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 |
Marianna Stella; Paul E. Engelhardt Use of parsing heuristics in the comprehension of passive sentences: Evidence from dyslexia and individual differences Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 12, pp. 1–19, 2022. @article{Stella2022, This study examined the comprehension of passive sentences in order to investigate whether individuals with dyslexia rely on parsing heuristics in language comprehension to a greater extent than non‐dyslexic readers. One hundred adults (50 dyslexics and 50 controls) read active and passive sentences, and we also manipulated semantic plausibility. Eye movements were monitored, while participants read each sentence, and afterwards, participants answered a comprehension question. We also assessed verbal intelligence and working memory in all participants. Results showed dyslexia status interacted with sentence structure and plausibility, such that participants with dyslexia showed significantly more comprehension errors with passive and implausible sentence. With respect to verbal intelligence and working memory, we found that individuals with lower verbal intelligence were overall more likely to make comprehension errors, and individuals with lower working memory showed particular difficulties with passive and implausible sentences. For reading times, we found that individuals with dyslexia were overall slower readers. These findings suggest that (1) individuals with dyslexia do rely on heuristics to a greater extent than do nondyslexic individuals, and (2) individual differences variables (e.g., verbal intelligence and working memory) are also related to the use of parsing heuristics. For the latter, lower ability individuals tended to be more consistent with heuristic processing (i.e., good‐enough representations). |
Sabine Thomassen; Kevin Hartung; Wolfgang Einhäuser; Alexandra Bendixen Low-high-low or high-low-high? Pattern effects on sequential auditory scene analysis Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 152, no. 5, pp. 1–11, 2022. @article{Thomassen2022, Sequential auditory scene analysis (ASA) is often studied using sequences of two alternating tones, such as ABAB or ABA_, with “_” denoting a silent gap, and “A” and “B” sine tones differing in frequency (nominally low and high). Many studies implicitly assume that the specific arrangement (ABAB vs ABA_, as well as low-high-low vs high-low-high within ABA_) plays a negligible role, such that decisions about the tone pattern can be governed by other considerations. To explicitly test this assumption, a systematic comparison of different tone patterns for two-tone sequences was performed in three different experiments. Participants were asked to report whether they perceived the sequences as originating from a single sound source (integrated) or from two interleaved sources (segregated). Results indicate that core findings of sequential ASA, such as an effect of frequency separation on the proportion of integrated and segregated percepts, are similar across the different patterns during prolonged listening. However, at sequence onset, the integrated percept was more likely to be reported by the participants in ABA_low-high-low than in ABA_high-low-high sequences. This asymmetry is important for models of sequential ASA, since the formation of percepts at onset is an integral part of understanding how auditory interpretations build up. |
Svetlana Toldova; Natalia Slioussar; Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya Discourse complexity in the light of eye‐tracking: A pilot Russian language study Journal Article In: Russian Journal of Linguistics, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 449–470, 2022. @article{Toldova2022, The paper explores the influence of discourse structure on text complexity. We assume that certain types of discourse units are easier to read than others, due to their explicit discourse structure, which makes their informational input more accessible. As a data source, we use the dataset from the MECO corpus, which contains eye movement data for 12 Russian texts read by 35 native speakers. We demonstrate that the approach relying on element ary discourse units (EDUs) can be felicitously used in the analysis of eye movement data, since fixation patterns on EDUs are similar to those on whole sentences. Our analysis has identified EDU outliers, which show shorter time of first fixation than estimated. We arranged these outliers into several groups associated with different discourse structures. First, these are statements with nominal predicates that set exposition of the text or macroproposition and, following those, EDUs that elaborate on the previous statement and signal the beginning of the narrative. Second, they are EDUs that serve as the middle component of a listing or a group of coordinated clauses or phrases. The final group represents EDUs that are part of an opposition, contrast or comparison. Discourse analysis based on EDUs has never been applied to eye movement data, so our project opens many avenues for further research of complexity of discourse structure. |
Aleksandra Tomić; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff Expecting the unexpected: Code-switching as a facilitatory cue in online sentence processing Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 81–92, 2022. @article{Tomic2022, Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching. |
Monika Tschense; Sebastian Wallot Using measures of reading time regularity (RTR) to quantify eye movement dynamics, and how they are shaped by linguistic information Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 1–21, 2022. @article{Tschense2022, In this article, we present the concept of reading time regularity (RTR) as a measure to capture reading process dynamics. The first study is concerned with examining one of the assumptions of RTR, namely, that process measures of reading, such as eye movement fluctuations and fixation durations, exhibit higher regularity when contingent on sequentially structured information, such as texts. To test this, eye movements of 26 German native speakers were recorded during reading-unrelated and reading-related tasks. To analyze the data, we used recurrence quantification analysis and sample entropy analysis to quantify the degree of temporal structure in time series of gaze steps and fixation durations. The results showed that eye movements become more regular in reading compared to nonreading conditions. These effects were most prominent when calculated on the basis of gaze step data. In a second study, eye movements of 27 native speakers of German were recorded for five conditions with increasing linguistic information. The results replicate the findings of the first study, verifying that these effects are not due to mere differences in task instructions between conditions. Implications for the concept of RTR and for future studies using these metrics in reading research are discussed |
Jung-Yueh Tu; Yu-Fu Chien The role of categorical perception and acoustic details in the processing of Mandarin tonal alternations in contexts: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 1–14, 2022. @article{Tu2022, This study investigated the perception of Mandarin tonal alternations in disyllabic words. In Mandarin, a low-dipping Tone3 is converted to a high-rising Tone2 when followed by another Tone3, known as third tone sandhi. Although previous studies showed statistically significant differences in F0 between a high-rising Sandhi-Tone3 (T3) and a Tone2, native Mandarin listeners failed to correctly categorize these two tones in perception tasks. The current study utilized the visual-world paradigm in eye-tracking to further examine whether acoustic details in lexical tone aid lexical access in Mandarin. Results showed that Mandarin listeners tend to process Tone2 as Tone2 whereas they tend to first process Sandhi-T3 as both Tone3 and Tone2, then later detect the acoustic differences between the two tones revealed by the sandhi context, and finally activate the target word during lexical access. The eye-tracking results suggest that subtle acoustic details of F0 may facilitate lexical access in automatic fashion in a tone language. |
James Turner Analysing the relationship between L2 production and different stages of L2 processing: Eye-tracking and acoustic evidence for a novel contrast Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 91, pp. 1–15, 2022. @article{Turner2022, This study analyses the relationship between native English speakers' perception and production of the novel French /y/–/u/ contrast. Acoustic data were extracted from the learners' production of French minimal pairs contrasting these French vowels and compared with their processing of the same items in a Visual World eye-tracking task. Results reveal that the vowel most acoustically similar to the learners' native English /u/ vowel, French /y/, is both easier to identify at early processing stages and more acoustically similar to a native French control group in production, indicating a perception-production relationship. Furthermore, analyses of individual variation reveal that the learners who process both /y/ and /u/ more successfully at later processing stages are also more likely to mark a greater distinction between these phonemes in production. Together, these results indicate a relationship between L2 processing and L2 production at multiple levels. Implications for current L2 speech models are discussed. |
Mats W. J. Es; Tom R. Marshall; Eelke Spaak; Ole Jensen; Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 55, no. 11-12, pp. 3191–3208, 2022. @article{Es2022, Sustained attention has long been thought to benefit perception in a continuous fashion, but recent evidence suggests that it affects perception in a discrete, rhythmic way. Periodic fluctuations in behavioral performance over time, and modulations of behavioral performance by the phase of spontaneous oscillatory brain activity point to an attentional sampling rate in the theta or alpha frequency range. We investigated whether such discrete sampling by attention is reflected in periodic fluctuations in the decodability of visual stimulus orientation from magnetoencephalographic (MEG) brain signals. In this exploratory study, human subjects attended one of the two grating stimuli, while MEG was being recorded. We assessed the strength of the visual representation of the attended stimulus using a support vector machine (SVM) to decode the orientation of the grating (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) from the MEG signal. We tested whether decoder performance depended on the theta/alpha phase of local brain activity. While the phase of ongoing activity in the visual cortex did not modulate decoding performance, theta/alpha phase of activity in the frontal eye fields and parietal cortex, contralateral to the attended stimulus did modulate decoding performance. These findings suggest that phasic modulations of visual stimulus representations in the brain are caused by frequency-specific top-down activity in the frontoparietal attention network, though the behavioral relevance of these effects could not be established. |
Sietske Viersen; Athanassios Protopapas; George K. Georgiou; Rauno Parrila; Laoura Ziaka; Peter F. Jong Lexicality effects on orthographic learning in beginning and advanced readers of Dutch: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 75, no. 6, pp. 1135–1154, 2022. @article{Viersen2022, Orthographic learning is the topic of many recent studies about reading, but much is still unknown about conditions that affect orthographic learning and their influence on reading fluency development over time. This study investigated lexicality effects on orthographic learning in beginning and relatively advanced readers of Dutch. Eye movements of 131 children in Grades 2 and 5 were monitored during an orthographic learning task. Children read sentences containing pseudowords or low-frequency real words that varied in number of exposures. We examined both offline learning outcomes (i.e., orthographic choice and spelling dictation) of target items and online gaze durations on target words. The results showed general effects of exposure, lexicality, and reading-skill level. Also, a two-way interaction was found between the number of exposures and lexicality when detailed orthographic representations were required, consistent with a larger overall effect of exposure on learning the spellings of pseudowords. Moreover, lexicality and reading-skill level were found to affect the learning rate across exposures based on a decrease in gaze durations, indicating a larger learning effect for pseudowords in Grade 5 children. Yet, further interactions between exposure and reading-skill level were not present, indicating largely similar learning curves for beginning and advanced readers. We concluded that the reading system of more advanced readers may cope somewhat better with words varying in lexicality, but is not more efficient than that of beginning readers in building up orthographic knowledge of specific words across repeated exposures. |
Monica Vanoncini; Natalie Boll-Avetisyan; Birgit Elsner; Stefanie Hoehl; Ezgi Kayhan The role of mother-infant emotional synchrony in speech processing in 9-month-old infants Journal Article In: Infant Behavior and Development, vol. 69, pp. 1–13, 2022. @article{Vanoncini2022, Rhythmicity characterizes both interpersonal synchrony and spoken language. Emotions and language are forms of interpersonal communication, which interact with each other throughout development. We investigated whether and how emotional synchrony between mothers and their 9-month-old infants relates to infants' word segmentation as an early marker of language development. Twenty-six 9-month-old infants and their German-speaking mothers took part in the study. To measure emotional synchrony, we coded positive, neutral and negative emotional expressions of the mothers and their infants during a free play session. We then calculated the degree to which the mothers' and their infants' matching emotional expressions followed a predictable pattern. To measure word segmentation, we familiarized infants with auditory text passages and tested how long they looked at the screen while listening to familiar versus novel words. We found that higher levels of predictability (i.e. low entropy) during mother-infant interaction is associated with infants' word segmentation performance. These findings suggest that individual differences in word segmentation relate to the complexity and predictability of emotional expressions during mother-infant interactions. |
2021 |
Aaron Veldre; Roslyn Wong; Sally Andrews Reading proficiency predicts the extent of the right, but not left, perceptual span in older readers Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 18–26, 2021. @article{Veldre2021, The gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm was used to assess the size and symmetry of the perceptual span in older readers. The eye movements of 49 cognitively intact older adults (60–88 years of age) were recorded as they read sentences varying in difficulty, and the availability of letter information to the right and left of fixation was manipulated. To reconcile discrepancies in previous estimates of the perceptual span in older readers, individual differences in written language proficiency were assessed with tests of vocabulary, reading comprehension, reading speed, spelling ability, and print exposure. The results revealed that higher proficiency older adults extracted information up to 15 letter spaces to the right of fixation, while lower proficiency readers showed no additional benefit beyond 9 letters to the right. However, all readers showed improvements to reading with the availability of up to 9 letters to the left—confirming previous evidence of reduced perceptual span asymmetry in older readers. The findings raise questions about whether the source of age-related changes in parafoveal processing lies in the adoption of a risky reading strategy involving an increased propensity to both guess upcoming words and make corrective regressions. |
Bram Vanroy; Moritz Schaeffer; Lieve Macken Comparing the effect of product-based metrics on the translation process Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 681945, 2021. @article{Vanroy2021, Characteristics of the translation product are often used in translation process research as predictors for cognitive load, and by extension translation difficulty. In the last decade, user-activity information such as eye-tracking data has been increasingly employed as an experimental tool for that purpose. In this paper, we take a similar approach. We look for significant effects that different predictors may have on three different eye-tracking measures: First Fixation Duration (duration of first fixation on a token), Eye-Key Span (duration between first fixation on a token and the first keystroke contributing to its translation), and Total Reading Time on source tokens (sum of fixations on a token). As predictors we make use of a set of established metrics involving (lexico)semantics and word order, while also investigating the effect of more recent ones concerning syntax, semantics or both. Our results show a, particularly late, positive effect of many of the proposed predictors, suggesting that both fine-grained metrics of syntactic phenomena (such as word reordering) as well as coarse-grained ones (encapsulating both syntactic and semantic information) contribute to translation difficulties. The effect on especially late measures may indicate that the linguistic phenomena that our metrics capture (e.g., word reordering) are resolved in later stages during cognitive processing such as problem-solving and revision. |
Martin R. Vasilev; Victoria I. Adedeji; Calvin Laursen; Marcin Budka; Timothy J. Slattery Do readers use character information when programming return-sweep saccades? Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 183, pp. 30–40, 2021. @article{Vasilev2021, Reading saccades that occur within a single line of text are guided by the size of letters. However, readers occasionally need to make longer saccades (known as return-sweeps) that take their eyes from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next. In this study, we tested whether return-sweep saccades are also guided by font size information and whether this guidance depends on visual acuity of the return-sweep target area. To do this, we manipulated the font size of letters (0.29 vs 0.39° per character) and the length of the first line of text (16 vs 26°). The larger font resulted in return-sweeps that landed further to the right of the line start and in a reduction of under-sweeps compared to the smaller font. This suggests that font size information is used when programming return-sweeps. Return-sweeps in the longer line condition landed further to the right of the line start and the proportion of under-sweeps increased compared to the short line condition. This likely reflects an increase in saccadic undershoot error with the increase in intended saccade size. Critically, there was no interaction between font size and line length. This suggests that when programming return-sweeps, the use of font size information does not depend on visual acuity at the saccade target. Instead, it appears that readers rely on global typographic properties of the text in order to maintain an optimal number of characters to the left of their first fixation on a new line. |
