EyeLink 临床和动眼神经眼球追踪出版物
EyeLink临床和oculomotor研究出版物至2023年(一些早于2024年)列在以下年份。您可以使用Saccadic Adaptation、Schizophrenia、Nystagmus等关键词搜索出版物。您还可以按年份搜索个人作者姓名和有限搜索(选择年份,然后单击搜索按钮)。如果我们错过了任何EyeLink临床或oculomotor文章,请给我们发电子邮件!
2020 |
Xiaoxiao Luo; Guanlan Kang; Yu Guo; Xingcheng Yu; Xiaolin Zhou In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 82, no. 4, pp. 1928–1941, 2020. @article{Luo2020a, This study investigates whether and how value-associated faces affect audiovisual speech perception and its eye movement pattern. Participants were asked to learn to associate particular faces with or without monetary reward in the training phase, and, in the subsequent test phase, to identify syllables that the talkers had said in video clips in which the talkers' faces had or had not been associated with reward. The syllables were either congruent or incongruent with the talkers' mouth movements. Crucially, in some cases, the incongruent syllables could elicit the McGurk effect. Results showed that the McGurk effect occurred more often for reward-associated faces than for non-reward-associated faces. Moreover, the signal detection analysis revealed that participants had lower criterion and higher discriminability for reward-associated faces than for non-reward-associated faces. Surprisingly, eye movement data showed that participants spent more time looking at and fixated more often on the extraoral (nose/cheek) area for reward-associated faces than for non-reward-associated faces, while the opposite pattern was observed on the oral (mouth) area. The correlation analysis demonstrated that, over participants, the more they looked at the extraoral area in the training phase because of reward, the larger the increase of McGurk proportion (and the less they looked at the oral area) in the test phase. These findings not only demonstrate that value-associated faces enhance the influence of visual information on audiovisual speech perception but also highlight the importance of the extraoral facial area in the value-driven McGurk effect. |
Siqi Lyu; Jung-Yueh Tu; Chien-Jer Charles Lin Processing plausibility in concessive and causal relations: Evidence from self-paced reading and eye-tracking Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 320–342, 2020. @article{Lyu2020a, In this study participants read plausible and implausible sentences containing concessive and causal relations in Chinese, for instance, [Although/Because] he has a talent for language, he [doesn't like/likes] learning English. In two self-paced reading experiments (Experiments 1 and 2), we consistently found the plausibility effect at the postcritical region in both concession and causality. When a second postcritical region was added (Experiment 2), implausibility induced a sustained effect in causality but became temporarily acceptable in concession. In an eye-tracking study, plausibility induced a larger effect in concession on the second-pass and the total reading time of the precritical regions than in causality. The results suggest that verifying sentence plausibility in a negated cause–effect relation (i.e., concession) can be as fast as in a direct cause–effect relation (i.e., causality), as negation is expected in processing concession. At a later stage, different strategies are adopted in resolving the implausibility of the two relations. We suggest that a perspective shift is involved in resolving the implausibility in concession, which induces greater cost compared with causality. |
Ross Macdonald; Silke Brandt; Anna Theakston; Elena Lieven; Ludovica Serratrice The role of animacy in children's interpretation of relative clauses in English: Evidence from sentence–picture matching and eye movements Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 44, no. 8, pp. 1–35, 2020. @article{Macdonald2020, Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs (“The book that the boy is reading”). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., “Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing”). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5–6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head-noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head-nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head-noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., “where is the tractor that the car is following”) to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity-based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short-term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1. |
Alexandra Marquis; Meera Al Kaabi; Tommi Leung; Fatima Boush What the eyes hear: An eye-tracking study on phonological awareness in Emirati Arabic Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, pp. 452, 2020. @article{Marquis2020, Phonological awareness is the ability to perceive and manipulate the sounds of spoken words. It is considered a good predictor of reading and spelling abilities. In the current study, we used an eye-tracking procedure to measure fixation differences while adults completed three conditions of phonological awareness in Emirati Arabic (EA): (1) explicit instructions for onset consonant matching (OCM), (2) implicit instructions for segmentation of initial consonant (SIC), and (3) rhyme matching (RM). We hypothesized that fixation indices would vary according to the experimental conditions. We expected explicit instructions to facilitate task performance. Thus, eye movements should reflect more efficient fixation patterns in the explicit OCM condition in comparison to the implicit SIC condition. Moreover, since Arabic is consonant-based, we hypothesized that participants would perform better in the consonant conditions (i.e., OCM and SIC) than in the rhyme condition (i.e., RM). Finally, we expected that providing feedback during practice trials would facilitate participants' performance overall. Response accuracy, expressed as a percentage of correct responses, was recorded alongside eye movement data. Results show that performance was significantly compromised in the RM condition, where targets received more fixations of longer average duration, and significantly longer gaze durations in comparison to the OCM and SIC conditions. Response accuracy was also significantly lower in the RM condition. Our results indicate that eye-tracking can be used as a tool to test phonological awareness skills and shows differences in performance between tasks containing a vowel or consonant manipulation. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Emily Johnson; Amy M. Lieberman The sign superiority effect: Lexical status facilitates peripheral handshape identification for deaf signers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 46, no. 11, pp. 1397–1410, 2020. @article{Schotter2020, Deaf signers exhibit an enhanced ability to process information in their peripheral visual field, particularly the motion of dots or orientation of lines. Does their experience processing sign language, which involves identifying meaningful visual forms across the visual field, contribute to this enhancement? We tested whether deaf signers recruit language knowledge to facilitate peripheral identification through a sign superiority effect (i.e., better handshape discrimination in a sign than a pseudosign) and whether such a superiority effect might be responsible for perceptual enhancements relative to hearing individuals (i.e., a decrease in the effect of eccentricity on perceptual identification). Deaf signers and hearing signers or nonsigners identified the handshape presented within a static ASL fingerspelling letter (Experiment 1), fingerspelled sequence (Experiment 2), or sign or pseudosign (Experiment 3) presented in the near or far periphery. Accuracy on all tasks was higher for deaf signers than hearing nonsigning participants and was higher in the near than the far periphery. Across experiments, there were different patterns of interactions between hearing status and eccentricity depending on the type of stimulus; deaf signers showed an effect of eccentricity for static fingerspelled letters, fingerspelled sequences, and pseudosigns but not for ASL signs. In contrast, hearing nonsigners showed an effect of eccentricity for all stimuli. Thus, deaf signers recruit lexical knowledge to facilitate peripheral perceptual identification, and this perceptual enhancement may derive from their extensive experience processing visual linguistic information in the periphery during sign comprehension. |
Sarah Schuster; Stefan Hawelka; Nicole Alexandra Himmelstoss; Fabio Richlan; Florian Hutzler The neural correlates of word position and lexical predictability during sentence reading: Evidence from fixation-related fMRI Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 613–624, 2020. @article{Schuster2020, By means of combining eye-tracking and fMRI, the present study aimed to investigate aspects of higher linguistic processing during natural reading which were formerly hard to assess with traditional paradigms. Specifically, we investigated the haemodynamic effects of incremental sentence comprehension–as operationalised by word position–and its relation to context-based word-level effects of lexical predictability. We observed that an increasing amount of words being processed was associated with an increase in activation in the left posterior middle temporal and angular gyri. At the same time, left occipito-temporal regions showed a decrease in activation with increasing word position. Region of interest (ROI) analyses revealed differential effects of word position and predictability within dissociable parts of the semantic network–showing that it is expedient to consider these effects conjointly. |
Kilian G. Seeber; Laura Keller; Alexis Hervais-Adelman When the ear leads the eye–the use of text during simultaneous interpretation Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 10, pp. 1480–1494, 2020. @article{Seeber2020, In our study we analyse the online processing of visual-verbal input during simultaneous interpreting with text. To that end, we compared 15 professional interpreters' eye movements during simultaneous interpreting with text (SIMTXT) to a baseline collected during reading while listening (RWL). We found that interpreters have a preference for a visual lead during RWL, following the pattern well-documented in silent and oral reading studies. During SIMTXT, in contrast, interpreters show a clear preference for a visual lag. We tentatively conclude that during SIMTXT the visual input might be used first and foremost to support the production of the output rather than the comprehension of the input. Importantly, we submit that the availability of the written text of the orally presented discourse might negatively affect predictive processing. |
Matthias J. Sjerps; Caitlin Decuyper; Antje S. Meyer Initiation of utterance planning in response to pre-recorded and “live” utterances Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 357–374, 2020. @article{Sjerps2020, In everyday conversation, interlocutors often plan their utterances while listening to their conversational partners, thereby achieving short gaps between their turns. Important issues for current psycholinguistics are how interlocutors distribute their attention between listening and speech planning and how speech planning is timed relative to listening. Laboratory studies addressing these issues have used a variety of paradigms, some of which have involved using recorded speech to which participants responded, whereas others have involved interactions with confederates. This study investigated how this variation in the speech input affected the participants' timing of speech planning. In Experiment 1, participants responded to utterances produced by a confederate, who sat next to them and looked at the same screen. In Experiment 2, they responded to recorded utterances of the same confederate. Analyses of the participants' speech, their eye movements, and their performance in a concurrent tapping task showed that, compared with recorded speech, the presence of the confederate increased the processing load for the participants, but did not alter their global sentence planning strategy. These results have implications for the design of psycholinguistic experiments and theories of listening and speaking in dyadic settings. |
Bryor Snefjella; Nadia Lana; Victor Kuperman How emotion is learned: Semantic learning of novel words in emotional contexts Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 115, pp. 1–18, 2020. @article{Snefjella2020, The present paper addresses two under-studied dimensions of novel word learning. We ask (a) whether originally meaningless novel words can acquire emotional connotations from their linguistic contexts, and (b) whether these acquired connotations can affect the quality of orthographic and semantic word learning and its retention over time. In five experiments using three stimuli sets, L1 speakers of English learned nine novel words embedded in contexts that were consistently positive, neutral or negative. Reading times were recorded during the learning phase, and vocabulary post-tests were administered immediately after that phase and after one week to assess learning. With two of three stimulus sets, the answer to (a) was positive: readers learned both the forms, definitional meanings and emotional connotations of novel words from their contexts. We confirmed (b) in two of three stimulus sets as well. Items were learned more accurately (by 10% to 20%) in positive rather than negative or neutral contexts. We propose the transfer of affect to a word from its collocations to be a virtually unstudied yet efficient mechanism of learning affective meanings. We further demonstrate that the transfer that occurs over a few exposures to a novel word in context is sufficient to elicit a long-lasting positivity advantage previously shown in existing words only. Null results in one stimulus set suggest that contextual transfer of affect is contingent on other contextual properties, such as text complexity. These findings are pitted against theories of vocabulary acquisition. |
Joshua Snell; Jan Theeuwes A story about statistical learning in a story: Regularities impact eye movements during book reading Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 113, pp. 104127, 2020. @article{Snell2020, A wealth of research attests to the key role of statistical learning in the acquisition and execution of skilled reading. Little is known, however, about how regularities impact the way readers navigate through their linguistic environment. While previous studies have mostly gauged the recognition of single words, oculomotor processes are likely influenced by multiple words at once. With these premises in mind, we performed analyses on the GECO book reading corpus to determine whether repeatedly encountering a given sentence structure improves oculomotor control. In the reading materials we labeled structures on the basis of both low- and high-level properties: respectively word length combinations (e.g., a 2-letter word followed by a 6-letter word followed by a 4-letter word) and syntactic structures (e.g., an article followed by a noun followed by a verb). Our analyses show that repeatedly encountering a structure leads to fewer and shorter fixations, and fewer corrective saccades. Critically, learning curves are steeper for structures that have a higher overall frequency, hence evidencing true statistical learning over and above readers' general tendency to accelerate as they progress through the book. Further, data from Dutch-English bilingual readers suggest that these types of learning occur across languages and at various levels of proficiency. We surmise that the reading system is tuned to statistical regularities pertaining not just to single words but also combinations of words. These regularities impact both linguistic processing and oculomotor control. |
Adrian Staub Do effects of visual contrast and font difficulty on readers' eye movements interact with effects of word frequency or predictability? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 46, no. 11, pp. 1235–1251, 2020. @article{Staub2020, The time a reader's eyes spend on a word is influenced by visual (e.g., contrast) as well as lexical (e.g., word frequency) and contextual (e.g., predictability) factors. Well-known visual word recognition models predict that visual and higher-level manipulations may have interactive effects on early eye movement measures, because of cascaded processing between levels. Previous eye movement studies provide conflicting evidence as to whether they do, possibly because of inconsistent manipulations or limited statistical power. In the present study, 2 highly powered experiments used sentences in which a target word's frequency and predictability were factorially manipulated. Experiment 1 also manipulated visual contrast, and Experiment 2 also manipulated font difficulty. Robust main effects of all manipulations were evident in both experiments. In Experiment 1, interactions between the effect of contrast and the effects of frequency and predictability were numerically small and statistically unreliable in both early (word skipping, first fixation duration) and later (gaze duration, go-past time) measures. In Experiment 2, frequency and predictability did demonstrate convincing interactions with font difficulty, but only in the later measures, possibly implicating a checking mechanism. We conclude that although the predicted interactions in early eye movement measures may exist, they are sufficiently weak that they are difficult to detect even in large eye movement experiments. |
Gary Jones; Francesco Cabiddu; Daniela S. Avila-Varela Two-year-old children's processing of two-word sequences occurring 19 or more times per million and their influence on subsequent word learning Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 199, pp. 1–19, 2020. @article{Jones2020, We know that 8-month-old infants track the statistical properties of a series of syllables and that 2- and 3-year-old children process familiar phrases more efficiently than unfamiliar phrases, but less is known about the intermediary level of two-word sequences. In Study 1, 2-year-olds (N = 45, mean age = 651 days) heard two-word sequences consisting of a prime word followed by a noun, with two pictures appearing on the screen (depicting the noun and a distractor). Eye tracking showed that children looked more quickly at the noun picture for two-word sequences occurring an average of 19 times per million and 206 times per million in child-directed speech than for novel sequences. In Study 2, corpus analyses showed that 2-year-olds' noun learning increased in line with the frequency of the two-word sequence that preceded it in caregiver speech utterances. This effect holds even after controlling nouns for frequency in caregiver speech, phonemic length, neighborhood density, phonotactic probability, and concreteness and after removing nouns produced in isolation by caregivers and nouns produced by children before being produced by caregivers. These studies show that young children's language processing is facilitated by known two-word sequences, allowing children to focus on more novel aspects of the utterance. Such efficiencies are far-reaching because nearly two thirds of child-directed utterances contain two-word sequences with frequencies of 19 or more per million. |
