EyeLink Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2023 (with some early 2024s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Visual World, Comprehension, Speech Production, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink reading or language articles, please email us!
2022 |
Weiyan Liao; Sara Tze Kwan Li; Janet Hui-wen Hsiao Music reading experience modulates eye movement pattern in English reading but not in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 12, pp. 1–14, 2022. @article{Liao2022a, Here we tested the hypothesis that in Chinese-English bilinguals, music reading experience may modulate eye movement planning in reading English but not Chinese sentences due to the similarity in perceptual demands on processing sequential symbol strings separated by spaces between music notation and English sentence reading. Chinese–English bilingual musicians and non-musicians read legal, semantically incorrect, and syntactically (and semantically) incorrect sentences in both English and Chinese. In English reading, musicians showed more dispersed eye movement patterns in reading syntactically incorrect sentences than legal sentences, whereas non-musicians did not. This effect was not observed in Chinese reading. Musicians also had shorter saccade lengths when viewing syntactically incorrect than correct musical notations and sentences in an unfamiliar alphabetic language (Tibetan), whereas non-musicians did not. Thus, musicians' eye movement planning was disturbed by syntactic violations in both music and English reading but not in Chinese reading, and this effect was generalized to an unfamiliar alphabetic language. These results suggested that music reading experience may modulate perceptual processes in reading differentially in bilinguals' two languages, depending on their processing similarities. |
Agnieszka Lijewska; Agnieszka Chmiel; Albrecht W. Inhoff Stages of sight translation: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 43, pp. 997–1018, 2022. @article{Lijewska2022, The aim of the study was to investigate the coordination of source text comprehension and translation in a sight translation task. The study also sought to determine whether translation strategies influence sight translation performance. Two groups of conference interpreters—professionals and trainees—sight translated English sentences into Polish while their eye movements and performance were monitored. Translation demands were manipulated by the use of either high- or low-frequency critical words in the sentences. Translation experience had no effect on first-pass viewing durations, but experts used shorter re-view durations than trainees (especially in the low-frequency condition). Professionals translated more accurately and with less pausing than trainees. Translation in the high-frequency condition was more accurate and had shorter pauses than in the low-frequency condition. Critical word translation accuracy increased with the translation onset latency (TOL) for individual sentences, and pause durations were relatively short when TOLs were either relatively short or long. Together, these findings indicate that, in sight translation, the initial phase of normal reading for comprehension is followed by phases in which reading and translation co-occur, and that translation strategy and translation performance are linked. |
Michael A. Johns; Paola E. Dussias Comparing single-word insertions and multi-word alternations in bilingual speech: Insights from pupillometry Journal Article In: Languages, vol. 7, pp. 1–19, 2022. @article{Johns2022, Prominent sociolinguistic theories of language mixing have posited that single-word insertions of one language into the other are the result of a distinct process than multi-word alternations between two languages given that the former overwhelmingly surface morphosyntactically integrated into the surrounding language. To date, this distinction has not been tested in comprehension. The present study makes use of pupillometry to examine the online processing of single-word insertions and multi-word alternations by highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals in Puerto Rico. Participants heard sentences containing target noun/adjective pairs (1) in unilingual Spanish, (2) where the Spanish noun was replaced with its English translation equivalent, followed by a Spanish post-nominal adjective, and (3) where both the noun and adjective appeared in English with the adjective occurring in the English pre-nominal position. Both types of language mixing elicit larger pupillary responses when compared to unilingual Spanish speech, though the magnitude of this difference depends on the grammatical gender of the target noun. Importantly, single-word insertions and multi-word alternations did not differ from one another. Taken together, these findings suggest that morphosyntactic integration is not the defining feature of single-word insertions, at least in comprehension, and that the comprehension system is tuned to the distributional properties of bilingual speech. |
Holly Joseph; Daisy Powell Does a specialist typeface affect how fluently children with and without dyslexia process letters, words, and passages? Journal Article In: Dyslexia, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 448–470, 2022. @article{Joseph2022, Children with dyslexia are at risk of poor academic attainment and lower life chances if they do not receive the support they need. Alongside phonics-based interventions which already have a strong evidence base, specialist dyslexia typefaces have been offered as an additional or alternative form of support. The current study examined whether one such typeface, Dyslexie, had a benefit over a standard typeface in identifying letters, reading words, and reading passages. 71 children, aged 8–12 years, 37 of whom had a diagnosis of dyslexia, completed a rapid letter naming task, a word reading efficiency task, and a passage reading task in two typefaces, Dyslexie and Calibri. Spacing between letters and words was kept constant. Results showed no differences in word or passage reading between the two typesfaces, but letter naming did appear to be more fluent when letters were presented in Dyslexie rather than Calibri text for all children. The results suggest that a typeface in which letters are designed to be distinctive from one another may be beneficial for letter identification and that an intervention in which children are taught letters in a specialist typeface is worthy of consideration. |
Barbara J. Juhasz Using eye movements to investigate the impact of childhood and recent frequency of occurrence on word identification during reading in college Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 409–416, 2022. @article{Juhasz2022, During reading, high-frequency words consistently receive shorter fixation durations relative to low-frequency words. However, how frequently a given word is experienced can vary across an individual's education. In the current study, the effects of both childhood and college-level word frequency on fixation durations were examined to assess the relative role of early childhood and recent frequency of occurrence on word identification during reading. Eye movements were recorded as 40 college students read neutral sentences containing 96 target words. The words varied on childhood and college-level frequency. Length of the sentences and pre-target and post-target characteristics were controlled across the four frequency conditions. Data were analyzed via linear mixed models fit to log-transformed fixation duration measures. Three fixation duration measures were examined to explore the time course of processing. Clear effects of college-level frequency were observed on fixation durations on the target words. The frequency with which a word is recently experienced during college affects word identification time in context. This suggests that the effect of word frequency on fixation durations during sentence reading is experience dependent and further supports the need for eye movement experiments to employ age-appropriate recent frequency estimates. |
Oksana Kanerva; Tuomo Häikiö Sound symbolic potential of russian onomatopoeias: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 432–445, 2022. @article{Kanerva2022, We investigated whether native Finnish speakers can grasp the meaning of Russian onomatopoeic words without any prior knowledge of the Russian language. In Experiment 1, elicitation test, naïve listeners generated associations for the acoustic events depicted by onomatopoeic words they heard. A cluster analysis suggested presence of different types of cues that affect the elicitation of associations. In the Facilitating cluster, associations were mostly correct; in the Counteracting cluster, they were predominantly incorrect. Worthy of note, many of the incorrect associations were systematic. In the Mixed cluster, there was a combination of cues; and in the Undefined cluster, no discrete cues affecting the formation of common associations were found. In Experiment 2, the same stimulus words were used in an eye-tracking experiment using visual world paradigm. It was shown that the participants have even better chances to map the onomatopoeic words to the correct semantic domain when extralinguistic information is available, in this case target images presented on the experimental display. The availability of both audio and visual inputs substantially boosted this process in all four clusters. Our findings support the view that imitative sound symbolism offers a scaffolding material for connecting onomatopoeias to their referents when words are pronounced in isolation. Cross-linguistic sound symbolism offers a good explanation to the presence of different cues that affect semantic recognition of unknown onomatopoeic words. On a larger scale, cross-linguistic similarities in onomatopoeias may be part of a broader phenomenon, universal sound symbolism, form-meaning mapping shared by a wide array of languages |
Efthymia C. Kapnoula; Arthur G. Samuel Reconciling the contradictory effects of production on word learning: Production may help at first, but it hurts later Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 394–415, 2022. @article{Kapnoula2022, Does saying a novel word help to recognize it later? Previous research on the effect of production on this aspect of word learning is inconclusive, as both facilitatory and detrimental effects of production are reported. In a set of three experiments, we sought to reconcile the seemingly contrasting findings by disentangling the production from other effects. In Experiment 1, participants learned eight new words and their visual referents. On each trial, participants heard a novel word twice: either (a) by hearing the same speaker produce it twice (Perception-Only condition) or (b) by first hearing the speaker once and then producing it themselves (Production condition). At test, participants saw two pictures while hearing a novel word and were asked to choose its correct referent. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that in the Perception-Only condition each word was spoken by 2 different speakers (equalizing talker variability between conditions). Experiment 3 was identical to Experiment 2, but at test words were spoken by a novel speaker to assess generalizability of the effect. Accuracy, reaction time, and eye-movements to the target image were collected. Production had a facilitatory effect during early stages of learning (after short training), but its effect became detrimental after additional training. The results help to reconcile conflicting findings regarding the role of production on word learning. This work is relevant to a wide range of research on human learning in showing that the same factor may play a different role at different stages of learning. |
Gregory D. Keating The effect of age of onset of bilingualism on gender agreement processing in Spanish as a heritage language Journal Article In: Language Learning, vol. 72, pp. 1170–1208, 2022. @article{Keating2022, Montrul's (2008) onset age hypothesis predicts that, if attrition occurs in early bilingualism, it will be more severe in simultaneous than in sequential bilinguals. This study tested that prediction in an eye-tracking experiment focused on the processing of Spanish gender agreement during sentence reading. Heritage Spanish speakers exposed to English at different ages (0–3, 4–6, 7–10 years) read sentences containing violations of noun–adjective gender agreement in 2 distance conditions (adjacent, nonadjacent). Mixed-effects modeling with reverse Helmert contrasts showed that heritage speakers displayed sensitivity to gender agreement violations in their minority language regardless of onset age and noun–adjective proximity. However, onset age of majority language acquisition determined how early sensitivity manifested itself in the time course of grammatical processing. Consistent with Montrul's hypothesis, sequential bilinguals showed sensitivity to violations earlier in their eye-movement record than did simultaneous bilinguals. The results suggest onset age can affect grammatical processing in bilinguals who otherwise acquire target like mental representations. |
Asaid Khateb; Ibrahim A. Asadi; Shiraz Habashi; Sebastian Peter Korinth Role of morphology in visual word recognition: A parafoveal preview study in Arabic using eye-tracking Journal Article In: Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 1030–1038, 2022. @article{Khateb2022, Words in Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are composed of two interwoven morphemes: roots and word patterns (verbal and nominal). Studies exploring the organizing principles of the mental lexicon in Hebrew reported robust priming effects by roots and verbal patterns, but not by nominal patterns. In Arabic, prior studies have produced some inconsistent results. Using the eye-tracking methodology, this study investigated whether the Arabic morphological classes (i.e., root, verbal pattern, nominal pattern) presented parafoveally would facilitate naming of foveally presented words among young native Arabic skilled readers. Results indicate that roots and both word patterns accelerated word naming latencies, suggesting that morphological knowledge contributed to word recognition processes in Arabic. The inclusion of the three morpheme classes into one study represents so far the most comprehensive study of morphological priming effects in Arabic. |
Jina Kim; Lindsey Meyer; Kristi Hendrickson The role of orthography and phonology in written word recognition: Evidence from eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 65, pp. 4812–4820, 2022. @article{Kim2022b, Purpose: There is a long-standing debate about how written words are recognized. Central to this debate is the role of phonology. The objective of this study is to contribute to our collective understanding regarding the role of phonology in written word recognition. Method: A total of 30 monolingual adults were tested using a novel written word version of the visual world paradigm (VWP). We compared activation of phonological anadromes (words that are matched for sounds but not letters, e.g., JAB-BADGE) and orthographic anadromes (words that are matched for letters but not sounds, e.g., LEG-GEL) to determine the relative role of phonology and orthography in familiar single-word reading. Results: We found that activation for phonological anadromes is earlier, more robust, and sustained longer than orthographic anadromes. Conclusions: These results are most consistent with strong phonological theories of single-word reading that posit an early and robust role of phonology. This study has broad implications for larger debates regarding reading instruction. |
Julie A. Kirkby; Rhiannon S. Barrington; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Parafoveal processing and transposed-letter effects in dyslexic reading Journal Article In: Dyslexia, vol. 28, pp. 359–374, 2022. @article{Kirkby2022, During parafoveal processing, skilled readers encode letter identity independently of letter position (Johnson et al., 2007). In the current experiment, we examined orthographic parafoveal processing in readers with dyslexia. Specifically, the eye movements of skilled readers and adult readers with dyslexia were recorded during a boundary paradigm experiment (Rayner, 1975). Parafoveal previews were either identical to the target word (e.g., nearly), a transposed-letter preview (e.g., enarly), or a substituted-letter preview (e.g., acarly). Dyslexic and non-dyslexic readers demonstrated orthographic parafoveal preview benefits during silent sentence reading and both reading groups encoded letter identity and letter position information parafoveally. However, dyslexic adults showed, that very early in lexical processing, during parafoveal preview, the positional information of a word's initial letters were encoded less flexibly compared to during skilled adult reading. We suggest that dyslexic readers are less able to benefit from correct letter identity information (i.e., in the letter transposition previews) due to the lack of direct mapping of orthography to phonology. The current findings demonstrate that dyslexic readers show consistent and dyslexic-specific reading difficulties in foveal and parafoveal processing during silent sentence reading. |
Dorota Klimek-Jankowska; Anna Czypionka; Joanna Błaszczak Imperfective aspect underspecified for number: Evidence from an eye-tracking during reading experiment Journal Article In: Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 823–859, 2022. @article{KlimekJankowska2022, In an eye-tracking during reading experiment we investigated the processing of ambiguous Polish imperfective verbs in contexts with disambiguating ('frequently' and 'yesterday') and neutral preceding adverbs. Grammatical number of NP objects was also manipulated. Verb regions received significantly longer regression path times when following a neutral compared to 'yesterday' contexts. This implies that in neutral contexts both senses of polysemous imperfective verbs are activated on the verbal region. Post-hoc analyses revealed more regressions from singular objects in neutral contexts, suggesting that a preference for a more frequent plural event sense was created before the first fixations on the object were made. Finally, we observed an effect consisting of longer first pass times on singular objects and more regressions from the following region in contexts with 'frequently', which is consistent with the view that imperfective aspect is underspecified for number. This pattern of results is compatible with Relevance Theory, which posits that the selection of one sense (single ongoing or plural) is an outcome of an inferential process based on frequency, context and world knowledge. However, the fact that sense frequency plays a role in this process indicates that it serves as input to context-based inferential processes suggesting that this information is pre-stored in the memory. |
Yiguang Liu; Florian Hintz; Junying Liang; Falk Huettig In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 25, pp. 801–815, 2022. @article{Liu2022d, Prediction is an important part of language processing. An open question is to what extent people predict language in challenging circumstances. Here we tested the limits of prediction by asking bilingual Dutch native speakers to interpret Dutch sentences into their English counterparts. In two visual world experiments, we recorded participants' eye movements to co-present visual objects while they engaged in interpreting tasks (consecutive and simultaneous interpreting). Most participants showed anticipatory eye movements to semantically-related upcoming target words in their L1 source language during both consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. A quarter of participants during simultaneous interpretation however did not move their eyes, an extremely unusual participant behaviour in visual world studies. Overall, the findings suggest that most people predict in the source language under challenging interpreting situations. Further work is required to understand the causes of the absence of (anticipatory) eye movements during simultaneous interpretation in a substantial subset of individuals. |