Martin R. Vasilev; Fabrice B. R. Parmentier; Julie A. Kirkby Distraction by auditory novelty during reading: Evidence for disruption in saccade planning, but not saccade execution Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 5, pp. 826–842, 2021. @article{Vasilev2021a, Novel or unexpected sounds that deviate from an otherwise repetitive sequence of the same sound cause behavioural distraction. Recent work has suggested that distraction also occurs during reading as fixation durations increased when a deviant sound was presented at the fixation onset of words. The present study tested the hypothesis that this increase in fixation durations occurs due to saccadic inhibition. This was done by manipulating the temporal onset of sounds relative to the fixation onset of words in the text. If novel sounds cause saccadic inhibition, they should be more distracting when presented during the second half of fixations when saccade programming usually takes place. Participants read single sentences and heard a 120 ms sound when they fixated five target words in the sentence. On most occasions (p =.9), the same sine wave tone was presented (“standard”), while on the remaining occasions (p =.1) a new sound was presented (“novel”). Critically, sounds were played, on average, either during the first half of the fixation (0 ms delay) or during the second half of the fixation (120 ms delay). Consistent with the saccadic inhibition hypothesis (SIH), novel sounds led to longer fixation durations in the 120 ms compared to the 0 ms delay condition. However, novel sounds did not generally influence the execution of the subsequent saccade. These results suggest that unexpected sounds have a rapid influence on saccade planning, but not saccade execution. |
Martin R. Vasilev; Mark Yates; Ethan Prueitt; Timothy J. Slattery Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 2, pp. 254–276, 2021. @article{Vasilev2021b, There is a growing understanding that the parafoveal preview effect during reading may represent a combination of preview benefits and preview costs due to interference from parafoveal masks. It has been suggested that visually degrading the parafoveal masks may reduce their costs, but adult readers were later shown to be highly sensitive to degraded display changes. Four experiments examined how preview benefits and preview costs are influenced by the perception of distinct parafoveal degradation at the target word location. Participants read sentences with four preview types (identity, orthographic, phonological, and letter-mask preview) and two levels of visual degradation (0% vs. 20%). The distinctiveness of the target word degradation was either eliminated by degrading all words in the sentence (Experiments 1a–2a) or remained present, as in previous research (Experiments 1b–2b). Degrading the letter masks resulted in a reduction in preview costs, but only when all words in the sentence were degraded. When degradation at the target word location was perceptually distinct, it induced costs of its own, even for orthographically and phonologically related previews. These results confirm previous reports that traditional parafoveal masks introduce preview costs that overestimate the size of the true benefit. However, they also show that parafoveal degradation has the unintended consequence of introducing additional costs when participants are aware of distinct degradation on the target word. Parafoveal degradation appears to be easily perceived and may temporarily orient attention away from the reading task, thus delaying word processing. |
Aiping Wang; Ming Yan; Bei Wang; Gaoding Jia; Albrecht W. Inhoff The perceptual span in Tibetan reading Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 1307–1316, 2021. @article{Wang2021n, Tibetan script differs from other alphabetic writing systems in that word forms can be composed of horizontally and vertically arrayed characters. To examine information extraction during the reading of this script, eye movements of native readers were recorded and used to control the size of a window of legible text that moved in synchrony with the eyes. Letters outside the window were masked, and no viewing constraints were imposed in a control condition. Comparisons of window conditions with the control condition showed that reading speed and oculomotor activity matched the control condition, when windows revealed three letters to the left and seven to eight letters to the right of a fixated letter location. Cross-script comparisons indicate that this perceptual span is smaller than for English and larger than for Chinese script. We suggest that the information density of a writing system influences the perceptual span during reading. |
Jingwen Wang; Bernhard Angele; Guojie Ma; Xingshan Li Repetition causes confusion: Insights to word segmentation during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 147–156, 2021. @article{Wang2021d, Since there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries in Chinese, it is common to see 2 identical neighboring characters in natural text. Usually, this occurs when there are 2 adjacent words containing the same character (we will call such a coincidental sequence of 2 identical characters repeated characters). In the present study, we examined how Chinese readers process words when there are repeated characters. In 3 experiments, we compared how Chinese readers process 4-character strings including 2 repeated characters (e.g. 行动动机, pinyin: xíngdòng dòngjī, meaning behavioral motivation) with a control condition where none of the characters repeat (e.g. 行动欲望, pinyin: xíngdòng yùwàng, meaning behavioral desire). In Experiment 1, the 4-character strings were presented for 40 ms and participants were asked to report as many characters as possible. Participants reported the second and third characters less accurately in the repeated condition than the control condition. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we embedded 2 different types of 4-character strings, compound Chinese characters and simple Chinese characters, into the same sentence frames, and asked participants to read these sentences normally. Gaze duration and total time on the second word were significantly longer in the repeated condition. These results suggest that the repeated characters increased the difficulty of word processing. Moreover, the results are consistent with the predictions of serial models, which assumes that words are processed serially in reading. |
Mengsi Wang; Hazel I. Blythe; Simon P. Liversedge In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 83, no. 8, pp. 3146–3161, 2021. @article{Wang2021f, Wang et al. (Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, in press, 2021) reported a Landolt-C learning and scanning experiment. In a learning session, they simulated exposure frequency effects successfully by training participants to learn target Landolt-C clusters with different exposures. The rate of learning high-frequency (HF) targets were greater than that of learning low-frequency (LF) targets. In a subsequent scanning session, participants were required to scan text-like Landolt-C strings to detect whether any pre-learnt target was embedded in the strings. The Landolt-C strings were displayed under different spacing formats (i.e., spaced format, unspaced format, and unspaced shaded format). However, the simulated exposure frequency effect did not occur in the scanning session. Wang et al. argued one straightforward reason for this might be because participants failed to maintain the memory of pre-learnt target to the scanning session. In the current study, we employed the same learning and scanning paradigm to investigate whether exposure frequency would occur in a target search task by using easier learning materials – pseudoword stimuli. The learning of pseudoword stimuli was much more successful than Landolt-C stimuli. Interestingly, however, we found a very different rate of learning effect such that the rate of learning LF targets was greater than HF targets. To our surprise, we did not find any influence of exposure frequency on eye movements during scanning even when participants were able to identify pre-learnt pseudowords in strings. Learning rate effect, exposure frequency effects, and saccadic targeting during the scanning of strings under different spacing formats are discussed in this paper. |
Youxi Wang; Xuelian Zang; Hua Zhang; Wei Shen The processing of the second syllable in recognizing Chinese disyllabic spoken words: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 1–14, 2021. @article{Wang2021l, In the current study, two experiments were conducted to investigate the processing of the second syllable (which was considered as the rhyme at the word level) during Chinese disyllabic spoken word recognition using a printed-word paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants heard a spoken target word and were simultaneously presented with a visual display of four printed words: a target word, a phonological competitor, and two unrelated distractors. The phonological competitors were manipulated to share either full phonemic overlap of the second syllable with targets (the syllabic overlap condition; e.g., 小篆, xiao3zhuan4, “calligraphy” vs. 公转, gong1zhuan4, “revolution”) or the initial phonemic overlap of the second syllable (the sub-syllabic overlap condition; e.g., 圆柱, yuan2zhu4, “cylinder” vs. 公转, gong1zhuan4, “revolution”) with targets. Participants were asked to select the target words and their eye movements were simultaneously recorded. The results did not show any phonological competition effect in either the syllabic overlap condition or the sub-syllabic overlap condition. In Experiment 2, to maximize the likelihood of observing the phonological competition effect, a target-absent version of the printed-word paradigm was adopted, in which target words were removed from the visual display. The results of Experiment 2 showed significant phonological competition effects in both conditions, i.e., more fixations were made to the phonological competitors than to the distractors. Moreover, the phonological competition effect was found to be larger in the syllabic overlap condition than in the sub-syllabic overlap condition. These findings shed light on the effect of the second syllable competition at the word level during spoken word recognition and, more importantly, showed that the initial phonemes of the second syllable at the syllabic level are also accessed during Chinese disyllabic spoken word recognition. |
Leila Wehbe; Idan Asher Blank; Cory Shain; Richard Futrell; Roger Levy; Titus Von Der Malsburg; Nathaniel Smith; Edward Gibson; Evelina Fedorenko Incremental language comprehension difficulty predicts activity in the language network but not the multiple demand network Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 31, no. 9, pp. 4006–4023, 2021. @article{Wehbe2021, What role do domain-general executive functions play in human language comprehension? To address this question, we examine the relationship between behavioral measures of comprehension and neural activity in the domain-general "multiple demand"(MD) network, which has been linked to constructs like attention, working memory, inhibitory control, and selection, and implicated in diverse goal-directed behaviors. Specifically, functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected during naturalistic story listening are compared with theory-neutral measures of online comprehension difficulty and incremental processing load (reading times and eye-fixation durations). Critically, to ensure that variance in these measures is driven by features of the linguistic stimulus rather than reflecting participant- or trial-level variability, the neuroimaging and behavioral datasets were collected in nonoverlapping samples. We find no behavioral-neural link in functionally localized MD regions; instead, this link is found in the domain-specific, fronto-temporal "core language network,"in both left-hemispheric areas and their right hemispheric homotopic areas. These results argue against strong involvement of domain-general executive circuits in language comprehension. |
Yipu Wei; Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul; Ted M. Sanders; Willem M. Mak The role of connectives and stance Mmrkers in the processing of subjective causal relations Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 58, no. 8, pp. 766–786, 2021. @article{Wei2021, Interpreting subjectivity in causal relations takes effort: Subjective, claim-argument relations are read slower than objective, cause-consequence relations. In an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment, we investigated whether connectives and stance markers can play a facilitative role. Sixty-five Chinese participants read sentences expressing a subjective causal relation, systematically varied in the use of stance markers (no, attitudinal, epistemic) in the first clause and connectives (neutral suoyi “so”, subjective kejian “so”) in the second clause. Results showed that processing subjectivity proceeds highly incrementally: The interplay of the subjectivity markers is visible as the sentence unfolds. Subjective connectives increased reading times, irrespective of the type of stance marker being used. Stance markers did, however, facilitate the processing of modal verbs in subjective relations. We conclude that processing subjectivity involves evaluating how the argument supports the claim and that connectives, modal verbs, and stance markers function as processing instructions that help readers achieve this evaluation. |
Veronica Whitford; Marc F. Joanisse In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 674007, 2021. @article{Whitford2021, We used eye movement measures of first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph reading to investigate how the activation of multiple lexical candidates, both within and across languages, influences visual word recognition in four different age and language groups: (1) monolingual children; (2) monolingual young adults; (3) bilingual children; and (4) bilingual young adults. More specifically, we focused on within-language and cross-language orthographic neighborhood density effects, while controlling for the potentially confounding effects of orthographic neighborhood frequency. We found facilitatory within-language orthographic neighborhood density effects (i.e., words were easier to process when they had many vs. few orthographic neighbors, evidenced by shorter fixation durations) across the L1 and L2, with larger effects in children vs. adults (especially the bilingual ones) during L1 reading. Similarly, we found facilitatory cross-language neighborhood density effects across the L1 and L2, with no modulatory influence of age or language group. Taken together, our findings suggest that word recognition benefits from the simultaneous activation of visually similar word forms during naturalistic reading, with some evidence of larger effects in children and particularly those whose words may have differentially lower baseline activation levels and/or weaker links between word-related information due to divided language exposure: bilinguals. |
Anne Wienholz; Derya Nuhbalaoglu; Markus Steinbach; Annika Herrmann; Nivedita Mani Phonological priming in German Sign Language Journal Article In: Sign Language & Linguistics, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 4–35, 2021. @article{Wienholz2021a, A number of studies provide evidence for a phonological priming effect in the recognition of single signs based on phonological parameters and that the specific phonological parameters modulated in the priming effect can influence the robustness of this effect. This eye tracking study on German Sign Language examined phonological priming effects at the sentence level, while varying the phonological relationship between prime-target sign pairs. We recorded participants' eye movements while presenting videos of sentences containing either related or unrelated prime-target sign pairs, and pictures of the target and an unrelated distractor. We observed a phonological priming effect for sign pairs sharing handshape and movement while differing in location parameter. Taken together, the data suggest a difference in the contribution of sign parameters to sign recognition and that sub-lexical features influence sign language processing. |
Anne Wienholz; Derya Nuhbalaoglu; Markus Steinbach; Annika Herrmann; Nivedita Mani Phonological priming in German sign language: An eye tracking study using the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Sign Language & Linguistics, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 1–32, 2021. @article{Wienholz2021, A number of studies provide evidence for a phonological priming effect in the recognition of single signs based on phonological parameters and that the specific phonological parameters modulated in the priming effect can influence the robustness of this effect. This eye tracking study on German Sign Language examined phonological priming effects at the sentence level, while varying the phonological relationship between prime-target sign pairs. We recorded participants' eye movements while presenting videos of sentences containing either related or unrelated prime-target sign pairs, and pictures of the target and an unrelated distractor. We observed a phonological priming effect for sign pairs sharing handshape and movement while differing in location parameter. Taken together, the data suggest a difference in the contribution of sign parameters to sign recognition and that sub-lexical features influence sign language processing. |
Matthew B. Winn; Katherine H. Teece Slower speaking rate reduces listening effort among listeners with cochlear implants Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 584–595, 2021. @article{Winn2021, OBJECTIVES: Slowed speaking rate was examined for its effects on speech intelligibility, its interaction with the benefit of contextual cues, and the impact of these factors on listening effort in adults with cochlear implants. DESIGN: Participants (n = 21 cochlear implant users) heard high- and low-context sentences that were played at the original speaking rate, as well as a slowed (1.4× duration) speaking rate, using uniform pitch-synchronous time warping. In addition to intelligibility measures, changes in pupil dilation were measured as a time-varying index of processing load or listening effort. Slope of pupil size recovery to baseline after the sentence was used as an index of resolution of perceptual ambiguity. RESULTS: Speech intelligibility was better for high-context compared to low-context sentences and slightly better for slower compared to original-rate speech. Speech rate did not affect magnitude and latency of peak pupil dilation relative to sentence offset. However, baseline pupil size recovered more substantially for slower-rate sentences, suggesting easier processing in the moment after the sentence was over. The effect of slowing speech rate was comparable to changing a sentence from low context to high context. The effect of context on pupil dilation was not observed until after the sentence was over, and one of two analyses suggested that context had greater beneficial effects on listening effort when the speaking rate was slower. These patterns maintained even at perfect sentence intelligibility, suggesting that correct speech repetition does not guarantee efficient or effortless processing. With slower speaking rates, there was less variability in pupil dilation slopes following the sentence, implying mitigation of some of the difficulties shown by individual listeners who would otherwise demonstrate prolonged effort after a sentence is heard. CONCLUSIONS: Slowed speaking rate provides release from listening effort when hearing an utterance, particularly relieving effort that would have lingered after a sentence is over. Context arguably provides even more release from listening effort when speaking rate is slower. The pattern of prolonged pupil dilation for faster speech is consistent with increased need to mentally correct errors, although that exact interpretation cannot be verified with intelligibility data alone or with pupil data alone. A pattern of needing to dwell on a sentence to disambiguate misperceptions likely contributes to difficulty in running conversation where there are few opportunities to pause and resolve recently heard utterances. |