Xin Kang; Gitte H. Joergensen; Gerry T. M. Altmann The activation of object-state representations during online language comprehension Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 210, pp. 1–11, 2020. @article{Kang2020, Understanding the time-course of event knowledge activation is crucial for theories of language comprehension. We report two experiments using the ‘visual world paradigm' (VWP) that investigated the dynamic mapping between object-state representations and real-time language processing. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences that described events resulting in either a substantial change of state (e.g. The chef will chop the onion) or a minimal change of state (e.g. The chef will weigh the onion). Concurrently, they viewed pictures depicting two versions of the target object (e.g., an onion) corresponding to the intact and changed states, and two unrelated distractors. A second sentence referred to the object with either a backward or a forward shift in event time (e.g. But first/And then, he will smell the onion). In Experiment 2, Degree of Change was manipulated by using different nouns in the first sentence (e.g. The girl will stomp on the penny/egg). The second sentence was similar to the ones used in Experiment 1 (e.g., But first/And then, she will look at the penny/egg). The results from both experiments showed that participants looked more at the ‘appropriate' state of the object that matched the language context, but the shift of visual attention emerged only when the object name was heard. Our findings suggest that situationally appropriate object representations do trigger eye movements to the corresponding states of the target object, but inappropriate representations are not necessarily eliminated from consideration until the language forces it. |
Greta Kaufeld; Wibke Naumann; Antje S. Meyer; Hans Rutger Bosker; Andrea E. Martin Contextual speech rate influences morphosyntactic prediction and integration Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 7, pp. 933–948, 2020. @article{Kaufeld2020, Understanding spoken language requires the integration and weighting of multiple cues, and may call on cue integration mechanisms that have been studied in other areas of perception. In the current study, we used eye-tracking (visual-world paradigm) to examine how contextual speech rate (a lower-level, perceptual cue) and morphosyntactic knowledge (a higher-level, linguistic cue) are iteratively combined and integrated. Results indicate that participants used contextual rate information immediately, which we interpret as evidence of perceptual inference and the generation of predictions about upcoming morphosyntactic information. Additionally, we observed that early rate effects remained active in the presence of later conflicting lexical information. This result demonstrates that (1) contextual speech rate functions as a cue to morphosyntactic inferences, even in the presence of subsequent disambiguating information; and (2) listeners iteratively use multiple sources of information to draw inferences and generate predictions during speech comprehension. We discuss the implication of these demonstrations for theories of language processing. |
Greta Kaufeld; Anna Ravenschlag; Antje S. Meyer; Andrea E. Martin; Hans Rutger Bosker Knowledge-based and signal-based cues are weighted flexibly during spoken language comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 1–14, 2020. @article{Kaufeld2020a, During spoken language comprehension, listeners make use of both knowledge-based and signal-based sources of information, but little is known about how cues from these distinct levels of representational hierarchy are weighted and integrated online. In an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm, we investigated the flexible weighting and integration of morphosyntactic gender marking (a knowledge-based cue) and contextual speech rate (a signal-based cue). We observed that participants used the morphosyntactic cue immediately to make predictions about upcoming referents, even in the presence of uncertainty about the cue's reliability. Moreover, we found speech rate normalization effects in participants' gaze patterns even in the presence of preceding morphosyntactic information. These results demonstrate that cues are weighted and integrated flexibly online, rather than adhering to a strict hierarchy. We further found rate normalization effects in the looking behavior of participants who showed a strong behavioral preference for the morphosyntactic gender cue. This indicates that rate normalization effects are robust and potentially automatic. We discuss these results in light of theories of cue integration and the two-stage model of acoustic context effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved). |
Nayoun Kim; Katy Carlson; Mike Dickey; Masaya Yoshida Processing gapping: Parallelism and grammatical constraints Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 5, pp. 781–798, 2020. @article{Kim2020b, This study aims to test two hypotheses about the online processing of Gapping: whether the parser inserts an ellipsis site in an incremental fashion in certain coordinated structures (the Incremental Ellipsis Hypothesis), or whether ellipsis is a late and dispreferred option (the Ellipsis as a Last Resort Hypothesis). We employ two offline acceptability rating experiments and a sentence fragment completion experiment to investigate to what extent the distribution of Gapping is controlled by grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints. Furthermore, an eye-tracking while reading experiment demonstrated that the parser inserts an ellipsis site incrementally but only when grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints allow for the insertion of the ellipsis site. This study shows that incremental building of the Gapping structure follows from the parser's general preference to keep the structure of the two conjuncts maximally parallel in a coordination structure as well as from grammatical restrictions on the distribution of Gapping such as the Coordination Constraint. |
Sebastian P. Korinth; Kerstin Gerstenberger; Christian J. Fiebach Wider letter-spacing facilitates word processing but impairs reading rates of fast readers Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, pp. 444, 2020. @article{Korinth2020, Previous reports of improved oral reading performance for dyslexic children but not for regular readers when between-letter spacing was enlarged led to the proposal of a dyslexia-specific deficit in visual crowding. However, it is in this context also critical to understand how letter spacing affects visual word recognition and reading in unimpaired readers. Adopting an individual differences approach, the present study, accordingly, examined whether wider letter spacing improves reading performance also for non-impaired adults during silent reading and whether there is an association between letter spacing and crowding sensitivity. We report eye movement data of 24 German students who silently read texts presented either with normal or wider letter spacing. Foveal and parafoveal crowding sensitivity were estimated using two independent tests. Wider spacing reduced first fixation durations, gaze durations, and total fixation time for all participants, with slower readers showing stronger effects. However, wider letter spacing also reduced skipping probabilities and elicited more fixations, especially for faster readers. In terms of words read per minute, wider letter spacing did not provide a benefit, and faster readers in particular were slowed down. Neither foveal nor parafoveal crowding sensitivity correlated with the observed letter-spacing effects. In conclusion, wide letter spacing reduces single word processing time in typically developed readers during silent reading, but affects reading rates negatively since more words must be fixated. We tentatively propose that wider letter spacing reinforces serial letter processing in slower readers, but disrupts parallel processing of letter chunks in faster readers. These effects of letter spacing do not seem to be mediated by individual differences in crowding sensitivity. |
A. A. Korneev; E. Yu Matveeva; T. V. Akhutina Eye movements in primary schoolchildren with different levels of reading skills Journal Article In: Human Physiology, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 235–243, 2020. @article{Korneev2020, Abstract: We studied the reading skills in primary schoolchildren (8–9 years of age) using the neuropsychological and eye tracking methods. We analyzed possible correlations between the level of reading skills and the preferred reading strategy with the features of eye movements and the cognitive function of children. The study involved 46 third-graders. Their reading skill was evaluated using the words with regular and irregular spelling. Based on a cluster analysis of reading performance, these children were divided into four groups according to the level and quality of reading development. Group 1 read all types of words well enough; group 2 read well regular words and slightly worse irregular words; children from groups 3 and 4 read regular words at a satisfactory level, while irregular words were read significantly worse than regular ones in group 3 and were not read by group 4 children. An eye tracking study allowed us to suggest that children with good reading skills are more likely to use the lexical strategy, and children with relatively poor reading skills use the sublexical strategy, which is more available to them. Moreover, analysis of the individual differences in poor readers showed that some of them were also able to recruit lexical strategy in the reading process. |
Drew J. McLaughlin; Kristin J. Van Engen Task-evoked pupil response for accurately recognized accented speech Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 147, no. 2, pp. EL151–EL156, 2020. @article{McLaughlin2020, Unfamiliar second-language (L2) accents present a common challenge to speech understanding. However, the extent to which accurately recognized unfamiliar L2-accented speech imposes a greater cognitive load than native speech remains unclear. The current study used pupillometry to assess cognitive load for native English listeners during the per- ception of intelligible Mandarin Chinese-accented English and American-accented English. Results showed greater pupil response (indicating greater cognitive load) for the unfamiliar L2-accented speech. These findings indicate that the mismatches between unfamiliar L2- accented speech and native listeners' linguistic representations impose greater cognitive load even when recognition accuracy is at ceiling. |
Ascensión Pagán; Megan Bird; Yaling Hsiao; Kate Nation Both semantic diversity and frequency influence children's sentence reading Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 356–364, 2020. @article{Pagan2020, Semantic diversity–a metric that captures variations in previous contextual experience with a word–influences children's lexical decision and reading aloud. We investigated the effects of semantic diversity and frequency on children's reading of words embedded in sentences, while eye movements were recorded. If semantic diversity and frequency reflect different aspects of experience that influence reading in different ways, they should show independent effects and perhaps even different processing signatures during reading. Forty-nine 9-year-olds read sentences containing high/low frequency and high/low diversity words, manipulated orthogonally. We observed main effects of both variables, with high frequency and high semantic diversity words being read more easily. These results show that variations in the amount and nature of contextual experience influence how easily words are processed during reading. |
Jinger Pan; Jochen Laubrock; Ming Yan Phonological consistency effects in Chinese sentence reading Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, pp. 1–16, 2020. @article{Pan2020, In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the processing of information about phonological consistency of Chinese phonograms during sentence reading. In Experiment 1, we adopted the error disruption paradigm in silent reading and found significant effects of phonological consistency and homophony in the foveal vision, but only in a late processing stage. Adding oral reading to Experiment 2, we found both effects shifted to earlier indices of parafoveal processing. Specifically, low-consistency characters led to a better homophonic foveal recovery effect in Experiment 1 and stronger homophonic preview benefits in Experiment 2. These findings suggest that phonological consistency information can be obtained during sentence reading, and compared to the low-consistency previews the high-consistency previews are processed faster, which leads to greater interference to the recognition of target characters. |
Jinger Pan; Ming Yan; Jochen Laubrock Semantic preview benefit and cost: Evidence from parafoveal fast-priming paradigm Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 205, pp. 1–10, 2020. @article{Pan2020a, How is semantic information in the mental lexicon accessed and selected during reading? Readers process information of both the foveal and parafoveal words. Recent eye-tracking studies hint at bi-phasic lexical activation dynamics, demonstrating that semantically related parafoveal previews can either facilitate, or interfere with lexical processing of target words in comparison to unrelated previews, with the size and direction of the effect depending on exposure time to parafoveal previews. However, evidence to date is only correlational, because exposure time was determined by participants' pre-target fixation durations. Here we experimentally controlled parafoveal preview exposure duration using a combination of the gaze-contingent fast-priming and boundary paradigms. We manipulated preview duration and examined the time course of parafoveal semantic activation during the oral reading of Chinese sentences in three experiments. Semantic previews led to faster lexical access of target words than unrelated previews only when the previews were presented briefly (80 ms in Experiments 1 and 3). Longer exposure time (100 ms or 150 ms) eliminated semantic preview effects, and full preview without duration limit resulted in preview cost, i.e., a reversal of preview benefit. Our results indicate that high-level semantic information can be obtained from parafoveal words and the size and direction of the parafoveal semantic effect depends on the level of lexical activation. |
Nick B. Pandža; Ian Phillips; Valerie P. Karuzis; Polly O'Rourke; Stefanie E. Kuchinsky Neurostimulation and pupillometry: New directions for learning and research in applied linguistics Journal Article In: Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, vol. 40, pp. 56–77, 2020. @article{Pandza2020, This paper begins by discussing new trends in the use of neurostimulation techniques in cognitive science and learning research, as well as the nascent research on their application in second language learning. To illustrate this, an experiment designed to investigate the impact of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), which is delivered via earbuds, on how learners process and learn Mandarin tones is reported. Pupillometry, which is an index of cognitive effort, is explained and illustrated as one way to assess the impact of tVNS. Participants in the study were native English speakers, naïve to tone languages, pseudorandomly assigned to active or control conditions, while balancing for nonlinguistic pitch ability and musical experience. Their performance after tVNS was assessed using a range of more traditional language outcome measures, including accuracy and reaction times from lexical recognition and recall tasks and was triangulated with pupillometry during word-learning to help understand the mechanism through which tVNS operates. Findings are discussed in light of the literatures on lexical tone learning, cognitive effort, and neurostimulation, including specific benefits for learners of tone languages. Recommendations are made for future work on the increasingly popular area of neurostimulation for the field of applied linguistics in the 40th anniversary issue of ARAL. |
Adam J. Parker; Julie A. Kirkby; Timothy J. Slattery Undersweep fixations during reading in adults and children Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 192, pp. 1–23, 2020. @article{Parker2020, Return sweeps take a reader's fixation from the end of one line to the start of the next. Return sweeps frequently undershoot their target and are followed by a corrective saccade toward the left margin. The pauses prior to corrective saccades are typically considered to be uninvolved in linguistic processing. However, recent findings indicate that these undersweep fixations influence skilled adult readers' subsequent reading pass across the line and provide a preview of line-initial words. The current research examined these effects in children. First, a children's reading corpus analysis revealed that words receiving an undersweep fixation were more likely skipped and received shorter gaze durations during a subsequent pass. Second, a novel eye movement experiment that directly compared adults' and children's eye movements indicated that, during an undersweep fixation, readers very briefly allocate their attention to the fixated word—as indicated by inhibition of return effects during a subsequent pass—prior to deploying attention toward the line-initial word. We argue that prior to the redeployment of attention, readers extract information at the point of fixation that facilitates later encoding and saccade targeting. Given similar patterns of results for adults and children, we conclude that the mechanisms controlling for oculomotor coordination and attention necessary for reading across line boundaries are established from a very early point in reading development. |
Clare Patterson; Petra B. Schumacher The timing of prominence information during the resolution of German personal and demonstrative pronouns Journal Article In: Dialogue and Discourse, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–39, 2020. @article{Patterson2020, German personal and demonstrative pronouns have distinct preferences in their interpretation; personal pronouns are more flexible in their interpretation but tend to resolve to a prominent antecedent, while demonstratives have a strong preference for a non-prominent antecedent. However, less is known about how prominence information is used during the process of resolution, particularly in the light of twostage processing models which assume that reference will normally be to the most accessible candidate. We conducted three experiments investigating how prominence information is used during the resolution of gender-disambiguated personal and demonstrative pronouns in German. While the demonstrative pronoun required additional processing compared to the personal pronoun, prominence information did not affect resolution in shallow conditions. It did, however, affect resolution under deep processing conditions. We conclude that prominence information is not ruled out by the presence of stronger resolution cues such as gender. However, the deployment of prominence information in the evaluation of candidate antecedents is under strategic control. |
Brennan R. Payne; Kara D. Federmeier; Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow Literacy skill and intra-individual variability in eye-fixation durations during reading: Evidence from a diverse community-based adult sample Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 11, pp. 1841–1861, 2020. @article{Payne2020, To understand the effects of literacy on fundamental processes involved in reading, we report a secondary data analysis examining individual differences in global eye-movement measures and first-pass eye-movement distributions in a diverse sample of community-dwelling adults aged 16 to 64. Participants (n = 80) completed an assessment battery probing verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities and read simple two-sentence passages while their eye movements were recorded. Analyses were focused on characterising the effects of literacy skill on both global indices of eye-fixation distributions and distributional differences in the sensitivity to lexical features. Global reading measures showed that lower literate adults read more slowly on average. However, distributional analyses of fixation durations revealed that the first-pass fixation durations of adults with lower literacy skill were not slower in general (i.e., there was no shift in the fixation duration distribution among lower literate adults). Instead, lower literacy was associated with greater intra-individual variability in first-pass fixation durations, including an increased proportion of extremely long fixations, differentially skewing the distribution of both first-fixation and gaze durations. Exploratory repeated-measures quantile regression analyses of gaze duration revealed differentially greater influences of word length among lower literate readers and greater activation of phonological and orthographic neighbours among higher literate readers, particularly in the tail of the distribution. Collectively, these findings suggest that literacy skill in adulthood is associated with systematic differences in both global and lexically driven eye-movement control during reading. |