Dillon Lohr; Henry Griffith; Oleg V. Komogortsev Eye know you: Metric learning for end-to-end biometric authentication using eye movements from a longitudinal dataset Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 276–288, 2022. @article{Lohr2022, The permanence of eye movements as a biometric modality remains largely unexplored in the literature. The present study addresses this limitation by evaluating a novel exponentially-dilated convolutional neural network for eye movement authentication using a recently proposed longitudinal dataset known as GazeBase. The network is trained using multi-similarity loss, which directly enables the enrollment and authentication of out-of-sample users. In addition, this study includes an exhaustive analysis of the effects of evaluating on various tasks and downsampling from 1000 Hz to several lower sampling rates. Our results reveal that reasonable authentication accuracy may be achieved even during both a low-cognitive-load task and at low sampling rates. Moreover, we find that eye movements are quite resilient against template aging after as long as 3 years. |
Jiaxin Long; Tianlin Wang; Miao Yu Sentential position of V-N combination modulates the rhythmic pattern effect during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 228, pp. 1–11, 2022. @article{Long2022, Though previous research has examined how implicit meter can facilitate the processing of stress-timed languages, syllable-timed languages, such as Chinese, remain under studied. Past research has shown that among verb-noun combinations in Chinese, the processing of [2 + 2] (two disyllabic words) combination rhythmic pattern is easier than that of [2 + 1] (a disyllabic word and a monosyllabic word) pattern, though it is unclear whether this effect is modulated by the sentential position of the verb-noun combination. The present study uses eye-tracking to examine the influence of position on rhythmic pattern during silent reading. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences with [2 + 1] versus [2 + 2] V[sbnd]N phrases embedded in different sentential positions. Results show that the fixation duration of [2 + 1] V-N phrases is significantly longer than that of [2 + 2] and that the fixation duration of V-N phrases is shorter at the sentence-middle position than it is at the sentence-final position, suggesting that the rhythmic pattern effect at the sentence-middle position exhibits a reduced magnitude compared to the sentence-final position. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences with either mono- or disyllabic words after the V-N phrases to further explore whether the reduction of the rhythmic pattern effect is related to the number of succeeding syllables. Results show that while the fixation duration of the [2 + 1] V-N pattern is significantly longer than that of the [2 + 2] pattern, there is no significant difference between the monosyllabic versus the disyllabic conditions, nor is there a significant interaction between rhythmic pattern and syllable length post V-N phrases, thus ruling out the rhythmic effect from succeeding context. Together, these patterns suggest that the reduction of the rhythmic pattern effect is caused by position rather than number of syllables after phrases. |
Priscila López-Beltrán; Michael A. Johns; Paola E. Dussias; Cristóbal Lozano; Alfonso Palma The effects of information structure in the processing of word order variation in the second language Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 639–670, 2022. @article{LopezBeltran2022, Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical counterparts when presented with discourse contexts that license their information structure constraints. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the effect of information structure on the online processing of active and passive constructions and whether this effect differed in monolinguals and L1-Spanish–L2-English speakers. In line with previous corpus studies, our results indicated that there was an interaction between word order and information structure according to which passive sentences were much more costly to process with new–given information structure patterns. Crucially, we failed to find evidence that the effect of information structure on word order constraints in comprehension differed between monolingual and L2 speakers. |
Yun-Jhen Lu; I. -Chun Kuo; Ming-Chou Ho The effects of emotional films and subtitle types on eye movement patterns Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 230, no. 110, pp. 1–7, 2022. @article{Lu2022, Background: In Taiwan, the use of subtitle is common in TV programs and movies. However, studies on subtitles mostly focus on foreign language learning and film subtitle translation. Few studies address how subtitle types and emotion-laden films affect the viewers' eye movement patterns. Purpose: We aim to examine how the emotion type of film (happy, sad, angry, fear, or neutral) and subtitle type (meaningful subtitle, no subtitle, or meaningless subtitle) affect the dwell times and fixation counts in the subtitle area. Methods: This study is a 5 (emotion type of film) × 3 (subtitle type) between-participants design. There were 15 participants per condition, resulting in a total of 225 participants. After watching a film, participants filled out a self-reported questionnaire regarding this film. Results: The subtitled films have more fixation counts and dwell time for the meaningful subtitle compared to meaningless subtitle and no subtitle. The dwell time was longer on the subtitle area for the sad film than the neutral and happy films. Also, the dwell time was longer on the subtitle area for the fear film than the happy film. There were more fixation counts on the subtitle area for the sad film than the angry and happy films. Conclusions: The subtitle meaning is critical in directing overt attention. Also, overt attention directed to the subtitle area is affected by the different emotion types of films. |
A. Lyu; A. E. Silva; S. H. Cheung; B. Thompson; L. Abel; A. M. Y. Cheong Effects of visual span on Chinese reading performance in normal peripheral vision Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 201, pp. 1–13, 2022. @article{Lyu2022, The current study examined the relationships among temporal processing speed, spatial visual span and Chinese character reading speed in normal central and peripheral vision. Maximum reading speed (MRS) and critical print size (CPS) of 26 native Chinese readers (13 young and 13 older adults) were determined at three visual field locations: central vision, 10° left and 10° below fixation using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Temporal processing speed was measured using trigrams of randomly selected Chinese characters presented at a range of exposure durations, while spatial visual span was measured using trigrams presented at different spatial positions. It was found that shorter temporal processing speed and larger spatial visual span were associated with faster MRS at the central and inferior visual field locations, but not at the left of fixation location. As expected, reading and visual span metrics were better in central vision compared to both peripheral locations. In addition, reading, temporal processing, and spatial visual span metrics were better in the young than older subjects (except for similar temporal processing speed at two peripheral locations). The results for central and inferior presentation locations support the hypothesis that temporal processing speed and spatial visual span were associated with Chinese character reading speed. Surprisingly, no correlation was observed for the 10° left of the fixation location, suggesting that the factors affecting reading speed might differ for inferior and lateral peripheral viewing locations. |
Xingcheng Ma; Dechao Li; Jie-Li Tsai; Yu-Yin Hsu An eye-tracking based investigation into reading behavior during Chinese-English sight translation: The effect of word order asymmetry Journal Article In: Translation and Interpreting, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 66–83, 2022. @article{Ma2022d, The focus of this study is the reading behavior of student interpreters during the process of Chinese-English sight translation. Eye-tracking was adopted to examine whether and how student interpreters' real-time reading is affected by the degree of word order asymmetry and modulated by the amount of contextual information available. A group of interpreter trainees sight translated asymmetric sentences (sentences that are structurally asymmetric to the target language) and symmetric sentences (sentences that are similar to the structure of the target language). These sentences were presented in isolation and embedded in discourse. Their eye movements were recorded for an analysis of their rereading rate and reading ahead frequency. The results show that the rereading rate for the asymmetric sentences was significantly higher than that for the symmetric ones. There were no notable differences in the reading ahead frequency between the two types of sentences. The role of context was limited in modulating the asymmetry-induced effect. This study addresses real-time reading behavior at the word level during sight translation and deepens our understanding of the cognitive processing involved in interpretation, as well as the potential influencing factors. |
Sasu Mäkelä; Jan Kujala; Riitta Salmelin Removing ocular artifacts from magnetoencephalographic data on naturalistic reading of continuous texts Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 16, pp. 1–18, 2022. @article{Maekelae2022, Naturalistic reading paradigms and stimuli consisting of long continuous texts are essential for characterizing the cortical basis of reading. Due to the highly dynamic nature of the reading process, electrophysiological brain imaging methods with high spatial and temporal resolution, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG), are ideal for tracking them. However, as electrophysiological recordings are sensitive to electromagnetic artifacts, data recorded during naturalistic reading is confounded by ocular artifacts. In this study, we evaluate two different pipelines for removing ocular artifacts from MEG data collected during continuous, naturalistic reading, with the focus on saccades and blinks. Both pipeline alternatives are based on blind source separation methods but differ fundamentally in their approach. The first alternative is a multi-part process, in which saccades are first extracted by applying Second-Order Blind Identification (SOBI) and, subsequently, FastICA is used to extract blinks. The other alternative uses a single powerful method, Adaptive Mixture ICA (AMICA), to remove all artifact types at once. The pipelines were tested, and their effects compared on MEG data recorded from 13 subjects in a naturalistic reading task where the subjects read texts with the length of multiple pages. Both pipelines performed well, extracting the artifacts in a single component per artifact type in most subjects. Signal power was reduced across the whole cortex in all studied frequency bands from 1 to 90 Hz, but especially in the frontal cortex and temporal pole. The results were largely similar for the two pipelines, with the exception that SOBI-FastICA reduced signal in the right frontal cortex in all studied frequency bands more than AMICA. However, there was considerable interindividual variation in the effects of the pipelines. As a holistic conclusion, we choose to recommend AMICA for removing artifacts from MEG data on naturalistic reading but note that the SOBI-FastICA pipeline has also various favorable characteristics. |
Ana Marcet; Manuel Perea Does omitting the accent mark in a word affect sentence reading? Evidence from Spanish Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 75, no. 1, pp. 148–155, 2022. @article{Marcet2022, Lexical stress in multisyllabic words is consistent in some languages (e.g., first syllable in Finnish), but it is variable in others (e.g., Spanish, English). To help lexical processing in a transparent language like Spanish, scholars have proposed a set of rules specifying which words require an accent mark indicating lexical stress in writing. However, recent word recognition using that lexical decision showed that word identification times were not affected by the omission of a word's accent mark in Spanish. To examine this question in a paradigm with greater ecological validity, we tested whether omitting the accent mark in a Spanish word had a deleterious effect during silent sentence reading. A target word was embedded in a sentence with its accent mark or not. Results showed no reading cost of omitting the word's accent mark in first-pass eye fixation durations, but we found a cost in the total reading time spent on the target word (i.e., including re-reading). Thus, the omission of an accent mark delays late, but not early, lexical processing in Spanish. These findings help constrain the locus of accent mark information in models of visual word recognition and reading. Furthermore, these findings offer some clues on how to simplify the Spanish rules of accentuation. |
Isabel A. Martin; Matthew J. Goupell; Yi Ting Huang Children's syntactic parsing and sentence comprehension with a degraded auditory signal Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 151, pp. 1–13, 2022. @article{Martin2022a, During sentence comprehension, young children anticipate syntactic structures using early-arriving words and have difficulties revising incorrect predictions using late-arriving words. However, nearly all work to date has focused on syntactic parsing in idealized speech environments, and little is known about how children's strategies for predicting and revising meanings are affected by signal degradation. This study compares comprehension of active and passive sentences in natural and vocoded speech. In a word-interpretation task, 5-year-olds inferred the meanings of novel words in sentences that (1) encouraged agent-first predictions (e.g., The blicket is eating the seal implies The blicket is the agent), (2) required revising predictions (e.g., The blicket is eaten by the seal implies The blicket is the theme), or (3) weakened predictions by placing familiar nouns in sentence-initial position (e.g., The seal is eating/eaten by the blicket). When novel words promoted agent-first predictions, children misinterpreted passives as actives, and errors increased with vocoded compared to natural speech. However, when familiar words were sentence-initial that weakened agent-first predictions, children accurately interpreted passives, with no signal-degradation effects. This demonstrates that signal quality interacts with interpretive processes during sentence comprehension, and the impacts of speech degradation are greatest when late-arriving information conflicts with predictions. |
Beatriz Martín-Luengo; Andriy Myachykov; Yury Shtyrov Deliberative process in sharing information with different audiences: Eye-tracking correlates Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 75, no. 4, pp. 730–741, 2022. @article{MartinLuengo2022, Research on conversational pragmatics demonstrates how interlocutors tailor the information they share depending on the audience. Previous research showed that, in informal contexts, speakers often provide several alternative answers, whereas in formal contexts, they tend to give only a single answer; however, the psychological underpinnings of these effects remain obscure. To investigate this answer selection process, we measured participants' eye movements in different experimentally modelled social contexts. Participants answered general knowledge questions by providing responses with either single (one) or plural (three) alternatives. Then, a formal (job interview) or informal (conversation with friends) context was presented and participants decided either to report or withdraw their responses after considering the given social context. Growth curve analysis on the eye movements indicates that the selected response option attracted more eye movements. There was a discrepancy between the answer selection likelihood and the proportion of fixations to the corresponding option—but only in the formal context. These findings support a more elaborate decision-making processes in formal contexts. They also suggest that eye movements do not necessarily accompany the options considered in the decision-making processes. |
McCall E. Sarrett; Christine Shea; Bob McMurray Within- and between-language competition in adult second language learners: Implications for language proficiency Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 165–181, 2022. @article{Sarrett2022, Second language (L2) learners must not only acquire L2 knowledge (i.e. vocabulary and grammar), but they must also rapidly access this knowledge. In monolinguals, efficient spoken word recognition is accomplished via lexical competition, by which listeners activate a range of candidates that compete for recognition as the signal unfolds. We examined this in adult L2 learners, investigating lexical competition both amongst words of the L2, and between L2 and native language (L1) words. Adult L2 learners (N = 33) in their third semester of college Spanish completed a cross-linguistic Visual World Paradigm task to assess lexical activation, along with a proficiency assessment (LexTALE-Esp). L2 learners showed typical incremental processing activating both within-L2 and cross-linguistic competitors, similar to fluent bilinguals. Proficiency correlated with both the speed of activating the target (which prior work links to the developmental progression in L1) and the degree to which competition ultimately resolves (linked to robustness of the lexicon). |
Raheleh Saryazdi; Craig G. Chambers Gesture and reference to objects in the here-and-now: Listeners' use of gesture cues in quiet and in noise Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 583–597, 2022. @article{Saryazdi2022, In face-to-face interaction, speakers spontaneously produce manual gestures that can facilitate listeners' comprehension of spoken language. The present study explores the factors affecting the uptake and influence of gesture cues in situations where a speaker is referring to objects visible to the listener. In this context, the listener's attention must be distributed across various scene regions, potentially reducing the ability to draw on and apply gesture cues in real time. In two experiments, the instruction provided by a speaker (e.g., “pick up the candy”) was accompanied by an iconic grasp gesture (produced alongside the verb) that reflected the size/shape of the intended target. Effects on listeners' comprehension were compared with a no-gesture condition. Experiment 1 (audiovisual gating task) showed that, under simplified processing circumstances, gesture cues allowed earlier identification of intended targets. Experiment 2 (eye tracking) explored whether this facilitation is found in real-time comprehension, and whether attention to gesture information is influenced by the acoustic environment (quiet vs. background noise). Measures of gaze position showed that although the speaker's gesturing hand was rarely fixated directly, gestures did facilitate comprehension, particularly when the target object was smaller relative to alternatives. The magnitude of the gesture effect was greater in quiet than in noise, suggesting that the latter did not provoke listeners to increase attention to gesture to compensate for the challenging auditory signal. Together, the findings clarify how situational factors influence listeners' attention to visual information during real-time comprehension. |