Jeremy Steffman Prosodic prominence effects in the processing of spectral cues Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 586–611, 2021. @article{Steffman2021, Two experiments test how phrasal prominence influences listeners' perception of vowel contrasts and how prominence information and vowel formant cues are integrated in processing. Experiment 1 finds that listeners incorporate phrasal prominence in their perception of vowels, in line with how spectral structure is modulated by prominence in speech. Experiment 2 explores how prominence information is integrated with formant cues in a visual world eyetracking task. Prominence shows an overall later influence in processing in line with current models of prosodic and segmental integration. However, listeners' perception of formants was also impacted more subtly by prominence immediately in processing such that prominence information directly shapes how formant cues are perceived. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for models of prosodic effects in segmental perception and possible differences between prosodic prominence and prosodic boundaries in this regard. |
Marianna Stella; Paul E. Engelhardt Comprehension and eye movements in the processing of subject-and object-relative clauses: Evidence from dyslexia and individual differences Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 11, pp. 915, 2021. @article{Stella2021, In this study, we examined eye movements and comprehension in sentences containing a relative clause. To date, few studies have focused on syntactic processing in dyslexia and so one goal of the study is to contribute to this gap in the experimental literature. A second goal is to contribute to theoretical psycholinguistic debate concerning the cause and the location of the processing difficulty associated with object-relative clauses. We compared dyslexic readers (n = 50) to a group of non-dyslexic controls (n = 50). We also assessed two key individual differences variables (working memory and verbal intelligence), which have been theorised to impact reading times and comprehension of subject-and object-relative clauses. The results showed that dyslexics and controls had similar comprehension accuracy. However, reading times showed participants with dyslexia spent significantly longer reading the sentences compared to controls (i.e., a main effect of dyslexia). In general, sentence type did not interact with dyslexia status. With respect to individual differences and the theoretical debate, we found that processing difficulty between the subject and object relatives was no longer significant when individual differences in working memory were controlled. Thus, our findings support theories, which assume that working memory demands are responsible for the processing difficulty incurred by (1) individuals with dyslexia and (2) object-relative clauses as compared to subject relative clauses. |
Andrew J. Stewart; Henrik Singmann; Matthew Haigh; Jeffrey S. Wood; Igor Douven Tracking the eye of the beholder: Is explanation subjective? Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 199–206, 2021. @article{Stewart2021, There is much recent evidence showing that explanation is central to various cognitive processes. On the other hand, philosophers have argued that the notions of explanation and explanation quality are too subjective for explanation to play any role in science: what may be an adequate explanation for one person may fail to be so for another. We compare the results of a study tasking participants with rating explanation quality with those of an eye-tracking study, finding that ratings of explanation quality from participants in the former study were strongly predictive of the ease with which participants in the latter study processed text fragments presenting the same explanations that were used in the rating study. This finding undermines the thought that explanation is only in the eye of the beholder. |
Kate Stone; João Veríssimo; Daniel J. Schad; Elise Oltrogge; Shravan Vasishth; Sol Lago The interaction of grammatically distinct agreement dependencies in predictive processing Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 9, pp. 1159–1179, 2021. @article{Stone2021, Previous research has found that comprehenders sometimes predict information that is grammatically unlicensed by sentence constraints. An open question is why such grammatically unlicensed predictions occur. We examined the possibility that unlicensed predictions arise in situations of information conflict, for instance when comprehenders try to predict upcoming words while simultaneously building dependencies with previously encountered elements in memory. German possessive pronouns are a good testing ground for this hypothesis because they encode two grammatically distinct agreement dependencies: a retrospective one between the possessive and its previously mentioned referent, and a prospective one between the possessive and its following nominal head. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we estimated the onset of predictive effects in participants' fixations. The results showed that the retrospective dependency affected resolution of the prospective dependency by shifting the onset of predictive effects. We attribute this effect to an interaction between predictive and memory retrieval processes. |
Benjamin Swets; Susanne Fuchs; Jelena Krivokapić; Caterina Petrone A cross-linguistic study of individual differences in speech planning Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 655516, 2021. @article{Swets2021, Although previous research has shown that there exist individual and cross-linguistic differences in planning strategies during language production, little is known about how such individual differences might vary depending on which language a speaker is planning. The present series of studies examines individual differences in planning strategies exhibited by speakers of American English, French, and German. Participants were asked to describe images on a computer monitor while their eye movements were monitored. In addition, we measured participants' working memory capacity and speed of processing. The results indicate that in the present study, English and German were planned less incrementally (further in advance) prior to speech onset compared to French, which was planned more incrementally (not as far in advance). Crucially, speed of processing predicted the scope of planning for French speakers, but not for English or German speakers. These results suggest that the different planning strategies that are invoked by syntactic choices available in different languages are associated with the tendency for speakers to rely on different cognitive support systems as they plan sentences. |
Debra Titone; Julie Mercier; Aruna Sudarshan; Irina Pivneva; Jason Gullifer; Shari Baum Spoken word processing in bilingual older adults Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 578–610, 2021. @article{Titone2021, We investigated whether bilingual older adults experience within- and cross-language competition during spoken word recognition similarly to younger adults matched on age of second language (L2) acquisition, objective and subjective L2 proficiency, and current L2 exposure. In a visual world eye-tracking paradigm, older and younger adults, who were French-dominant or English-dominant English-French bilinguals, listened to English words, and looked at pictures including the target (field), a within-language competitor (feet) or cross-language (French) competitor (fille, “girl”), and unrelated filler pictures while their eye movements were monitored. Older adults showed evidence of greater within-language competition as a function of increased target and competitor phonological overlap. There was some evidence of age-related differences in cross-language competition, however, it was quite small overall and varied as a function of target language proficiency. These results suggest that greater within- and possibly cross-language lexical competition during spoken word recognition may underlie some of the communication difficulties encountered by healthy bilingual older adults. |
Blaine Tomkins In: Laterality, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 539–563, 2021. @article{Tomkins2021, Previous research suggests that the right visual field advantage on the lexical decision task occurs independent of the visual quality of stimuli [Chiarello, C., Senehi, J., & Soulier, M. (1986). Viewing conditions and hemisphere asymmetry for the lexical decision. Neuropsychologia, 24(4), 521–529]. However, previous studies examining these effects have had methodological limitations that were addressed and controlled for in the present study. Participants performed a divided visual field, lexical decision task for words that varied in size (Experiment 1) and visibility (Experiment 2). Results showed a quality by visual field interaction effect. In both experiments, response times were faster for targets presented to the right visual field in the high quality (i.e., large font, high visibility) conditions; however, visual quality resulted in no differences for targets presented to the left visual field. Furthermore, this quality by visual field interaction effect was only observed when the target was a word. These results suggest that the left hemisphere advantage for lexical decision depends on the perceptual quality of targets, consistent with an early stage of processing account of hemispheric asymmetry during lexical decision. Findings are discussed within the context of word recognition and decision-based models. |
Débora Torres; Wagner R. Sena; Humberto A. Carmona; André A. Moreira; Hernán A. Makse; José S. Andrade Eye-tracking as a proxy for coherence and complexity of texts Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 16, no. 12, pp. e0260236, 2021. @article{Torres2021, Reading is a complex cognitive process that involves primary oculomotor function and high-level activities like attention focus and language processing. When we read, our eyes move by primary physiological functions while responding to language-processing demands. In fact, the eyes perform discontinuous twofold movements, namely, successive long jumps (saccades) interposed by small steps (fixations) in which the gaze “scans” confined locations. It is only through the fixations that information is effectively captured for brain processing. Since individuals can express similar as well as entirely different opinions about a given text, it is therefore expected that the form, content and style of a text could induce different eye-movement patterns among people. A question that naturally arises is whether these individuals' behaviours are correlated, so that eye-tracking while reading can be used as a proxy for text subjective properties. Here we perform a set of eye-tracking experiments with a group of individuals reading different types of texts, including children stories, random word generated texts and excerpts from literature work. In parallel, an extensive Internet survey was conducted for categorizing these texts in terms of their complexity and coherence, considering a large number of individuals selected according to different ages, gender and levels of education. The computational analysis of the fixation maps obtained from the gaze trajectories of the subjects for a given text reveals that the average “magnetization” of the fixation configurations correlates strongly with their complexity observed in the survey. Moreover, we perform a thermodynamic analysis using the Maximum-Entropy Model and find that coherent texts were closer to their corresponding “critical points” than non-coherent ones, as computed from the Pairwise Maximum-Entropy method, suggesting that different texts may induce distinct cohesive reading activities. |
Matthew J. Traxler; Timothy Banh; Madeline M. Craft; Kurt Winsler; Trevor A. Brothers; Liv J. Hoversten; Pilar Piñar; David P. Corina Word skipping in deaf and hearing bilinguals: Cognitive control over eye movements remains with increased perceptual span Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 601–630, 2021. @article{Traxler2021, Deaf readers may have larger perceptual spans than ability-matched hearing native English readers, allowing them to read more efficiently (Belanger & Rayner, 2015). To further test the hypothesis that deaf and hearing readers have different perceptual spans, the current study uses eye-movement data from two experiments in which deaf American Sign Language-English bilinguals, hearing native English speakers, and hearing Chinese-English bilinguals read semantically unrelated sentences and answered comprehension questions after a proportion of them. We analyzed skip rates, fixation times, and accuracy on comprehension questions. In addition, we analyzed how lexical properties of words affected skipping behavior and fixation durations. Deaf readers skipped words more often than native English speakers, who skipped words more often than Chinese-English bilinguals. Deaf readers had shorter first-pass fixation times than the other two groups. All groups' skipping behaviors were affected by lexical frequency. Deaf readers' comprehension did not differ from hearing Chinese-English bilinguals, despite greater skipping and shorter fixation times. Overall, the eye-tracking findings align with Belanger's word processing efficiency hypothesis. Effects of lexical frequency on skipping behavior indicated further that eye movements during reading remain under cognitive control in deaf readers. |
Annie Tremblay; Sahyang Kim; Seulgi Shin; Taehong Cho In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 1–13, 2021. @article{Tremblay2021, This study investigates how phonological and phonetic aspects of the native-language (L1) intonation modulate the use of tonal cues in second-language (L2) speech segmentation. Previous research suggested that prosodic learning is more difficult if the L1 and L2 intonations are phonologically similar but phonetically different (French-Korean) than if they are phonologically different (English-French/Korean) (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis; Tremblay, Broersma, Coughlin & Choi, 2016). This study provides another test of this hypothesis. Korean listeners and French-speaking and English-speaking L2 learners of Korean in Korea completed an eye-tracking experiment investigating the effects of phrase tones in Korean. All groups patterned similarly with the phrase-final tone, but, unlike Korean and French listeners, English listeners showed early benefits from the phrase-initial tone (signaling word-initial boundaries in English). Importantly, French listeners patterned like Korean listeners with both tones. The Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis is refined to suggest that prosodic learning difficulties may not be persistent for immersed L2 learners. |
Kathryn A. Tremblay; Katherine S. Binder; Scott P. Ardoin; Amani Talwar; Elizabeth L. Tighe Third graders' strategy use and accuracy on an expository text: an exploratory study using eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 737–756, 2021. @article{Tremblay2021a, Background: Of the myriad of reading comprehension (RC) assessments used in schools, multiple-choice (MC) questions continue to be one of the most prevalent formats used by educators and researchers. Outcomes from RC assessments dictate many critical factors encountered during a student's academic career, and it is crucial that we gain a deeper understanding of the nuances of these assessments and the types of skills needed for their successful completion. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine how different component skills (i.e., decoding, word recognition, reading fluency, RC and working memory) were related to students' response accuracy as they read a text and responded to MC questions. Methods: We monitored the eye movements of 73 third graders as they read an expository text and answered MC questions. We investigated whether the component skills differentially predicted accuracy across different question types and difficulty levels. Results: Results indicated that readers who answered MC questions correctly were able to identify when they needed to reread the text to find the answer and were better able to find the relevant area in the text compared with incorrect responders. Incorrect responders were less likely to reread the text to find the answer and generally had poorer precision when attempting to locate the answer in the text. Finally, the component skills relied upon by readers to answer RC questions were related to the type and difficulty of the questions. Conclusions: Results of the present study suggest that comprehension difficulties can arise from a myriad of sources and that reading abilities together with test-taking strategies impact RC test outcomes. |
Marianne L. Marloes L. Moort; Arnout Koornneef; Paul W. Broek Differentiating text-based and knowledge-Bbsed validation processes during reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 22–41, 2021. @article{Moort2021, To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but when and how they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive architecture of text-based and knowledge-based validation processes, we used eye-tracking methodology. Participants read versions of texts that varied systematically in (in)coherence with prior text or background knowledge. Contradictions with respect to prior text and background knowledge both were found to disrupt reading but in different ways: The two types of contradiction led to distinct patterns of processes, and, importantly, these differences were evident already in early processing stages. Moreover, knowledge-based incoherence triggered more pervasive and longer (repair) processes than did text-based incoherence. Finally, processing of text-based and knowledge-based incoherence was not influenced by readers' working memory capacity. |
Guangyao Zhang; Binke Yuan; Huimin Hua; Ya Lou; Nan Lin; Xingshan Li Individual differences in first-pass fixation duration in reading are related to resting-state functional connectivity Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 213, pp. 1–10, 2021. @article{Zhang2021, Although there are considerable individual differences in eye movements during text reading, their neural correlates remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the first-pass fixation duration (FPFD) in natural reading and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) in the brain. We defined the brain regions associated with early visual processing, word identification, attention shifts, and oculomotor control as seed regions. The results showed that individual FPFDs were positively correlated with individual RSFCs between the early visual network, visual word form area, and eye movement control/dorsal attention network. Our findings provide new evidence on the neural correlates of eye movements in text reading and indicate that individual differences in fixation time may shape the RSFC differences in the brain through the time-on-task effect and the mechanism of Hebbian learning. |