Ana Pellicer-Sánchez; Kathy Conklin; Laura Vilkaitė-Lozdienė The effect of pre-reading instruction on vocabulary learning: An investigation of L1 and L2 readers' eye movements Journal Article In: Language Learning, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 1–42, 2020. @article{PellicerSanchez2020, This study examined the effect of pre-reading vocabulary instruction on learners' attention and vocabulary learning. We randomly assigned participants (L1 = 92; L2 = 88) to one of four conditions: pre-reading instruction, where participants' received explicit instruction on six novel items and read a text with the items repeated eight times; reading-only, where participants simply read the same text with the novel items repeated eight times; reading-baseline, where participants read the same text with the repeated items replaced by known (control) words; and instruction-only, where participants received explicit instruction on the novel items and read an unrelated text. Eye-tracking was used to measure amount of attention to the vocabulary during reading. We assessed knowledge of the target vocabulary in three immediate posttests (form recognition, meaning recall, and meaning recognition). Results showed that pre-reading instruction (plus reading the text) led to both more vocabulary learning and a processing advantage. Cumulative reading times were a significant predictor of meaning recognition scores. |
Z. Ellen Peng; Alan Kan; Ruth Y. Litovsky Development of binaural sensitivity: Eye gaze as a measure of real-time processing Journal Article In: Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, vol. 14, pp. 39, 2020. @article{Peng2020, Children localize sounds using binaural cues when navigating everyday auditory environments. While sensitivity to binaural cues reaches maturity by 8–10 years of age, large individual variability has been observed in the just-noticeable-difference (JND) thresholds for interaural time difference (ITD) among children in this age range. To understand the development of binaural sensitivity beyond JND thresholds, the “looking-while-listening” paradigm was adapted in this study to reveal the real-time decision-making behavior during ITD processing. Children ages 8–14 years with normal hearing (NH) and a group of young NH adults were tested. This novel paradigm combined eye gaze tracking with behavioral psychoacoustics to estimate ITD JNDs in a two-alternative forced-choice discrimination task. Results from simultaneous eye gaze recordings during ITD processing suggested that children had adult-like ITD JNDs, but they demonstrated immature decision-making strategies. While the time course of arriving at the initial fixation and final decision in providing a judgment of the ITD direction was similar, children exhibited more uncertainty than adults during decision-making. Specifically, children made more fixation changes, particularly when tested using small ITD magnitudes, between the target and non-target response options prior to finalizing a judgment. These findings suggest that, while children may exhibit adult-like sensitivity to ITDs, their eye gaze behavior reveals that the processing of this binaural cue is still developing through late childhood. |
Tatiana E. Petrova; Elena I. Riekhakaynen; Valentina S. Bratash An eye-tracking study of sketch processing: Evidence from Russian Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, pp. 297, 2020. @article{Petrova2020, This study investigates the online process of reading and analyzing of sketchnotes (visual notes containing a handwritten text and drawings) on Russian language material. Using the eye-tracking method, we compared the processing of different types of sketchnotes [“path” (trajectory), linear, and radial] and the processing of a verbal text. Biographies of Russian writers were used as the material. In a preliminary experiment, we asked 89 college students to read the biographies and to evaluate each text or sketch using five scales (from −2 to +2). The best example for each of three formats of sketchnotes and a verbal text was chosen. In the main experiment, 21 secondary school students examined four different biographies in four different formats (three sketchnotes and a verbal text), answered to the factual and analytical questions to these texts and estimated the difficulty of each text. We measured the total dwell time, the total fixation count, the average fixation duration for each stimulus as well as for separate zones inside the sketches including verbal and non-verbal information. Our results show that readers process the information better and faster while reading sketchnotes than a verbal text. In the trajectory sketchnotes, the readers followed the order of elements aimed by the author of the sketchnotes better than in the radial and linear sketchnotes. The analysis of participants' eye movements while processing the stimuli made it possible to propose several recommendations for creating effective sketchnotes. |
Christian Pfeiffer; Nora Hollenstein; Ce Zhang; Nicolas Langer Neural dynamics of sentiment processing during naturalistic sentence reading Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 218, pp. 116934, 2020. @article{Pfeiffer2020, When we read, our eyes move through the text in a series of fixations and high-velocity saccades to extract visual information. This process allows the brain to obtain meaning, e.g., about sentiment, or the emotional valence, expressed in the written text. How exactly the brain extracts the sentiment of single words during naturalistic reading is largely unknown. This is due to the challenges of naturalistic imaging, which has previously led researchers to employ highly controlled, timed word-by-word presentations of custom reading materials that lack ecological validity. Here, we aimed to assess the electrical neural correlates of word sentiment processing during naturalistic reading of English sentences. We used a publicly available dataset of simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG), eye-tracking recordings, and word-level semantic annotations from 7129 words in 400 sentences (Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus; Hollenstein et al., 2018). We computed fixation-related potentials (FRPs), which are evoked electrical responses time-locked to the onset of fixations. A general linear mixed model analysis of FRPs cleaned from visual- and motor-evoked activity showed a topographical difference between the positive and negative sentiment condition in the 224–304 ms interval after fixation onset in left-central and right-posterior electrode clusters. An additional analysis that included word-, phrase-, and sentence-level sentiment predictors showed the same FRP differences for the word-level sentiment, but no additional FRP differences for phrase- and sentence-level sentiment. Furthermore, decoding analysis that classified word sentiment (positive or negative) from sentiment-matched 40-trial average FRPs showed a 0.60 average accuracy (95% confidence interval: [0.58, 0.61]). Control analyses ruled out that these results were based on differences in eye movements or linguistic features other than word sentiment. Our results extend previous research by showing that the emotional valence of lexico-semantic stimuli evoke a fast electrical neural response upon word fixation during naturalistic reading. These results provide an important step to identify the neural processes of lexico-semantic processing in ecologically valid conditions and can serve to improve computer algorithms for natural language processing. |
Ulrich Pomper; Rebecca Schmid; Ulrich Ansorge Continuous, lateralized auditory stimulation biases visual spatial processing Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, pp. 1183, 2020. @article{Pomper2020a, Sounds in our environment can easily capture human visual attention. Previous studies have investigated the impact of spatially localized, brief sounds on concurrent visuospatial attention. However, little is known on how the presence of a continuous, lateralized auditory stimulus (e.g., a person talking next to you while driving a car) impacts visual spatial attention (e.g., detection of critical events in traffic). In two experiments, we investigated whether a continuous auditory stream presented from one side biases visual spatial attention toward that side. Participants had to either passively or actively listen to sounds of various semantic complexities (tone pips, spoken digits, and a spoken story) while performing a visual target discrimination task. During both passive and active listening, we observed faster response times to visual targets presented spatially close to the relevant auditory stream. Additionally, we found that higher levels of semantic complexity of the presented sounds led to reduced visual discrimination sensitivity, but only during active listening to the sounds. We provide important novel results by showing that the presence of a continuous, ongoing auditory stimulus can impact visual processing, even when the sounds are not endogenously attended to. Together, our findings demonstrate the implications of ongoing sounds on visual processing in everyday scenarios such as moving about in traffic. |
Vincent Porretta; Lori Buchanan; Juhani Järvikivi When processing costs impact predictive processing: The case of foreign-accented speech and accent experience Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, pp. 1–8, 2020. @article{Porretta2020, Listeners use linguistic information and real-world knowledge to predict upcoming spoken words. However, studies ofpredictive processing have focused on prediction under optimal listening conditions. We examined the effect offoreign-accented speech on predictive processing. Furthermore, we investigated whether accent-specific experience facilitates predictive processing. Using the visual world paradigm, we demonstrated that although the presence of an accent impedes predictive processing, it does not preclude it. We further showed that as listener experience increases, predictive processing for accented speech increases and begins to approximate the pattern seen for native speech. These results speak to the limitation of the processing resources that must be allocated, leading to a trade-offwhen listeners are faced with increased uncertainty and more effortful recognition due to a foreign accent. |
Heather D. Porter; Koomi Kim; Judith K. Franzak; Katherine MacDonald Reframing and repositioning college readers' assumptions about reading through eye movement miscue analysis Journal Article In: Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, vol. 63, no. 5, pp. 519–528, 2020. @article{Porter2020, As one of multiple ways to explore the reading process, eye movement miscue analysis is a tool that provides a continuous record of eye fixations and movements over an entire text, and a record of the oral reading of that text and the miscues (observed responses) that readers produce. The authors present profiles of two successful college readers who doubted their reading efficacy. Using data from eye tracking, miscue analysis, and the retelling, the authors invited the readers to examine their assumptions about reading and how they positioned themselves as readers. Data presented were drawn from the readers' eye movements during the reading of two texts—one an informational text and the other a constructed text with embedded errors—and are discussed in relation to the readers' perceptions of reader identity and processes. Implications for teachers include strategies for helping readers address common misconceptions about reading and reclaim their role as meaning makers. |
Krishnamachari S. Prahalad; Daniel R. Coates Asymmetries of reading eye movements in simulated central vision loss Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 171, pp. 1–10, 2020. @article{Prahalad2020, Patients with central vision loss are forced to use an eccentric retinal location as a substitute for the fovea, called a preferred retinal locus, or PRL. Clinical studies have shown that patients habitually choose a PRL located either to the left, and/or below the scotoma in the visual field. The position to the right of the scotoma is almost never chosen, even though this would be theoretically more suitable for reading, since the scotoma no longer blocks the upcoming text. In the current study, we tested whether this asymmetry may have an oculomotor basis. Six normally sighted subjects viewed page-like text with a simulated scotoma, identifying embedded numbers in “words” comprising random letters. Subjects trained and tested with three different artificial PRL (“pseudo-PRL,” or pPRL) locations: inferior, to the right, or to the left of the scotoma. After several training blocks for each pPRL position, subjects were found to produce reliable oculomotor control. Both reading speed and eye movement characteristics reproduced observations from traditional paradigms such as page-mode reading and RSVP for an advantage for an inferior pPRL. While left and right positions resulted in similar reading speeds, we observed that a right pPRL caused excessively large saccades and more direction switches, exhibiting a zig-zag pattern that developed spontaneously. Thus, we propose that patients' typical avoidance of pPRL positions to the right of their scotoma could have an oculomotor component: the erratic eye motion might potentially negate the perceptual benefit that this pPRL would offer. |
Heather Winskel; Theeraporn Ratitamkul The initial functional unit when naming words and pseudowords in Thai: Evidence from masked priming Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 275–290, 2020. @article{Winskel2020, Cross-linguistic research indicates that the initial unit used to build an ortho-phonological representation can vary between languages and is related to the particular characteristics of the language. Thai is particularly interesting as it has both syllabic and phonemic characteristics. Using the masked priming paradigm, we examined the functional unit that is initially activated when naming monosyllabic Thai words (Experiment 1) and pseudowords (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, the response times to the onset prime and identity (onset + vowel) conditions were not significantly different but were both significantly faster than the control prime (onset different). In Experiment 2, pseudowords were used so that the effects of orthographic vowel position could be examined. In Thai, vowels can precede the consonant in writing but phonologically follow it in speech (e.g., the written word ‘odg' would be spoken as /dog/) whereas other vowels are spoken in the order that they are written. Similar results were found as in Experiment 1, as the identity prime did not have a greater facilitatory effect than the onset consonant prime. Notably, there were no orthographic effects due to orthographic vowel position. These results support the view that the onset is the initial functional unit that is activated when naming Thai visual words/pseudowords using the masked priming paradigm. |
Brent Wolter; Junko Yamashita; Chi Yui Leung Conceptual transfer and lexical development in adjectives of space: Evidence from judgments, reaction times, and eye tracking Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 595–625, 2020. @article{Wolter2020, This study investigated conceptual transfer and lexical development for spatial adjectives using participant judgments, reaction times, and eye-tracking measures. The study focused on the Japanese adjective semai and its partially equivalent English translation narrow. The study presented participants with images depicting two rooms with slight differences in height and width and asked them to identify which room was narrower. The only variation was the language in which the instructions were given: native language (L1) instructions for two L1 control groups, second language (L2) instructions for the experimental group (L1 Japanese speakers of L2 English). The results showed fundamental differences in processing between the control groups in respect to the judgments and reaction times, but not for the eye-tracking measures. Furthermore, the experimental group's behavior indicated a conceptual understanding of narrow that was in line with developments in proficiency, but also limited to the judgment and reaction time measures. Based on these findings, we conclude that (a) conceptual transfer affects processing on receptive language tasks, and (b) L2 conceptual representations come to resemble those of native speakers as learners develop their lexical knowledge. However, we also suggest that (c) although conceptualizations likely affect cognitive functions, our eye-tracking data were too crude to capture this. |
Fang Xie; Victoria A. McGowan; Min Chang; Lin Li; Sarah J. White; Kevin B. Paterson; Jingxin Wang; Kayleigh L. Warrington Revealing similarities in the perceptual span of young and older Chinese readers Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 8, pp. 1189–1205, 2020. @article{Xie2020, Older readers (aged 65+ years) of both alphabetic languages and character-based languages like Chinese read more slowly than their younger counterparts (aged 18–30 years). A possible explanation for this slowdown is that, due to age-related visual and cognitive declines, older readers have a smaller perceptual span and so acquire less information on each fixational pause. However, although aging effects on the perceptual span have been investigated for alphabetic languages, no such studies have been reported to date for character-based languages like Chinese. Accordingly, we investigated this issue in three experiments that used different gaze-contingent moving window paradigms to assess the perceptual span of young and older Chinese readers. In these experiments, text was shown either entirely as normal or normal only within a narrow region (window) comprising either the fixated word, the fixated word, and one word to its left, or the fixated word and either one or two words to its right. Characters outside these windows were replaced using a pattern mask (Experiment 1) or a visually similar character (Experiment 2), or blurred to render them unidentifiable (Experiment 3). Sentence reading times were overall longer for the older compared with the younger adults and differed systematically across display conditions. Crucially, however, the effects of display condition were essentially the same across the two age groups, indicating that the perceptual span for Chinese does not differ substantially for the older and young adults. We discuss these findings in relation to other evidence suggesting the perceptual span is preserved in older adulthood. |