Raheleh Saryazdi; Joanne Nuque; Craig G. Chambers Pragmatic inferences in aging and human-robot communication Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 223, pp. 1–12, 2022. @article{Saryazdi2022a, Despite the increase in research on older adults' communicative behavior, little work has explored patterns of age-related change in pragmatic inferencing and how these patterns are adapted depending on the situation-specific context. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants followed instructions like “Click on the greenhouse”, which were either played over speakers or spoken live by a co-present robot partner. Implicit inferential processes were measured by exploring the extent to which listeners temporarily (mis)understood the unfolding noun to be a modified phrase referring to a competitor object in the display (green hat). This competitor was accompanied by either another member of the same category or an unrelated item (tan hat vs. dice). Experiment 1 (no robot) showed clear evidence of contrastive inferencing in both younger and older adults (more looks to the green hat when the tan hat was also present). Experiment 2 explored the ability to suppress these contrastive inferences when the robot talker was known to lack any color perception, making descriptions like “green hat” implausible. Younger but not older listeners were able to suppress contrastive inferences in this context, suggesting older adults could not keep the relevant limitations in mind and/or were more likely to spontaneously ascribe human attributes to the robot. Together, the findings enhance our understanding of pragmatic inferencing in aging. |
Olivera Savic; Layla Unger; Vladimir M. Sloutsky Exposure to co-occurrence regularities in language drives semantic integration of new words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 48, no. 7, pp. 1064–1081, 2022. @article{Savic2022, Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between apple, juicy, and pear. These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become integrated into our semantic networks? Here, we investigated whether humans integrate new words by harnessing simple statistical regularities of word use in language, including: (a) Direct co-occurrence (e.g., eat-apple) and (b) Shared co-occurrence (e.g., apple and pear both co-occur with eat). In four reported experiments (N = 139), semantic priming (Experiments 1–3) and eye-tracking (Experiment 4) paradigms revealed that new words became linked to familiar words following exposure to sentences in which they either directly co-occurred, or shared co-occurrence. This finding highlights a potentially key role for co-occurrence in building organized word knowledge that is fundamental to our unique fluency with language. |
Karly M. Schleicher; Ana I. Schwartz Bilingual discourse comprehension: The role of language overlap in updating the discourse representation Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 184–208, 2022. @article{Schleicher2022, In the present study we examined whether overlap in language across texts influences the integration of information into a coherent discourse representation for bilingual readers. Across two experiments highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals read pairs of expository passages describing two fictional science facts while their eye-movements were monitored. One of the facts was revised in the second passage, requiring a discourse updating. The language of the two passages and follow-up questions was fully crossed. Accuracy was lower for questions pertaining to revised facts when the second passage was in the second language (L2). This cost was exacerbated when the first passage was in the dominant language, suggesting strong interference from the representation of the first passage which impeded updating the discourse model in the L2. This interference was eliminated in Experiment 2 when second passages were written based on a refutation-style text structure. Analyses of reading times on the pseudo-terms before and after the revised fact was stated indicated that the previous version of the fact was reactivated and interfered with processing. This interference was similar regardless of whether passages were written in the same or different languages. |
Judith Schlenter; Yulia Esaulova; Sarah Dolscheid; Martina Penke Ambiguity in case marking does not affect the description of transitive events in German: Evidence from sentence production and eye-tracking Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 7, pp. 844–865, 2022. @article{Schlenter2022, The current study examined how German speakers described a scene where an agent acts upon a patient when the patient of the event was cued (a red dot preceding the patient, Experiment 1 vs. preview of the patient, Experiment 2). Prior research has shown that effects of attention manipulation on syntactic choice display cross-linguistic variation with notable differences between languages that have morphological case marking on noun phrases and English that lacks such marking. Since in German nominative subject case and accusative object case are unambiguously marked on masculine nouns but not on feminine nouns, it provides the ideal testing ground to investigate how case marking affects sentence production. Our results did not reveal any effect of case marking although the different types of attention manipulation were effective. Moreover, the eye-gaze data revealed that German speakers applied the same sentence-planning strategy for both masculine nouns (unambiguous) and feminine nouns (ambiguous). |
Merel C. J. Scholman; Liam Blything; Kate Cain; Jet Hoek; Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul Discourse rules: The effects of clause order principles on the reading process Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 10, pp. 1277–1291, 2022. @article{Scholman2022, In an eye-tracking-while-reading study, we investigated adult monolinguals' (N = 80) processing of two-clause sentences embedded in short narratives. Three principles theorised to guide comprehension of complex sentences were contrasted: one operating at the clause level, namely clause structure (main clause–subordinate clause or vice versa), and two operating at the discourse-level, namely givenness (given-new vs. new-given) and event order (chronological vs. reverse order). The results indicate that clause structure mainly affects early stages of processing, whereas the two principles operating at the discourse level are more important during later stages and for reading times of the entire sentence. Event order was found to operate relatively independently of the other principles. Givenness was found to overrule clause structure, a phenomenon that can be related to the grounding function of preposed subordinate clauses. We propose a new principle to reflect this interaction effect: the grounding principle. |
Marco S. G. Senaldi; Debra A. Titone Less direct, more analytical: Eye-movement measures of L2 idiom reading Journal Article In: Languages, vol. 7, pp. 1–26, 2022. @article{Senaldi2022, Idioms (e.g., break the ice, spill the beans) are ubiquitous multiword units that are often semantically non-compositional. Psycholinguistic data suggests that L1 readers process idioms in a hybrid fashion, with early comprehension facilitated by direct retrieval, and later comprehension inhibited by factors promoting compositional parsing (e.g., semantic decomposability). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the role of direct retrieval and compositional analysis when idioms are read naturally in sentences in an L2. Thus, French–English bilingual adults with French as their L1 were tested using English sentences. For idioms in canonical form, Experiment 1 showed that prospective verb-related decomposability and retrospective noun-related decomposability guided L2 readers towards bottom-up figurative meaning access over different time courses. Direct retrieval played a lesser role, and was mediated by the availability of a congruent “cognate” idiom in the readers' L1. Next, Experiment 2 included idioms where direct retrieval was disrupted by a phrase-final language switch into French (e.g., break the glace, spill the fèves). Switched idioms were read comparably to switched literal phrases at early stages, but were penalized at later stages. These results collectively suggest that L2 idiom processing is mostly compositional, with direct retrieval playing a lesser role in figurative meaning comprehension. |
Marco S. G. Senaldi; Junyan Wei; Jason W. Gullifer; Debra Titone Scratching your tête over language-switched idioms: Evidence from eye-movement measures of reading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 1230–1256, 2022. @article{Senaldi2022a, Idioms are semantically non-compositional multiword units whose meanings often go beyond literal interpretations of their component words (e.g., break the ice, kick the bucket, spill the beans). According to hybrid models of idiom processing, idioms are subject to both direct retrieval from the lexicon in early stages of processing, and word-by-word compositional reanalysis in later stages of comprehension. However, a less clear aspect is how disrupting an idiom's canonical form, and thus its direct retrieval, impacts the time course of comprehension. In this eye-tracking reading study, healthy English-French bilingual adults with English as their dominant language read sentences containing English idioms in their canonical form (e.g., break the ice), or in a switched form where the phrase-final noun was translated into French (e.g., break the glace). Thus, within this manipulation, momentary language switches modified the canonical form of idioms, while at the same time minimally altering the semantics of their component words, thus nudging readers towards a compositional processing route. Analyses of eye-movement data revealed switching costs in longer reading times at early (but not late) processing stages for idioms compared to matched literal phrases. Interestingly, the cost of language switching was attenuated by the availability of a translationally equivalent idiom in the non-target language (French, e.g., briser la glace). Taken together, these results suggest that direct retrieval is the preferential route in the comprehension of idioms' canonical forms, which acts as an effective repair strategy by the language-processing system when recovering the underlying form of modified idioms. |
Adi Shechter; Ronen Hershman; David L. Share A pupillometric study of developmental and individual differences in cognitive effort in visual word recognition Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1–7, 2022. @article{Shechter2022, Throughout the history of modern psychology, the neural basis of cognitive performance, and particularly its efficiency, has been assumed to be an essential determinant of developmental and individual differences in a wide range of human behaviors. Here, we examine one aspect of cognitive efficiency—cognitive effort, using pupillometry to examine differences in word reading among adults (N = 34) and children (N = 34). The developmental analyses confirmed that children invested more effort in reading than adults, as indicated by larger and sustained pupillary responses. The within-age (individual difference) analyses comparing faster (N = 10) and slower (N = 10) performers revealed that in both age groups, the faster readers demonstrated accelerated pupillary responses compared to slower readers, although both groups invested a similar overall degree of cognitive effort. These findings have the potential to open up new avenues of research in the study of skill growth in word recognition and many other domains of skill learning. |
Jing Shen; Laura P. Fitzgerald; Erin R. Kulick Interactions between acoustic challenges and processing depth in speech perception as measured by task-evoked pupil response Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, pp. 1–13, 2022. @article{Shen2022, Speech perception under adverse conditions is a multistage process involving a dynamic interplay among acoustic, cognitive, and linguistic factors. Nevertheless, prior research has primarily focused on factors within this complex system in isolation. The primary goal of the present study was to examine the interaction between processing depth and the acoustic challenge of noise and its effect on processing effort during speech perception in noise. Two tasks were used to represent different depths of processing. The speech recognition task involved repeating back a sentence after auditory presentation (higher-level processing), while the tiredness judgment task entailed a subjective judgment of whether the speaker sounded tired (lower-level processing). The secondary goal of the study was to investigate whether pupil response to alteration of dynamic pitch cues stems from difficult linguistic processing of speech content in noise or a perceptual novelty effect due to the unnatural pitch contours. Task-evoked peak pupil response from two groups of younger adult participants with typical hearing was measured in two experiments. Both tasks (speech recognition and tiredness judgment) were implemented in both experiments, and stimuli were presented with background noise in Experiment 1 and without noise in Experiment 2. Increased peak pupil dilation was associated with deeper processing (i.e., the speech recognition task), particularly in the presence of background noise. Importantly, there is a non-additive interaction between noise and task, as demonstrated by the heightened peak pupil dilation to noise in the speech recognition task as compared to in the tiredness judgment task. Additionally, peak pupil dilation data suggest dynamic pitch alteration induced an increased perceptual novelty effect rather than reflecting effortful linguistic processing of the speech content in noise. These findings extend current theories of speech perception under adverse conditions by demonstrating that the level of processing effort expended by a listener is influenced by the interaction between acoustic challenges and depth of linguistic processing. The study also provides a foundation for future work to investigate the effects of this complex interaction in clinical populations who experience both hearing and cognitive challenges. |
Noam Siegelman; Sascha Schroeder; Cengiz Acartürk; Hee Don Ahn; Svetlana Alexeeva; Simona Amenta; Raymond Bertram; Rolando Bonandrini; Marc Brysbaert; Daria Chernova; Sara Maria Da Fonseca; Nicolas Dirix; Wouter Duyck; Argyro Fella; Ram Frost; Carolina A. Gattei; Areti Kalaitzi; Nayoung Kwon; Kaidi Lõo; Marco Marelli; Timothy C. Papadopoulos; Athanassios Protopapas; Satu Savo; Diego E. Shalom; Natalia Slioussar; Roni Stein; Longjiao Sui; Analí Taboh; Veronica Tønnesen; Kerem Alp Usal; Victor Kuperman Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO) Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 54, pp. 2843–2863, 2022. @article{Siegelman2022, Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading behavior that are shared and those that vary systematically across languages through an investigation of eye-tracking data from 13 languages recorded during text reading. We begin with reporting a bibliometric analysis of eye-tracking studies showing that the current empirical base is insufficient for cross-linguistic comparisons. We respond to this empirical lacuna by presenting the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO), the product of an international multi-lab collaboration. We examine which behavioral indices differentiate between reading in written languages, and which measures are stable across languages. One of the findings is that readers of different languages vary considerably in their skipping rate (i.e., the likelihood of not fixating on a word even once) and that this variability is explained by cross-linguistic differences in word length distributions. In contrast, if readers do not skip a word, they tend to spend a similar average time viewing it. We outline the implications of these findings for theories of reading. We also describe prospective uses of the publicly available MECO data, and its further development plans. |
Francis X. Smith; Bob McMurray Lexical access changes based on listener needs: Real-time word recognition in continuous speech in cochlear implant users Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 1487–1501, 2022. @article{Smith2022, Objectives: A key challenge in word recognition is the temporary ambiguity created by the fact that speech unfolds over time. In normal hearing (NH) listeners, this temporary ambiguity is resolved through incremental processing and competition among lexical candidates. Post-lingually deafened cochlear implant (CI) users show similar incremental processing and competition but with slight delays. However, even brief delays could lead to drastic changes when compounded across multiple words in a phrase. This study asks whether words presented in non-informative continuous speech (a carrier phrase) are processed differently than in isolation and whether NH listeners and CI users exhibit different effects of a carrier phrase. Design: In a Visual World Paradigm experiment, listeners heard words either in isolation or in non-informative carrier phrases (e.g., "click on the."). Listeners selected the picture corresponding to the target word from among four items including the target word (e.g., mustard), a cohort competitor (e.g., mustache), a rhyme competitor (e.g., custard), and an unrelated item (e.g., penguin). Eye movements were tracked as an index of the relative activation of each lexical candidate as competition unfolds over the course of word recognition. Participants included 21 post-lingually deafened cochlear implant users and 21 NH controls. A replication experiment presented in the Supplemental Digital Content, http://links.lww.com/EANDH/A999 included an additional 22 post-lingually deafened CI users and 18 NH controls. Results: Both CI users and the NH controls were accurate at recognizing the words both in continuous speech and in isolation. The time course of lexical activation (indexed by the fixations) differed substantially between groups. CI users were delayed in fixating the target relative to NH controls. Additionally, CI users showed less competition from cohorts than NH controls (even as previous studies have often report increased competition). However, CI users took longer to suppress the cohort and suppressed it less fully than the NH controls. For both CI users and NH controls, embedding words in carrier phrases led to more immediacy in lexical access as observed by increases in cohort competition relative to when words were presented in isolation. However, CI users were not differentially affected by the carriers. Conclusions: Unlike prior work, CI users appeared to exhibit "wait-and-see" profile, in which lexical access is delayed minimizing early competition. However, CI users simultaneously sustained competitor activation late in the trial, possibly to preserve flexibility. This hybrid profile has not been observed previously. When target words are heard in continuous speech, both CI users and NH controls more heavily weight early information. However, CI users (but not NH listeners) also commit less fully to the target, potentially keeping options open if they need to recover from a misperception. This mix of patterns reflects a lexical system that is extremely flexible and adapts to fit the needs of a listener. |