Mengyan Zhu; Xiangling Zhuang; Guojie Ma Readers extract semantic information from parafoveal two-character synonyms in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 773–790, 2021. @article{Zhu2021c, In Chinese reading, the possibility and mechanism of semantic parafoveal processing has been debated for a long time. To advance the topic, “semantic preview benefit” in Chinese reading was reexamined, with a specific focus on how it is affected by the semantic relatedness between preview and target words at the two-character word level. Eighty critical two-character words were selected as target words. Reading tasks with gaze-contingent boundary paradigms were used to study whether different semantic-relatedness preview conditions influenced parafoveal processing. The data showed that synonyms (the most closely related preview) produced significant preview benefit compared with the semantic-related (non-synonyms) condition, even when plausibility was controlled. This result indicates that the larger extent of semantic preview benefit is mainly caused by the larger semantic relatedness between preview and target words. Moreover, plausibility is not the only cause of semantic preview benefit in Chinese reading. These findings improve the current understanding of the mechanism of parafoveal processing in Chinese reading and the implications on modeling eye movement control are discussed. |
Sainan Zhao; Lin Li; Min Chang; Jingxin Wang; Kevin B. Paterson A further look at ageing and word predictability effects in Chinese reading: Evidence from one-character words Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 68–78, 2021. @article{Zhao2021, Older adults are thought to compensate for slower lexical processing by making greater use of contextual knowledge, relative to young adults, to predict words in sentences. Accordingly, compared to young adults, older adults should produce larger contextual predictability effects in reading times and skipping rates for words. Empirical support for this account is nevertheless scarce. Perhaps the clearest evidence to date comes from a recent Chinese study showing larger word predictability effects for older adults in reading times but not skipping rates for two-character words. However, one possibility is that the absence of a word-skipping effect in this experiment was due to the older readers skipping words infrequently because of difficulty processing two-character words parafoveally. We therefore took a further look at this issue, using one-character target words to boost word-skipping. Young (18–30 years) and older (65+ years) adults read sentences containing a target word that was either highly predictable or less predictable from the prior sentence context. Our results replicate the finding that older adults produce larger word predictability effects in reading times but not word-skipping, despite high skipping rates. We discuss these findings in relation to ageing effects on reading in different writing systems. |
Matthew B. Winn; Katherine H. Teece Listening effort is not the same as speech intelligibility score Journal Article In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 25, pp. 1–26, 2021. @article{Winn2021a, Listening effort is a valuable and important notion to measure because it is among the primary complaints of people with hearing loss. It is tempting and intuitive to accept speech intelligibility scores as a proxy for listening effort, but this link is likely oversimplified and lacks actionable explanatory power. This study was conducted to explain the mechanisms of listening effort that are not captured by intelligibility scores, using sentence-repetition tasks where specific kinds of mistakes were prospectively planned or analyzed retrospectively. Effort measured as changes in pupil size among 20 listeners with normal hearing and 19 listeners with cochlear implants. Experiment 1 demonstrates that mental correction of misperceived words increases effort even when responses are correct. Experiment 2 shows that for incorrect responses, listening effort is not a function of the proportion of words correct but is rather driven by the types of errors, position of errors within a sentence, and the need to resolve ambiguity, reflecting how easily the listener can make sense of a perception. A simple taxonomy of error types is provided that is both intuitive and consistent with data from these two experiments. The diversity of errors in these experiments implies that speech perception tasks can be designed prospectively to elicit the mistakes that are more closely linked with effort. Although mental corrective action and number of mistakes can scale together in many experiments, it is possible to dissociate them to advance toward a more explanatory (rather than correlational) account of listening effort. |
Sanmei Wu; Liangsu Tian; Jiaqiao Chen; Guangyao Chen; Jingxin Wang Exploring the cognitive mechanism of irrelevant speech effect in chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica Sinica, vol. 53, no. 7, pp. 729–745, 2021. @article{Wu2021a, A wealth of research shows that irrelevant background speech can interfere with reading behavior. This effect is often described as the irrelevant speech effect (ISE). Two key theories have been proposed to account for this effect; namely, the Phonological-Interference Hypothesis and the Semantic-Interference Hypothesis. Few studies have investigated the irrelevant speech effect in Chinese reading. Moreover, the underlying mechanisms for the effect also remain unclear. Accordingly, with the present research we examined the irrelevant speech effect in Chinese using eye movement measures. Three experiments were conducted to explore the effects of different kinds of background speech. Experiment 1 used simple sentences, Experiment 2 used complex sentence, and Experiment 3 used paragraphs. The participants in each experiment were skilled readers who were undergraduate recruited from the university, who read the sentence while their eye movements were recorded using an EyeLink 1000 eye-tracker (SR Research inc.). The three experiments used the same background speech conditions. In an unintelligible background speech condition, participants heard irrelevant speech in Spanish (which none of the participants could understand), while in an intelligible background speech condition, they heard irrelevant speech in Chinese. Finally, in third condition, the participants read in silence, with no background speech present. The results showed no significant difference in key eye movement measures (total reading time, average fixation duration, number of fixations, number of regressions, total fixation time, and regression path reading time) for the silent compared to the unintelligible background speech condition across all three experiments. In Experiment 1, which used simple sentences as stimuli, there was also no significant difference between the silent and intelligible background speech condition. However, in Experiment 2, which used more complex sentences, normal reading was disrupted in the intelligible background speech condition compared to silence, revealing an ISE for these more difficult sentences. Compared with the silent condition, the intelligible background speech produced longer reading times and average fixation duration, more numbers of fixations and regressions, longer regression path reading time and longer total fixation times. Finally, Experiment 3 also produced evidence for an ISE, with longer total reading times, more fixations, and longer regression path reading times and total reading times in the intelligible background speech condition compared with silence. To sum up, the results of the current three experiments suggest that: (1) unintelligible speech does not disrupt normal reading significantly, contrary to the Phonological-Interference Hypothesis; (2) intelligible background speech can disrupt the reading of complex (but not simpler) sentences and also paragraph reading, supporting the Semantic-Interference Hypothesis. Such findings suggest that irrelevant speech might disrupt later stages of lexical processing and semantic integration in reading, and that this effect is modulated by the difficulty of the reading task. |
Guoli Yan; Zebo Lan; Zhu Meng; Yingchao Wang; Valerie Benson Phonological coding during sentence reading in Chinese deaf readers: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 287–303, 2021. @article{Yan2021a, Phonological coding plays an important role in reading for hearing students. Experimental findings regarding phonological coding in deaf readers are controversial, and whether deaf readers are able to use phonological coding remains unclear. In the current study we examined whether Chinese deaf students could use phonological coding during sentence reading. Deaf middle school students, chronological age-matched hearing students, and reading ability-matched hearing students had their eye movements recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled characters, homophones, or unrelated characters. Both hearing groups had shorter total reading times on homophones than they did on unrelated characters. In contrast, no significant difference was found between homophones and unrelated characters for the deaf students. However, when the deaf group was divided into more-skilled and less-skilled readers according to their scores on reading fluency, the homophone advantage noted for the hearing controls was also observed for the more-skilled deaf students. |
Bo Yao; Jason R. Taylor; Briony Banks; Sonja A. Kotz Reading direct speech quotes increases theta phase-locking: Evidence for cortical tracking of inner speech? Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 239, pp. 118313, 2021. @article{Yao2021a, Growing evidence shows that theta-band (4–7 Hz) activity in the auditory cortex phase-locks to rhythms of overt speech. Does theta activity also encode the rhythmic dynamics of inner speech? Previous research established that silent reading of direct speech quotes (e.g., Mary said: “This dress is lovely!”) elicits more vivid inner speech than indirect speech quotes (e.g., Mary said that the dress was lovely). As we cannot directly track the phase alignment between theta activity and inner speech over time, we used EEG to measure the brain's phase-locked responses to the onset of speech quote reading. We found that direct (vs. indirect) quote reading was associated with increased theta phase synchrony over trials at 250–500 ms post-reading onset, with sources of the evoked activity estimated in the speech processing network. An eye-tracking control experiment confirmed that increased theta phase synchrony in direct quote reading was not driven by eye movement patterns, and more likely reflects synchronous phase resetting at the onset of inner speech. These findings suggest a functional role of theta phase modulation in reading-induced inner speech. |
Panpan Yao; Timothy J. Slattery; Xingshan Li Sentence context modulates the neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements. Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–40, 2021. @article{Yao2021b, In the current study, we conducted two eye-tracking reading experiments to explore whether sentence context can influence neighbor effects in word recognition during Chinese reading. Chinese readers read sentences in which the targets' orthographic neighbors were either plausible or implausible with the pre-target context. The results revealed that the neighbor effect was influenced by context: the context in the biased condition (where only targets but not neighbors can fit in the pre-target context) evoked a significantly weaker inhibitory neighbor effect than in the neutral condition (where both targets and neighbors can fit in the pre-target context). These results indicate that contextual information can be used to modulate neighbor effects during on-line sentence reading in Chinese. |
Lili Yu; Yanping Liu; Erik D. Reichle In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 150, no. 8, pp. 1612–1641, 2021. @article{Yu2021a, Chinese words consist of a variable number of characters that are normally written in continuous lines, without the blank spaces that are used to separate words in most alphabetic writing systems. These conventions raise questions about the relative roles of character versus whole-word processing in word identification, and how words are segmented from strings of characters for the purpose of their identification and saccade targeting. The present article attempts to address these questions by reporting an eye-movement experiment in which 60 participants read a corpus of sentences containing two-character target words that varied in terms of their overall frequency and the frequency of their initial characters. We examine participants' eye movements using both corpus-based statistical models and more standard analyses of our target words. In addition to documenting how key lexical variables influence eye movements and highlighting a few discrepancies between the results obtained using our two statistical approaches, our experiment shows that high-frequency initial characters can actually slow word identification. We discuss the theoretical significance of this finding and others for current models of Chinese reading, and then describe a new computational model of eye-movement control during the reading of Chinese. Finally, we report simulations showing that this model can account for our findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) |
Chuanli Zang; Ying Fu; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Foveal and parafoveal processing of Chinese three-character idioms in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 119, pp. 1–15, 2021. @article{Zang2021, Chinese idioms are likely to be represented and processed as Multi-Constituent Units (MCUs, a multi-word unit with a single lexical representation, see Zang, 2019). Chinese idioms with a 1-character verb and 2-character noun structure are processed foveally, but not parafoveally, as a single lexical unit (Yu et al., 2016), probably because the verb only loosely constrains noun identity. By contrast, Chinese idioms with modifier-noun structure are more likely MCU candidates due to significant modifier constraint over the subsequent noun. We investigated whether idioms of this type are parafoveally and foveally processed as MCUs during natural reading. In Experiment 1, we manipulated phrase type (idiom or matched phrase) and preview of the noun (identity, unrelated character or pseudocharacter) using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). A larger preview effect occurred for idioms on the modifier with shorter fixations for identical than unrelated and pseudocharacter previews. This suggests idioms are parafoveally processed to a greater extent than matched phrases. In Experiment 2, preview of the modifier and noun of idioms and phrases (identity or pseudocharacter) was orthogonally manipulated (c.f., Cutter, Drieghe & Liversedge, 2014). For identity modifiers, a greater noun preview effect occurred for idioms relative to phrases providing further evidence that modifier-noun idioms are lexicalised MCUs and processed parafoveally as single, unified representations. |
Alessandra Zarcone; Vera Demberg Interaction of script knowledge and temporal discourse cues in a visual world study Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 58, no. 9, pp. 804–819, 2021. @article{Zarcone2021, There is now a well-established literature showing that people anticipate upcoming concepts and words during language processing. Commonsense knowledge about typical event sequences and verbal selectional preferences can contribute to anticipating what will be mentioned next. We here investigate how temporal discourse connectives (before, after), which signal event ordering along a temporal dimension, modulate predictions for upcoming discourse referents. Our study analyses anticipatory gaze in the visual world and supports the idea that script knowledge, temporal connectives (before eating → menu, appetizer), and the verb's selectional preferences (order → appetizer) jointly contribute to shaping rapid prediction of event participants. |
Tao Zeng; Wen Mao; Yarong Gao An eye-tracking study of structural priming from abstract arithmetic to Chinese atructure NP1 + You + NP2 + Hen + AP Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, no. 1-26, 2021. @article{Zeng2021, The present study attempted to explore the abstract priming effects from mathematical equations to Mandarin Chinese structure NP1 + You + NP2 + Hen + AP in an on-line comprehension task with the aim to figure out the mechanism that underlying these effects. The results revealed that compared with baseline priming conditions, participants tended to choose more high-attachment options in high-attachment priming conditions and more low-attachment priming options in low-attachment priming conditions. Such difference had reached a significant level, which provided evidence for the shared structural representation across mathematical and linguistic domains. Additionally, the fixations sequences during arithmetic calculations reflected those equations were processed hierarchically and could be extracted in parallel instead of being scanned in a sequentially left-to-right order. Our results have provided some evidence for the Representational Account. |
Tao Zeng; Yating Mu; Taoyan Zhu Structural priming from simple arithmetic to Chinese ambiguous structures: Evidence from eye movement Journal Article In: Cognitive Processing, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 185–207, 2021. @article{Zeng2021a, This article explores the domain generality of hierarchical representation between linguistic and mathematical cognition by adopting the structural priming paradigm in an eye-tracking reading experiment. The experiment investigated whether simple arithmetic equations with high (e.g., (7 + 2) × 3 + 1)- or low (e.g., 7 + 2 × 3 + 1)- attachment influence language users' interpretation of Chinese ambiguous structures (NP1 + He + NP2 + De + NP3; Quantifier + NP1 + De + NP2; NP1 + Kan/WangZhe + NP2 + AP). On the one hand, behavioral results showed that high-attachment primes led to more high-attachment interpretation, while low-attachment primes led to more low-attachment interpretation. On the other hand, the eye movement data indicated that structural priming was of great help to reduce dwell time on the ambiguous structure. There were structural priming effects from simple arithmetic to three different structures in Chinese, which provided new evidence on the cross-domain priming from simple arithmetic to language. Besides attachment priming effect at global level, online sentence integration at local level was found to be structure-dependent by some differences in eye movement measures. Our results have provided some evidence for the Representational Account. |