Fang Xie; Jingxin Wang; Lisha Hao; Xue Zhang; Kayleigh L. Warrington Perceptual span is independent of font size for older and young readers: Evidence from Chinese. Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 35, no. 7, pp. 1026–1040, 2020. @article{Xie2020a, Research suggests that visual acuity plays a more important role in parafoveal processing in Chinese reading than in spaced alphabetic languages, such that in Chinese, as the font size increases, the size of the perceptual span decreases. The lack of spaces and the complexity of written Chinese may make characters in eccentric positions particularly hard to process. Older adults generally have poorer visual capabilities than young adults, particularly in parafoveal vision, and so may find large characters in the parafovea particularly hard to process compared with smaller characters because of their greater eccentricity. Therefore, the effect of font size on the perceptual span may be larger for older readers. Crucially, this possibility has not previously been investigated; however, this may represent a unique source of age-related reading difficulty in logographic languages. Accordingly, to explore the relationship between font size and parafoveal processing for both older and young adult readers, we manipulated font size and the amount of parafoveal information available with different masking stimuli in 2 silent-reading experiments. The results show that decreasing the font size disrupted reading behavior more for older readers, such that reading times were longer for smaller characters, but crucially, the influence of font size on the perceptual span was absent for both age groups. These findings provide new insight into age-related reading difficulty in Chinese by revealing that older adults can successfully process substantial parafoveal information across a range of font sizes. This indicates that older adults' parafoveal processing may be more robust than previously considered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) |
Shuwei Xue; Arthur M. Jacobs; Jana Lüdtke What is the difference? Rereading Shakespeare's sonnets — An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, pp. 421, 2020. @article{Xue2020a, Texts are often reread in everyday life, but most studies of rereading have been based on expository texts, not on literary ones such as poems, though literary texts may be reread more often than others. To correct this bias, the present study is based on two of Shakespeare's sonnets. Eye movements were recorded, as participants read a sonnet then read it again after a few minutes. After each reading, comprehension and appreciation were measured with the help of a questionnaire. In general, compared to the first reading, rereading improved the fluency of reading (shorter total reading times, shorter regression times, and lower fixation probability) and the depth of comprehension. Contrary to the other rereading studies using literary texts, no increase in appreciation was apparent. Moreover, results from a predictive modeling analysis showed that readers' eye movements were determined by the same critical psycholinguistic features throughout the two sessions. Apparently, even in the case of poetry, the eye movement control in reading is determined mainly by surface features of the text, unaffected by repetition. |
Ming Yan; Hong Li; Yongqiang Su; Yuqing Cao; Jinger Pan The perceptual span and individual differences among Chinese children Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 520–530, 2020. @article{Yan2020, In the present study, we explored the perceptual span of typically developing Chinese children in Grade 3 (G3) during their reading of age-appropriate sentences, utilizing the gaze contingent moving window paradigm. Overall, these Chinese children had a smaller perceptual span than adults, covering only one character leftward and two characters rightward of the currently fixated one. In addition, individual differences in reading ability (i.e., number of characters correctly read aloud per minute) influenced the size of the perceptual span. Fluent readers' reading and eye-movement parameters benefited from previewing the third upcoming characters, whereas non-fluent readers reached their asymptotic performances in a smaller window revealing rightwards by only two characters. These results suggest that the perceptual span is modulated dynamically by reading ability. Non-fluent readers need to focus their attention on foveal words, leading to narrowed perceptual span and reduced parafoveal processing. |
Shaorong Yan; T. Florian Jaeger Expectation adaptation during natural reading Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 10, pp. 1394–1422, 2020. @article{Yan2020b, Implicit expectations play a central role in sentence processing. These expectations are often assumed to be static or change only at relatively slow time scales. Some theoretical proposals, however, hold that comprehenders continuously adapt their expectations based on recent input. Existing evidence has relied heavily on self-paced reading, which requires familiarisation with a novel task. We instead employ eye-tracking reading to investigate the role of expectation adaptation during speeds and task demands more closely resembling natural reading. In two experiments, subjects read sentences that contained higher than expected proportions of a previously highly unexpected structure (reduced relative clauses). We test how this change in the statistics of structures within the experiment affects reading: if subjects adapt their expectations, reading times for the unexpected structure should decrease over the course of the experiment. This prediction is confirmed in both experiments. Significant effects of the changing statistics are observed for regression-related measures but not first-pass reading measures. We discuss possible accounts of this pattern in the eye-movement record. |
Yang Xie-lan; He Wen-guang Argument ambiguities make subject relative clause more difficult to process than object relative clause in Mandarin Journal Article In: Journal of Literature and Art Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 102–113, 2020. @article{YangXie2020, Relative clauses (RCs) processing has been a hot issue in decades. Studies from head-initial languages have found that SRCs were easier to comprehend than ORCs, and many different models were constructed to account for SRCs preference. Chinese are head-final languages and the head noun phrases are behind the internal-clause. Such a great difference in syntactic structure made Chinese to be the optimum material to test the models mentioned above. In the paper, two experiments were carried out using eye-movement tracking methods to explore the difficulty with RCs processing in mandarin, and results showed that: when the two noun phrases were both from animate category, SRCs were more difficult than ORCs, but when the noun phrases in the internal-relative-clause were inanimate and the noun phrases in the matrix were animate, the difficulties with SRCs were greatly reduced. Based on these findings, we hold that the linear syntactic distance between the gap and the filler was not the key reason to the difficulty with SRCs. On the contrary, the ambiguity in argument construction may be the most important. |
Wei Yang; Xinyu Fu Effects of English capitals on reading performance of Chinese learners: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: International Journal of Asian Language Processing, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2020. @article{Yang2020, Native English speakers need more time to recognize capital letters in reading, yet the influence of capitals upon Chinese learners' reading performance is seldom studied. We conducted an eye tracker experiment to explore the cognitive features of Chinese learners in reading texts containing capital letters. The effect of English proficiency on capital letter reading is also studied. The results showed that capitals significantly increase the cognitive load in Chinese learners' reading process, complicate their cognitive processing, and lower their reading efficiency. The perception of capital letters of Chinese learners is found to be an isolated event and may influence the word-superiority effect. English majors, who possess relatively stronger English logical thinking capability than non-English majors, face the same difficulty as the non-English majors do if no practice of capital letter reading has been done. |
Bo Yao Mental simulations of phonological representations are causally linked to silent reading of direct versus indirect speech Journal Article In: Journal of Cognition, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 6, 2020. @article{Yao2020, Embodied theories propose that language is understood via mental simulations of sensory states related to perception and action. Given that direct speech (e.g., She says, "It's a lovely day!") is perceived to be more vivid than indirect speech (e.g., She says (that) it's a lovely day) in perception, recent research shows in silent reading that more vivid speech representations are mentally simulated for direct speech than for indirect speech. This 'simulated' speech is found to contain suprasegmental prosodic representations (e.g., speech prosody) but its phonological detail and its causal role in silent reading of direct speech remain unclear. Here in three experiments, I explored the phonological aspect and the causal role of speech simulations in silent reading of tongue twisters in direct speech, indirect speech and non-speech sentences. The results demonstrated greater visual tongue-twister effects (phonemic interference) during silent reading (Experiment 1) but not oral reading (Experiment 2) of direct speech as compared to indirect speech and non-speech. The tongue-twister effects in silent reading of direct speech were selectively disrupted by phonological interference (concurrent articulation) as compared to manual interference (finger tapping) (Experiment 3). The results replicated more vivid speech simulations in silent reading of direct speech, and additionally extended them to the phonological dimension. Crucially, they demonstrated a causal role of phonological simulations in silent reading of direct speech, at least in tongue-twister reading. The findings are discussed in relation to multidimensionality and task dependence of mental simulation and its mechanisms. |
Chuanli Zang; Hong Du; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Word skipping in Chinese reading: The role of high-frequency preview and syntactic felicity Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 603–620, 2020. @article{Zang2020, Two experiments are reported to investigate whether Chinese readers skip a high-frequency preview word without taking the syntax of the sentence context into account. In Experiment 1, we manipulated target word syntactic category, frequency, and preview using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). For high-frequency verb targets, there were identity and pseudocharacter previews alongside a low-frequency noun preview. For low-frequency verb targets, there were identity and pseudocharacter previews alongside a high-frequency noun preview. Results showed that for high-frequency targets, skipping rates were higher for identical previews compared with the syntactically infelicitous alternative low-frequency preview and pseudocharacter previews, however for low-frequency targets, skipping rates were higher for high-frequency previews (even when they were syntactically infelicitous) compared with the other 2 previews. Furthermore, readers were more likely to skip the target when they had a high-frequency, syntactically felicitous preview compared to a high-frequency, syntactically infelicitous preview. The pattern of felicity effects was statistically robust when readers launched saccades from near the target. In Experiment 2, we assessed whether display change awareness influenced the patterns of results in Experiment 1. Results showed that the overall patterns held in Experiment 2 regardless of some readers being more likely to be aware of the display change than others. These results suggest that decisions to skip a word in Chinese reading are primarily based on parafoveal word familiarity, though the syntactic felicity of a parafoveal word also exerts a robust influence for high-frequency previews. |
Tao Zeng; Yarong Gao; Xiaoya Li Priming effects of hierarchical graphics on Chinese ambiguous structures Journal Article In: American Journal of Psychology and Cognitive Science, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2020. @article{Zeng2020a, Inspired by the researches concerning structural priming across cognitive domains, this study investigated the priming effects from hierarchical graphics to Chinese structures. Unlike syntactic priming, structural priming refers to the tendency to repeat or process a current sentence better due to its structural similarity to the previously experienced “prime”, which can be abstract structures and even independent of language, as long as the prime and the target share some aspects of abstract structural representation. Since both abstract graphics and specific structures share similar hierarchical structures, this research conducted the priming experiment with eye tracking technique to verify structural priming effects from hierarchical graphics to Chinese ambiguous structures. The study adopted the sentence comprehension task through EyelinkII which covered two variant ambiguous structures: Quantifier + NP1 + De + NP2 and NP1 + Kan/WangZhe + NP2 + AP. There were 24 sets of materials and every set contained three priming hierarchical graphics and a target sentence. The priming conditions were high-attachment prime condition, low-attachment prime condition and baseline prime condition respectively. The target sentences were ambiguous, for example, liangge xuesheng de jiazhang ‘two parents of the students' or ‘two students' parents'. Then, a question followed, for example, xuesheng jiazhang de shuliangshi? ‘What is the number of parents?' The different choice representing different comprehension of the target sentence, for choice A was liangge ‘two' resulting from high-attachment comprehension, while choice B was buqueding ‘uncertain' resulting from low-attachment comprehension. The comprehension task aimed to verify whether the structure of hierarchical graphics affected the tendency of target sentences comprehension. Results showed that there is priming effect from abstract graphics to Chinese ambiguous structures according to behavioral data and eye movement |
Lena Stock; Charlotte Krüger-Zechlin; Zain Deeb; Lars Timmermann; Josefine Waldthaler Natural reading in Parkinson's disease with and without mild cognitive impairment Journal Article In: Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, vol. 12, pp. 120, 2020. @article{Stock2020, Background: Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) show eye movement abnormalities and frequently complain about difficulties in reading. So far, it is unclear whether basal ganglia dysfunction or cognitive impairment has a greater impact on eye movements during reading. Objective: To analyze eye movement behavior during a natural reading task with respect to cognitive state and dopaminergic therapy in PD and healthy controls. Methods: Eye movements of 59 PD patients and 29 age- and education-matched healthy controls were recorded during mute, self-paced reading of a text. 25 cognitively normal PD patients performed the task additionally in off medication state. Clinical assessment included a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and the motor section of MDS—Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS). Results: PD-mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was diagnosed in 21 patients. Reading speed was significantly reduced in PD-MCI compared to healthy controls and PD patients without MCI due to higher numbers of progressive saccades. Cognitively intact PD patients showed no significant alterations of reading speed or eye movement pattern during reading. The fixation duration tended to be prolonged in PD compared to healthy controls and decreased significantly after levodopa intake. Scores for executive functions, attention, and language correlated with reading speed in the PD group. Conclusion: The present study is the first to reveal (1) reduced reading speed with altered reading pattern in PD with MCI and (2) a relevant impact of levodopa on fixation duration during reading in PD. Further research is needed to determine whether therapeutic interventions, e.g., levodopa or neuropsychological training, improve the subjective reading experience for patients with PD. |
Juan Su; Guoen Yin; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Stoyan Kurtev; Kayleigh L. Warrington; Victoria A. McGowan; Simon P. Liversedge; Kevin B. Paterson Flexibility in the perceptual span during reading: Evidence from Mongolian Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 82, no. 4, pp. 1566–1572, 2020. @article{Su2020, Readers can acquire useful information from only a narrow region of text around each fixation (the perceptual span), which extends asymmetrically in the direction of reading. Studies with bilingual readers have additionally shown that this asymmetry reverses with changes in horizontal reading direction. However, little is known about the perceptual span's flexibility following orthogonal (vertical vs. horizontal) changes in reading direction, because of the scarcity of vertical writing systems and because changes in reading direction often are confounded with text orientation. Accordingly, we assessed effects in a language (Mongolian) that avoids this confound, in which text is conventionally read vertically but can also be read horizontally. Sentences were presented normally or in a gaze-contingent paradigm in which a restricted region of text was displayed normally around each fixation and other text was degraded. The perceptual span effects on reading rates were similar in both reading directions. These findings therefore provide a unique (nonconfounded) demonstration of perceptual span flexibility. |
Alan Taitz; M. Florencia Assaneo; Diego E. Shalom; Marcos A. Trevisan Motor representations underlie the reading of unfamiliar letter combinations Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 10, pp. 3828, 2020. @article{Taitz2020, Silent reading is a cognitive operation that produces verbal content with no vocal output. One relevant question is the extent to which this verbal content is processed as overt speech in the brain. To address this, we acquired sound, eye trajectories and lips' dynamics during the reading of consonant-consonant-vowel (CCV) combinations which are infrequent in the language. We found that the duration of the first fixations on the CCVs during silent reading correlate with the duration of the transitions between consonants when the CCVs are actually uttered. With the aid of an articulatory model of the vocal system, we show that transitions measure the articulatory effort required to produce the CCVs. This means that first fixations during silent reading are lengthened when the CCVs require a greater laryngeal and/or articulatory effort to be pronounced. Our results support that a speech motor code is used for the recognition of infrequent text strings during silent reading. |