Joshua Snell; Tom Kempen; Christian N. L. Olivers Multi-res: An interface for improving reading without central vision Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 201, pp. 1–7, 2022. @article{Snell2022, Loss of sharp foveal vision, as is inherent to Macular Degeneration (MD), severely impacts reading. One strategy for preserving patients' reading ability involves a one-by-one serial visual presentation (SVP) of words, whereby words are viewed extrafoveally. However, the method is limited as patients often retain the natural tendency to foveate words, thus bringing those words in the scotomal region. Additionally, SVP offers no compensation for the fact that orthographic input is degraded outside the fovea. Addressing these issues, here we tested a novel interface wherein texts are presented word-by-word, but with multiple repetitions (Multi-Res) of each word being displayed simultaneously around the fovea. We hypothesized that the Multi-Res setup would lead readers to make fewer detrimental eye movements, and to recognize words faster as a consequence of multiplied orthographic input. We used eye-tracking to simulate a gaze-contingent foveal scotoma in normally-sighted participants, who read words either in classic SVP or in Multi-Res mode. In line with our hypotheses, reading was drastically better in the Multi-Res condition, with faster recognition, fewer saccades and increased oculomotor stability. We surmise that the Multi-Res method has good potential for improving reading in central vision loss, over and above classic SVP techniques. |
Myeongeun Son; Jongbong Lee; Aline Godfroid Attention to form and meaning revisited: Insights from eye tracking Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 1–30, 2022. @article{Son2022, Motivated by a series of interconnected studies on simultaneous attention to form and meaning, we revisit L2 learners' real-time processing of text by using eye-tracking as an unobtrusive method to provide concurrent data on attention allocation. Seventy-five L2 Spanish learners were instructed to attend to an assigned form in a reading passage and to press a button when they noticed it. After reading the passage, the learners answered 10 multiple-choice comprehension questions. The participants' responses to the comprehension questions and their reading behaviors reflected in eye-movement data suggest that attention to grammatical form may hinder L2 learners' simultaneous attention to form and meaning. However, individual differences in global text processing contributed to the differences in the participants' text-comprehension scores over and above the task instruction to attend to form: Slower L2 readers who read the passage more carefully showed better text comprehension. |
Suhad Sonbul; Dina Abdel Salam El-Dakhs; Kathy Conklin; Gareth Carrol “Bread and butter” or “butter and bread”? Nonnatives' processing of novel lexical patterns in context Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, pp. 1–23, 2022. @article{Sonbul2022, Little is known about how nonnative speakers process novel language patterns in the input they encounter. The present study examines whether nonnatives develop a sensitivity to novel binomials and their ordering preference from context. Thirty-nine nonnative speakers of English (L1 Arabic) read three short stories seeded with existing binomials ( black and white ) and novel ones ( bags and coats ) while their eye movements were monitored. The existing binomials appeared once in their forward (conventional) form and once in their reversed form. The novel binomials appeared in their experimentally defined forward form in different frequency conditions (two vs. four encounters) and once in the reversed form. Results showed no advantage for existing binomials over their reversed forms. For the novel binomials, the nonnative speakers read subsequent encounters significantly faster than initial ones for both frequency conditions. More importantly, the final reversed form also led to faster reading, suggesting that L2 speakers process the reversed form of a novel binomial as another encounter, ignoring the established order. |
Kaiyan Song; Hui Chang; Yuxia Wang Processing of Chinese base‑generated‑topic sentences by L1‑Korean speakers: An eye‑tracking study Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 12, pp. 1–18, 2022. @article{Song2022, According to the shallow structure hypothesis (SSH), adult L2 learners rely more on lexical‑semantic and pragmatic information but less so on syntactic information in online language processing, ending up with shallower syntactic representation. To test the SSH, we conducted an eye‑tracking experiment on L1‑Korean L2‑Chinese learners with native Chinese speakers as the baseline, investigating their processing of Chinese base‑generated‑topic sentences (BGT). The results show that both the intermediate and advanced Korean learners of Chinese are sensitive to and can make use of syntactic information, but only the advanced learners are sensitive to the semantic constraint when processing Chinese BGT sentences, providing evidence against the SSH. |
Thomas St. Pierre; Jean Pierre Koenig When one speaker's broccoli is another speaker's cauliflower: The real-time processing of multiple speaker vocabularies Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 9, pp. 1131–1152, 2022. @article{St.Pierre2022, Once interlocutors settle on a specific label in conversation, they tend to maintain the linguistic precedent and reuse the same label (i.e. they become lexically entrained). This helps to facilitate comprehension, with listeners identifying referents more quickly when repeated labels are used compared to new labels. In the current study, we looked at whether listeners are additionally sensitive to repeated infelicitous labels (Experiment 1), as when non-native speakers, for example, overgeneralise a term (e.g. identifying a chair as the chair with tires). In addition, we investigated the extent to which listeners' expectations of incorrect labels are influenced by knowledge of community speaking patterns, testing whether listeners could disregard recently encountered lexical errors from a non-native speaker as possible labels when processing a native speaker, who should not be expected to produce such errors (Experiment 2). Our results provide no evidence that listeners were able to take into account speaker information. |
Zoey Stark; Léon Franzen; Aaron P. Johnson Insights from a dyslexia simulation font: Can we simulate reading struggles of individuals with dyslexia? Journal Article In: Dyslexia, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 228–243, 2022. @article{Stark2022, Individuals with dyslexia struggle at explaining what it is like to have dyslexia and how they perceive letters and words differently. This led the designer Daniel Britton to create a font that aims to simulate the perceptual experience of how effortful reading can be for individuals with dyslexia (http://danielbritton.info/dyslexia). This font removes forty percent of each character stroke with the aim of increasing reading effort, and in turn empathy and understanding for individuals with dyslexia. However, its efficacy has not yet been empirically tested. In the present study, we compared participants without dyslexia reading texts in the dyslexia simulation font to a group of individuals with dyslexia reading the same texts in Times New Roman font. Results suggest that the simulation font amplifies the struggle of reading, surpassing that experienced by adults with dyslexia—as reflected in increased reading time and overall number of eye movements in the majority of typical readers reading in the simulation font. Future research could compare the performance of the Daniel Britton simulation font against a sample of beginning readers with dyslexia as well as seek to design and empirically test an adapted simulation font with an increased preserved percentage of letter strokes. |
Silvia Primativo; Danila Rusich; Marialuisa Martelli; Lisa S. Arduino The timing of semantic processing in the parafovea: Evidence from a rapid parallel visual presentation study Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 12, no. 11, pp. 1–12, 2022. @article{Primativo2022, In the present investigation we adopted the Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Paradigm with the aim of studying the timing of parafoveal semantic processing. The paradigm consisted in the simultaneous presentation of couple of words, one in fovea (W1) and one in parafovea (W2). In three experiments, we manipulated word frequency, semantic relatedness between the two words and the effect of stimulus duration (150, 100, 50 ms). Accuracy on W2 was higher when W1 and W2 were both of high-frequency and when they were semantically related. W1 reading times were faster when both words were highly-frequent but only when the two words were semantically related (150 ms); when W2 was highly frequent and semantically related to the foveal word (100 ms). When the stimuli were presented for 50 ms, the reading times were reduced when W1 was highly frequent and, crucially, in case of a semantic relation between the two words. Our results suggest that it is possible to extract semantic information from the parafovea very fast (within 100 ms) and in parallel to the processing of the foveal word, especially when the cognitive load required for the latter is reduced, as is the case for high-frequency words. We discuss the resulting data in terms of word recognition and eye movements' models. |
Cecilia Puebla; Claudia Felser Discourse prominence and antecedent mis-retrieval during native and non-native pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Discours, no. 29, pp. 1–29, 2022. @article{Puebla2022, Previous studies on non-native (L2) anaphor resolution suggest that L2 comprehenders are guided more strongly by discourse-level cues compared to native (L1) comprehenders. Here we examine whether and how a grammatically inappropriate antecedent's discourse status affects the likelihood of it being considered during L1 and L2 pronoun resolution. We used an interference paradigm to examine how the extrasentential discourse impacts the resolution of German object pronouns. In an eye-tracking-during-reading experiment we examined whether an elaborated local antecedent ruled out by binding Condition B would be mis-retrieved during pronoun resolution, and whether initially introducing this antecedent as the discourse topic would affect the chances of it being mis-retrieved. While both participant groups rejected the inappropriate antecedent in an offline questionnaire irre-spective of its discourse prominence, their real-time processing patterns differed. L1 speakers initially mis-retrieved the inappropriate antecedent regardless of its contextual prominence. L1 Russian/L2 German speakers, in contrast, were affected by the antecedent's discourse status, considering it only when it was discourse-new but not when it had previously been introduced as the discourse topic. Our findings show that L2 comprehenders are highly sensitive to discourse dynamics such as topic shifts, supporting the claim that discourse-level cues are more strongly weighted during L2 compared to L1 processing. |
Tianying Qing; Ying Xiao; Huidong Xue; Wei Wang; Ming Ye; Jing Hu; Licheng Xue; Bing Chen; Yating Lv; Jing Zhao Development of attentional bias towards visual word forms in the environment in preschool children Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 214–227, 2022. @article{Qing2022, Environmental prints (e.g., the name “Mcdonald's” on advertising boards) provide a visual environment rich in written words at the early stage of learning to read. Children's attention to words is closely related to the process of learning to read. However, what remains unclear is how children's attention to words in environmental prints develops and is related to their reading ability before conventional reading training begins. Using the eye-tracking technique, the present study examined the early development of attention to words in environmental prints. Four-, five-, and six-year-old preschool children were tested. We transformed the original format of each environmental print into three versions with gradually minimized contextual cues (i.e., colour, logo, and font type). The results showed that attentional bias towards words increases with age even before conventional reading training. Moreover, it appears that a rapid increase occurs between the ages of four and five. The logo cue (rather than colour cue or font type cue) has a salient effect on the attentional bias towards words. Attentional bias towards words is increased with children's reading ability. |
Katerina Eleonora K. Rassia; Konstantinos Moutoussis; John S. Pezaris Reading text works better than watching videos to improve acuity in a simulation of artificial vision Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2022. @article{Rassia2022, Simulated artificial vision is used in visual prosthesis design to answer questions about device usability. We previously reported a striking increase in equivalent visual acuity with daily use of a simulation of artificial vision in an active task, reading sentences, that required high levels of subject engagement, but passive activities are more likely to dominate post-implant experience. Here, we investigated the longitudinal effects of a passive task, watching videos. Eight subjects used a simulation of a thalamic visual prosthesis with 1000 phosphenes to watch 23 episodes of classic American television in daily, 25-min sessions, for a period of 1 month with interspersed reading tests that quantified reading accuracy and reading speed. For reading accuracy, we found similar dynamics to the early part of the learning process in our previous report, here leading to an improvement in visual acuity of 0.15 ± 0.05 logMAR. For reading speed, however, no change was apparent by the end of training. We found that single reading sessions drove about twice the improvement in acuity of single video sessions despite being only half as long. We conclude that while passive viewing tasks may prove useful for post-implant rehabilitation, active tasks are likely to be preferable. |
Ileana Ratiu; Schea Fissel-Brannick; Miyka Whiting; Lindsay Murnion; Tamiko Azuma The impact of mild traumatic brain injury on reading comprehension and eye movements: preliminary results Journal Article In: Journal of Communication Disorders, vol. 96, pp. 1–18, 2022. @article{Ratiu2022, Introduction: Individuals who sustain a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) can suffer from executive function, working memory, and attention deficits, which can impact functional task performance, including reading comprehension. Individuals with mTBI commonly report reading difficulties, but such difficulties have been historically difficult to capture using behavioral measures. The current study examined reading performance in those with and without mTBI using eye-tracking measures, which may be more sensitive to reading impairment in mTBI. Method/Results: In Experiment 1, 26 participants with a history of mTBI and 26 healthy control participants completed working memory (WM) and reading comprehension tasks. We found no differences in behavioral measures but found that spontaneous eye-blinking frequency was lower during the reading task in the mTBI group. In Experiment 2, we explored the impact of auditory distraction (e.g., multi-talker babble) on reading and memory performance. Twenty-three new participants with a history of mTBI and 26 healthy control participants completed a short-term memory (STM) task, a WM task, and a reading comprehension task under two distraction conditions. As in Experiment 1, we found no differences on behavioral measures, but observed significant differences on spontaneous eye-blinking frequency between those with and without mTBI. Group differences in distraction effects were also observed and performance on the WM task predicted reading comprehension performance. Conclusions: The lack of differences on behavioral measures between groups, but lower frequencies of spontaneous eye blinking in the mTBI group suggests that while these individuals successfully completed the reading comprehension task, they may require more cognitive resources to do so. |
Theresa Redl; Agnieszka Szuba; Peter Swart; Stefan L. Frank; Helen Hoop Masculine generic pronouns as a gender cue in generic statements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 59, no. 10, pp. 828–845, 2022. @article{Redl2022, An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with speakers of Dutch (N = 84, 36 male), a language that falls between grammatical and natural-gender languages. We tested whether a masculine generic pronoun causes a male bias when used in generic statements—that is, in the absence of a specific referent. We tested two types of generic statements by varying conceptual number, hypothesizing that the pronoun zijn “his” was more likely to cause a male bias with a conceptually singular than a conceptually plural antecedent (e.g., Someone (conceptually singular)/Everyone (conceptually plural) with perfect pitch can tune his instrument quickly). We found male participants to exhibit a male bias but with the conceptually singular antecedent only. Female participants showed no signs of a male bias. The results show that the generically intended masculine pronoun zijn “his” leads to a male bias in conceptually singular generic contexts but that this further depends on participant gender. |
Johannes Rennig; Michael S. Beauchamp Intelligibility of audiovisual sentences drives multivoxel response patterns in human superior temporal cortex Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 247, pp. 1–9, 2022. @article{Rennig2022, Regions of the human posterior superior temporal gyrus and sulcus (pSTG/S) respond to the visual mouth movements that constitute visual speech and the auditory vocalizations that constitute auditory speech, and neural responses in pSTG/S may underlie the perceptual benefit of visual speech for the comprehension of noisy auditory speech. We examined this possibility through the lens of multivoxel pattern responses in pSTG/S. BOLD fMRI data was collected from 22 participants presented with speech consisting of English sentences presented in five different formats: visual-only; auditory with and without added auditory noise; and audiovisual with and without auditory noise. Participants reported the intelligibility of each sentence with a button press and trials were sorted post-hoc into those that were more or less intelligible. Response patterns were measured in regions of the pSTG/S identified with an independent localizer. Noisy audiovisual sentences with very similar physical properties evoked very different response patterns depending on their intelligibility. When a noisy audiovisual sentence was reported as intelligible, the pattern was nearly identical to that elicited by clear audiovisual sentences. In contrast, an unintelligible noisy audiovisual sentence evoked a pattern like that of visual-only sentences. This effect was less pronounced for noisy auditory-only sentences, which evoked similar response patterns regardless of intelligibility. The successful integration of visual and auditory speech produces a characteristic neural signature in pSTG/S, highlighting the importance of this region in generating the perceptual benefit of visual speech. |