Gaisha Oralova; Victor Kuperman Effects of spacing on sentence reading in Chinese Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 765335, 2021. @article{Oralova2021, Given that Chinese writing conventions lack inter-word spacing, understanding whether and how readers of Chinese segment regular unspaced Chinese writing into words is an important question for theories of reading. This study examined the processing outcomes of introducing spaces to written Chinese sentences in varying positions based on native speaker consensus. The measure of consensus for every character transition in our stimuli sentences was the percent of raters who placed a word boundary in that position. The eye movements of native readers of Chinese were recorded while they silently read original unspaced sentences and their experimentally manipulated counterparts for comprehension. We introduced two types of spaced sentences: one with spaces inserted at every probable word boundary (heavily spaced), and another with spaces placed only at highly probable word boundaries (lightly spaced). Linear mixed-effects regression models showed that heavily spaced sentences took identical time to read as unspaced ones despite the shortened fixation times on individual words (Experiment 1). On the other hand, reading times for lightly spaced sentences and words were shorter than those for unspaced ones (Experiment 2). Thus, spaces proved to be advantageous but only when introduced at highly probable word boundaries. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications of these findings. |
Isabel Orenes “Looking at” negation: Faster processing for symbolic rather than iconic representations Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 1417–1436, 2021. @article{Orenes2021, Many studies have shown the double processing of negation, suggesting that negation integration into sentence meaning is delayed. This contrasts with some researches that have found that such integration is rather immediate. The present study contributes to this debate. Affirmative and negative compound sentences (e.g., “because he was not hungry, he did not order a salad”) were presented orally in a visual world paradigm while four printed words were on the screen: salad, no salad, soup, and no soup. The eye-tracking data showed two different fixation patterns for negative causal assertions, which are linked to differences in the representation and inferential demands. One indicates that negation is integrated immediately, as people look at the explicit negation (e.g., no salad) very early. The other, in which people look at the alternate (e.g., soup) much later, indicates that what is delayed in time is the representation of the alternate. These results support theories that combine iconic and symbolic representations, such as the model theory. |
Nele Ots Cognitive constraints on advance planning of sentence intonation Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 16, no. 11, pp. e0259343, 2021. @article{Ots2021, Pitch peaks tend to be higher at the beginning of longer than shorter sentences (e.g., 'A farmer is pulling donkeys' vs 'A farmer is pulling a donkey and goat'), whereas pitch valleys at the ends of sentences are rather constant for a given speaker. These data seem to imply that speakers avoid dropping their voice pitch too low by planning the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks prior to speaking. However, the length effect on sentence-initial pitch peaks appears to vary across different types of sentences, speakers and languages. Therefore, the notion that speakers plan sentence intonation in advance due to the limitations in low voice pitch leaves part of the data unexplained. Consequently, this study suggests a complementary cognitive account of length-dependent pitch scaling. In particular, it proposes that the sentence-initial pitch raise in long sentences is related to high demands on mental resources during the early stages of sentence planning. To tap into the cognitive underpinnings of planning sentence intonation, this study adopts the methodology of recording eye movements during a picture description task, as the eye movements are the established approximation of the real-time planning processes. Measures of voice pitch (Fundamental Frequency) and incrementality (eye movements) are used to examine the relationship between (verbal) working memory (WM), incrementality of sentence planning and the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks. |
Dato Abashidze; Pia Knoeferle Influence of actor's congruent and incongruent gaze on language processing Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 701742, 2021. @article{Abashidze2021, In interpreting spoken sentences in event contexts, comprehenders both integrate their current interpretation of language with the recent past (e.g., events they have witnessed) and develop expectations about future event possibilities. Tense cues can disambiguate this linking but temporary ambiguity in their interpretation may lead comprehenders to also rely on further, situation-specific cues (e.g., an actor's gaze as a cue to his future actions). How comprehenders reconcile these different cues in real time is an open issue that we must address to accommodate comprehension. It has been suggested that relating a referential expression (e.g., a verb) to a referent (e.g., a recent event) is preferred over relying on other cues that refer to the future and are not yet referentially grounded (“recent-event preference”). Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments compared this recent-event preference with effects of an actor's gaze and of tense/temporal adverbs as cues to a future action event. The results revealed that people overall preferred to focus on the recent (vs. future) event target in their interpretation, suggesting that while a congruent and incongruent actor gaze can jointly with futuric linguistic cues neutralize the recent-event preference late in the sentence, the latter still plays a key role in shaping participants' initial verb-based event interpretation. Additional post-experimental memory tests provided insight into the longevity of the gaze effects. |
Nawras Abbas; Tamar Degani; Anat Prior Equal opportunity interference: Both L1 and L2 influence L3 morpho-syntactic processing Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 673535, 2021. @article{Abbas2021, We investigated cross-language influences from the first (L1) and second (L2) languages in third (L3) language processing, to examine how order of acquisition and proficiency modulate the degree of cross-language influences, and whether these cross-language influences manifest differently in online and offline measures of L3 processing. The study focused on morpho-syntactic processing of English as an L3 among Arabic-Hebrew-English university student trilinguals (n = 44). Importantly, both L1 (Arabic) and L2 (Hebrew) of participants are typologically distant from L3 (English), which allows overcoming confounds of previous research. Performance of trilinguals was compared to that of native English monolingual controls (n = 37). To investigate the source of cross-language influences, critical stimuli were ungrammatical sentences in English, which when translated could be grammatical in L1, in L2 or in both. Thus, the L3 morpho-syntactic structures included in the study were a mismatch with L1, a mismatch with L2, a Double mismatch, with both L1 and L2, or a no mismatch condition. Participants read the English sentences while their eye-movements were recorded (online measure), and they also performed grammaticality judgments following each sentence (offline measure). Across both measures, cross-language influences were assessed by comparing the performance of the trilinguals in each of the critical interference conditions to the no-interference condition, and by comparing their performance to that of the monolingual controls. L1 interference was evident in first pass sentence reading, and marginally in offline grammaticality judgment, and L2 interference was robust across second pass reading and grammaticality judgments. These results suggest that either L1 or the L2 can be the source of cross-language influences in L3 processing, but with different time-courses. The findings highlight the difference between online and offline measures of performance: processing language in real-time reflects mainly automatic activation of morpho-syntactic structures, whereas offline judgments might also involve strategic and meta-linguistic decision making. Together, the findings show that during L3 processing, trilinguals have access to all previously acquired linguistic knowledge, and that the multilingual language system is fully interactive. |
Miriam Aguilar; Pilar Ferré; José M. Gavilán; José A. Hinojosa; Josep Demestre The actress was on the balcony, after all: Eye-tracking locality and PR-availability effects in Spanish Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 211, pp. 104624, 2021. @article{Aguilar2021, The relationship between syntactic ambiguity and locality has been a reliable cornerstone in theories of language comprehension with one exception: non-local preferences in object-modifying relative clauses preceded by two potential hosts (DP1 of DP2 RC). We test the offline and online effects of the availability of an alternative structure, the pseudo-relative, on the parsing of relative clauses. It has been claimed that pseudo-relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their simplicity at the structural, interpretive and pragmatic levels, and act as a confound in the attachment literature (Grillo, 2012; Grillo & Costa, 2014). Our results show that attachment preferences are modulated by the availability of pseudo-relatives in offline and online tests. However, when this factor is controlled, parsing of relative clauses in Spanish is initially ruled by principles of locality, which can eventually be overridden by other factors. |
Farah Akthar; Hannah Harvey; Ahalya Subramanian; Simon Liversedge; Robin Walker In: Journal of Vision, vol. 21, no. 12, pp. 1–24, 2021. @article{Akthar2021, Reading with central vision loss (CVL), as caused by macular disease, may be enhanced by presenting text using dynamic formats such as horizontally scrolling text or rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). The rationale for these dynamic text formats is that they can be read while holding gaze away from the text, potentially supporting reading while using the eccentric viewing strategy. This study was designed to evaluate the practice of reading with CVL, with passages of text presented as static sentences, with horizontal scrolling sentences, or as single-word RSVP. In separate studies, normally sighted participants with a simulated (artificial) central scotoma, controlled by an eye-tracker, or participants with CVL resulting from macular degeneration read passages of text using the eccentric viewing technique. Comprehension was better overall with scrolling text when reading with a simulated CVL, whereas RSVP produced lower overall comprehension and high error rates. Analysis of eye movement behavior showed that participants consistently adopted a strategy of making multiple horizontal saccades on the text itself. Adherence to using eccentric viewing was better with RSVP, but this did not translate into better reading performance. Participants with macular degeneration and an actual CVL also showed the highest comprehension and lowest error rates with scrolling text and the lowest comprehension and highest errors with RSVP. We conclude that scrolling text can support effective reading in people with CVL and has potential as a reading aid. |
Jorge González Alonso; Ian Cunnings; HIiroki Fujita; David Miller; Jason Rothman Gender attraction in sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, vol. 6, no. 20, pp. 1–26, 2021. @article{Alonso2021, Agreement attraction, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g.The key to the cabinets were rusty), has been influential in motivating models of memory access during language comprehension. It is contested, however, whether such effects arise due to a faulty representation of relevant morphosyntactic features, or as a result of memory retrieval. Existing studies of agreement attraction in comprehension have largely been limited to subject-verb number agreement, primarily in English, and while attraction in other agreement phenomena such as gender has been investigated in production, very few studies have focused on gender attraction in comprehension. We conducted five experiments investigating noun-adjective gender agreement during comprehension in Spanish. Our results indicate attraction effects during online sentence processing that are consistent with approaches ascribing attraction to interference during memory retrieval, rather than to a faulty representation of agreement features. We interpret our findings as consistent with the predictions of cue-based parsing. |
Nicole M. Amichetti; Jonathan Neukam; Alexander J. Kinney; Nicole Capach; Samantha U. March; Mario A. Svirsky; Arthur Wingfield Adults with cochlear implants can use prosody to determine the clausal structure of spoken sentences Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 150, no. 6, pp. 4315–4328, 2021. @article{Amichetti2021, Speech prosody, including pitch contour, word stress, pauses, and vowel lengthening, can aid the detection of the clausal structure of a multi-clause sentence and this, in turn, can help listeners determine the meaning. However, for cochlear implant (CI) users, the reduced acoustic richness of the signal raises the question of whether CI users may have difficulty using sentence prosody to detect syntactic clause boundaries within sentences or whether this ability is rescued by the redundancy of the prosodic features that normally co-occur at clause boundaries. Twenty-two CI users, ranging in age from 19 to 77 years old, recalled three types of sentences: sentences in which the prosodic pattern was appropriate to the location of a clause boundary within the sentence (congruent prosody), sentences with reduced prosodic information, or sentences in which the location of the clause boundary and the prosodic marking of a clause boundary were placed in conflict. The results showed the presence of congruent prosody to be associated with superior sentence recall and a reduced processing effort as indexed by the pupil dilation. The individual differences in a standard test of word recognition (consonant-nucleus-consonant score) were related to the recall accuracy as well as the processing effort. The outcomes are discussed in terms of the redundancy of the prosodic features, which normally accompany a clause boundary and processing effort. VC 2021 Acoustical Society of America. |
Sally Andrews; Aaron Veldre Wrapping up sentence comprehension: The role of task demands and individual differences Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 123–140, 2021. @article{Andrews2021, This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was unmarked by punctuation, weakly marked by a comma, or strongly marked by a period. Comprehension demands were manipulated by presenting questions after either 25% or 100% of passages. Wrap-up effects at punctuation boundaries manifested principally in rereading of earlier text and were more marked in lower proficiency readers. High comprehension load was associated with longer total reading time but had little impact on wrap-up effects. The relationship between eye movements and comprehension accuracy suggested that poor comprehension was associated with a shallower reading strategy under low comprehension demands. The implications of these findings for understanding how the processes involved in self-regulating comprehension are modulated by reading proficiency and comprehension goals are discussed. |
Caitlyn Antal; Roberto G. Almeida Indeterminate and enriched propositions in context linger: Evidence from an eye-tracking false memory paradigm Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 741685, 2021. @article{Antal2021, A sentence such as We finished the paper is indeterminate with regards to what we finished doing with the paper. Indeterminate sentences constitute a test case for two major issues regarding language comprehension: (1) how we compose sentence meaning; and (2) what is retained in memory about what we read in context over time. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants read short stories that were unexpectedly followed by one of three recognition probes: (a) an indeterminate sentence (Lisa began the book), that is identical to the one in the story; (b) an enriched but false probe (Lisa began reading the book); and (c) a contextually unrelated probe (Lisa began writing the book). The probes were presented either at the offset of the original indeterminate sentence in context or following additional neutral discourse. We measured accuracy, probe recognition time, and reading times of the probe sentences. Results showed that, at the immediate time point, participants correctly accepted the identical probes with high accuracy and short recognition times, but that this effect reversed to chance-level accuracy and significantly longer recognition times at the delayed time point. We also found that participants falsely accept the enriched probe at both time points 50% of the time. There were no reading-time differences between identical and enriched probes, suggesting that enrichment might not be an early, mandatory process for indeterminate sentences. Overall, results suggest that while context produces an enriched proposition, an unenriched proposition true to the indeterminate sentence also lingers in memory. |
M. Antúnez; S. Mancini; J. A. Hernández-Cabrera; L. J. Hoversten; H. A. Barber; M. Carreiras Cross-linguistic semantic preview benefit in Basque-Spanish bilingual readers: Evidence from fixation-related potentials Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 214, pp. 104905, 2021. @article{Antunez2021, During reading, we can process and integrate information from words allocated in the parafoveal region. However, whether we extract and process the meaning of parafoveal words is still under debate. Here, we obtained Fixation-Related Potentials in a Basque-Spanish bilingual sample during a Spanish reading task. By using the boundary paradigm, we presented different parafoveal previews that could be either Basque non-cognate translations or unrelated Basque words. We prove for the first time cross-linguistic semantic preview benefit effects in alphabetic languages, providing novel evidence of modulations in the N400 component. Our findings suggest that the meaning of parafoveal words is processed and integrated during reading and that such meaning is activated and shared across languages in bilingual readers. |
Keith S. Apfelbaum; Jamie Klein-Packard; Bob McMurray The pictures who shall not be named: Empirical support for benefits of preview in the Visual World Paradigm Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 121, pp. 1–57, 2021. @article{Apfelbaum2021, A common critique of the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) in psycholinguistic studies is that what is designed as a measure of language processes is meaningfully altered by the visual context of the task. This is crucial, particularly in studies of spoken word recognition, where the displayed images are usually seen as just a part of the measure and are not of fundamental interest. Many variants of the VWP allow participants to sample the visual scene before a trial begins. However, this could bias their interpretations of the later speech or even lead to abnormal processing strategies (e.g., comparing the input to only preactivated working memory representations). Prior work has focused only on whether preview duration changes fixation patterns. However, preview could affect a number of processes, such as visual search, that would not challenge the interpretation of the VWP. The present study uses a series of targeted manipulations of the preview period to ask if preview alters looking behavior during a trial, and why. Results show that evidence of incremental processing and phonological competition seen in the VWP are not dependent on preview, and are not enhanced by manipulations that directly encourage phonological prenaming. Moreover, some forms of preview can eliminate nuisance variance deriving from object recognition and visual search demands in order to produce a more sensitive measure of linguistic processing. These results deepen our understanding of how the visual scene interacts with language processing to drive fixations patterns in the VWP, and reinforce the value of the VWP as a tool for measuring real-time language processing. Stimuli, data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/b7q65/. |