Philip Thierfelder; Gillian Wigglesworth; Gladys Tang Orthographic and phonological activation in Hong Kong deaf readers: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 12, pp. 2217–2235, 2020. @article{Thierfelder2020a, We used an error disruption paradigm to investigate how deaf readers from Hong Kong, who had varying levels of reading fluency, use orthographic, phonological, and mouth-shape-based (i.e., “visemic”) codes during Chinese sentence reading while also examining the role of contextual information in facilitating lexical retrieval and integration. Participants had their eye movements recorded as they silently read Chinese sentences containing orthographic, homophonic, homovisemic, or unrelated errors. Sentences varied in terms of how much contextual information was available leading up to the target word. Fixation time analyses revealed that in early fixation measures, deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations. However, in contexts where targets were highly predictable, fixation times on homophonic errors decreased relative to those on unrelated errors, suggesting that higher levels of contextual predictability facilitated early phonological activation. In the measure of total reading time, results indicated that deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations, but they also appeared to activate word meanings through visemic representations in late error recovery processes. Examining the influence of reading fluency level on error recovery processes, we found that, in comparison to deaf readers with lower reading fluency levels, those with higher reading fluency levels could more quickly resolve homophonic and orthographic errors in the measures of gaze duration and total reading time, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings as they relate to the lexical quality hypothesis and the dual-route cascaded model of reading by deaf adults. |
Philip Thierfelder; Gillian Wigglesworth; Gladys Tang Sign phonological parameters modulate parafoveal preview effects in deaf readers Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 201, pp. 1–14, 2020. @article{Thierfelder2020, Research has found that deaf readers unconsciously activate sign translations of written words while reading. However, the ways in which different sign phonological parameters associated with these sign translations tie into reading processes have received little attention in the literature. In this study on Chinese reading, we used a parafoveal preview paradigm to investigate how four different types of sign phonologically related preview affect reading processes in adult deaf signers of Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). The four types of sign phonologically related preview-target pair were: (1) pairs with HKSL translations that overlapped in three parameters—handshape, location, and movement; (2) pairs that overlapped in only handshape and location; (3) pairs that only overlapped in handshape and movement; and (4) pairs that only overlapped in location and movement. Results showed that the handshape parameter was of particular importance as only sign translation pairs that had handshape among their overlapping sign phonological parameters led to early sign activation. Furthermore, we found that, compared to control previews, deaf readers took longer to read targets when the sign translation previews overlapped with targets in either handshape and movement or handshape, movement, and location. In contrast, fixation times on targets were shorter when previews and targets overlapped location and any single additional parameter—either handshape or movement. These results indicate that the phonological parameters of handshape, location, and movement are activated via orthography during Chinese reading and can have different effects on parafoveal processing in deaf signers of HKSL. |
Simon P. Tiffin-Richards; Sascha Schroeder Context facilitation in text reading: A study of children's eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 9, pp. 1701–1713, 2020. @article{TiffinRichards2020, Words are seldom read in isolation. Predicting or anticipating upcoming words in a text, based on the context in which they are read, is an important aspect of efficient language processing. In sentence reading, words with congruent preceding context have been shown to be processed faster than words read in neutral or incongruous contexts. The onset of contextual facilitation effects is found very early in the first-pass-reading eye-movement and electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of skilled adult readers. However, the effect of contextual facilitation on children's eye movements during reading remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we tracked children's and adults' eye movements while reading stories with embedded words that were either strongly or weakly related to a clear narrative theme. Our central finding is that children showed late contextual facilitation effects during text reading as opposed to both early and late facilitation effects found in skilled adult readers. Contextual constraint had a similar effect on children's and adults' initiation of regressive saccades, whereas children invested more time in rereading relative to adults after encountering weakly contextually constrained words. Quantile regression analyses revealed that contextual facilitation effects had an early onset in adults' first-pass reading, whereas they only had a late onset in children's gaze durations. |
Xiuli Xiuhong Tong; Wei Shen; Zhao Li; Mengdi Xu; Liping Pan; Shelley Xiuli Tong; Xiuli Xiuhong Tong Phonological, not semantic, activation dominates Chinese character recognition: Evidence from a visual world eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 617–628, 2020. @article{Tong2020a, Combining eye-tracking technique with a revised visual world paradigm, this study examined how positional, phonological, and semantic information of radicals are activated in visual Chinese character recognition. Participants' eye movements were tracked when they looked at four types of invented logographic characters including a semantic radical in the legal (e.g., (Figure presented.)) and illegal positions ((Figure presented.)), a phonetic radical in the legal (e.g., (Figure presented.)) and illegal positions (e.g., (Figure presented.)). These logographic characters were presented simultaneously with either a sound-cued (e.g., /qiao2/) or meaning-cued (e.g., a picture of a bridge) condition. Participants appeared to allocate more visual attention towards radicals in legal, rather than illegal, positions. In addition, more eye fixations occurred on phonetic, rather than on semantic, radicals across both sound- and meaning-cued conditions, indicating participants' strong preference for phonetic over semantic radicals in visual character processing. These results underscore the universal phonology principle in processing non-alphabetic Chinese logographic characters. |
Kristen M. Tooley Contrasting mechanistic accounts of the lexical boost Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 48, no. 5, pp. 815–838, 2020. @article{Tooley2020, While many recent studies focused on abstract syntactic priming effects have implicated an error-based learning mechanism, there is little consensus on the most likely mechanism underlying the lexical boost. The current study aimed at refining understanding of the mechanism that leads to this priming effect. In two eye-tracking during reading experiments, the nature of the lexical boost was investigated by comparing predictions from competing accounts in terms of decay and the requirement of structural overlap between primes and targets. Experiment 1 revealed facilitation of target structure processing for shorter relative to longer primes, when there were fewer intervening words between prime and target verbs. In Experiment 2, significant lexically boosted priming effects were observed, but only when the target structure also appeared in the prime, and not when the prime had a different structure but a high degree of lexical overlap with the target. Overall, these results are most consistent with a short-lived mechanistic account rather than an error-based learning account of the lexical boost. Furthermore, these results align with dual-mechanism accounts of syntactic priming whereby different mechanisms are claimed to produce abstract syntactic priming effects and the lexical boost. |
Josef Toon; Anuenue Kukona Activating semantic knowledge during spoken words and environmental sounds: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 1–22, 2020. @article{Toon2020, Two visual world experiments investigated the activation of semantically related concepts during the processing of environmental sounds and spoken words. Participants heard environmental sounds such as barking or spoken words such as “puppy” while viewing visual arrays with objects such as a bone (semantically related competitor) and candle (unrelated distractor). In Experiment 1, a puppy (target) was also included in the visual array; in Experiment 2, it was not. During both types of auditory stimuli, competitors were fixated significantly more than distractors, supporting the coactivation of semantically related concepts in both cases; comparisons of the two types of auditory stimuli also revealed significantly larger effects with environmental sounds than spoken words. We discuss implications of these results for theories of semantic knowledge. |
Fatemeh Torabi Asr; Vera Demberg Interpretation of discourse connectives Is probabilistic: Evidence from the study of but and although Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 376–399, 2020. @article{TorabiAsr2020, Connectives can facilitate the processing of discourse relations by helping comprehenders to infer the intended coherence relation holding between two text spans. Previous experimental studies have focused on pairs of connectives that are very different from one another to be able to compare and formalize the distinguishing effects of these particles in discourse comprehension. In this article, we compare two connectives, but and although, which overlap in terms of the relations they can signal. We demonstrate in a set of carefully controlled studies that while a connective can be a marker of several discourse relations, it can have a specific fine-grained biasing effect on linguistic inferences and that this bias can be derived (or predicted) from the connectives' distribution of relations found in production data. The effects that we find speak to the ambiguity of discourse connectives, in general, and the different functions of but and although, in particular. These effects cannot be explained within the earlier accounts of discourse connectives, which propose that each connective has a core meaning or processing instruction. Instead, we here lay out a probabilistic account of connective meaning and interpretation, which is based on the distribution of connectives in production and is supported by our experimental findings. |
Alexandra Ţurcan; Hannah Howman; Ruth Filik Examining the role of context in written sarcasm comprehension: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 10, pp. 1966–1976, 2020. @article{Turcan2020, This article addresses a current theoretical debate between modular and interactive accounts of sarcasm processing, by investigating the role of context (specifically, knowing that a character has been sarcastic before) in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to read texts that introduced a character as being either sarcastic or not and ended in either a literal or an unfamiliar sarcastic remark. The results indicated that when the character was previously literal, a subsequent sarcastic remark was more difficult to process than its literal counterpart. However, when the context was supportive of the sarcastic interpretation (i.e., the character was known to be sarcastic), subsequent sarcastic remarks were as easy to read as literal equivalents, which would support the predictions of interactive accounts. Importantly, this effect was not preceded by a main effect of literality, which constitutes evidence against the predictions of modular accounts. |
Anastasia Ulicheva; Hannah Harvey; Mark Aronoff; Kathleen Rastle Skilled readers' sensitivity to meaningful regularities in English writing Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 195, pp. 103810, 2020. @article{Ulicheva2020, Substantial research has been undertaken to understand the relationship between spelling and sound, but we know little about the relationship between spelling and meaning in alphabetic writing systems. We present a computational analysis of English writing in which we develop new constructs to describe this relationship. Diagnosticity captures the amount of meaningful information in a given spelling, whereas specificity estimates the degree of dispersion of this meaning across different spellings for a particular sound sequence. Using these two constructs, we demonstrate that particular suffix spellings tend to be reserved for particular meaningful functions. We then show across three paradigms (nonword classification, spelling, and eye tracking during sentence reading) that this form of regularity between spelling and meaning influences the behaviour of skilled readers, and that the degree of this behavioural sensitivity mirrors the strength of spelling-to-meaning regularities in the writing system. We close by arguing that English spelling may have become fractionated such that the high degree of spelling-sound inconsistency maximises the transmission of meaningful information. |
Franziska Usée; Arthur M. Jacobs; Jana Lüdtke From abstract symbols to emotional (in-)sights: An eye tracking study on the effects of emotional vignettes and pictures Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, pp. 905, 2020. @article{Usee2020, Reading is known to be a highly complex, emotion-inducing process, usually involving connected and cohesive sequences of sentences and paragraphs. However, most empirical results, especially from studies using eye tracking, are either restricted to simple linguistic materials (e.g., isolated words, single sentences) or disregard valence-driven effects. The present study addressed the need for ecologically valid stimuli by examining the emotion potential of and reading behavior in emotional vignettes, often used in applied psychological contexts and discourse comprehension. To allow for a cross-domain comparison in the area of emotion induction, negatively and positively valenced vignettes were constructed based on pre-selected emotional pictures from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka et al., 2014). We collected ratings of perceived valence and arousal for both material groups and recorded eye movements of 42 participants during reading and picture viewing. Linear mixed-effects models were performed to analyze effects of valence (i.e., valence category, valence rating) and stimulus domain (i.e., textual, pictorial) on ratings of perceived valence and arousal, eye movements in reading, and eye movements in picture viewing. Results supported the success of our experimental manipulation: emotionally positive stimuli (i.e., vignettes, pictures) were perceived more positively and less arousing than emotionally negative ones. The cross-domain comparison indicated that vignettes are able to induce stronger valence effects than their pictorial counterparts, no differences between vignettes and pictures regarding effects on perceived arousal were found. Analyses of eye movements in reading replicated results from experiments using isolated words and sentences: perceived positive text valence attracted shorter reading times than perceived negative valence at both the supralexical and lexical level. In line with previous findings, no emotion effects on eye movements in picture viewing were found. This is the first eye tracking study reporting superior valence effects for vignettes compared to pictures and valence-specific effects on eye movements in reading at the supralexical level. |
Awel Vaughan-Evans; Simon P. Liversedge; Gemma Fitzsimmons; Manon W. Jones Syntactic co-activation in natural reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 28, no. 10, pp. 541–556, 2020. @article{VaughanEvans2020, The extent to which syntactic co-activation occurs during natural reading is currently unknown. Here, we measured the eye movements of Welsh-English bilinguals and English monolinguals as they read English sentences. Target words were manipulated to create nonwords that were consistent or inconsistent with the rules of Welsh soft mutation (a morphosyntactic process that alters the initial consonant of words). Nonwords were only visible in parafoveal preview, and a direct fixation triggered the presentation of the normal English word. Linear mixed effects analyses revealed a robust parafoveal preview benefit for identity (television) compared with mutated (delevision) and aberrant previews (belevision), and a parafoveal-on-foveal effect in our bilingual sample. Bilingual readers' sentence reanalysis was affected by the implicit Welsh mutation, but only in contexts that would elicit a mutation in Welsh. Our findings suggest that morphosyntactic rules are co-activated during natural reading, however further investigations must evaluate the robustness of this effect. |
Aaron Veldre; Erik D. Reichle; Roslyn Wong; Sally Andrews The effect of contextual plausibility on word skipping during reading Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 197, pp. 1–14, 2020. @article{Veldre2020, Recent eye-movement evidence suggests readers are more likely to skip a high-frequency word than a low-frequency word independently of the semantic or syntactic acceptability of the word in the sentence. This has been interpreted as strong support for a serial processing mechanism in which the decision to skip a word is based on the completion of a preliminary stage of lexical processing prior to any assessment of contextual fit. The present large-scale study was designed to reconcile these findings with the plausibility preview effect: higher skipping and reduced first-pass reading times for words that are previewed by contextually plausible, compared to implausible, sentence continuations that are unrelated to the target word. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a short (3–4 letters) or long (6 letters) target word. The boundary paradigm was used to present parafoveal previews which were either higher or lower frequency than the target, and either plausible or implausible in the sentence context. The results revealed strong, independent effects of all three factors on target skipping and early measures of target fixation duration, while frequency and plausibility interacted on later measures of target fixation duration. Simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading demonstrated that plausibility effects on skipping are potentially consistent with the assumption that higher-level contextual information only affects post-lexical integration processes. However, no current model of eye movements in reading provides an explicit account of the information or processes that allow readers to rapidly detect an integration failure. |
Jorrig Vogels; David M. Howcroft; Elli Tourtouri; Vera Demberg How speakers adapt object descriptions to listeners under load Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 78–92, 2020. @article{Vogels2020, A controversial issue in psycholinguistics is the degree to which speakers employ audience design during language production. Hypothesising that a consideration of the listener's needs is particularly relevant when the listener is under cognitive load, we had speakers describe objects for a listener performing an easy or a difficult simulated driving task. We predicted that speakers would introduce more redundancy in their descriptions in the difficult driving task, thereby accommodating the listener's reduced cognitive capacity. The results showed that speakers did not adapt their descriptions to a change in the listener's cognitive load. However, speakers who had experienced the driving task themselves before and who were presented with the difficult driving task first were more redundant than other speakers. These findings may suggest that speakers only consider the listener's needs in the presence of strong enough cues, and do not update their beliefs about these needs during the task. |
