluded that vertical and horizontal landing positions in single-sentence reading are associated with differences in fixation durations in opposite ways. |
Jinger Pan; Ming Yan; Jochen Laubrock; Hua Shu; Reinhold Kliegl Eye-voice span during rapid automatized naming of digits and dice in Chinese normal and dyslexic children Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 967–979, 2013. @article{Pan2013,We measured Chinese dyslexic and control children's eye movements during rapid automatized naming (RAN) with alphanumeric (digits) and symbolic (dice surfaces) stimuli. Both types of stimuli required identical oral responses, controlling for effects associated with speech production. Results showed that naming dice was much slower than naming digits for both groups, but group differences in eye-movement measures and in the eye-voice span (i.e. the distance between the currently fixated item and the voiced item) were generally larger in digit-RAN than in dice-RAN. In addition, dyslexics were less efficient in parafoveal processing in these RAN tasks. Since the two RAN tasks required the same phonological output and on the assumption that naming dice is less practiced than naming digits in general, the results suggest that the translation of alphanumeric visual symbols into phonological codes is less efficient in dyslexic children. The dissociation of the print-to-sound conversion and phonological representation suggests that the degree of automaticity in translation from visual symbols to phonological codes in addition to phonological processing per se is also critical to understanding dyslexia. |
Kevin B. Paterson; Victoria A. McGowan; Timothy R. Jordan Filtered text reveals adult age differences in reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 352–364, 2013. @article{Paterson2013,Sensitivity to certain spatial frequencies declines with age and this may have profound effects on reading performance. However, the spatial frequency content of text actually used by older adults (aged 65+), and how this differs from that used by young adults (aged 18-30), remains to be determined. To investigate this issue, the eye movement behavior of young and older adult readers was assessed using a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm in which text was shown normally within a region centered at the point of gaze, whereas text outside this region was filtered to contain only low, medium, or high spatial frequencies. For young adults, reading times were affected by spatial frequency content when windows of normal text extended up to nine characters wide. Within this processing region, the reading performance of young adults was affected little when text outside the window contained either only high or medium spatial frequencies, but was disrupted substantially when text contained only low spatial frequencies. By contrast, the reading performance of older adults was affected by spatial frequency content when windows extended up to 18 characters wide. Moreover, within this extended processing region, reading performance was disrupted when text contained any one band of spatial frequencies, but was disrupted most of all when text contained only high spatial frequencies. These findings indicate that older adults are sensitive to the spatial frequency content of text from a much wider region than young adults, and rely much more than young adults on coarse-scale components of text when reading. |
Manuel Perea Why does the APA recommend the use of serif fonts? Journal Article In: Psicothema, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 13–17, 2013. @article{Perea2013,Background: The publication norms of the American Psychological Association recommend the use of a serif font in the manuscripts (Times New Roman). However, there seems to be no well-substantiated reason why serif fonts would produce any advantage during letter/word processing. Method: This study presents an experiment in which sentences were presented either with a serif or sans serif font from the same family while participants' eye movements were monitored. Results: Results did not reveal any differences of type of font in eye movement measures –except for a minimal effect in the number of progressive saccades. Conclusions: There is no reason why the APA publication norms recommend the use of serif fonts other than uniformity in the elaboration/presentation of the manuscripts. |
Silvia Primativo; Lisa S. Arduino; Maria De Luca; Roberta Daini; Marialuisa Martelli Neglect dyslexia: A matter of "good looking" Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 51, no. 11, pp. 2109–2119, 2013. @article{Primativo2013,Brain-damaged patients with right-sided unilateral spatial neglect (USN) often make left-sided errors in reading single words or pseudowords (neglect dyslexia, ND). We propose that both left neglect and low fixation accuracy account for reading errors in neglect dyslexia.Eye movements were recorded in USN patients with (ND+) and without (ND-) neglect dyslexia and in a matched control group of right brain-damaged patients without neglect (USN-). Unlike ND- and controls, ND+ patients showed left lateralized omission errors and a distorted eye movement pattern in both a reading aloud task and a non-verbal saccadic task. During reading, the total number of fixations was larger in these patients independent of visual hemispace, and most fixations were inaccurate. Similarly, in the saccadic task only ND+ patients were unable to reach the moving dot. A third experiment addressed the nature of the left lateralization in reading error distribution by simulating neglect dyslexia in ND- patients. ND- and USN- patients had to perform a speeded reading-at-threshold task that did not allow for eye movements. When stimulus exploration was prevented, ND- patients, but not controls, produced a pattern of errors similar to that of ND+ with unlimited exposure time (e.g., left-sided errors).We conclude that neglect dyslexia reading errors may arise in USN patients as a consequence of an additional and independent deficit unrelated to the orthographic material. In particular, the presence of an altered oculo-motor pattern, preventing the automatic execution of the fine saccadic eye movements involved in reading, uncovers, in USN patients, the attentional bias also in reading single centrally presented words. |
Ralph Radach Monitoring local comprehension monitoring in sentence reading Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 191–206, 2013. @article{Radach2013,Comprehension monitoring is considered a key issue in current debates on ways to improve children' reading comprehension. However, processes and mechanisms underlying this skill are currently not well understood. This article describes one of the first attempts to study comprehension monitoring using eye-tracking methodology. Students in fifth grade were asked to read sentences for comprehension while also checking whether the meaning of the sentence was generally correct or incorrect. Items required the processing of conjunctive relations between two clauses that were either causally consistent or inconsistent. In addition, the polarity of the relation was varied by replacing the conjunction “because” with “although, ” creating an additional level of processing difficulty. Inconsistency played a minor role and was dominated by polarity effects that were also modulated by the correctness of the answer. The present task represents an effective tool to study local comprehension monitoring and highlights the importance of conjunctive relations for maintaining textual coherence during reading. |
Ralph Radach; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Lisa Glover; Christian Vorstius Contextual constraint and N+2 preview effects in reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 619–633, 2013. @article{Radach2013a,Extracting linguistic information from locations beyond the currently fixated word is a core component of skilled reading. Recent debate on this topic is focused on the question of whether useful linguistic information can be extracted from more than one (parafoveally visible) word to the right of a fixated word (N). The current study examined this issue through the use parafoveal previews with a short and high-frequency next (N + 1) word, as this should increase the opportunity for the extraction of useful information from the subsequent (N + 2) word. Pairs of N + 2 words were selected so that contextual constraint was either high or low. Using saccade contingent display manipulations, preview of a N + 2 target word during word N viewing consisted of either a visually dissimilar nonword or a word. The results revealed a substantial drop in fixation probability for word N + 1 when the N + 2 preview was masked with a nonword. Furthermore, the masking of word N + 2 influenced its viewing duration even when word N + 1 was fixated prior to word N + 2 viewing. These results provide compelling evidence for the view that the linguistic processing can encompass more than one word at a time. |