Tracy Reuter; Mia Sullivan; Casey Lew-Williams Look at that: Spatial deixis reveals experience-related differences in prediction Journal Article In: Language Acquisition, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 1–26, 2022. @article{Reuter2022, Prediction-based theories posit that interlocutors use prediction to process language efficiently and to coordinate dialogue. The present study evaluated whether listeners can use spatial deixis (i.e., this, that, these, and those) to predict the plurality and proximity of a speaker's upcoming referent. In two eye-tracking experiments with varying referential complexity (N = 168), native English-speaking adults, native English-learning 5-year-olds, and nonnative English-learning adults viewed images while listening to sentences with or without informative deictic determiners, e.g., Look at the/this/that/these/those wonderful cookie(s). Results showed that all groups successfully exploited plurality information. However, they varied in using deixis to anticipate the proximity of the referent; specifically, L1 adults showed more robust prediction than L2 adults, and L1 children did not show evidence of prediction. By evaluating listeners with varied language experiences, this investigation helps refine proposed mechanisms of prediction and suggests that linguistic experience is key to the development of such mechanisms. |
Krista Rich; Grant Eckstein; Ethan Lynn Reading rate gain in a second language: The effect of unassisted repeated reading and intensity on word-level reading measures Journal Article In: The Reading Matrix, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 2022. @article{Rich2022, Repeated reading is a popular intervention used to help struggling readers by exposing them to the same text multiple times. While the approach has been effective in L1 and some EFL settings, little research has explored its effectiveness compared against a control group or among ESL learners. Our study examined reading rate gains using words per minute and four eye-tracking measures with 46 mid-intermediate ESL learners grouped into three 14-week treatment groups: a control group that read 26 text passages (about two per week) just once through, another that read the same passages twice in each sitting, and a third that read the passages three times per sitting. Data collection on unfamiliar reading passages took place at 7-week intervals. While results indicated no significant difference among the groups, reading rate did improve significantly in all measures within the first seven weeks but tapered off in the final seven weeks. Eye-tracking measures revealed that readers made fewer regressions and skipped fewer words but gazed at words for less time by week 7, a finding that suggests reading fluency interventions helped students become more fluent readers. While these findings corroborate previous L1 and EFL research and provide support for the efficacy of reading fluency intervention, more research is needed to understand specific contexts in which repeated reading is most efficacious. |
Paula Ríos-López; Andreas Widmann; Aurélie Bidet-Caulet; Nicole Wetzel The effect of background speech on attentive sound processing: A pupil dilation study Journal Article In: International Journal of Psychophysiology, vol. 174, pp. 47–56, 2022. @article{RiosLopez2022, Listening to task-irrelevant speech while performing a cognitive task can involuntarily deviate our attention and lead to decreases in performance. One explanation for the impairing effect of irrelevant speech is that semantic processing can consume attentional resources. In the present study, we tested this assumption by measuring performance in a non-linguistic attentional task while participants were exposed to meaningful (native) and non-meaningful (foreign) speech. Moreover, based on the tight relation between pupillometry and attentional processes, we also registered changes in pupil diameter size to quantify the effect of meaningfulness upon attentional allocation. To these aims, we recruited 41 native German speakers who had neither received formal instruction in French nor had extensive informal contact with this language. The focal task consisted of an auditory oddball task. Participants performed a duration discrimination task containing frequently repeated standard sounds and rarely presented deviant sounds while a story was read in German or (non-meaningful) French in the background. Our results revealed that, whereas effects of language meaningfulness on attention were not detectable at the behavioural level, participants' pupil dilated more in response to the sounds of the auditory task when background speech was played in non-meaningful French compared to German, independent of sound type. In line with the initial hypothesis, this suggested that semantic processing of the native language required attentional resources, which lead to fewer resources devoted to the processing of the sounds of the focal task. Our results highlight the potential of the pupil dilation response for the investigation of subtle cognitive processes that might not surface when only behaviour is measured. |
Kelly C. Roth; Kenna R. H. Clayton; Greg D. Reynolds Infant selective attention to native and non-native audiovisual speech Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2022. @article{Roth2022, The current study utilized eye-tracking to investigate the effects of intersensory redundancy and language on infant visual attention and detection of a change in prosody in audiovisual speech. Twelve-month-old monolingual English-learning infants viewed either synchronous (redundant) or asynchronous (non-redundant) presentations of a woman speaking in native or non-native speech. Halfway through each trial, the speaker changed prosody from infant-directed speech (IDS) to adult-directed speech (ADS) or vice versa. Infants focused more on the mouth of the speaker on IDS trials compared to ADS trials regardless of language or intersensory redundancy. Additionally, infants demonstrated greater detection of prosody changes from IDS speech to ADS speech in native speech. Planned comparisons indicated that infants detected prosody changes across a broader range of conditions during redundant stimulus presentations. These findings shed light on the influence of language and prosody on infant attention and highlight the complexity of audiovisual speech processing in infancy. |
Nuria Sagarra; Nicole Rodriguez Subject-verb number agreement in bilingual processing: (Lack of) age of acquisition and proficiency effects Journal Article In: Languages, vol. 7, pp. 1–22, 2022. @article{Sagarra2022, Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition. |
Drew J. McLaughlin; Maggie E. Zink; Lauren Gaunt; Brent Spehar; Kristin J. Van Engen; Mitchell S. Sommers; Jonathan E. Peelle Pupillometry reveals cognitive demands of lexical competition during spoken word recognition in young and older adults Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2022. @article{McLaughlin2022, In most contemporary activation-competition frameworks for spoken word recognition, candidate words compete against phonological “neighbors” with similar acoustic properties (e.g., “cap” vs. “cat”). Thus, recognizing words with more competitors should come at a greater cognitive cost relative to recognizing words with fewer competitors, due to increased demands for selecting the correct item and inhibiting incorrect candidates. Importantly, these processes should operate even in the absence of differences in accuracy. In the present study, we tested this proposal by examining differences in processing costs associated with neighborhood density for highly intelligible items presented in quiet. A second goal was to examine whether the cognitive demands associated with increased neighborhood density were greater for older adults compared with young adults. Using pupillometry as an index of cognitive processing load, we compared the cognitive demands associated with spoken word recognition for words with many or fewer neighbors, presented in quiet, for young (n = 67) and older (n = 69) adult listeners. Growth curve analysis of the pupil data indicated that older adults showed a greater evoked pupil response for spoken words than did young adults, consistent with increased cognitive load during spoken word recognition. Words from dense neighborhoods were marginally more demanding to process than words from sparse neighborhoods. There was also an interaction between age and neighborhood density, indicating larger effects of density in young adult listeners. These results highlight the importance of assessing both cognitive demands and accuracy when investigating the mechanisms underlying spoken word recognition. |
Johannes M. Meixner; Jessie S. Nixon; Jochen Laubrock; Johannes M. Meixner; Jessie S. Nixon; Jochen Laubrock The perceptual span is dynamically adjusted in response to foveal load by beginning readers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 151, no. 6, pp. 1219–1232, 2022. @article{Meixner2022, The perceptual span describes the size of the visual field from which information is obtained during a fixation in reading. Its size depends on characteristics of writing system and reader, but-according to the foveal load hypothesis-it is also adjusted dynamically as a function of lexical processing difficulty. Using the moving window paradigm to manipulate the amount of preview, here we directly test whether the perceptual span shrinks as foveal word difficulty increases. We computed the momentary size of the span from word-based eye-movement measures as a function of foveal word frequency, allowing us to separately describe the perceptual span for information affecting spatial saccade targeting and temporal saccade execution. First fixation duration and gaze duration on the upcoming (parafoveal) word N + 1 were significantly shorter when the current (foveal) word N was more frequent. We show that the word frequency effect is modulated by window size. Fixation durations on word N + 1 decreased with high-frequency words N, but only for large windows, that is, when sufficient parafoveal preview was available. This provides strong support for the foveal load hypothesis. To investigate the development of the foveal load effect, we analyzed data from three waves of a longitudinal study on the perceptual span with German children in Grades 1 to 6. Perceptual span adjustment emerged early in development at around second grade and remained stable in later grades. We conclude that the local modulation of the perceptual span indicates a general cognitive process, perhaps an attentional gradient with rapid readjustment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved). |
Rita Mendonça; Margarida V. Garrido; Gün R. Semin Two cultural processing asymmetries drive spatial attention Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 46, no. 8, pp. 1–24, 2022. @article{Mendonca2022, Cultural routines, such as reading and writing direction (script direction), channel attention orientation. Depending on one's native language habit, attention is biased from left-to-right (LR) or from right-to-left (RL). Here, we further document this bias, as it interacts with the spatial directionality that grounds time concepts. We used a spatial cueing task to test whether script direction and the grounding of time in Portuguese (LR, Exp. 1) and Arabic (RL, Exp. 2) shape visuomotor performance in target discrimination. Temporal words (e.g., tomorrow, yesterday) were presented as cues in two modalities: visual (Exp. 1–2) and auditory (Exp. 1). Gaze movement (Exp. 1) and speed of discrimination decisions (Exp. 1–2) of targets presented to the left or right sides of the screen were assessed. As predicted, the interaction between target location and time concepts was significant across both modalities and linguistic communities. Additionally, LR participants detected the target on the right side of the screen faster after a future word than the target on the left side of the screen after a past word cue. In contrast, RL participants detected the target on the left side of the screen faster when the cue word was a future word than the target on the right side of the screen cued by a past word. In both modalities, the initial eye-gaze movement (Exp. 1) was responsive to the cue's time referent, further confirming that time orients attention. An additional bias was observed for the first fixation onset, which landed earlier on the target set that matched habitualized spatial routines. We conclude that scanning regularities are shaped by writing habits and bodily grounded categorical features. |
Pablo Oyarzo; David D. Preiss; Diego Cosmelli In: Psychophysiology, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 1–20, 2022. @article{Oyarzo2022, Although eye movements during reading have been studied extensively, their variation due to attentional fluctuations such as spontaneous distractions is not well understood. Here we used a naturalistic reading task combined with an attentional sampling method to examine the effects of mind wandering—and the subsequent metacognitive awareness of its occurrence—on eye movements and pupillary dynamics. Our goal was to better understand the attentional and metacognitive processes involved in the initiation and termination of mind wandering episodes. Our results show that changes in eye behavior are consistent with underlying independent cognitive mechanisms working in tandem to sustain the attentional resources required for focused reading. In addition to changes in blink frequency, blink duration, and the number of saccades, variations in eye movements during unaware distractions point to a loss of the perceptual asymmetry that is usually observed in attentive, left-to-right reading. Also, before self-detected distractions, we observed a specific increase in pupillary diameter, indicating the likely presence of an anticipatory autonomic process that could contribute to becoming aware of the current attentional state. These findings stress the need for further research tackling the temporal structure of attentional dynamics during tasks that have a significant real-world impact. |
Jinger Pan; Ming Yan Preview frequency effects in reading: Evidence from Chinese Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 86, no. 7, pp. 2256–2265, 2022. @article{Pan2022b, Studies about sentence reading have shown that visual and lexical information beyond the currently fixated word can be integrated across fixations. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm has been used widely to explore the extent to which parafoveal information can be processed before a word is fixated on. However, a critical review of the current literature suggests that unrelated mask previews are an unlikely baseline control with zero lexical activation, blurring the nature of experimental effects observed in the paradigm. The present study, therefore, aimed at shedding light on the effect of parafoveal mask properties through a manipulation of preview word frequency. Low-frequency preview words that are unrelated to target words elicited a larger interference than high-frequency preview words. We discuss implications of the preview frequency effect for computational models of eye-movement control in reading. |
Jinger Pan; Ming Yan; Su-Ling Yeh Accessing semantic information from above: Parafoveal processing during the reading of vertically presented sentences in traditional Chinese Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 1–18, 2022. @article{Pan2022a, As traditional Chinese readers are familiar with reading texts both horizontally rightwards and vertically downwards, the traditional Chinese script provides us a chance to investigate the influence of reading direction on preview benefits by ruling out the confounding factor of different familiarities with reading directions. The present study examines whether parafoveal information can be obtained when reading Chinese sentences in the vertical direction. We manipulated semantic and phonological relatedness between parafoveal preview words and target words. Results showed that traditional Chinese readers could obtain semantic information from preview words; however, there was no phonological preview benefit. Our findings agree with the notion that Chinese characters are well-optimized for semantic access. |
Caterina Laura Paolazzi; Nino Grillo; Claudia Cera; Fani Karageorgou; Emily Bullman; Wing Yee Chow; Andrea Santi Eyetracking while reading passives: An event structure account of difficulty Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 135–153, 2022. @article{Paolazzi2022, Among existing accounts of passivisation difficulty, some argue it depends on the predicate semantics (i.e. passives are more difficult with subject-experiencer than agent-patient verbs). Inconsistent with the accounts that predict passive difficulty, Paolazzi et al. (2019) found that passives were read faster than actives at the verb and object by-phrase in a series of self-paced reading experiments, with no modulation of verb type. However, self-paced reading provides limited direct measurement of late revision/interpretive processing. We used modified stimuli from Paolazzi et al. (2019) to re-examine this issue in two eye-tracking while reading experiments. We found that in late measures, passives with subject-experiencer verbs had longer fixation durations than actives at the verb and two subsequent regions but no difference was observed across agent-patient verbs. Subject-experiencer verbs provide a state, but the passive structure requires an event. Thus, the required eventive interpretation is coerced with subject-experiencers (if possible) and induces difficulty. |
Alberto Parola; Francesca M. Bosco An eye-tracking investigation of the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of simple and complex communicative acts Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 75, no. 10, pp. 1976–1995, 2022. @article{Parola2022, Indirect speech acts communicate more than their literal meaning, and their comprehension relies on the listener's ability to draw the appropriate inferences in a given context. We used eye tracking to investigate the cognitive processing involved in the comprehension of simple (direct) and complex (unconventional indirect) communicative acts, a more general distinction that applies not only to sincere speech acts, but also to irony and deceit. We recorded the eye movements of 40 participants while they read 60 stories (20 sincere, 20 deceitful, 20 ironic) consisting of a context and a target answer. For each story, we created two different contexts so that the same identical target answer was a simple (direct) and a complex (unconventional indirect) communicative act, respectively. We also assessed the indirectness of simple and complex communicative acts, as well as participants' working memory (WM) and theory of mind (ToM). Eye-pattern analysis showed that complex communicative acts were more difficult to understand than simple acts; differences between simple and complex acts held for all the pragmatic phenomena investigated, though processing differences were greater for sincere acts than for irony and deceit. We found a role of indirectness and ToM in the pragmatic processing of simple and complex acts, whereas the role of WM was modest. The present findings underscore the importance of adopting an encompassing theory that can account for different types of indirect speech acts, such as sincere, deceitful and ironic acts; they also suggest the importance of assessing individual differences in inferential and cognitive abilities. |