Susana Araújo; Falk Huettig; Antje S. Meyer What underlies the deficit in rapid automatized naming (RAN) in adults with dyslexia? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 534–549, 2021. @article{Araujo2021, This eye-tracking study explored how phonological encoding and speech production planning for successive words are coordinated in adult readers with dyslexia (N = 22) and control readers (N = 25) during rapid automatized naming (RAN). Using an object-RAN task, we orthogonally manipulated the word-form frequency and phonological neighborhood density of the object names and assessed the effects on speech and eye movements and their temporal coordination. In both groups, there was a significant interaction between word frequency and neighborhood density: shorter fixations for dense than for sparse neighborhoods were observed for low- but not for high-frequency words. This finding does not suggest a specific difficulty in lexical phonological access in dyslexia. However, in readers with dyslexia only, these lexical effects percolated to the late processing stages, indicated by longer offset eye-speech lags. We close by discussing potential reasons for this finding, including suboptimal specification of phonological representations and deficits in attention control or in multi-item coordination. |
Begoña Arechabaleta Regulez; Silvina Montrul Psycholinguistic evidence for incipient language change in Mexican Spanish: The extension of differential object marking Journal Article In: Languages, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 131, 2021. @article{ArechabaletaRegulez2021, Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects overtly with the preposition a, an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM). However, in some varieties of Spanish, DOM is advancing to inanimate objects. Language change starts at the individual level, but how does it start? What manifestation of linguistic knowledge does it affect? This study traced this innovative use of DOM in oral production, grammaticality judgments and on-line comprehension (reading task with eye-tracking) in the Spanish of Mexico. Thirty-four native speakers (ages 18–22) from the southeast of Mexico participated in the study. Results showed that the incidence of the innovative use of DOM with inanimate objects varied by task: DOM innovations were detected in on-line processing more than in grammaticality judgments and oral production. Our results support the hypothesis that language variation and change may start with on-line comprehension. |
Nicolai D. Ayasse; Alana J. Hodson; Arthur Wingfield The principle of least effort and comprehension of spoken sentences by younger and older adults Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 629464, 2021. @article{Ayasse2021, There is considerable evidence that listeners' understanding of a spoken sentence need not always follow from a full analysis of the words and syntax of the utterance. Rather, listeners may instead conduct a superficial analysis, sampling some words and using presumed plausibility to arrive at an understanding of the sentence meaning. Because this latter strategy occurs more often for sentences with complex syntax that place a heavier processing burden on the listener than sentences with simpler syntax, shallow processing may represent a resource conserving strategy reflected in reduced processing effort. This factor may be even more important for older adults who as a group are known to have more limited working memory resources. In the present experiment, 40 older adults (Mage = 75.5 years) and 20 younger adults (Mage = 20.7) were tested for comprehension of plausible and implausible sentences with a simpler subject-relative embedded clause structure or a more complex object-relative embedded clause structure. Dilation of the pupil of the eye was recorded as an index of processing effort. Results confirmed greater comprehension accuracy for plausible than implausible sentences, and for sentences with simpler than more complex syntax, with both effects amplified for the older adults. Analysis of peak pupil dilations for implausible sentences revealed a complex three-way interaction between age, syntactic complexity, and plausibility. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence comprehension, and pupillometry as an index of intentional task engagement. |
Ibtehal Baazeem; Hend Al-Khalifa; Abdulmalik Al-Salman Cognitively driven Arabic text readability assessment using eye-tracking Journal Article In: Applied Sciences, vol. 11, no. 18, pp. 8607, 2021. @article{Baazeem2021, Using physiological data helps to identify the cognitive processing in the human brain. One method of obtaining these behavioral signals is by using eye-tracking technology. Previous cognitive psychology literature shows that readable and difficult-to-read texts are associated with certain eye movement patterns, which has recently encouraged researchers to use these patterns for readability assessment tasks. However, although it seems promising, this research direction has not been explored adequately, particularly for Arabic. The Arabic language is defined by its own rules and has its own characteristics and challenges. There is still a clear gap in determining the potential of using eye-tracking measures to improve Arabic text. Motivated by this, we present a pilot study to explore the extent to which eye-tracking measures enhance Arabic text readability. We collected the eye movements of 41 participants while reading Arabic texts to provide real-time processing of the text; these data were further analyzed and used to build several readability prediction models using different regression algorithms. The findings show an improvement in the readability prediction task, which requires further investigation. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first study to explore the relationship between Arabic readability and eye movement patterns. |
Mireille Babineau; Alex Carvalho; John Trueswell; Anne Christophe Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 24, pp. e13010, 2021. @article{Babineau2021, Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., ‘ko') replaced either personal pronouns or articles, children were able to infer semantic properties for novel words co-occurring with the newly learned function word (i.e., objects vs. actions). These findings implicate a mechanism by which a distributional analysis, associated with a small vocabulary of known words, could be sufficient to identify some properties associated with specific syntactic contexts. |
Briony Banks; Emma Gowen; Kevin J. Munro; Patti Adank Eye gaze and perceptual adaptation to audiovisual degraded speech Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 64, no. 9, pp. 3432–3445, 2021. @article{Banks2021, Purpose: Visual cues from a speaker's face may benefit perceptual adaptation to degraded speech, but current evidence is limited. We aimed to replicate results from previous studies to establish the extent to which visual speech cues can lead to greater adaptation over time, extending existing results to a real-time adaptation paradigm (i.e., without a separate training period). A second aim was to investigate whether eye gaze patterns toward the speaker's mouth were related to better perception, hypothesizing that listeners who looked more at the speaker's mouth would show greater adaptation. Method: A group of listeners (n = 30) was presented with 90 noise-vocoded sentences in audiovisual format, whereas a control group (n = 29) was presented with the audio signal only. Recognition accuracy was measured throughout and eye tracking was used to measure fixations toward the speaker's eyes and mouth in the audiovisual group. Results: Previous studies were partially replicated: The audiovisual group had better recognition throughout and adapted slightly more rapidly, but both groups showed an equal amount of improvement overall. Longer fixations on the speaker's mouth in the audiovisual group were related to better overall accuracy. An exploratory analysis further demonstrated that the duration of fixations to the speaker's mouth decreased over time. Conclusions: The results suggest that visual cues may not benefit adaptation to degraded speech as much as previously thought. Longer fixations on a speaker's mouth may play a role in successfully decoding visual speech cues; however, this will need to be confirmed in future research to fully understand how patterns of eye gaze are related to audiovisual speech recognition. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/ 2wqkf/. |
Eliza Barach; Laurie Beth Feldman; Heather Sheridan Are emojis processed like words?: Eye movements reveal the time course of semantic processing for emojified text Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 978–991, 2021. @article{Barach2021, Emojis have many functions that support reading. Most obviously, they convey semantic information and support reading comprehension (Lo, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 11[5], 595–597, 2008; Riordan, Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 75–86, 2017b). However, it is undetermined whether emojis recruit the same perceptual and cognitive processes for identification and integration during reading as do words. To investigate whether emojis are processed like words, we used eye tracking to examine the time course of semantic processing of emojis during reading. Materials consisted of sentences containing a target word (e.g., coffee in the sentence “My tall coffee is just the right temperature”) when there was no emoji present and when there was a semantically congruent (i.e., synonymous) emoji (e.g., the cup of coffee emoji, [InlineMediaObject not available: see fulltext.]) or an incongruent emoji (e.g., the beer mug emoji, [InlineMediaObject not available: see fulltext.]) present at the end of the sentence. Similar to congruency effects with words, congruent emojis were fixated for shorter periods and were less likely to be refixated than were incongruent emojis. In addition, congruent emojis were more frequently skipped than incongruent emojis, which suggests that semantic aspects of emoji processing begin in the parafovea. Finally, the presence of an emoji, relative to its absence increased target-word skipping rates and reduced total time on target words. We discuss the implications of our findings for models of eye-movement control during reading. |
Eliza Barach; Leah Gloskey; Heather Sheridan Satisfaction-of-Search (SOS) impacts multiple-target searches during proofreading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 29, no. 8, pp. 510–518, 2021. @article{Barach2021a, In multiple-target visual searches, subsequent search misses (SSMs; [Cain, M. S., Adamo, S. H., & Mitroff, S. R. (2013). A taxonomy of errors in multiple-target visual search. Visual Cognition, 21(7), 899–921. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2013.843627]) occur when the discovery of one target hinders detection of another target (formerly referred to as Satisfaction of Search [Tuddenham, W. J. (1962). Visual search, image organization, and reader error in roentgen diagnosis studies of the psychophysiology of Roentgen image perception memorial fund lecture. Radiology, 78(5), 694–704. https://doi.org/10.1148/78.5.694]). Here, we examined whether SSMs would occur during a proofreading task, and we contrasted the cognitive resource depletion theory and the Satisfaction of Search (SOS) accounts of SSMs. We monitored participants' eye movements while proofreading for typographical errors (i.e., typos) in lists of words that were presented either in a straight horizontal line or in random locations. There was a significant SSM effect since detection of a first typo hindered the detection of a second typo. Furthermore, in support of the SOS account, the detection of a first typo expedited search, as shown by faster reaction times and reduced fixation durations and refixations on the second typo. |
Erica M. Ellis; Arielle Borovsky; Jeffrey L. Elman; Julia L. Evans Toddlers' ability to leverage statistical information to support word learning Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 600694, 2021. @article{Ellis2021, Purpose: This study investigated whether the ability to utilize statistical regularities from fluent speech and map potential words to meaning at 18-months predicts vocabulary at 18- and again at 24-months. Method: Eighteen-month-olds (N = 47) were exposed to an artificial language with statistical regularities within the speech stream, then participated in an object-label learning task. Learning was measured using a modified looking-while-listening eye-tracking design. Parents completed vocabulary questionnaires when their child was 18-and 24-months old. Results: Ability to learn the object-label pairing for words after exposure to the artificial language predicted productive vocabulary at 24-months and amount of vocabulary change from 18- to 24 months, independent of non-verbal cognitive ability, socio-economic status (SES) and/or object-label association performance. Conclusion: Eighteen-month-olds' ability to use statistical information derived from fluent speech to identify words within the stream of speech and then to map the “words” to meaning directly predicts vocabulary size at 24-months and vocabulary change from 18 to 24 months. The findings support the hypothesis that statistical word segmentation is one of the important aspects of word learning and vocabulary acquisition in toddlers. |
Michael A. Eskenazi; Paige Kemp; Jocelyn R. Folk Word skipping during the lexical acquisition process Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 3, pp. 548–558, 2021. @article{Eskenazi2021a, During reading, most words are identified in the fovea through a direct fixation; however, readers also identify some words in the parafovea without directly fixating them. This word skipping process is influenced by many lexical and visual factors including word length, launch position, frequency, and predictability. Although these factors are well understood, there is some disagreement about the process that leads to word skipping and the degree to which skipped words are processed. The purpose of this study was to investigate the word skipping process when readers are exposed to novel words in an incidental lexical acquisition paradigm. Participants read 18 three-letter novel words (i.e., pru, cho) in three different informative contexts each while their eye movements were monitored. They then completed a surprise test of their orthographic and semantic acquisition and a spelling skill assessment. Mixed-effects models indicated that participants learned spellings and meanings of words at the same rate regardless of the number of times that they were skipped. However, word skipping rates increased across the three exposures and reading times decreased. Results indicate that readers appear to process skipped words to the same degree as fixated words. However, this may be due to a more cautious skipping process used during lexical acquisition of unfamiliar words compared to processing of already known words. |
Michael A. Eskenazi; Bailey Nix Individual differences in the desirable difficulty effect during lexical acquisition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 45–52, 2021. @article{Eskenazi2021, Reading in difficult or novel fonts results in slower and less efficient reading (Slattery & Rayner, 2010); however, these fonts may also lead to better learning and memory (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011). This effect is consistent with a desirable difficulty effect such that more effort during encoding results in better long term retention (Bjork, 1994). The effect is robust and found in many contexts; however, it has not yet been applied to the process of lexical acquisition. The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether readers would learn words better when presented in Sans Forgetica, a font designed to induce desirable difficulty. One hundred sixty participants were randomly assigned to one font type and read sentences with 15 very low-frequency English words presented in two different informative contexts while their eye movements were monitored. They completed a spelling skill assessment and tests of their orthographic and semantic acquisition of the words. Linear mixed effects analyses were conducted and indicate that high-skill spellers learned the spelling and meaning of words better in the desirable difficulty font, but low-skill spellers did not show the same benefit. This pattern highlights the importance of individual differences in learning such that a desirable difficulty for one reader may be an undesirable difficulty for another. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) |
George D. Farmer; Paula Smith; Simon Baron-Cohen; William J. Skylark The effect of autism on information sampling during decision-making: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 614–637, 2021. @article{Farmer2021, Recent research has highlighted a tendency for more rational and deliberative decision-making in individuals with autism. We tested this hypothesis by using eye-tracking to investigate the information processing strategies that underpin multiattribute choice in a sample of adults diagnosed with autism spectrum condition. We found that, as the number of attributes defining each option increased, autistic decision-makers were speedier, examined less of the available information, and spent a greater proportion of their time examining the option they eventually chose. Rather than indicating a more deliberative style, our results are consistent with a tendency for individuals with autism to narrow down the decision-space more quickly than does the neurotypical population. |
Saoradh Favier; Antje S. Meyer; Falk Huettig Literacy can enhance syntactic prediction in spoken language processing Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 150, no. 10, pp. 2167–2174, 2021. @article{Favier2021, Language comprehenders can use syntactic cues to generate predictions online about upcoming language. Previous research with reading-impaired adults and healthy, low-proficiency adult and child learners suggests that reading skills are related to prediction in spoken language comprehension. Here, we investigated whether differences in literacy are also related to predictive spoken language processing in non-reading-impaired proficient adult readers with varying levels of literacy experience. Using the visual world paradigm enabled us to measure prediction based on syntactic cues in the spoken sentence, prior to the (predicted) target word. Literacy experience was found to be the strongest predictor of target anticipation, independent of general cognitive abilities. These findings suggest that (a) experience with written language can enhance syntactic prediction of spoken language in normal adult language users and (b) processing skills can be transferred to related tasks (from reading to listening) if the domains involve similar processes (e.g., predictive dependencies) and representations (e.g., syntactic). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) |