Margreet Vogelzang; Francesca Foppolo; Maria Teresa Guasti; Hedderik Rijn; Petra Hendriks Reasoning about alternative forms is costly: The processing of null and overt pronouns in Italian using pupillary responses Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 158–183, 2020. @article{Vogelzang2020, Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are found to be less costly to process than overt pronouns. We argue that this difference is caused by an additional reasoning step that is needed to process marked overt pronouns but not unmarked null pronouns. A comparison with data from Dutch, a language with overt but no null pronouns, demonstrates that Italian pronouns are processed differently from Dutch pronouns. These findings suggest that the processing of a marked form is influenced by alternative forms within the same language, making its processing costly. |
Xiaoming Wang; Xinbo Zhao; Yanning Zhang Deep-learning-based reading eye-movement analysis for aiding biometric recognition Journal Article In: Neurocomputing, 2020. @article{Wang2020j, Eye-movement recognition is a new type of biometric recognition technology. Without considering the characteristics of the stimuli, the existing eye-movement recognition technology is based on eye-movement trajectory similarity measurements and uses more eye-movement features. Related studies on reading psychology have shown that when reading text, human eye-movements are different between individuals yet stable for a given individual. This paper proposes a type of technology for aiding biometric recognition based on reading eye-movement. By introducing a deep-learning framework, a computational model for reading eye-movement recognition (REMR) was constructed. The model takes the text, fixation, and text-based linguistic feature sequences as inputs and identifies a human subject by measuring the similarity distance between the predicted fixation sequence and the actual one (to be identified). The experimental results show that the fixation sequence similarity recognition algorithm obtained an equal error rate of 19.4% on the test set, and the model obtained an 86.5% Rank-1 recognition rate on the test set. |
Signy Wegener; Hua-Chen Wang; Kate Nation; Anne Castles Tracking the evolution of orthographic expectancies over building visual experience Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 199, pp. 1–17, 2020. @article{Wegener2020, Literate children can generate expectations about the spellings of newly learned words that they have not yet seen in print. These initial spelling expectations, or orthographic skeletons, have previously been observed at the first orthographic exposure to known spoken words. Here, we asked what happens to the orthographic skeleton over repeated visual exposures. Children in Grade 4 (N = 38) were taught the pronunciations and meanings of one set of 16 novel words, whereas another set were untrained. Spellings of half the items were predictable from their phonology (e.g., nesh), whereas the other half were less predictable (e.g., koyb). Trained and untrained items were subsequently shown in print, embedded in sentences, and eye movements were monitored as children silently read all items over three exposures. A larger effect of spelling predictability for orally trained items compared with untrained items was observed at the first and second orthographic exposures, consistent with the notion that oral vocabulary knowledge had facilitated the formation of spelling expectations. By the third orthographic exposure, this interaction was no longer significant, suggesting that visual experience had begun to update children's spelling expectations. Delayed follow-up testing revealed that when visual exposure was equated, oral training provided a strong persisting benefit to children's written word recognition. Findings suggest that visual exposure can alter children's developing orthographic representations and that this process can be captured dynamically as children read novel words over repeated visual exposures. |
Anke Weidmann; Laura Richert; Maximilian Bernecker; Miriam Knauss; Kathlen Priebe; Benedikt Reuter; Martin Bohus; Meike Müller-Engelmann; Thomas Fydrich Dwelling on verbal but not pictorial threat cues: An eye-tracking study with adult survivors of childhood interpersonal violence Journal Article In: Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 46–54, 2020. @article{Weidmann2020, Objective: Previous studies have found evidence of an attentional bias for trauma-related stimuli in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using eye-tracking (ET) technlogy. However, it is unclear whether findings for PTSD after traumatic events in adulthood can be transferred to PTSD after interpersonal trauma in childhood. The latter is often accompanied by more complex symptom features, including, for example, affective dysregulation and has not yet been studied using ET. The aim of this study was to explore which components of attention are biased in adult victims of childhood trauma with PTSD compared to those without PTSD. Method: Female participants with (n = 27) or without (n = 27) PTSD who had experienced interpersonal violence in childhood or adolescence watched different traumarelated stimuli (Experiment 1: words, Experiment 2: facial expressions). We analyzed whether traumarelated stimuli were primarily detected (vigilance bias) and/or dwelled on longer (maintenance bias) compared to stimuli of other emotional qualities. Results: For trauma-related words, there was evidence of a maintenance bias but not of a vigilance bias. For trauma-related facial expressions, there was no evidence of any bias. Conclusions: At present, an attentional bias to trauma-related stimuli cannot be considered as robust in PTSD following trauma in childhood compared to that of PTSD following trauma in adulthood. The findings are discussed with respect to difficulties attributing effects specifically to PTSD in this highly comorbid though understudied population. |
Alex L. White; John Palmer; Geoffrey M. Boynton Visual word recognition: Evidence for a serial bottleneck in lexical access Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 82, no. 4, pp. 2000–2017, 2020. @article{White2020, Reading is a demanding task, constrained by inherent processing capacity limits. Do those capacity limits allow for multiple words to be recognized in parallel? In a recent study, we measured semantic categorization accuracy for nouns presented in pairs. The words were replaced by post-masks after an interval that was set to each subject's threshold, such that with focused attention they could categorize one word with ~80% accuracy. When subjects tried to divide attention between both words, their accuracy was so impaired that it supported a serial processing model: on each trial, subjects could categorize one word but had to guess about the other. In the experiments reported here, we investigated how our previous result generalizes across two tasks that require lexical access but vary in the depth of semantic processing (semantic categorization and lexical decision), and across different masking stimuli, word lengths, lexical frequencies and visual field positions. In all cases, the serial processing model was supported by two effects: (1) a sufficiently large accuracy deficit with divided compared to focused attention; and (2) a trial-by-trial stimulus processing tradeoff, meaning that the response to one word was more likely to be correct if the response to the other was incorrect. However, when the task was to detect colored letters, neither of those effects occurred, even though the post-masks limited accuracy in the same way. Altogether, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that visual processing of words is parallel but lexical access is serial. |
Peng Zhou; Weiyi Ma; Likan Zhan A deficit in using prosodic cues to understand communicative intentions by children with autism spectrum disorders: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: First Language, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 41–63, 2020. @article{Zhou2020, The present study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were able to use prosodic cues to understand others' communicative intentions. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, the study found that unlike typically developing (TD) 4-year-olds, both 4-year-olds with ASD and 5-year-olds with ASD exhibited an eye gaze pattern that reflected their inability to use prosodic cues to infer the intended meaning of the speaker. Their performance was relatively independent of their verbal IQ and mean length of utterance. In addition, the findings also show that there was no development in this ability from 4 years of age to 5 years of age. The findings indicate that Mandarin-speaking preschool children with ASD exhibit a deficit in using prosodic cues to understand the communicative intentions of the speaker, and this ability might be inherently impaired in ASD. |
Wei Zheng; Yizhen Wang; Xiaolu Wang The effect of salience on Chinese pun comprehension: A visual world paradigm study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, pp. 116, 2020. @article{Zheng2020, The present study adopted the printed-word visual world paradigm to investigate the salience effect on Chinese pun comprehension. In such an experiment, participants listen to a spoken sentence while looking at a visual display of four printed words (including a semantic competitor, a phonological competitor, and two unrelated distractors). Previous studies based on alphabetic languages have found robust phonological effects (participants fixated more at phonological competitors than distractors during the unfolding of the spoken target words), while controversy remains regarding the existence of a similar semantic effect. A recent Chinese study reported reliable semantic effects in two experiments using this paradigm, suggesting that Chinese participants could actively map the semantic input from the auditory modality with the semantic information retrieved from printed words. In light of their study, we designed an experiment with two conditions: a replication condition to test the validity of using the printed-word world paradigm in Chinese semantic research, and a pun condition to assess the role played by salience during pun comprehension. Indeed, global analyses have revealed robust semantic effects in both experimental conditions, where participants were found more attracted to the semantic competitors than to the distractors with the emergence of target words. More importantly, the local analyses from the pun condition have shown that the participants were more attracted to the semantic competitors related to the salient meaning of the ambiguous word in a pun than to those related to the less salient meanings within 200 ms after target word offset. This finding suggests that the salient meaning of the ambiguous word in a pun is activated and assessed faster than its less salient counterpart. The initial advantage observed in the present study is consistent with the prediction of the graded salience hypothesis rather than the direct access model. |
Zehui Zhan; Jun Wu; Hu Mei; Qianyi Wu; Patrick S. W. Fong Individual difference on reading ability tested by eye-tracking: From perspective of gender Journal Article In: Interactive Technology and Smart Education, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 267–283, 2020. @article{Zhan2020, Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the individual difference on digital reading, by examining the eye-tracking records of male and female readers with different reading ability (including their pupil size, blink rate, fixation rate, fixation duration, saccade rate, saccade duration, saccade amplitude and regression rate). Design/methodology/approach: A total of 74 participants were selected according to 6,520 undergraduate students' university entrance exam scores and the follow-up reading assessments. Half of them are men and half are women, with the top 3% good readers and the bottom 3% poor readers, from different disciplines. Findings: Results indicated that the major gender differences on reading abilities were indicated by saccade duration, regression rate and blink rate. The major effects on reading ability have a larger effect size than the major effect on gender. Among all the indicators that have been examined, blink rate and regression rates are the most sensitive to the gender attribute, while the fixation rate and saccade amplitude showed the least sensitiveness. Originality/value: This finding could be helpful for user modeling with eye-tracking data in intelligent tutoring systems, where necessary adjustments might be needed according to users' individual differences. In this way, instructors could be able to provide purposeful guidance according to what the learners had seen and personalized the experience of digital reading. |
Bin Zhao; Jinfeng Huang; Gaoyan Zhang; Jianwu Dang; Minbo Chen; Yingjian Fu; Longbiao Wang Brain network reconstruction of speech production based on electro-encephalography and eye movement Journal Article In: Acoustical Science and Technology, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 349–350, 2020. @article{Zhao2020, To fully understand the brain mechanism associated with speech functions, it is necessary to unfold the spatiotemporal brain dynamics during the whole speech processing range [1]. However, previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) studies focused on cerebral activation patterns and their regional functions, while lacking information of the time courses [2]. In contrast, electroencephalography (EEG) and magneto- encephalography (MEG) with high temporal resolution are inferior in source localization, and are also easily buried in electromagnetic artifacts from muscular actions in articulation, thus interfering with the analysis. In this study, we introduced a novel multimodal data acquisition system to collect EEG, eye movement, and speech in an oral reading task. The behavior data (eye movement and speech) were used for segmenting cognitive stages. EEG data went through independent component analyses (ICA), component clustering, and time-varying (adaptive) multi-variate autoregressive modeling [3] for estimating the spatiotemporal causal interactions among brain regions in each cognitive and speech process. Statistical analyses and literature review were followed to interpret the brain dynamic results for better understanding the speech functions. |
Vladislav I. Zubov; Tatiana E. Petrova Lexically or grammatically adapted texts: What is easier to process for secondary school children? Journal Article In: Procedia Computer Science, vol. 176, pp. 2117–2124, 2020. @article{Zubov2020, This article presents the results of an eye-tracking experiment on Russian language material, exploring the reading process in secondary school children with general speech underdevelopment. The objective of the study is to reveal what type of a text is better to use to make the reading and comprehension easier: lexically adapted text or grammatically adapted text? The data from Russian-speaking participants from the compulsory school (experimental group) and 28 secondary school children with normal speech development (control group) indicate that both types of adaptation proved to be efficient for recalling the information from the text. Though, we revealed that in teenagers with language disorders in anamnesis lower perceptual processes are partially compensated (parameters of eye movements), but higher comprehension processes remain affected. |
Manman Zhang; Simon P. Liversedge; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Chuanli Zang The influence of foveal lexical processing load on parafoveal preview and saccadic targeting during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica Sinica, vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 1–11, 2020. @article{Zhang2020d, Parafoveal pre-processing contributes to highly efficient reading for skilled readers. Research has demonstrated that high-skilled or fast readers extract more parafoveal information from a wider parafoveal region more efficiently compared to less-skilled or slow readers. It is argued that individual differences in parafoveal preview are due to high-skilled or fast readers focusing less of their at- tention on foveal word processing than less-skilled or slow readers. In other words, foveal processing difficulty might modulate an individual's amount of parafoveal preview (i.e., Foveal Load Hypothesis). However, few studies have provided evidence in support of this claim. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore whether and how foveal lexical processing load modulates parafoveal preview of readers with different reading speeds (a commonly used measurement of reading skill or reading proficiency). By using a three-minute reading comprehension task, 28 groups of fast and slow readers were selected from 300 participants (234 were valid) according to their reading speed in the current study. Participants were then asked to read sentences while their eye movements were recorded using an Eyelink 1000 eye-tracker. Each experimental sentence contained a pre-target word that varied in lexical frequency to manipulate foveal processing load (low load: high frequency; high load: low frequency), and a target word ma- nipulated for preview (identical or pseudocharacter) within the boundary paradigm. Global analyses showed that, although fast readers had similar accuracy of reading comprehension to slow readers, they had shorter reading times, longer forward saccades, made fewer fixations and regressions, and had higher reading speeds compared to slow readers, indicating that our selection of fast and slow readers was highly effective. The pre-target word analyses showed that there was a main effect of word frequency on first-pass reading times, indicating an effective manipulation of foveal load. Addition- ally, there were significant interactions of Reading Group × Word Frequency, and Reading Group × Word Frequency × Parafoveal Preview for first fixation and single fixation durations, showing that the frequency effects were reliable for fast readers rather than for slow readers with pseudocharacter previews, while the frequency effects were similar for the two groups with identical previews. However, the target word analyses did not show any three-way or two-way interactions for the first-pass reading times as well as for skipping probability. To be specific, the first-pass reading times were shorter at the target word with identical previews in relation to pseudocharacter previews (i.e., preview benefit effects); importantly, similar size effects occurred for both fast readers and slow readers. The findings in the present study suggest that lexical information from the currently fixated word can be extracted and can be used quickly for fast readers, while such information is used later for slow readers. This, however, does not result in more (or less) preview benefit for fast readers in relation to slow readers. In conclusion, foveal lexical processing does not modulate preview benefit for fast and slow readers, and the present results provide no support for the Foveal Load Hypothesis. Our findings of foveal load effects on parafoveal preview for fast and slow readers cannot be readily explained by current computational models (e.g., E-Z Reader model and SWIFT model). |
Hui Zhang; Ping Wang; Tinghu Kang Aesthetic experience of field cognitive style in the appreciation of cursive and running scripts: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Art and Design Review, vol. 8, pp. 215–227, 2020. @article{Zhang2020c, This study compares the characteristics of the aesthetic experience of different cognitive styles in calligraphy style. The study used a cursive script and running script as experimental materials and the EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker to record eye movements while viewing calligraphy. The results showed that, in the overall analysis, there were differences in the field cogni-tion style in total fixation counts, saccade amplitude, and saccade counts and differences in the calligraphic style in total fixation counts and saccade counts. Further local analysis found significant differences in the field cogni-tive style in mean pupil diameter, fixation counts, and regression in count, and that there were differences in fixation counts and regression in count in the calligraphic style, as well as interactions with the area of interest. The results indicate that the field cognitive style is characterized by different aesthetic experiences in calligraphy appreciation and that there are aesthetic preferences in calligraphy style. |