Olga Parshina; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Sofya Goldina; Ekaterina Iskra; Margarita Serebryakova; Vladislava Staroverova; Nina Zdorova; Olga Dragoy Global reading processes in children with high risk of dyslexia: A scanpath analysis Journal Article In: Annals of Dyslexia, vol. 72, no. 3, pp. 403–425, 2022. @article{Parshina2022, The study presents the first systematic comparison of the global reading processes via scanpath analysis in Russian-speaking children with and without reading difficulties. First, we compared basic eye-movement characteristics in reading sentences in two groups of children in grades 1 to 5 (N = 72 in high risk of developmental dyslexia group and N = 72 in the control group). Next, using the scanpath method, we investigated which global reading processes these children adopt to read the entire sentence and how these processes differ between the groups. Finally, we were interested in the timeframe of the change in the global reading processes from the 1st to the 5th grades for both groups. We found that the main difference in word-level measures between groups was the reading speed reflected in fixation durations. However, the examination of the five identified global reading processes revealed qualitative similarities in reading patterns between groups. Children in the control group progressed quickly and by the 4th grade engaged in an adult-like fluent reading process. The high-risk group started with the beginner reading process, then similar to first graders in the control group, engaged mostly in the intermediate and upper-intermediate reading processes in 2nd to 4th grades. They reach the advanced process in the 5th grade, the same pattern preferred by the control group second graders. Overall, the scanpath analysis reveals that although there are quantitative differences in the word-level eye-tracking measures between groups, qualitatively children in the high-risk group read on par with typically developing peers but with a 3-year reading delay. |
Olga Parshina; Irina A. Sekerina; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Titus Malsburg Monolingual and bilingual reading processes in Russian: An exploratory scanpath analysis Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 469–492, 2022. @article{Parshina2022a, In the present study, we used a scanpath approach to investigate reading processes and factors that can shape them in monolingual Russian-speaking adults, 8-year-old children, and bilingual Russian-speaking readers. We found that monolingual adults' eye movement patterns exhibited a fluent scanpath reading process, representing effortless processing of the written material: They read straight from left to right at a fast pace, skipped words, and regressed rarely. Both high-proficiency heritage-language speakers' and second graders' eye movement patterns exhibited an intermediate scanpath reading process, characterized by a slower pace, longer fixations, an absence of word skipping, and short regressive saccades. Second-language learners and low-proficiency heritage-language speakers exhibited a beginner reading process that involved the slowest pace, even longer fixations, no word skipping, and frequent rereading of the whole sentence and of particular words. We suggest that unlike intermediate readers who use the respective process to resolve local processing difficulties (e.g., word recognition failure), beginner readers, in addition, experience global-level challenges in semantic and morphosyntactic information integration. Proficiency in Russian for heritage-language speakers and comprehension scores for second-language learners were the only individual difference factors predictive of the scanpath reading process adopted by bilingual speakers. Overall, the scanpath analysis revealed qualitative differences in scanpath reading processes among various groups of readers and thus adds a qualitative dimension to the conventional quantitative evaluation of word-level eye-tracking measures. |
Ana Pellicer-Sánchez; Kathy Conklin; Laura Vilkaitė-Lozdienė (Re)Examining the benefits of pre-reading instruction for vocabulary learning Journal Article In: TESOL Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 363–375, 2022. @article{PellicerSanchez2022, The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of pre-reading instruction on learners' initial attention to taught lexical items while controlling for frequency of occurrence. Specifically, it aimed to further examine the recent finding that pre-reading instruction does not lead to differences in amount of attention allocated to taught items when first encountered in the text (Pellicer-Sanchez et al., 2020). Results from the present study demonstrate that pre-reading instruction leads to increased initial attention to target vocabulary, supporting the role of attention and engagement in vocabulary learning and contributing to our understanding of the effects of pre-reading instruction as an attention-drawing technique |
Ana Pellicer-Sánchez; Anna Siyanova-Chanturia; Fabio Parente In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 727–756, 2022. @article{PellicerSanchez2022a, This study examined the processing and acquisition of novel words and their collocates (i.e., words that frequently co-occur with other words) from reading and the effect of frequency of exposure on this process. First and second language speakers of English read a story with 1) eight exposures of adjective-pseudoword collocations, 2) four exposures of the same collocations, or 3) eight exposures of control collocations. Results of recall and recognition tests showed that participants acquired knowledge not only of the form and meaning of the pseudowords but also of their collocates. The analysis of eye movements showed a significant effect of exposure on the processing of novel collocations for both first and second language readers, with reading times decreasing as a function of exposure. Eight exposures to novel adjective-pseudoword collocations were enough to develop processing speed comparable to that of known collocations. However, when analyzing the processing of the individual components of the collocations, results showed that eight exposures to the pseudowords were not enough for second language readers to develop processing speed comparable to known words. The frequency manipulation in the present study (four vs. eight exposures) did not lead to differences in the learning or processing of collocations. Finally, reading times were not a significant predictor of vocabulary gains. |
Leona Polyanskaya Cognitive mechanisms of statistical learning and segmentation of continuous sensory input Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 50, no. 5, pp. 979–996, 2022. @article{Polyanskaya2022, Two classes of cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to explain segmentation of continuous sensory input into discrete recurrent constituents: clustering and boundary-finding mechanisms. Clustering mechanisms are based on identifying frequently co-occurring elements and merging them together as parts that form a single constituent. Bracketing (or boundary-finding) mechanisms work by identifying rarely co-occurring elements that correspond to the boundaries between discrete constituents. In a series of behavioral experiments, I tested which mechanisms are at play in the visual modality both during segmentation of a continuous syllabic sequence into discrete word-like constituents and during recognition of segmented constituents. Additionally, I explored conscious awareness of the products of statistical learning—whole constituents versus merged clusters of smaller subunits. My results suggest that both online segmentation and offline recognition of extracted constituents rely on detecting frequently co-occurring elements, a process likely based on associative memory. However, people are more aware of having learnt whole tokens than of recurrent composite clusters. |
Markus J. Hofmann; Mareike A. Kleemann; André Roelke-Wellmann; Christian Vorstius; Ralph Radach Semantic feature activation takes time: Longer SOA elicits earlier priming effects during reading Journal Article In: Cognitive Processing, vol. 23, pp. 309–318, 2022. @article{Hofmann2022, While most previous studies of “semantic” priming confound associative and semantic relations, here we use a simple co-occurrence-based approach to examine “pure” semantic priming, while experimentally controlling for associative relations. We define associative relations by the co-occurrence of words in the sentences of a large text corpus. Contextual-semantic feature overlap, in contrast, is defined by the number of common associates that the prime shares with the target. Then we revisit the spreading activation theory and examine whether a long vs. short time available for semantic feature activation leads to early vs. late viewing time effects on the target words of a sentence reading experiment. We independently manipulate contextual-semantic feature overlap of two primes with one target word in sentences of the form pronoun, verb prime, article, adjective prime and target noun, e. g., "She rides the gray elephant." The results showed that long-SOA (verb-noun) overlap reduces early single and first fixation durations of the target noun, and short-SOA (adjective-noun) overlap reduces late go-past durations. This result pattern can be explained by the spreading activation theory: The semantic features of the prime words need some time to become sufficiently active before they can reliably affect target processing. Therefore, the verb can act on the target noun's early eye-movement measures presented three words later, while the adjective is presented immediately prior to the target—thus a difficult adjective-noun semantic integration leads to a late sentence re-examination of the preceding words. |
Lingshan Huang; Jingyang Jiang The role of working memory in unfamiliar word processing across proficiency levels: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 607–621, 2022. @article{Huang2022b, The present study examined how working memory (WM) affects unfamiliar word processing during L2 reading comprehension among L2 learners with different proficiency levels. Forty-four participants were divided into the higher proficiency group (n = 22) and the lower proficiency group (n = 22). All of them read an English text with 17 target unfamiliar words while their eye movements were tracked. After online reading, they subsequently completed an L2 reading comprehension test and a WM test respectively. The results showed that WM significantly correlated with L2 reading comprehension in the higher proficiency group. In addition, the effect of WM capacity on L2 reading comprehension performance was mediated by unfamiliar words' first fixation duration in the higher proficiency group. Results of the study revealed the different mechanisms of unfamiliar word processing among learners with different proficiency levels from the cognitive dimension of WM. |
Lingshan Huang; Jinghui Ouyang; Jingyang Jiang The relationship of word processing with L2 reading comprehension and working memory: Insights from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Learning and Individual Differences, vol. 95, pp. 1–12, 2022. @article{Huang2022c, The present study combines both online (eye-tracking) and offline (reading comprehension test) measures to investigate the relationships among word processing, working memory (WM) and second language (L2) reading comprehension performance. Forty-eight Chinese students read an English text with 17 unfamiliar words while their eye movements were recorded with two different settings (L1-glossed and non-glossed). A reading comprehension test and a reading span task were respectively used to evaluate participants' L2 reading comprehension performance and WM capacity. The results indicated that L2 reading comprehension performance was related to first fixation duration (FFD) on unfamiliar words, and the FFD on unfamiliar words was related to participants' WM capacity. Moreover, the effect of unfamiliar words' FFD on L2 reading comprehension performance can be moderated by participants' WM capacity. These relationships were not found when the unfamiliar words were glossed by L1. The results expand our understanding of the role of WM in unfamiliar word processing during L2 reading comprehension. |
Jiwon Hwang; Chikako Takahashi; Hyunah Baek; Alex Hong Lun Yeung; Ellen Broselow Do L1 tone language speakers enjoy a perceptual advantage in processing English contrastive prosody?∗ Journal Article In: Bilingualism, vol. 25, pp. 816–826, 2022. @article{Hwang2022, This study compared the ability of English monolinguals and Mandarin-English bilinguals to make use of English contrastive prosody not only in natural speech but also in masked speech, in which the only available information was prosodic. In contrast to earlier studies (Choi et al.2019; Choi, 2021; Tong et al.2015) which found that L1 tone language speakers outperformed native speakers in tasks involving the use of pitch to identify stress position in English, we did not find a similar advantage for Mandarin-English bilinguals in the interpretation of English contrastive prosody, even under conditions that enforced reliance on pitch contours. These findings are consistent with other studies suggesting that the integration of prosodic information into discourse is an area of particular difficulty for L2 speakers. |
Laura Israel; Lars Konieczny; Evelyn C. Ferstl Cognitive and affective aspects of verbal humor: A visual-world eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Communication, vol. 6, pp. 1–13, 2022. @article{Israel2022, Many theories of verbal humour postulate that the funniness of jokes is caused by an incongruency in the punchline whose resolution yields a feeling of mirth. While there are studies testing the prediction that this situation model updating leads to increases in processing costs, there are few studies directly assessing the time course of when the alternative situation models are entertained. In a visual world paradigm, stories were presented auditorily and displays were presented illustrating either the situation implied by the context or the final interpretation after the punchline. Eye movement data confirmed the switch from the initial to the final interpretation for jokes as well as for non-funny control stories that also required a situation model revision. In addition to these effects of the cognitive revision requirements, the pupil dilations were sensitive to the affective component of joke comprehension. These results are discussed in light of incongruency theories of verbal humour. |
Lewis T. Jayes; Gemma Fitzsimmons; Mark J. Weal; Johanna K. Kaakinen; Denis Drieghe The impact of hyperlinks, skim reading and perceived importance when reading on the Web Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 1–28, 2022. @article{Jayes2022, It has previously been shown that readers spend a great deal of time skim reading on the Web and that this type of reading can affect comprehension of text. Across two experiments, we examine how hyperlinks influence perceived importance of sentences and how perceived importance in turn affects reading behaviour. In Experiment 1, participants rated the importance of sentences across passages of Wikipedia text. In Experiment 2, a different set of participants read these passages while their eye movements were tracked, with the task being either reading for comprehension or skim reading. Reading times of sentences were analysed in relation to the type of task and the importance ratings from Experiment 1. Results from Experiment 1 show readers rated sentences without hyperlinks as being of less importance than sentences that did feature hyperlinks, and this effect is larger when sentences are lower on the page. It was also found that short sentences with more links were rated as more important, but only when they were presented at the top of the page. Long sentences with more links were rated as more important regardless of their position on the page. In Experiment 2, higher importance scores resulted in longer sentence reading times, measured as fixation durations. When skim reading, however, importance ratings had a lesser impact on online reading behaviour than when reading for comprehension. We suggest readers are less able to establish the importance of a sentence when skim reading, even though importance could have been assessed by information that would be fairly easy to extract (i.e. presence of hyperlinks, length of sentences, and position on the screen). |
Yanfang Jia; Binghan Zheng In: Across Languages and Cultures, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 36–55, 2022. @article{Jia2022, This study explores the interaction effect between source text (ST) complexity and machine translation (MT) quality on the task difficulty of neural machine translation (NMT) post-editing from English to Chinese. When investigating human effort exerted in post-editing, existing studies have seldom taken both ST complexity and MT quality levels into account, and have mainly focused on MT systems used before the emergence of NMT. Drawing on process and product data of post-editing from 60 trainee translators, this study adopted a multi-method approach to measure post-editing task difficulty, including eye-tracking, keystroke logging, quality evaluation, subjective rating, and retrospective written protocols. The results show that: 1) ST complexity and MT quality present a significant interaction effect on task difficulty of NMT post-editing; 2) ST complexity level has a positive impact on post-editing low-quality NMT (i.e., post-editing task becomes less difficult when ST complexity decreases); while for post-editing high-quality NMT, it has a positive impact only on the subjective ratings received from participants; and 3) NMT quality has a negative impact on its post-editing task difficulty (i.e., post-editing task becomes less difficult when MT quality goes higher), and this impact is stronger when ST complexity increases. This paper concludes that both ST complexity and MT quality should be considered when testing post-editing difficulty, designing tasks for post-editor training, and setting fair post-editing pricing schemes. |
Juan Vela-Candelas; Natàlia Català; Josep Demestre Effects of world knowledge on the prediction of upcoming verbs: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 1335–1345, 2022. @article{VelaCandelas2022, Some theories of sentence processing make a distinction between two kinds of meaning: a linguistic meaning encoded at the lexicon (i.e., selectional restrictions), and an extralinguistic knowledge derived from our everyday experiences (i.e., world knowledge). According to such theories, the former meaning is privileged over the latter in terms of the time-course of its access and influence during on-line language comprehension. The present study aims to examine whether world knowledge anomalies (that do not violate selectional restrictions) are rapidly detected during online sentence processing. In an eye-tracking experiment, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific verb (entrevistar or secuestrar, the Spanish translations for to interview and to kidnap) depended on the agent of the event (periodista or terrorista, the Spanish translations for journalist and terrorist). The results showed an effect of typicality in regression path duration and total reading times at both the verb region and the spillover region, thus providing evidence that world knowledge is rapidly accessed and used during on-line sentence comprehension. |
Aaron Veldre; Roslyn Wong; Sally Andrews Predictability effects and parafoveal processing in older readers Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 222–238, 2022. @article{Veldre2022, Normative aging is accompanied by visual and cognitive changes that impact the systems that are critical for fluent reading. The patterns of eye movements during reading displayed by older adults have been characterized as demonstrating a trade-off between longer forward saccades and more word skipping versus higher rates of regressions back to previously read text. This pattern is assumed to reflect older readers' reliance on top-down contextual information to compensate for reduced uptake of parafoveal information from yet-to-be fixated words. However, the empirical evidence for these assumptions is equivocal. This study investigated the depth of older readers' parafoveal processing as indexed by sensitivity to the contextual plausibility of parafoveal words in both neutral and highly constraining sentence contexts. The eye movements of 65 cognitively intact older adults (61–87 years) were compared with data previously collected from young adults in two sentence reading experiments in which critical target words were replaced by valid, plausible, related, or implausible previews until the reader fixated on the target word location. Older and younger adults showed equivalent plausibility preview benefits on first-pass reading measures of both predictable and unpredictable words. However, older readers did not show the benefit of preview orthographic relatedness that was observed in young adults and showed significantly attenuated preview validity effects. Taken together, the data suggest that older readers are specifically impaired in the integration of parafoveal and foveal information but do not show deficits in the depth of parafoveal processing. The implications for understanding the effects of aging on reading are discussed. |