Leigh B. Fernandez; Christoph Scheepers; Shanley E. M. Allen Cross-linguistic differences in parafoveal semantic and orthographic processing Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 83, no. 8, pp. 3183–3200, 2021. @article{Fernandez2021a, In this study we investigated parafoveal processing by L1 and late L2 speakers of English (L1 German) while reading in English. We hypothesized that L2ers would make use of semantic and orthographic information parafoveally. Using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated six parafoveal masks in a sentence (Mark found th*e wood for the fire; * indicates the invisible boundary): identical word mask (wood), English orthographic mask (wook), English string mask (zwwl), German mask (holz), German orthographic mask (holn), and German string mask (kxfs). We found an orthographic benefit for L1ers and L2ers when the mask was orthographically related to the target word (wood vs. wook) in line with previous L1 research. English L2ers did not derive a benefit (rather an interference) when a non-cognate translation mask from their L1 was used (wood vs. holz), but did derive a benefit from a German orthographic mask (wood vs. holn). While unexpected, it may be that L2ers incur a switching cost when the complete German word is presented parafoveally, and derive a benefit by keeping both lexicons active when a partial German word is presented parafoveally (narrowing down lexical candidates). To the authors' knowledge there is no mention of parafoveal processing in any model of L2 processing/reading, and the current study provides the first evidence for a parafoveal non-cognate orthographic benefit (but only with partial orthographic overlap) in sentence reading for L2ers. We discuss how these findings fit into the framework of bilingual word recognition theories. |
María Fernández-López; Jonathan Mirault; Jonathan Grainger; Manuel Perea How resilient is reading to letter rotations? A parafoveal preview investigation. Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–14, 2021. @article{FernandezLopez2021, Skilled readers have developed a certain amount of tolerance to variations in the visual form of words (e.g., CAPTCHAs, handwritten text, etc.). To examine how visual distortion affects the mapping from the visual input onto abstract word representations during normal reading, we focused on a single type of distortion: letter rotation. Importantly, two leading neurally inspired models of word recognition (SERIOL model, Whitney, 2001; LCD model, Dehaene et al., 2005) make distinct predictions: Whereas the SERIOL model postulates that the cost of letter rotation increases gradually, the LCD model assumes an all-or-none boundary at around 40° to 45° rotation angle. To examine these predictions in a normal reading scenario, we conducted a parafoveal preview experiment using the gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm. The parafoveal previews were identical or unrelated to the target word. Critically, each preview's individual letters were rotated 15°, 30°, 45°, or 60°. Apart from the parafoveal previews, all text, including target words, was presented with letters in their canonical upright orientation. Results showed that the advantage of the identity preview condition in eye fixation times on the target word decreased progressively by rotation angle. This pattern of results favors the view that the cost of letter rotation during normal reading increases gradually as a function of the angle of rotation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) |
Francesca Foppolo; Jasmijn E. Bosch; Ciro Greco; Maria N. Carminati; Francesca Panzeri Draw a star and make it perfect: Incremental processing of telicity Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 45, no. 10, pp. e13052, 2021. @article{Foppolo2021, Predicates like “coloring-the-star” denote events that have a temporal duration and a culmination point (telos). When combined with perfective aspect (e.g., “Valeria has colored the star”), a culmination inference arises implying that the action has stopped, and the star is fully colored. While the perfective aspect is known to constrain the conceptualization of the event as telic, many reading studies have demonstrated that readers do not make early commitments as to whether the event is bounded or unbounded. A few visual-world studies tested the processing of telic predicates during online sentence processing, demonstrating an early integration of aspectual and temporal cues. By employing the visual-world paradigm, we tested the incremental processing of the perfective aspect in Italian in two eye-tracking studies in which listeners heard durative predicates in the perfective form in a scenario showing a completed and a non-completed event. Differently from previous studies, we compared telic durative predicates such as “coloring-the-star” to punctual predicates such as “lighting-the-candle.” While for punctual predicates, the inferences of telicity (the event has a telos) and of culmination (the telos is reached) are lexically encoded in the perfective verb, for durative predicates, the degree of event completion (visually encoded) needs to be integrated with perfective aspect (linguistically encoded) for the culmination inference derivation. By modulating the interaction of visual and linguistic stimuli across the two experiments, we show that the verb's perfective aspect triggers the culmination inference incrementally during sentence processing, offering novel evidence for the continuous integration of linguistic processing with real-world visual information. |
Stefan L. Frank; Patty Ernst; Robin L. Thompson; Rein Cozijn The missing-VP effect in readers of English as a second language Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 1204–1219, 2021. @article{Frank2021, English sentences with double center-embedded clauses are read faster when they are made ungrammatical by removing one of the required verb phrases. This phenomenon is known as the missing-VP effect. German and Dutch speakers do not experience the missing-VP effect when reading their native language, but they do when reading English as a second language (L2). We investigate whether the missing-VP effect when reading L2 English occurs in native Dutch speakers because their knowledge of English is similar to that of native English speakers (the high exposure account), or because of the difficulty of L2 reading (the low proficiency account). In an eye-tracking study, we compare the size of the missing-VP effect between native Dutch and native English participants, and across native Dutch participants with varying L2 English proficiency and exposure. Results provide evidence for both accounts, suggesting that both native-like knowledge of English and L2 reading difficulty play a role. |
Léon Franzen; Zoey Stark; Aaron P. Johnson Individuals with dyslexia use a different visual sampling strategy to read text Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 11, pp. 6449, 2021. @article{Franzen2021, Individuals with dyslexia present with reading-related deficits including inaccurate and/or less fluent word recognition and poor decoding abilities. Slow reading speed and worse text comprehension can occur as secondary consequences of these deficits. Reports of visual symptoms such as atypical eye movements during reading gave rise to a search for these deficits' underlying mechanisms. This study sought to replicate established behavioral deficits in reading and cognitive processing speed while investigating their underlying mechanisms in more detail by developing a comprehensive profile of eye movements specific to reading in adult dyslexia. Using a validated standardized reading assessment, our findings confirm a reading speed deficit among adults with dyslexia. We observed different eye movements in readers with dyslexia across numerous eye movement metrics including the duration of a stop (i.e., fixation), the length of jumps (i.e., saccades), and the number of times a reader's eyes expressed a jump atypical for reading. We conclude that individuals with dyslexia visually sample written information in a laborious and more effortful manner that is fundamentally different from those without dyslexia. Our findings suggest a mix of aberrant cognitive linguistic and oculomotor processes being present in adults with dyslexia. |
Max R. Freeman; Viorica Marian Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Eye-tracking evidence that L2 proficiency impacts access of L1 phonotactics Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, pp. 1–29, 2021. @article{Freeman2021, A bilingual's language system is highly interactive. When hearing a second language (L2), bilinguals access native-language (L1) words that share sounds across languages. In the present study, we examine whether input modality and L2 proficiency moderate the extent to which bilinguals activate L1 phonotactic constraints (i.e., rules for combining speech sounds) during L2 processing. Eye movements of English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals were tracked as they searched for a target English word in a visual display. On critical trials, displays included a target that conflicted with the Spanish vowel-onset rule (e.g., spa), as well as a competitor containing the potentially activated "e"onset (e.g., egg). The rule violation was processed either in the visual modality (Experiment 1) or audio-visually (Experiment 2). In both experiments, bilinguals with lower L2 proficiency made more eye movements to competitors than fillers. Findings suggest that bilinguals who have lower L2 proficiency access L1 phonotactic constraints during L2 visual word processing with and without auditory input of the constraint-conflicting structure (e.g., spa). We conclude that the interactivity between a bilingual's two languages is not limited to words that share form across languages, but also extends to sublexical, rule-based structures. |
Hiroki Fujita; Ian Cunnings Reanalysis processes in non-native sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 628–641, 2021. @article{Fujita2021, We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (laughed), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (the baby) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (dressed). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis. |
Hiroki Fujita; Ian Cunnings Lingering misinterpretation in native and nonnative sentence processing: Evidence from structural priming Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 475–504, 2021. @article{Fujita2021a, Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers sometimes misinterpret temporarily ambiguous sentences like When Mary dressed the baby laughed happily. Recent studies suggest that the initially assigned misinterpretation (Mary dressed the baby) may persist even after disambiguation, and that L2 speakers may have particular difficulty discarding initial misinterpretations. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers are more persistent with misinterpretation compared with L1 speakers during sentence processing, using the structural priming and eye tracking while reading tasks. In the experiment, participants read prime followed by target sentences. Reading times revealed that unambiguous but not ambiguous prime sentences facilitated processing of the globally correct interpretation of ambiguous target sentences. However, this priming effect was only observed when the prime and target sentence shared the same verb. Comprehension accuracy rates were not significantly influenced by priming effects but did provide evidence of lingering misinterpretation. We did not find significant L1/L2 differences in either priming effects or persistence of misinterpretation. Together, these results suggest that initially assigned misinterpretations linger in both L1 and L2 readers during sentence processing and that L1 and L2 comprehension priming is strongly lexically mediated. |
Max Garagnani; Evgeniya Kirilina; Friedemann Pulvermüller Semantic grounding of novel spoken words in the primary visual cortex Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 15, pp. 1–16, 2021. @article{Garagnani2021, Embodied theories of grounded semantics postulate that, when word meaning is first acquired, a link is established between symbol (word form) and corresponding semantic information present in modality-specific—including primary—sensorimotor cortices of the brain. Direct experimental evidence documenting the emergence of such a link (i.e., showing that presentation of a previously unknown, meaningless word sound induces, after learning, category-specific reactivation of relevant primary sensory or motor brain areas), however, is still missing. Here, we present new neuroimaging results that provide such evidence. We taught participants aspects of the referential meaning of previously unknown, senseless novel spoken words (such as “Shruba” or “Flipe”) by associating them with either a familiar action or a familiar object. After training, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to analyze the participants' brain responses to the new speech items. We found that hearing the newly learnt object-related word sounds selectively triggered activity in the primary visual cortex, as well as secondary and higher visual areas.These results for the first time directly document the formation of a link between the novel, previously meaningless spoken items and corresponding semantic information in primary sensory areas in a category-specific manner, providing experimental support for perceptual accounts of word-meaning acquisition in the brain. |
Bethany Gardner; Sadie Dix; Rebecca Lawrence; Cameron Morgan; Anaclare Sullivan; Chigusa Kurumada Online pragmatic interpretations of scalar adjectives are affected by perceived speaker reliability Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. e0245130, 2021. @article{Gardner2021, Linguistic communication requires understanding of words in relation to their context. Among various aspects of context, one that has received relatively little attention until recently is the speakers themselves. We asked whether comprehenders' online language comprehension is affected by the perceived reliability with which a speaker formulates pragmatically well-formed utterances. In two eye-tracking experiments, we conceptually replicated and extended a seminal work by Grodner and Sedivy (2011). A between-participant manipulation was used to control reliability with which a speaker follows implicit pragmatic conventions (e.g., using a scalar adjective in accordance with contextual contrast). Experiment 1 replicated Grodner and Sedivy's finding that contrastive inference in response to scalar adjectives was suspended when both the spoken input and the instructions provided evidence of the speaker's (un)reliability: For speech from the reliable speaker, comprehenders exhibited the early fixations attributable to a contextually-situated, contrastive interpretation of a scalar adjective. In contrast, for speech from the unreliable speaker, comprehenders did not exhibit such early fixations. Experiment 2 provided novel evidence of the reliability effect in the absence of explicit instructions. In both experiments, the effects emerged in the earliest expected time window given the stimuli sentence structure. The results suggest that real-time interpretations of spoken language are optimized in the context of a speaker identity, characteristics of which are extrapolated across utterances. |
Carolina A. Gattei; Luis A. París; Diego E. Shalom Information structure and word order canonicity in the comprehension of Spanish texts: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 629724, 2021. @article{Gattei2021, Word order alternation has been described as one of the most productive information structure markers and discourse organizers across languages. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that word order is a crucial cue for argument interpretation. Previous studies about Spanish sentence comprehension have shown greater difficulty to parse sentences that present a word order that does not respect the order of participants of the verb's lexico-semantic structure, irrespective to whether the sentences follow the canonical word order of the language or not. This difficulty has been accounted as the cognitive cost related to the miscomputation of prominence status of the argument that precedes the verb. Nonetheless, the authors only analyzed the use of alternative word orders in isolated sentences, leaving aside the pragmatic motivation of word order alternation. By means of an eye-tracking task, the current study provides further evidence about the role of information structure for the comprehension of sentences with alternative word order and verb type, and sheds light on the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We analyzed both “early” and “late” eye-movement measures as well as accuracy and response times to comprehension questions. Results showed an overall influence of information structure reflected in a modulation of late eye-movement measures as well as offline measures like total reading time and questions response time. However, effects related to the miscomputation of prominence status did not fade away when sentences were preceded by a context that led to non-canonical word order of constituents, showing that prominence computation is a core mechanism for argument interpretation, even in sentences preceded by context. |
Haoyan Ge; Iris Mulders; Xin Kang; Aoju Chen; Virginia Yip Processing focus in native and non-native speakers of English: An eye-tracking study in the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 1057–1088, 2021. @article{Ge2021, This visual-world eye-tracking study investigated the processing of focus in English sentences with preverbal only by L2 learners whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch, compared to native speakers of English. Participants heard only-sentences with prosodic prominence either on the object or on the verb and viewed pictures containing an object-focus alternative and a verb-focus alternative. We found that both L2 groups showed delayed eye movements to the alternative of focus, which was different from the native speakers of English. Moreover, Dutch learners of English were even slower than Cantonese learners of English in directing fixations to the alternative of focus. We interpreted the delayed fixation patterns in both L2 groups as evidence of difficulties in integrating multiple interfaces in real time. Furthermore, the similarity between English and Dutch in the use of prosody to mark focus hindered Dutch learners' L2 processing of focus, whereas the difference between English and Cantonese in the realization of focus facilitated Cantonese learners' processing of focus in English. |