Han Zhang; Chuyan Qu; Kevin F. Miller; Kai S. Cortina Missing the joke: Reduced rereading of garden-path jokes during mind-wandering Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 638–648, 2020. @article{Zhang2020g, Mind-wandering (i.e., thoughts irrelevant to the current task) occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced rereading when the reader read the so-called garden-path jokes. In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the violation creates a semantic incongruity that needs to be resolved (e.g., "My girlfriend has read so many negative things about smoking. Therefore, she decided to quit reading."). Rereading text prior to the punchline can help resolve the incongruity. In a main study and a preregistered replication, participants read jokes and nonfunny controls embedded in filler texts and responded to thought probes that assessed intentional and unintentional mind-wandering. Results were consistent across the two studies: When the reader was not mind-wandering, jokes elicited more rereading (from the punchline) than the nonfunny controls did, and had a recall advantage over the nonfunny controls. During mind-wandering, however, the additional eye movement processing and the recall advantage of jokes were generally reduced. These results show that mind-wandering is associated with reduced rereading, which is important for resolving higher level comprehension difficulties. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved). |
Michael G. Cutter; Andrea E. Martin; Patrick Sturt The activation of contextually predictable words in syntactically illegal positions Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 9, pp. 1423–1430, 2020. @article{Cutter2020, We present an eye-tracking study testing a hypothesis emerging from several theories of prediction during language processing, whereby predictable words should be skipped more than unpredictable words even in syntactically illegal positions. Participants read sentences in which a target word became predictable by a certain point (e.g., “bone” is 92% predictable given, “The dog buried his..”), with the next word actually being an intensifier (e.g., “really”), which a noun cannot follow. The target noun remained predictable to appear later in the sentence. We used the boundary paradigm to present the predictable noun or an alternative unpredictable noun (e.g., “food”) directly after the intensifier, until participants moved beyond the intensifier, at which point the noun changed to a syntactically legal word. Participants also read sentences in which predictable or unpredictable nouns appeared in syntactically legal positions. A Bayesian linear-mixed model suggested a 5.7% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in syntactically legal positions, and a 3.1% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in illegal positions. We discuss our findings in relation to theories of lexical prediction during reading. |
Michael G. Cutter; Andrea E. Martin; Patrick Sturt Readers detect an low-level phonological violation between two parafoveal words Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 204, pp. 1–13, 2020. @article{Cutter2020a, In two eye-tracking studies we investigated whether readers can detect a violation of the phonological-grammatical convention for the indefinite article an to be followed by a word beginning with a vowel when these two words appear in the parafovea. Across two experiments participants read sentences in which the word an was followed by a parafoveal preview that was either correct (e.g. Icelandic), incorrect and represented a phonological violation (e.g. Mongolian), or incorrect without representing a phonological violation (e.g. Ethiopian), with this parafoveal preview changing to the target word as participants made a saccade into the space preceding an. Our data suggests that participants detected the phonological violation while the target word was still two words to the right of fixation, with participants making more regressions from the previewed word and having longer go-past times on this word when they received a violation preview as opposed to a non-violation preview. We argue that participants were attempting to perform aspects of sentence integration on the basis of low-level orthographic information from the previewed word. |
Guadalupe Santos; Julie E. Boland; Richard L. Lewis Grammatical predictions in Spanish-English bilinguals and Spanish-language learners Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 907–925, 2020. @article{Santos2020, Although bilingual individuals know 2 languages, research suggests that the languages are not separate in the mind. This is especially evident when a bilingual individual switches languages midsentence, indicating that mental representations are, to some degree, overlapping or integrated across the 2 languages. In 2 eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the nature of this integration during reading to examine whether incremental grammatical predictions generated by Spanish-English bilinguals (Experiment 1 |
Gayle DeDe Perceptual span in individuals with aphasia Journal Article In: Aphasiology, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 235–253, 2020. @article{DeDe2020, Background: Perceptual span refers to the field of effective vision during reading comprehension. It is determined by many factors, including reading proficiency. No studies have investigated the perceptual span in people with reading comprehension impairments due to aphasia. Aims: The present study examined whether perceptual span is smaller in individuals with aphasia than controls. Methods and Procedures: The task was a gaze-contingent moving windows paradigm during silent reading using an eye tracker. Data from 11 individuals with aphasia and 15 neurotypical controls were analyzed. Outcomes and Results: Perceptual span in individuals with aphasia was the fixated word plus one word to the right of fixation, whereas perceptual span in controls was the fixated word plus two words to the right of fixation. Conclusion: Individuals with aphasia have a smaller perceptual span than controls, which likely reflects increased effort during reading comprehension. |
Ambre Denis-Noël; Chotiga Pattamadilok; Éric Castet; Pascale Colé Activation time-course of phonological code in silent word recognition in adult readers with and without dyslexia Journal Article In: Annals of Dyslexia, vol. 70, no. 3, pp. 313–338, 2020. @article{DenisNoel2020, In skilled adult readers, reading words is generally assumed to rapidly and automatically activate the phonological code. In adults with dyslexia, despite the main consensus on their phonological processing deficits, little is known about the activation time course of this code. The present study investigated this issue in both populations. Participants' accuracy and eye movements were recorded while they performed a visual lexical decision task in which phonological consistency of written words was manipulated. Readers with dyslexia were affected by phonological consistency during second fixation duration of visual word recognition suggesting a late activation of the phonological code. Regarding skilled readers, no influence of phonological consistency was found when the participants were considered a homogeneous population. However, a different pattern emerged when they were divided into two subgroups according to their phonological and semantic abilities: Those who showed better decoding than semantic skills were affected by phonological consistency at the earliest stage of visual word recognition while those who showed better semantic than decoding skills were not affected by this factor at any processing stage. Overall, the findings suggest that the presence of phonological deficits in readers with dyslexia is associated with a delayed activation of phonological representations during reading. In skilled readers, the contribution of phonology varies with their reading profile, i.e., being phonologically or semantically oriented. |
Rutvik H. Desai; Wonil Choi; John M. Henderson Word frequency effects in naturalistic reading Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 1–12, 2020. @article{Desai2020, Word frequency is a central psycholinguistic variable that accounts for substantial variance in language processing. A number of neuroimaging studies have examined frequency at a single word level, typically demonstrating a strong negative, and sometimes positive correlation between frequency and hemodynamic response. Here, 40 subjects read passages of text in an MRI scanner while their eye movements were recorded. We used fixation-related analysis to identify neural activity tied to the frequency of each fixated word. We found that negative correlations with frequency were reduced, while strong positive correlations were found in the temporal and parietal areas associated with semantics. We propose that the processing cost of low frequency words is reduced due to contextual cues. Meanings of high frequency words are more readily accessed and integrated with context resulting in enhanced processing in the semantic system. The results demonstrate similarities and differences between single word and naturalistic text processing. |
Nicolas Dirix; Heleen Vander Beken; Ellen De Bruyne; Marc Brysbaert; Wouter Duyck Reading text when studying in a second language: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 371–397, 2020. @article{Dirix2020, The authors investigated how eye movements are influenced by different reading goals in participants' first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants read or studied the contents of texts while their eye movements were recorded. One group was asked to read L1 and L2 texts as they would read any expository text (informational reading). Another group was asked to study L1 and L2 texts for subsequent tests involving true/false questions (study condition). After reading, all participants, including those in the informational reading condition, completed the true/false tests without being able to further consult the texts, which allowed the authors to investigate the extent to which reading goal and text language affect recognition memory for texts. In general, more reading time was spent on studying than on informational reading, which also resulted in higher test scores in the study condition. The L2-processing cost was larger in the study condition than in the informational reading condition: Participants needed approximately 20% more time to study L2 texts. The results of various eye movement measures suggest that this is caused by slower word recognition processes and a smaller amount of information that can be processed simultaneously in L2. This was true not only for the first reading of the text but also for the rereadings in the study condition. Interestingly, the additional time for L2 studying seemed to compensate for the less efficient processing, as the recognition test scores were the same in L2 as in L1. |
Dagmar Divjak; Petar Milin; Srdan Medimorec Construal in language: A visual-world approach to the effects of linguistic alternations on event perception and conception Journal Article In: Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 37–72, 2020. @article{Divjak2020, The theoretical notion of 'construal' captures the idea that the way in which we describe a scene reflects our conceptualization of it. Relying on the concept of ception - which conjoins conception and perception - we operationalized construal and employed a Visual World Paradigm to establish which aspects of linguistic scene description modulate visual scene perception, thereby affecting event conception. By analysing viewing behaviour after alternating ways of describing location (prepositions), agentivity (active/passive voice) and transfer (NP/PP datives), we found that the linguistic construal of a scene affects its spontaneous visual perception in two ways: either by determining the order in which the components of a scene are accessed or by modulating the distribution of attention over the components, making them more or less salient than they naturally are. We also found evidence for the existence of a cline in the construal effect with stronger expressive differences, such as the prepositional manipulation, inducing more prominent changes in visual perception than the dative manipulation. We discuss the claims language can lay to affecting visual information uptake and hence conceptualization of a static scene in the light of these results. |
Kaitlyn Easson; Noor Z. Al Dahhan; Donald C. Brien; John R. Kirby; Douglas P. Munoz Developmental trends of visual processing of letters and objects using naming speed tasks Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 14, pp. 562712, 2020. @article{Easson2020, Studying the typical development of reading is key to understanding the precise deficits that underlie reading disabilities. An important correlate of efficient reading is the speed of naming arrays of simple stimuli such as letters and pictures. In this cross-sectional study, we examined developmental changes in visual processing that occurs during letter and object naming from childhood to early adulthood in terms of behavioral task efficiency, associated articulation and eye movement parameters, and the coordination between them, as measured by eye-voice span in both the spatial and temporal domains. We used naming speed (NS) tasks, in which participants were required to name sets of letters or simple objects as quickly and as accurately as possible. Single stimulus manipulations were made to these tasks to make the stimuli either more visually and/or phonologically similar to one another in order to examine how these manipulations affected task performance and the coordination between speech and eye movements. Across development there was an increased efficiency in speech and eye movement performance and their coordination in both the spatial and temporal domains. Furthermore, manipulations to the phonological and visual similarity of specific letter and object stimuli revealed that orthographic processing played a greater role than phonological processing in performance, with the contribution of phonological processing diminishing across development. This comprehensive typical developmental trajectory provides a benchmark for clinical populations to elucidate the nature of the cognitive dysfunction underlying reading difficulties. |
Grant Eckstein; Sarah Miner; Katie Watkins; Judy James; Mornie Sims; Allison Wallace Baker; Larissa Grahl Reading academic citations: How professors and graduate students read for different purposes Journal Article In: The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 2020. @article{Eckstein2020, Citations provide truncated yet socially complex information about sources in academic texts which students are obliged to read, comprehend, and then ultimately produce as part of an academic discourse community. While researchers have observed a developmental process whereby students produce citations during source-based writing, little work has investigated the reading stage when students visually encounter citations. In this study, we explored academic reading behaviors by examining eye movements of 27 graduate students and 18 professors as they read 6 authentic research texts for various purposes (summary, analysis, synthesis). Results of factorial ANOVAs showed no differences between students and professors but did reveal that both groups spent far less time looking at citations than surrounding text and that reading purposes affected citation reading behavior. These results indicate that students and professors read academic citations in similar ways. Further, the findings suggest that synthesizing sources, not just summarizing or analyzing them, results in greater attention to citations; thus, students developing their academic writing and citation skills may benefit from synthesizing multiple sources. |
Ciara Egan; Filipe Cristino; Joshua S. Payne; Guillaume Thierry; Manon W. Jones How alliteration enhances conceptual–attentional interactions in reading Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 124, pp. 111–118, 2020. @article{Egan2020, In linguistics, the relationship between phonological word form and meaning is mostly considered arbitrary. Why, then, do literary authors traditionally craft sound relationships between words? We set out to characterise how dynamic interactions between word form and meaning may account for this literary practice. Here, we show that alliteration influences both meaning integration and attentional engagement during reading. We presented participants with adjective-noun phrases, having manipulated semantic relatedness (congruent, incongruent) and form repetition (alliterating, non-alliterating) orthogonally, as in “dazzling-diamond”; “sparkling-diamond”; “dangerous-diamond”; and “creepy-diamond”. Using simultaneous recording of event-related brain potentials and pupil dilation (PD), we establish that, whilst semantic incongruency increased N400 amplitude as expected, it reduced PD, an index of attentional engagement. Second, alliteration affected semantic evaluation of word pairs, since it reduced N400 amplitude even in the case of unrelated items (e.g., “dangerous-diamond”). Third, alliteration specifically boosted attentional engagement for related words (e.g., “dazzling-diamond”), as shown by a sustained negative correlation between N400 amplitudes and PD change after the window of lexical integration. Thus, alliteration strategically arouses attention during reading and when comprehension is challenged, phonological information helps readers link concepts beyond the level of literal semantics. Overall, our findings provide a tentative mechanism for the empowering effect of sound repetition in literary constructs. |
Julia Egger; Caroline F. Rowland; Christina Bergmann Improving the robustness of infant lexical processing speed measures Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 52, no. 5, pp. 2188–2201, 2020. @article{Egger2020, Visual reaction times to target pictures after naming events are an informative measurement in language acquisition research, because gaze shifts measured in looking-while-listening paradigms are an indicator of infants' lexical speed of processing. This measure is very useful, as it can be applied from a young age onwards and has been linked to later language development. However, to obtain valid reaction times, the infant is required to switch the fixation of their eyes from a distractor to a target object. This means that usually at least half the trials have to be discarded—those where the participant is already fixating the target at the onset of the target word—so that no reaction time can be measured. With few trials, reliability suffers, which is especially problematic when studying individual differences. In order to solve this problem, we developed a gaze-triggered looking-while-listening paradigm. The trials do not differ from the original paradigm apart from the fact that the target object is chosen depending on the infant's eye fixation before naming. The object the infant is looking at becomes the distractor and the other object is used as the target, requiring a fixation switch, and thus providing a reaction time. We tested our paradigm with forty-three 18-month-old infants, comparing the results to those from the original paradigm. The Gaze-triggered paradigm yielded more valid reaction time trials, as anticipated. The results of a ranked correlation between the conditions confirmed that the manipulated paradigm measures the same concept as the original paradigm. |