Laura Vilkaitė-Lozdienė Do different morphological forms of collocations show comparable processing facilitation? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 48, no. 9, pp. 1328–1347, 2022. @article{VilkaiteLozdiene2022, There are numerous studies showing processing advantages for collocations, but none of them so far takes into account the fact that the morphological form of a collocation varies to fit the context. Questions whether collocations retain their processing advantage when their morphological form changes and how or if different morphological forms of the same collocation are related in the mental lexicon have remained unanswered. The present study starts addressing these questions. The article reports an eye-tracking experiment during which 37 native speakers of Lithuanian (a morphologically complex language) read 10 short stories with embedded verb + object collocations in three different morphological forms (infinitive + accusative, past tense third person + accusative, and passive attributive participle + nominative) as well as control phrases (60 target items per participant). Mixed-effects analysis showed that collocations in all three morphological forms were processed with comparable facilitation. The study also analyzed whether the phrasal form frequency of the specific morphological form or the base frequency of that collocation works better at predicting reading behavior. The results show no clear advantage of one or the other. Potential reasons for this finding are discussed. |
Saúl Villameriel; Brendan Costello; Marcel Giezen; Manuel Carreiras Cross-modal and cross-language activation in bilinguals reveals lexical competition even when words or signs are unheard or unseen Journal Article In: PNAS, vol. 119, no. 36, pp. 1–9, 2022. @article{Villameriel2022, We exploit the phenomenon of cross-modal, cross-language activation to examine the dynamics of language processing. Previous within-language work showed that seeing a sign coactivates phonologically related signs, just as hearing a spoken word coactivates phonologically related words. In this study, we conducted a series of eye-tracking experiments using the visual world paradigm to investigate the time course of cross-language coactivation in hearing bimodal bilinguals (Spanish–Spanish Sign Language) and unimodal bilinguals (Spanish/Basque). The aim was to gauge whether (and how) seeing a sign could coactivate words and, conversely, how hearing a word could coactivate signs and how such cross-language coactivation patterns differ from within-language coactivation. The results revealed cross-language, cross-modal activation in both directions. Furthermore, comparison with previous findings of within-language lexical coactivation for spoken and signed language showed how the impact of temporal structure changes in different modalities. Spoken word activation follows the temporal structure of that word only when the word itself is heard; for signs, the temporal structure of the sign does not govern the time course of lexical access (location coactivation precedes handshape coactivation)—even when the sign is seen. We provide evidence that, instead, this pattern of activation is motivated by how common in the lexicon the sublexical units of the signs are. These results reveal the interaction between the perceptual properties of the explicit signal and structural linguistic properties. Examining languages across modalities illustrates how this interaction impacts language processing. |
Chiara Visentin; Chiara Valzolgher; Matteo Pellegatti; Paola Potente; Francesco Pavani; Nicola Prodi A comparison of simultaneously-obtained measures of listening effort: Pupil dilation, verbal response time and self-rating Journal Article In: International Journal of Audiology, vol. 61, no. 7, pp. 561–573, 2022. @article{Visentin2022, Objective: The aim of this study was to assess to what extent simultaneously-obtained measures of listening effort (task-evoked pupil dilation, verbal response time [RT], and self-rating) could be sensitive to auditory and cognitive manipulations in a speech perception task. The study also aimed to explore the possible relationship between RT and pupil dilation. Design: A within-group design was adopted. All participants were administered the Matrix Sentence Test in 12 conditions (signal-to-noise ratios [SNR] of −3, −6, −9 dB; attentional resources focussed vs divided; spatial priors present vs absent). Study sample: Twenty-four normal-hearing adults, 20–41 years old (M = 23.5), were recruited in the study. Results: A significant effect of the SNR was found for all measures. However, pupil dilation discriminated only partially between the SNRs. Neither of the cognitive manipulations were effective in modulating the measures. No relationship emerged between pupil dilation, RT and self-ratings. Conclusions: RT, pupil dilation, and self-ratings can be obtained simultaneously when administering speech perception tasks, even though some limitations remain related to the absence of a retention period after the listening phase. The sensitivity of the three measures to changes in the auditory environment differs. RTs and self-ratings proved most sensitive to changes in SNR. |
Maya Zhe Wang; Benjamin Y. Hayden; Sarah R. Heilbronner A structural and functional subdivision in central orbitofrontal cortex Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2022. @article{Wang2022f, Economic choice requires many cognitive subprocesses, including stimulus detection, valuation, motor output, and outcome monitoring; many of these subprocesses are associated with the central orbitofrontal cortex (cOFC). Prior work has largely assumed that the cOFC is a single region with a single function. Here, we challenge that unified view with convergent anatomical and physiological results from rhesus macaques. Anatomically, we show that the cOFC can be subdivided according to its much stronger (medial) or weaker (lateral) bidirectional anatomical connectivity with the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). We call these subregions cOFCm and cOFCl, respectively. These two subregions have notable functional differences. Specifically, cOFCm shows enhanced functional connectivity with PCC, as indicated by both spike-field coherence and mutual information. The cOFCm-PCC circuit, but not the cOFCl-PCC circuit, shows signatures of relaying choice signals from a non-spatial comparison framework to a spatially framed organization and shows a putative bidirectional mutually excitatory pattern. |
Colleen B. Ward; Jennifer E. Mack The effect of an aphasia ID card on the processing of language produced by a speaker with nonfluent aphasia Journal Article In: Journal of Communication Disorders, vol. 100, pp. 1–14, 2022. @article{Ward2022, Introduction: We tested whether aphasia self-disclosure via an aphasia ID card impacts (1) how non-aphasic listeners initially process language produced by a speaker with aphasia and (2) learning of the speaker's error patterns over time. Methods: In this eye-tracking experiment, 27 young adults followed instructions recorded by a speaker with nonfluent aphasia while viewing a target picture and a distractor. The Card group (n = 14) was shown a simulated aphasia ID card for the speaker and the No Card group (n = 13) was not. The task was divided into Pre-Observation and Post-Observation blocks. Between blocks, participants observed the speaker making semantic paraphasias. Eye-tracking analyses compared the time course of target advantage (reflecting competition from the distractor picture) and workspace advantage (reflecting attention to task) between groups and blocks. Results: Pre-Observation, the Card group had a higher target advantage than the No Card group in the post-response window (i.e., after participants had responded), indicating sustained attention to the speaker's language. Across blocks, there was evidence that the Card group (but not the No Card group) learned that the speaker makes semantic paraphasias. Conclusions: Aphasia ID cards impacted listeners' processing of language produced by a speaker with nonfluent aphasia. Increased patience and attentiveness may underlie both the Card group's sustained attention to the speaker as well as learning of the speaker's error patterns. Further research should address whether these changes impact communication success between PWA and new conversation partners. |
Matthew B. Winn; Katherine H. Teece Effortful listening despite correct responses: The cost of mental repair in sentence recognition by listeners with cochlear implants Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 65, pp. 3966–3980, 2022. @article{Winn2022, Purpose: Speech recognition percent correct scores fail to capture the effort of mentally repairing the perception of speech that was initially misheard. This study measured the effort of listening to stimuli specifically designed to elicit mental repair in adults who use cochlear implants (CIs). Method: CI listeners heard and repeated sentences in which specific words were distorted or masked by noise but recovered based on later context: a signature of mental repair. Changes in pupil dilation were tracked as an index of effort and time-locked with specific landmarks during perception. Results: Effort significantly increases when a listener needs to repair a misperceived word, even if the verbal response is ultimately correct. Mental repair of words in a sentence was accompanied by greater prevalence of errors elsewhere in the same sentence, suggesting that effort spreads to consume resources across time. The cost of mental repair in CI listeners was essentially the same as that observed in listeners with normal hearing in previous work. Conclusions: Listening effort as tracked by pupil dilation is better explained by the mental repair and reconstruction of words rather than the appearance of correct or incorrect perception. Linguistic coherence drives effort more heavily than the mere presence of mistakes, highlighting the importance of testing materials that do not constrain coherence by design. |
Lu Zijia; F. u Ying; Zhang Manman; Zang Chuanli; Bai Xuejun Parafoveal processing of part-of-speech information in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica Sinica, vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 441–452, 2022. @article{Zijia2022, In this study, the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to explore whether the part-of-speech information of parafoveal words can be processed in Chinese reading by manipulating the part-of-speech consistency between the preview words and the target words. The experiment adopted a single factor 3-level design with three previewing conditions: identical preview, part-of-speech non-violation preview and part-of-speech violation preview. The linear mixed model and Bayesian analysis of the experimental data showed that there was no significant difference on fixation durations and fixation probability of the target words under the condition of part-of-speech violation and part-of-speech non-violation suggesting no preview effect of part-of-speech information. The results tended to support the sequential attention shift model, and the future development of eye movement control model should pay more attention to flexibility and universality of the model. |
Ting Zou; Yutong Liu; Huiting Zhong The roles of consonant, rime, and tone in Mandarin spoken word recognition: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 1–19, 2022. @article{Zou2022, This study investigated the relative role of sub-syllabic components (initial consonant, rime, and tone) in spoken word recognition of Mandarin Chinese using an eye-tracking experiment with a visual world paradigm. Native Mandarin speakers (all born and grew up in Beijing) were presented with four pictures and an auditory stimulus. They were required to click the picture according to the sound stimulus they heard, and their eye movements were tracked during this process. For a target word (e.g., tang2 “candy”), nine conditions of competitors were constructed in terms of the amount of their phonological overlap with the target: consonant competitor (e.g., ti1 “ladder”), rime competitor (e.g., lang4 “wave”), tone competitor (e.g., niu2 “cow”), consonant plus rime competitor (e.g., tang1”soup”), consonant plus tone competitor (e.g., tou2 “head”), rime plus tone competitor (e.g., yang2 “sheep”), cohort competitor (e.g., ta3 “tower”), cohort plus tone competitor (e.g., tao2 “peach”), and baseline competitor (e.g., xue3 “snow”). A growth curve analysis was conducted with the fixation to competitors, targets, and distractors, and the results showed that (1) competitors with consonant or rime overlap can be adequately activated, while tone overlap plays a weaker role since additional tonal information can strengthen the competitive effect only when it was added to a candidate that already bears much phonological similarity with the target. (2) Mandarin words are processed in an incremental way in the time course of word recognition since different partially overlapping competitors could be activated immediately; (3) like the pattern found in English, both cohort and rime competitors were activated to compete for lexical activation, but these two competitors were not temporally distinctive and mainly differed in the size of their competitive effects. Generally, the gradation of activation based on the phonological similarity between target and candidates found in this study was in line with the continuous mapping models and may reflect a strategy of native speakers shaped by the informative characteristics of the interaction among different sub-syllabic components. |
Junyi Zhou; Lulu Wang Differences in the effects of reading and aerobic exercise interventions on inhibitory control of college students with mobile phone addiction Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 13, pp. 1–9, 2022. @article{Zhou2022c, Although many previous studies have shown that short-time moderate-intensity aerobic exercise can improve one's inhibitory control, some researchers suggested that its effect on inhibitory control is small. Meanwhile, some studies have shown that reading has a positive effect on inhibitory control. Since many studies examining the effect of exercise on inhibitory control used reading as a filler task, it is important to compare their effects. The present study used the antisaccade task as a tool to examine the differences in the effects of aerobic exercise and reading on inhibitory control of college students with mobile phone addiction. Thirty healthy college students with mobile phone addiction (range: 17–20 years, mean: 19.2 years) took part in the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to an aerobic exercise group and a reading group. For the aerobic exercise group, participants were asked to perform moderate-intensity aerobic exercise for 15 min. For the reading group, participants were asked to sit quietly and read articles from newspapers for 15 min. Each participant's inhibitory control was examined pre- and post-intervention using the antisaccade task. In the antisaccade task, they have to direct their gaze toward the mirror image location of the target appearing parafoveally as quickly and as accurately as possible. The results showed significant main effects of Time (pre-test vs. post-test) on antisaccade latency and error rate. More importantly, a significant interaction of Time (pre-test vs. post-test) and Group (aerobic exercise vs. reading) was found on antisaccade latency. Specifically, the antisaccade latencies in the post-test were significantly shorter than those in the pre-test for the reading group, but the antisaccade latencies in the post-test and pre-test were comparable for the aerobic exercise group. The results of the present study imply that although both exercise and reading have effects on inhibitory control of college students with mobile phone addiction, the effect of reading may be somehow superior to exercise. Moreover, the current results also imply that researchers should be cautious when using reading as a filler task in future studies regarding the effect of aerobic exercise. The limitations of the present study were discussed. |
Yueyuan Zheng; Xinchen Ye; Janet H. Hsiao Does adding video and subtitles to an audio lesson facilitate its comprehension? Journal Article In: Learning and Instruction, vol. 77, pp. 1–13, 2022. @article{Zheng2022, We examined whether adding video and subtitles to an audio lesson facilitates its comprehension and whether the comprehension depends on participants' cognitive abilities, including working memory and executive functions, and where they looked during video viewing. Participants received lessons consisting of statements of facts under four conditions: audio-only, audio with verbatim subtitles, audio with relevant video, and audio with both subtitles and video. Comprehension was assessed as the accuracy in answering multiple-choice questions for content memory. We found that subtitles facilitated comprehension whereas video did not. In addition, comprehension of audio lessons with video depended on participants' cognitive abilities and eye movement pattern: a more centralized (looking mainly at the screen center) eye movement pattern predicted better comprehension as opposed to a distributed pattern (with distributed regions of interest). Thus, whether video facilitates comprehension of audio lessons depends on both learners' cognitive abilities and where they look during video viewing. |
Guangyao Zhang; Panpan Yao; Guojie Ma; Jingwen Wang; Junyi Zhou; Linjieqiong Huang; Pingping Xu; Lijing Chen; Songlin Chen; Junjuan Gu; Wei Wei; Xi Cheng; Huimin Hua; Pingping Liu; Ya Lou; Wei Shen; Yaqian Bao; Jiayu Liu; Nan Lin; Xingshan Li The database of eye-movement measures on words in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Scientific Data, vol. 9, pp. 1–8, 2022. @article{Zhang2022d, Eye movements are one of the most fundamental behaviors during reading. A growing number of Chinese reading studies have used eye-tracking techniques in the last two decades. The accumulated data provide a rich resource that can reflect the complex cognitive mechanisms underlying Chinese reading. This article reports a database of eye-movement measures of words during Chinese sentence reading. The database contains nine eye-movement measures of 8,551 Chinese words obtained from 1,718 participants across 57 Chinese sentence reading experiments. All data were collected in the same experimental environment and from homogenous participants, using the same protocols and parameters. This database enables researchers to test their theoretical or computational hypotheses concerning Chinese reading efficiently using a large number of words. The database can also indicate the processing difficulty of Chinese words during text reading, thus providing a way to control or manipulate the difficulty level of Chinese texts. |