Spyridoula Cheimariou; Thomas A. Farmer; Jean K. Gordon The effects of age and verbal ability on word predictability in reading Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 531–542, 2021. @article{Cheimariou2021, Increased predictability effects in older compared to younger adults have been mostly observed in late eye-movement measures during reading. However, it is unclear whether and how these effects may be related to verbal ability, which typically improves with age. Past studies have shown that verbal abilities modulate the predictability effect. Here, we aimed to replicate predictability effects in younger and older adults in a sentence reading paradigm and to investigate how verbal ability modulates the predictability effect. We monitored 26 younger and 27 older adults' eye movements as they read sentences with target words varying in predictability and examined the impact of age and verbal ability, as reflected in vocabulary and print exposure measures. Replicating previous studies, we found that older adults relied more heavily on contextual information in their anticipation of upcoming input in one late measure. In one early measure (first-fixation duration), participants with higher scores in verbal ability showed greater predictability effects, whereas the predictability effect was virtually absent in those with low scores. In one late measure (regression-path duration), age interacted with predictability. However, verbal ability, when included as a covariate in this model, could not account for the age-related increases in predictability effects. Collectively, our findings indicate that verbal ability influences predictability effects in early processing stages, suggesting facilitation of initial word processing and that some aspect of aging other than verbal ability influences predictability effects in late measures. The latter finding most likely reflects a shift toward integrative controlled processes with age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) |
Mingjing Chen; Yongsheng Wang; Bingjie Zhao; Xin Li; Xuejun Bai The trade-off between format familiarity and word-segmentation facilitation in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 602931, 2021. @article{Chen2021d, In alphabetic writing systems (such as English), the spaces between words mark the word boundaries, and the basic unit of reading is distinguished during visual-level processing. The visual-level information of word boundaries facilitates reading. Chinese is an ideographic language whose text contains no intrinsic inter-word spaces as the marker of word boundaries. Previous studies have shown that the basic processing unit of Chinese reading is also a word. However, findings remain inconsistent regarding whether inserting spaces between words in Chinese text promotes reading performance. Researchers have proposed that there may be a trade-off between format familiarity and the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces. In order to verify this, this study manipulated the format familiarity via reversing the Chinese reading direction from right to left to investigate this issue in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to examine whether inter-word spaces facilitated Chinese reading in an unfamiliar format. Experiment 1 was conducted that 40 native Chinese undergraduates read Chinese sentences from right to left on four format conditions. The results showed faster reading speed and shorter total reading time for the inter-word spaced format. Based on this finding, Experiment 2 examined whether the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces would reduce or disappear after improving the format familiarity; this experiment was conducted that 40 native Chinese undergraduates who did not participate in Experiment 1 read Chinese sentences from right to left on four format conditions after ten-day reading training. There was no significant difference between the total reading time and reading speed in the inter-word spaced format and unspaced format, which suggests that the facilitation effect of inter-word spaces in Chinese reading changed smaller. The combined results of the two experiments suggest that there is indeed a trade-off between format familiarity and the facilitation of word segmentation, which supports the assumption of previous studies. |
Shuang Chen; Yuqing Tang; Xiuna Lv; Kevin B. Paterson; Lijing Chen Similarity between referents constrains the processing of contrastive focus during reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 45–53, 2021. @article{Chen2021f, Contrastive focus implies a contrast between two elements. However, it is unclear whether and how any interplay between such a contrast and similarity between potentially contrasting elements might affect focus processing. Accordingly, we report an eye movement experiment investigating this issue. The experiment used a background story to introduce eight characters whose social identities were manipulated to be similar or dissimilar. Participants first read this background story, then a series of two-sentence discourses while their eye movements were recorded. Each discourse referred to two characters from the passage who had either similar or dissimilar identities, with one (the target character) either focused using the Chinese particle zhiyou (meaning only) or unfocused. The results showed a typical focus facilitation effect, such that target character names were processed more quickly when focused than unfocused. We also observed a main effect of the similarity/dissimilarly of characters and, crucially, an interaction between this variable and focus. This interaction was due to slower processing of a post-target region when the target character was focused and the two characters had similar rather than dissimilar identities, but no such effect when the target character was unfocused. The findings suggest that establishing a contrast between referents is effortful during reading when these have similar rather than dissimilar social identities and so are more difficult to differentiate. The distinctiveness of referents in a discourse context may therefore constrain the establishment of contrastive focus during reading. We discuss these findings in relation to current theories of focus interpretation. |
Ho Chen-En What does professional experience have to offer? An eyetracking study of sight interpreting/translation behaviour Journal Article In: Translation, Cognition and Behavior, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 47–74, 2021. @article{ChenEn2021, This study investigated the impact of professional experience on the process and product of sight interpreting/translation (SiT). Seventeen experienced interpreters, with at least 150 days' professional experience, and 18 interpreting students were recruited to conduct three tasks: silent reading, reading aloud, and SiT. All participants had similar interpreter training backgrounds. The data of the SiT task are reported here, with two experienced interpreters (both AIIC members) assessing the participants' interpretations on accuracy and style, which includes fluency and other paralinguistic performance. The findings show that professional experience contributed to higher accuracy, although there was no between-group difference in the mean score on style, overall task time, length of the SiT output, and mean fixation duration of each stage of reading. The experienced practitioners exhibited more varied approaches at the beginning of the SiT task, with some biding their time longer than the others before oral production started, but quality was not affected. Moving along, the practitioners showed better language flexibility in that their renditions were faster, steadier, and less disrupted by pauses and the need to read further to maintain the flow of interpretation. |
Yesi Cheng; Jason Rothman; Ian Cunnings Parsing preferences and individual differences in nonnative sentence processing: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 129–151, 2021. @article{Cheng2021, Using both offline and online measures, the present study investigates attachment resolution in relative clauses in English natives (L1) and nonnatives (L2). We test how relative clause resolution interacts with linguistic factors and participant-level individual differences. Previous L1 English studies have demonstrated a low attachment preference and also an ambiguity advantage suggesting that L1ers may not have as strong a low attachment preference as is sometimes claimed. We employ a similar design to examine this effect in L1 and L2 comprehension. Offline results indicate that both groups exhibit a low attachment preference, positively correlated with reading span scores and with proficiency in the L2 group. Online results also suggest a low attachment preference in both groups. However, our data show that individual differences influence online attachment resolution for both native and nonnatives; higher lexical processing efficiency correlates with quicker resolution of linguistic conflicts. We argue that the current findings suggest that attachment resolution during L1 and L2 processing share the same processing mechanisms and are modulated by similar individual differences. |
Meghan Clayards; M. Gareth Gaskell; Sarah Hawkins Phonetic detail is used to predict a word's morphological composition Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 87, pp. 101055, 2021. @article{Clayards2021, An eye-tracking experiment tested the hypothesis that listeners use within-word fine phonetic detail that systematically reflects morphological structure, when the phonemes are identical (dis in discolour (true prefix) vs. discover (pseudo prefix)) and when they differ (re-cover vs. recover). Spoken sentence pairs, identical up to at least the critical word (e.g. I'd be surprised if the boys discolour/discover it), were cross-spliced at the prefix-stem boundary to produce stimuli in which the critical syllable's acoustics either matched or mismatched the sentence continuation. On each trial listeners heard one sentence, and selected one of two photographs depicting the pair. Matched and mismatched stimuli were heard in separate sessions, at least a week apart. Matched stimuli led to more looks to the target photograph overall and time-course analysis suggested this was true at the earliest moments. We also observed stronger effects for earlier trials and the effects tended to weaken over the course of the experiment. These results suggest that normal speech perception involves continuously monitoring phonetic detail, and, when it is systematically associated with meaning, using it to facilitate rapid understanding. |
Sarah Colby; Bob McMurray Cognitive and physiological measures of listening effort during degraded speech perception: Relating dual-task and pupillometry paradigms Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 64, no. 9, pp. 3627–3652, 2021. @article{Colby2021, Purpose: Listening effort is quickly becoming an important metric for assessing speech perception in less-than-ideal situations. However, the relationship between the construct of listening effort and the measures used to assess it remains unclear. We compared two measures of listening effort: a cognitive dual task and a physiological pupillometry task. We sought to investigate the relationship between these measures of effort and whether engaging effort impacts speech accuracy. Method: In Experiment 1, 30 participants completed a dual task and a pupillometry task that were carefully matched in stimuli and design. The dual task consisted of a spoken word recognition task and a visual match-to-sample task. In the pupillometry task, pupil size was monitored while participants completed a spoken word recognition task. Both tasks presented words at three levels of listening difficulty (unmodified, eight-channel vocoding, and four-channel vocoding) and provided response feedback on every trial. We refined the pupillometry task in Experiment 2 (n = 31); crucially, participants no longer received response feedback. Finally, we ran a new group of subjects on both tasks in Experiment 3 (n = 30). Results: In Experiment 1, accuracy in the visual task decreased with increased signal degradation in the dual task, but pupil size was sensitive to accuracy and not vocoding condition. After removing feedback in Experiment 2, changes in pupil size were predicted by listening condition, suggesting the task was now sensitive to engaged effort. Both tasks were sensitive to listening difficulty in Experiment 3, but there was no relationship between the tasks and neither task predicted speech accuracy. Conclusions: Consistent with previous work, we found little evidence for a relationship between different measures of listening effort. We also found no evidence that effort predicts speech accuracy, suggesting that engaging more effort does not lead to improved speech recognition. Cognitive and physiological measures of listening effort are likely sensitive to different aspects of the construct of listening effort. |
Kathy Conklin; Gareth Carrol Words go together like 'bread and butter': The rapid, automatic acquisition of lexical patterns Journal Article In: Applied Linguistics, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 492–513, 2021. @article{Conklin2021, While it is possible to express the same meaning in different ways ('bread and butter' versus 'butter and bread'), we tend to say things in the same way. As much as half of spoken discourse is made up of formulaic language or linguistic patterns. Despite its prevalence, little is known about how the processing system treats novel patterns and how rapidly a sensitivity to them arises in natural contexts. To address this, we monitored native English speakers' eye movements when reading short stories containing existing (conventional) patterns ('time and money'), seen once, and novel patterns ('wires and pipes'), seen one to five times. Subsequently, readers saw both existing and novel phrases in the reversed order ('money and time'; 'pipes and wires'). In four to five exposures, much like existing lexical patterns, novel ones demonstrate a processing advantage. Sensitivity to lexical patterns - including the co-occurrence of lexical items and the order in which they occur - arises rapidly and automatically during natural reading. This has implications for language learning and is in line with usage-based models of language processing. |
Jason C. Coronel; Olivia M. Bullock; Hillary C. Shulman; Matthew D. Sweitzer; Robert M. Bond; Shannon Poulsen Eye movements predict large-scale voting decisions Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 836–848, 2021. @article{Coronel2021, More than 100 countries allow people to vote directly on policies in direct democracy elections (e.g., 2016 Brexit referendum). Politicians are often responsible for writing ballot language, and voters frequently encounter ballot measures that are difficult to understand. We examined whether eye movements from a small group of individuals can predict the consequences of ballot language on large-scale voting decisions. Across two preregistered studies (Study 1: N = 120 registered voters, Study 2: N = 120 registered voters), we monitored laboratory participants' eye movements as they read real ballot measures. We found that eye-movement responses associated with difficulties in language comprehension predicted aggregate voting decisions to abstain from voting and vote against ballot measures in U.S. elections (total number of votes cast = 137,661,232). Eye movements predicted voting decisions beyond what was accounted for by widely used measures of language difficulty. This finding demonstrates a new way of linking eye movements to out-of-sample aggregate-level behaviors. |
Lei Cui; Jue Wang; Yingliang Zhang; Fengjiao Cong; Wenxin Zhang; Jukka Hyönä Compound word frequency modifies the effect of character frequency in reading Chinese Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 4, pp. 610–633, 2021. @article{Cui2021, In two eye-tracking studies, reading of two-character Chinese compound words was examined. First and second character frequency were orthogonally manipulated to examine the extent to which Chinese compound words are processed via the component characters. In Experiment 1, first and second character frequency were manipulated for frequent compound words, whereas in Experiment 2 it was done for infrequent compound words. Fixation time and skipping probability for the first and second character were affected by its frequency in neither experiment, nor in their pooled analysis. Yet, in Experiment 2 fixations on the second character were longer when a high-frequency character was presented as the first character compared with when a low-frequency character was presented as the first character. This reversed character frequency effect reflects a morphological family size effect and is explained by the constraint hypothesis, according to which fixation time on the second component of two-component compound words is shorter when its identity is constrained by the first component. It is concluded that frequent Chinese compound words are processed holistically, whereas with infrequent compound words there is some room for the characters to play a role in the identification process. |
Winfried Menninghaus; Sebastian Wallot What the eyes reveal about (reading) poetry Journal Article In: Poetics, vol. 85, pp. 101526, 2021. @article{Menninghaus2021, This study investigated how rhyme and meter affect eye movements and subjective aesthetic evaluations while reading poems. Earlier findings suggest that the effects might include prosodic predictability-driven cognitive and affective rewards from increased processing fluency (Blohm, Wagner, Schlesewsky and Menninghaus, 2018, McGlone and Tofighbakhsh, 2000), but also semantic and syntactic disfluency, as rhyme and meter are often implemented at the expense of unusual word forms and word order (Menninghaus et al., 2015, Wallot and Menninghaus, 2018). This study set out to investigate the extent to which eye movements might reveal not only distinct effects of fluency and disfluency at the same time, but potentially also hedonic responses that are associated with longer rather than shorter self-motivated exposure, in line with the hypothesis of “savoring” (Frijda and Sundararajan, 2007). The results reveal several fluency-enhancing effects of rhyme and meter on reading times for more global features of the poems, but also increased disfluency effects on gaze durations for some more local features of the poems. Moreover, some of the latter effects are readily interpretable in terms of the savoring hypothesis. Eye movement characteristics that were predictive of higher aesthetic evaluation—irrespective of the presence or absence of rhyme and meter—similarly resulted in increased fluency, disfluency, and savoring effects. Our study thus reveals, for the first time, a complex picture of effects that co-occur while reading poetic prosody, based on analyzing different dimensions of a single psychophysiological variable, namely, eye movements. |
Emmelien Merchie; Leen Catrysse; Hilde Van Keer Mind maps as primers when reading-for-learning in elementary grades? An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Instructional Science, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 23–65, 2021. @article{Merchie2021, Mind maps are often used to help readers process texts, but their effectiveness is empirically under-investigated. This study explores whether the use of mind maps presented either before or after the text can prime successful selective processing strategies related to the text topic structure. Differences in performance outcomes (i.e., memory and comprehension) are also investigated. Sixty-four late elementary education students were randomly assigned to a text-only-condition (T), mind map-text-condition (MMT) or text-mind map-condition (TMM). All groups studied an informative text while their eye movements were registered. Multilayered posttests and interviews were administered. Linear mixed effect models and one-way analysis of variances show that presenting a mind map beforehand primes more successful selective processing strategies than when the mind map is presented afterwards or not presented. In contrast, the TMM-condition outperformed the others in their amount of free recall and coherence. This study suggests that both receiving a mind map before or after text processing can be beneficial during targeted instruction in view of successful reading-for-learning. |