Gareth Carrol; Kathy Conklin Is all formulaic language created equal? Unpacking the processing advantage for different types of formulaic sequences Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 95–122, 2020. @article{Carrol2020a, Research into recurrent, highly conventionalized “formulaic” sequences has shown a processing advantage compared to “novel” (non-formulaic) language. Studies of individual types of formulaic sequence often acknowledge the contribution of specific factors, but little work exists to compare the processing of different types of phrases with fundamentally different properties. We use eye-tracking to compare the processing of three types of formulaic phrases—idioms, binomials, and collocations—and consider whether overall frequency can explain the advantage for all three, relative to control phrases. Results show an advantage, as evidenced through shorter reading times, for all three types. While overall phrase frequency contributes much of the processing advantage, different types of phrase do show additional effects according to the specific properties that are relevant to each type: frequency, familiarity, and decomposability for idioms; predictability and semantic association for binomials; and mutual information for collocations. We discuss how the results contribute to our understanding of the representation and processing of multiword lexical units more broadly. |
Gareth Carrol; Jeannette Littlemore Resolving figurative expressions during reading: The role of familiarity, transparency, and context Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 57, no. 7, pp. 609–626, 2020. @article{Carrol2020, Native speakers understand familiar idioms (e.g., over the moon) and conventional metaphors (e.g., describing time as a doctor) quickly and easily. In two eye-tracking studies we considered how native speakers are able to make sense of fundamentally unfamiliar figurative expressions. In Experiment 1 compared with literal paraphrases of the same meaning, known idioms had a clear advantage, unknown idioms showed a significant disadvantage, and conventional metaphors showed no difference between figurative and literal versions. In Experiment 2 readers saw known and unknown idioms (or paraphrases) in contexts that either supported the intended meaning or were neutral. Strength of context had minimal effect on reading patterns for either idiom type and had no effect when readers were asked to subsequently identify the meaning. Context may be helpful in terms of sense selection but not when new senses need to be generated, at which point aspects such as transparency become more important. |
Emilia Castaño; Gareth Carrol Mental simulation in the processing of literal and metaphorical motion language: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 153–170, 2020. @article{Castano2020, An eye-tracking while listening study based on the blank screen paradigm was conducted to investigate the processing of literal and metaphorical verbs of motion. The study was based on two assumptions from the literature: that language comprehension by default engages mental simulation, and that looking behavior (measured through patterns of eye movements) can provide a window into ongoing cognitive processes. This study specifically compared the comprehension of sentences that depicted actual physical motion (the curtain is rising) and sentences that described changes in quantity or emotional states in terms of vertical motion (prices are rising). Results showed that eye movements were selectively biased upward or downward in accordance with the direction implied by the verb, regardless of the context (literal or metaphorical) in which they appeared, and in the absence of any visual stimuli or explicit task. Thus, these findings suggest that literal and metaphorical language drive spontaneous, direction-specific mental simulations captured by eye movements and that at least in the case of verbs presented in the present progressive, which emphasizes the ongoing nature of actions, visual biases along the vertical axis may start during the verb itself. |
Johan Chandra; André Krügel; Ralf Engbert Modulation of oculomotor control during reading of mirrored and inverted texts Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 10, pp. 4210, 2020. @article{Chandra2020, The interplay between cognitive and oculomotor processes during reading can be explored when the spatial layout of text deviates from the typical display. In this study, we investigate various eye-movement measures during reading of text with experimentally manipulated layout (word-wise and letter-wise mirrored-reversed text as well as inverted and scrambled text). While typical findings (e.g., longer mean fixation times, shorter mean saccades lengths) in reading manipulated texts compared to normal texts were reported in earlier work, little is known about changes of oculomotor targeting observed in within-word landing positions under the above text layouts. Here we carry out precise analyses of landing positions and find substantial changes in the so-called launch-site effect in addition to the expected overall slow-down of reading performance. Specifically, during reading of our manipulated text conditions with reversed letter order (against overall reading direction), we find a reduced launch-site effect, while in all other manipulated text conditions, we observe an increased launch-site effect. Our results clearly indicate that the oculomotor system is highly adaptive when confronted with unusual reading conditions. |
Johan Chandra; André Krügel; Ralf Engbert Experimental test of Bayesian saccade targeting under reversed reading direction Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 82, no. 3, pp. 1230–1240, 2020. @article{Chandra2020a, During reading, rapid eye movements (saccades) shift the reader's line of sight from one word to another for high-acuity visual information processing. While experimental data and theoretical models show that readers aim at word centers, the eye-movement (oculomotor) accuracy is low compared to other tasks. As a consequence, distributions of saccadic landing positions indicate large (i) random errors and (ii) systematic over- and undershoot of word centers, which additionally depend on saccade lengths (McConkie et al. Visual Research, 28(10), 1107–1118, 1988). Here we show that both error components can be simultaneously reduced by reading texts from right to left in German language (N = 32). We used our experimental data to test a Bayesian model of saccade planning. First, experimental data are consistent with the model. Second, the model makes specific predictions of the effects of the precision of prior and (sensory) likelihood. Our results suggest that it is a more precise sensory likelihood that can explain the reduction of both random and systematic error components. |
Min Chang; Lisha Hao; Sainan Zhao; Lin Li; Kevin B. Paterson; Jingxin Wang Flexible parafoveal encoding of character order supports word predictability effects in Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 82, no. 6, pp. 2793–2801, 2020. @article{Chang2020, Several eye-movement studies have revealed flexibility in the parafoveal processing of character-order information in Chinese reading. In particular, studies show that processing a two-character word in a sentence benefits more from parafoveal preview of a nonword created by transposing rather than replacing its two characters. One issue that has not been investigated is whether the contextual predictability of the target word influences this processing of character order information. However, such a finding would provide novel evidence for an early influence of context on lexical processing in Chinese reading. Accordingly, we investigated this issue in an eye-movement experiment using the boundary paradigm and sentences containing two-character target words with high or low contextual predictability. Prior to the reader's gaze crossing an invisible boundary, each target word was shown normally (i.e. a valid preview) or with its two characters either transposed or replaced by unrelated characters to create invalid nonword previews. These invalid previews reverted to the target word once the reader's gaze crossed the invisible boundary. The results showed larger preview benefits (i.e. a decrease in fixation times) for target words following transposed-character than substituted-character previews, revealing a transposed-character effect similar to that in previous research. In addition, a word predictability effect (shorter fixation times for words with high than low predictability) was observed following both valid and transposed-character previews, but not substituted-character previews. The findings therefore reveal that context can influence an early stage of lexical processing in Chinese reading during which character order is processed flexibly. |
Min Chang; Kuo Zhang; Lisha Hao; Sainan Zhao; Victoria A. McGowan; Kayleigh L. Warrington; Kevin B. Paterson; Jingxin Wang; Sarah C. Gunn Word predictability depends on parafoveal preview validity in chinese reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 33–40, 2020. @article{Chang2020a, Research with alphabetic scripts shows that providing an invalid parafoveal preview eliminates or diminishes effects of contextual predictability on word identification, revealing that such effects depend on the interplay between top-down contextual expectations and bottom-up perceptual information. Whether similar effects are observed in character-based scripts like Chinese is unknown. However, such knowledge would extend our understanding of contextual prediction in different writing systems. Accordingly, we conducted an eye movement experiment using the boundary paradigm to assess contextual predictability effects on the processing of target words with valid and invalid parafoveal previews. Interactions between predictability and preview validity were observed in early reading times but not word-skipping for targets. This suggests an interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes drives contextual processing in Chinese reading, but that word-skipping is not strongly mediated by contextual expectations in this script. We consider these findings in relation to differences between alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems. |
Wenshuo Chang; Yunyan Duan; Jingjing Qian; Fuyun Wu; Xiaoming Jiang; Xiaolin Zhou Gender interference in processing Chinese compound reflexive: Evidence from reading eye-tracking Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 10, pp. 1355–1370, 2020. @article{Chang2020d, In Chinese, the compound reflexive ta-ziji (“him/her-self”) has the gender marking pronoun ta, hence presenting a good test case for interference effects from structurally illicit antecedents predicted by cue-based retrieval models. Using reading eye-tracking, we manipulated the gender of ta-ziji that (mis)matches that of matrix- and local-subject. Results showed no interference whatsoever when ta-ziji matched local subjects. Only when ta-ziji mismatched local subjects did we find an inhibitory interference on first fixation duration and gaze duration at the verb immediately preceding ta-ziji, but a facilitatory interference on gaze duration at ta-ziji. Furthermore, at ta-ziji, total reading times were longer for gender-mismatching local subjects than for gender-matching ones. These findings are partially predicted by the standard cue-based retrieval model, but are mostly consistent with the structure-favoring cue-based retrieval model, suggesting that the structural cue plays a dominant role in the antecedent retrieval process, with interference occurring only in highly constrained situations. |
MingLei Chen; ChiaHsing Chen In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 180–200, 2020. @article{Chen2020d, Background: Reading researchers have generally considered that reading is an interactive combination of top-down (higher-level language skill) and bottom-up (lower-level language skill) processes. Nevertheless, the mechanisms through which readers apply these skills for online text comprehension are unclear. Methods: The present study thus used eight classical Chinese (CC) texts and their corresponding vernacular translation (VT) texts for controlling the text structure and meaning to explore such mechanisms in high school students. Results: With partial-out to the influences of (a) students' language achievement scores, (b) word frequency and (c) word length, we observed no significant difference in comprehension accuracy between the CC and VT texts, and the CC texts involved a significantly lower reading speed than did the VT texts. Moreover, the first fixation duration, gaze duration, rereading time and total reading time for the CC texts were longer than those for the VT texts. For all events, CC text reading required a longer fixation duration and significantly longer rereading time and total reading time than did VT text reading. Further observations show that students comprehended CC texts by adjusting their lower- and higher-level language skills. Conclusion: These findings demonstrate that even if CC texts contain a relatively high number of low-frequency words, as readers get more and more contextual information from the text, they can gradually apply higher-level reading skills to understand the meaning of the text, which can ease the dependence on word decoding. Highlights: What is already known about this topic Lower- and higher-level language skills—which reflect lexical access and higher order text integration, respectively—affect reading comprehension. Theory and research in reading comprehension have emphasised the interactive process of both language skills to lead to successfully understanding text. What this paper adds By using classical Chinese texts and their corresponding vernacular translations to control the meaning of texts, text event structures and the corresponding word sequence, we determined that high school students comprehended classical Chinese texts by adjusting their lower- and higher-level language skills. This study also revealed students' dynamical adjustment of lower- and higher-level language skills within construction and integration phases according to various events. Implications for theory, policy or practice This study demonstrated that word-based eye-movement measures can reflect the processing of lower- and higher-level components in online reading and can reveal the even construction and integration processes of construction–integration model theory. By thoroughly examining reading strategies for texts structured according to events, this study revealed how high school students can achieve a certain degree of comprehension of classical Chinese texts through the use of higher-level language skills. |
Scarlett Child; Jane Oakhill; Alan Garnham Tracking your emotions: An eye-tracking study on reader's engagement with perspective during text comprehension Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 73, no. 6, pp. 929–940, 2020. @article{Child2020, An eye-tracking study explored perspective effects on eye-movements during reading. We presented texts that included either a personal perspective (you) or an onlooker perspective (he or she). We measured whether fixations on the pronouns themselves differed as a function of perspective, and whether fixations on pronouns were affected by the emotional valence of the text which was either positive or negative. It was found that early in the text, processing of you is easier than he or she. However, as the character referred to by he or she becomes more familiar, fixations on he or she decrease, specifically in negative contexts. |
Agnieszka Chmiel; Przemysław Janikowski; Agnieszka Lijewska Multimodal processing in simultaneous interpreting with text Journal Article In: Target, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 37–58, 2020. @article{Chmiel2020, The present study focuses on (in)congruence of input between the visual and the auditory modality in simultaneous interpreting with text. We asked twenty-four professional conference interpreters to simultaneously interpret an aurally and visually presented text with controlled incongruences in three categories (numbers, names and control words), while measuring interpreting accuracy and eye movements. The results provide evidence for the dominance of the visual modality, which goes against the professional standard of following the auditory modality in the case of incongruence. Numbers enjoyed the greatest accuracy across conditions possibly due to simple cross-language semantic mappings. We found no evidence for a facilitation effect for congruent items, and identified an impeding effect of the presence of the visual text for incongruent items. These results might be interpreted either as evidence for the Colavita effect (in which visual stimuli take precedence over auditory ones) or as strategic behaviour applied by professional interpreters to avoid risk. |
Sun-Joo Cho; Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Paul De Boeck; Jianhong Shen Modeling intensive polytomous time-series eye-tracking data: A dynamic tree-based item response model Journal Article In: Psychometrika, vol. 85, pp. 154–184, 2020. @article{Cho2020, This paper presents a dynamic tree-based item response (IRTree) model as a novel extension of the autoregressive generalized linear mixed effect model (dynamic GLMM). We illustrate the unique utility of the dynamic IRTree model in its capability of modeling differentiated processes indicated by intensive polytomous time-series eye-tracking data. The dynamic IRTree was inspired by but is distinct from the dynamic GLMM which was previously presented by Cho, Brown-Schmidt, and Lee (Psychometrika 83(3):751–771, 2018). Unlike the dynamic IRTree, the dynamic GLMM is suitable for modeling intensive binary time-series eye-tracking data to identify visual attention to a single interest area over all other possible fixation locations. The dynamic IRTree model is a general modeling framework which can be used to model change processes (trend and autocorrelation) and which allows for decomposing data into various sources of heterogeneity. The dynamic IRTree model was illustrated using an experimental study that employed the visual-world eye-tracking technique. The results of a simulation study showed that parameter recovery of the model was satisfactory and that ignoring trend and autoregressive effects resulted in biased estimates of experimental condition effects in the same conditions found in the empirical study. |
Eunjin Chun L2 prediction guided by linguistic experience Journal Article In: English Teaching, vol. 75, pp. 79–103, 2020. @article{Chun2020, Research suggests that prediction is important for language comprehension and learning. Accordingly, it becomes crucial to understand factors that can influence prediction. In this regard, speakers' prior linguistic experience such as parsing bias has been claimed to affect prediction in the error-based learning account. To test this claim, the current study, using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, investigated if L2 speakers' anticipatory eye movements are influenced by their parsing bias, and if individuals' parsing bias interacts with their working memory capacity and/or vocabulary size for the prediction. The results showed no main effect of the parsing bias on the prediction overall, and the parsing bias did not interact with the working memory capacity and/or the vocabulary size for the prediction. Importantly, however, the speakers' parsing bias significantly interacted with the trials. The influence of the parsing bias over the course of this experiment suggests that L2 speakers' prediction is guided by their recent experience with linguistic input as well as long-term linguistic experience. |