Yancui Zhang; Min Chang; Jingxin Wang Increasing intercharacter spacing reduces the transposed-character effect in Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 371–377, 2022. @article{Zhang2022m, Spacing is a very important visual cue in alphabetic languages as well as other languages, such as Chinese, which has no special interword spacing but has equal intercharacter spacing. Studies have shown that spacing has a significant effect on letter/character identity or position processing. However, whether spacing modulates the transposed-letter/-character effect remains unknown. This study conducted an eye-movement experiment using the boundary paradigm to explore whether increasing intercharacter spacing affected the transposed-character effect in Chinese reading. The results indicate that Chinese readers have flexible adjustment strategies for intercharacter spacing and that there is an obvious transposed-character effect. Crucially, increasing intercharacter spacing by three points resulted in stricter character position processing as compared with identity processing, thus reducing the transposed-character effect. Our findings are consistent with models in which visual elements comprise an important factor in the transposed-letter/-character effect, while the existence of the transposed-character effect suggests that the orthographic abstract component is also relevant. |
Wei Zheng; Xiaolu Wang Contextual support for less salient homophones and pun humor appreciation: Evidence from eye movements in reading Chinese homophone puns Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, pp. 1–10, 2022. @article{Zheng2022b, Punning is an important means of creating humorous effects by intentionally exploiting semantic ambiguity. Previous psycholinguistic research on puns has mainly focused on the process of meaning retrieval in homograph puns, while it is still not entirely clear how readers dynamically utilize contextual information to understand homophone puns. In the current investigation, 68 native Chinese participants were recruited to read three types of experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded: (1) the homophone-pun sentences where the less salient homophone was visually presented, (2) the homophone-salient sentences where the salient homophone was used, and (3) the homophone-error sentences where the critical context noun in the homophone puns was replaced with an unrelated word. Humor rating results of the homophone puns and the homophone-salient sentences demonstrated that the less salient homophones rather than the salient ones elicited much larger humor responses when presented visually in the same potential pun context. In addition, the reverse fixation pattern in the homophone area and the spill-over region also suggested that meanings of the salient homophones were more recoverable even when not presented visually. Statistical analyses of the homophone puns and the homophone-error sentences showed that the semantic relatedness between the critical context noun and the less salient homophone could significantly predict the humor rating scores of Chinese readers. Taken together, less salient homophones need to receive more contextual support to balance out the advantages of salient homophones before generating a humorous pun interpretation. |
Agata Wolna; Joanna Durlik; Zofia Wodniecka Pronominal anaphora resolution in Polish: Investigating online sentence interpretation using eye-tracking Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1–28, 2022. @article{Wolna2022, The mechanism of anaphora resolution is subject to large cross-linguistic differences. The most likely reason for this is the different sensitivity of pronouns to the range of factors that determine their reference. In the current study, we explored the mechanism of anaphora resolution in Polish. First, we explored preferences in the interpretation of null and overt pronouns in ambiguous sentences. More specifically, we investigated whether Polish speakers prefer to relate overt pronouns to subject or object antecedents. Subsequently, we tested the consequences of violating this bias when tracing the online sentence-interpretation process using eye-tracking. Our results show that Polish speakers have a strong preference for interpreting null pronouns as referring to subject antecedents and interpreting overt pronouns as referring to object antecedents. However, in online sentence interpretation, only overt pronouns showed sensitivity to a violation of the speaker's preference for a pronoun-antecedent match. This suggests that null pronoun resolution is more flexible than overt pronoun resolution. Our results indicate that it is much easier for Polish speakers to shift the reference of a null pronoun than an overt one whenever a pronoun is forced to refer to a less-preferred antecedent. These results are supported by naturalness ratings, which showed that null pronouns are considered equally natural regardless of their reference, while overt pronouns referring to subject antecedents are rated as considerably less natural than those referring to object antecedents. To explain this effect, we propose that the interpretation of null and overt pronouns is sensitive to different factors which determine their reference. |
Brent Wolter; Chi Yui Leung; Shaoxin Wang; Shifa Chen; Junko Yamashita Comparing linguistic and cultural explanations for visual search strategies Journal Article In: Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 623–657, 2022. @article{Wolter2022, Visual search studies have shown that East Asians rely more on information gathered through their extrafoveal (i.e., peripheral) vision than do Western Caucasians, who tend to rely more on information gathered using their foveal (i.e., central) vision. However, the reasons for this remain unclear. Cognitive linguists suggest that the difference is attributable linguistic variation, while cultural psychologists contend it is due to cultural factors. The current study used eye-tracking data collected during a visual search task to compare these explanations by leveraging a semantic difference against a cultural difference to determine which view best explained strategies used on the task. The task was administered to Chinese, American, and Japanese participants with a primary focus on the Chinese participants' behaviors since the semantic difference aligned the Chinese participants with the Americans, while their cultural affiliation aligned them with the Japanese participants. The results indicated that the Chinese group aligned more closely with the American group on most measures, suggesting that semantic differences were more important than cultural affiliation on this particular task. However, there were some results that could not be accounted for by the semantic differences, suggesting that linguistic and cultural factors might affect visual search strategies concurrently. |
Roslyn Wong; Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Are there independent effects of constraint and predictability on eye movements during reading? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–15, 2022. @article{Wong2022, Evidence of processing costs for unexpected words presented in place of a more expected completion remains elusive in the eye-movement literature. The current study investigated whether such prediction error costs depend on the source of constraint violation provided by the prior context. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read predictable words and unpredictable alternatives that were either semantically related or unrelated in three-sentence passages. The passages differed in whether the source of constraint originated solely from the global context provided by the first two semantically rich senten- ces of the passage, from the local context provided by the final sentence of the passage, from both the global and local context, or from none of the three sentences of the passage. The results revealed the expected processing advantage for predictable completions in any constraining context, although the rela- tive contributions of the different sources of constraint varied across the time course of word processing. Unpredictable completions, however, did not yield any processing costs when the context constrained to- ward a different word, instead producing immediate processing benefits in the presence of any constrain- ing context. Moreover, the initial processing of related unpredictable completions was enhanced further by the provision of a supportive global context. Predictability effects therefore do not appear to be deter- mined by cloze probability alone but also by the nature of the prior contextual constraint especially when they encourage the construction of higher-level discourse representations. The implications of these find- ings for understanding existing theoretical models of predictive processing are discussed. |
Liling Xu; Sui Liu; Suiping Wang; Dongxia Sun; Nan Li Word's predictability can modulate semantic preview effect in high-constraint sentences Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, pp. 1–8, 2022. @article{Xu2022, The processing of words in sentence reading is influenced by both information from sentential context (the effect of predictability) and information from previewing upcoming words (the preview effect), but how both effects interact during online reading is not clear. In this study, we tested the interaction of predictability effect and the preview effect in predicting reading processing. In the experiment, sentence constraint was controlled using all high-constraint sentences as materials. We manipulated both the predictability of the target word in the sentence and the semantic relationship between the preview word and the target word as predictors of the semantic preview effect. The results showed that the semantic preview effect was present only when the target word had low-predictability in the sentence but was not observed when the target word had high-predictability in the sentence. The results suggest that contextual information in reading can modulate the pre-activation of words and thus influence whether the preview word has a priming effect. The results of this study provide further evidence that reading comprehension involves an interactive system of processing multiple sources of information at multiple levels. |
Qing Yang; Yiya Chen Phonological competition in Mandarin spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 7, pp. 820–843, 2022. @article{Yang2022b, Most of the world's languages use both segment and lexical tone to distinguish word meanings. However, the few studies on spoken word recognition in tone languages show conflicting results concerning the relative contribution of (sub-)syllabic constituents, and the time course of how segmental and tonal information is utilised. In Experiments 1 & 2, participants listened to monosyllabic Mandarin words with the presence of a phonological competitor, which overlaps in either segmental syllable, onset and tone, rhyme and tone, or just tone. Eye movement results only confirmed the segmental syllable competition effect. Experiment 3 investigated the time course of segmental vs. tonal cue utilisation by manipulating their point of divergence (POD) and found that POD modulates the look trajectories of both segmental and tonal phonological competitors. While listeners can use both segmental and tonal information incrementally to constrain lexical activation, segmental syllable plays an advantageous role in Mandarin spoken word recognition. |
Panpan Yao; Reem Alkhammash; Xingshan Li In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 390–408, 2022. @article{Yao2022a, We aimed to tackle the question about the time course of plausibility effect in on-line processing of Chinese nouns in temporarily ambiguous structures, and whether L2ers can immediately use the plausibility information generated from classifier-noun associations in analyzing ambiguous structures. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to explore how native Chinese speakers (Experiment 1) and high-proficiency Dutch-Chinese learners (Experiment 2) on-line process 4-character novel noun-noun combinations in Chinese. In each pair of nominal phrases (Numeral+Classifier+Noun1+Noun2), the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 varied (plausible vs. implausible) while the whole nominal phrases were always plausible. Results showed that the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 associations had an immediate effect on Noun1, and a reversed effect on Noun2 for both groups of participants. These findings indicated that plausibility plays an immediate role in incremental semantic integration during on-line processing of Chinese. Similar to native Chinese speakers, high-proficiency L2ers can also use the plausibility information of classifier-noun associations in syntactic reanalysis. |
Panpan Yao; Adrian Staub; Xingshan Li Predictability eliminates neighborhood effects during Chinese sentence reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 243–252, 2022. @article{Yao2022b, Previous research has demonstrated effects of both orthographic neighborhood size and neighbor frequency in word recognition in Chinese. A large neighborhood—where neighborhood size is defined by the number of words that differ from a target word by a single character—appears to facilitate word recognition, while the presence of a higher-frequency neighbor has an inhibitory effect. The present study investigated modulation of these effects by a word's predictability in context. In two eye-movement experiments, the predictability of a target word in each sentence was manipulated. Target words differed in their neighborhood size (Experiment 1) and in whether they had a higher-frequency neighbor (Experiment 2). The study replicated the previously observed effects of neighborhood size and neighbor frequency when the target word was unpredictable, but in both experiments neighborhood effects were absent when the target was predictable. These results suggest that when a word is preactivated by context, the activation of its neighbors may be diminished to such an extent that these neighbors do not effectively compete for selection. |
Panpan Yao; Linnaea Stockall; David Hall; Hagit Borer Processing evidence for the grammatical encoding of the mass/count distinction in Mandarin Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 51, pp. 341–371, 2022. @article{Yao2022, Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers, ontological count and mass nouns, and phrase structures with and without biased syntactic cues we found that the mass/count distinction is initially computed using phrase structure but can be overridden in cases where the syntax is incompatible with nouns' ontological meanings. The results indicate that in Mandarin Chinese, syntactic cues can be rapidly used to make predictions about upcoming information in real time processing. |
Wei Yi Processing of novel L2 compounds across repeated exposures during reading: A growth curve analysis Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 551–579, 2022. @article{Yi2022, Using eye tracking, this study examined L2 learners' real-time processing of novel compounds across repeated exposures during reading. Sixty-one L2 speakers of Chinese read 12 stories over two days. Unbeknown to them, 12 novel compounds were embedded, each occurring six times. Growth curve analyses showed that semantic transparency, working memory capacity, and morphological awareness had no impact on fixation durations for the novel compounds. However, participants with a larger L2 vocabulary size processed novel opaque compounds significantly faster than those with a smaller L2 vocabulary size. For both transparent and opaque compounds, first fixation durations did not change across exposures, yet similar curvilinear decreasing patterns were found in gaze duration and total reading time, with the rates of decrease moderated by L2 vocabulary size and working memory capacity, respectively. Taken together, such findings provide converging evidence supporting the incidental nature of vocabulary learning through natural reading. |
Wei Yi; Shiyi Lu; Robert Dekeyser Orthographic, semantic, and contextual influences on initial processing and learning of novel words during reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 194–219, 2022. @article{Yi2022a, This study investigates how orthographic, semantic and contextual variables - including word length, concreteness, and contextual support - impact on the processing and learning of new words in a second language (L2) when first encountered during reading. Students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were recruited to read sentences for comprehension, embedded with unfamiliar L2 words that occurred once. Immediately after this, they received a form recognition test, a meaning recall test, and a meaning recognition test. Eye-movement data showed significant effects of word length on both early and late processing of novel words, along with effects of concreteness only on late-processing eye-tracking measures. Informative contexts were read slower than neutral contexts, yet contextual support did not show any direct influence on the processing of novel words. Interestingly, initial learning of abstract words was better than concrete words in terms of form and meaning recognition. Attentional processing of novel L2 words, operationalized by total reading time, positively predicted L2 learners' recognition of new orthographic forms. Taken together, these results suggest: 1) orthographic, semantic and contextual factors play distinct roles for initial processing and learning of novel words; 2) online processing of novel words contributes to L2 learners' initial knowledge of unfamiliar lexical items acquired from reading. |
Haojue Yu; Foroogh Shamsi; MiYoung Kwon Altered eye movements during reading under degraded viewing conditions: Background luminance, text blur, and text contrast Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 22, no. 10, pp. 1–20, 2022. @article{Yu2022a, Degraded viewing conditions caused by either natural environments or visual disorders lead to slow reading. Here, we systematically investigated how eye movement patterns during reading are affected by degraded viewing conditions in terms of spatial resolution, contrast, and background luminance. Using a high-speed eye tracker, binocular eye movements were obtained from 14 young normally sighted adults. Images of text passages were manipulated with varying degrees of background luminance (1.3–265 cd/m2), text blur (severe blur to no blur), or text contrast (2.6%–100%). We analyzed changes in key eye movement features, such as saccades, microsaccades, regressive saccades, fixations, and return-sweeps across different viewing conditions. No significant changes were observed for the range of tested background luminance values. However, with increasing text blur and decreasing text contrast, we observed a significant decrease in saccade amplitude and velocity, as well as a significant increase in fixation duration, number of fixations, proportion of regressive saccades, microsaccade rate, and duration of return-sweeps. Among all, saccade amplitude, fixation duration, and proportion of regressive saccades turned out to be the most significant contributors to reading speed, together accounting for 90% of variance in reading speed. Our results together showed that, when presented with degraded viewing conditions, the patterns of eye movements during reading were altered accordingly. These findings may suggest that the seemingly deviated eye movements observed in individuals with visual impairments may be in part resulting from active and optimal information acquisition strategies operated when visual sensory input becomes substantially deprived. |