EyeLink阅读和语言眼球追踪出版物
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2024 (with some early 2025s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Visual World, Comprehension, Speech Production, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink reading or language articles, please email us!
2013 |
Arnout W. Koornneef; Ted J. M. Sanders Establishing coherence relations in discourse: The influence of implicit causality and connectives on pronoun resolution Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1169–1206, 2013. @article{Koornneef2013,Many studies have shown that readers and listeners recruit verb-based implicit causality information rapidly in the service of pronoun resolution. However, since most of these studies focused on constructions in which because connected the two critical clauses, it is unclear to what extent implicit causality information affects the processing of pronouns embedded in other types of coherence relations. In an eye-tracking and completion study we addressed this void by varying whether because, but, and and joined a primary clause containing the implicit causality verb, with a secondary clause containing a critical gender-marked pronoun. The results showed that the claims made for implicit causality hold if the connective because is present (i.e., a reading time delay following a pronoun that is inconsistent with the implicit causality bias of the verb), but do not generalise to other connectives like but and and. This shows that the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a pronoun resolution cue depends on the coherence relation in which the verb, the antecedent and the pronoun appear. Many studies have shown that readers and listeners recruit verb-based implicit causality information rapidly in the service of pronoun resolution. However, since most of these studies focused on constructions in which because connected the two critical clauses, it is unclear to what extent implicit causality information affects the processing of pronouns embedded in other types of coherence relations. In an eye-tracking and completion study we addressed this void by varying whether because, but, and and joined a primary clause containing the implicit causality verb, with a secondary clause containing a critical gender-marked pronoun. The results showed that the claims made for implicit causality hold if the connective because is present (i.e., a reading time delay following a pronoun that is inconsistent with the implicit causality bias of the verb), but do not generalise to other connectives like but and and. This shows that the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a pronoun resolution cue depends on the coherence relation in which the verb, the antecedent and the pronoun appear. |
Hamutal Kreiner; Simon Garrod; Patrick Sturt Number agreement in sentence comprehension: The relationship between grammatical and conceptual factors Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 6, pp. 829–874, 2013. @article{Kreiner2013,Studies in theoretical linguistics argue that subject-verb agreement is more sensitive to grammatical number, while pronoun-antecedent agreement is more sensitive to conceptual number. This claim is robustly supported by speech production research, but few studies have examined this issue in comprehension. We investigated this dissociation between conceptual and grammatical number agreement in three eye-tracking reading experiments, using collective nouns like ?group?, which can be notionally interpreted as either singular or plural. Experiment 1 indicated that pronoun-antecedent agreement is conceptually driven; Experiment 2 indicated that subject-verb agreement is morpho-syntactically driven. Experiment 3 indicated that the morpho-grammatical processes that control the initial processing of subject-verb agreement do not bias later semantic processing of pronoun-antecedent number agreement, even when the anaphor and the verb occur in the same sentence, and the same collective noun is both the subject of the verb and antecedent of the pronoun. In view of these findings we propose that the processes that control number agreement in comprehension show a dissociation between semantic and morpho-syntactic processing that is similar to the dissociation demonstrated in speech-production. We discuss various theoretical frameworks that can account for this similarity.$backslash$nStudies in theoretical linguistics argue that subject-verb agreement is more sensitive to grammatical number, while pronoun-antecedent agreement is more sensitive to conceptual number. This claim is robustly supported by speech production research, but few studies have examined this issue in comprehension. We investigated this dissociation between conceptual and grammatical number agreement in three eye-tracking reading experiments, using collective nouns like ?group?, which can be notionally interpreted as either singular or plural. Experiment 1 indicated that pronoun-antecedent agreement is conceptually driven; Experiment 2 indicated that subject-verb agreement is morpho-syntactically driven. Experiment 3 indicated that the morpho-grammatical processes that control the initial processing of subject-verb agreement do not bias later semantic processing of pronoun-antecedent number agreement, even when the anaphor and the verb occur in the same sentence, and the same collective noun is both the subject of the verb and antecedent of the pronoun. In view of these findings we propose that the processes that control number agreement in comprehension show a dissociation between semantic and morpho-syntactic processing that is similar to the dissociation demonstrated in speech-production. We discuss various theoretical frameworks that can account for this similarity. |
Victor Kuperman; Julie A. Van Dyke Reassessing word frequency as a determinant of word recognition for skilled and unskilled readers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 802–823, 2013. @article{Kuperman2013,The importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension emphasizes the need to accurately assess an individual's familiarity with words. The present article highlights problems with using occurrence counts in corpora as an index of word familiarity, especially when studying individuals varying in reading experience. We demonstrate via computational simulations and norming studies that corpus-based word frequencies systematically overestimate strengths of word representations, especially in the low-frequency range and in smaller-size vocabularies. Experience-driven differences in word familiarity prove to be faithfully captured by the subjective frequency ratings collected from responders at different experience levels. When matched on those levels, this lexical measure explains more variance than corpus-based frequencies in eye-movement and lexical decision latencies to English words, attested in populations with varied reading experience and skill. Furthermore, the use of subjective frequencies removes the widely reported (corpus) Frequency × Skill interaction, showing that more skilled readers are equally faster in processing any word than the less skilled readers, not disproportionally faster in processing lower frequency words. This finding challenges the view that the more skilled an individual is in generic mechanisms of word processing, the less reliant he or she will be on the actual lexical characteristics of that word. |
Evelyne Lagrou; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Wouter Duyck Interlingual lexical competition in a spoken sentence context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 963–972, 2013. @article{Lagrou2013,We used the visual world paradigm to examine interlingual lexical competition when Dutch-English bilinguals listened to low-constraining sentences in their nonnative (L2; Experiment 1) and native (L1; Experiment 2) languages. Additionally, we investigated the influence of the degree of cross-lingual phonological similarity. When listening in L2, participants fixated more on competitor pictures of which the onset of the name was phonologically related to the onset of the name of the target in the nontarget language (e.g., fles, "bottle", given target flower) than on phonologically unrelated distractor pictures. Even when they listened in L1, this effect was also observed when the onsets of the names of the target picture (in L1) and the competitor picture (in L2) were phonologically very similar. These findings provide evidence for interlingual competition during the comprehension of spoken sentences, both in L2 and in L1. |
Paola E. Dussias; Jorge R. Valdés Kroff; Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo; Chip Gerfen When gender and looking go hand in hand Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 353–387, 2013. @article{Dussias2013,In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald ( 2007 ) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether gram- matical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2) processing. Sixteen monolingual Spanish participants (control group) The and 18 English-speaking learners of Spanish (evenly divided into high and low Spanish profi ciency) saw two-picture visual scenes in which items matched or did not match in gender. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they listened to 28 sentences in which masculine and feminine target items were preceded by an article that agreed in gender with the two pictures or agreed only with one of the pictures. An additional group of 15 Italian learners of Spanish was tested to examine whether the presence of gender in the fi rst language (L1) modulates the degree to which gender is used during L2 processing. Data were analyzed by comparing the proportion of eye fi xations on the objects in each condition. Monolingual Spanish speakers looked sooner at the referent on different-gender trials than on same-gender trials, replicating results reported in past literature. Italian-Spanish bilinguals exhibited a gender anticipatory effect, but only for the feminine condition. For the masculine condition, partici- pants waited to hear the noun before identifying the referent. Like the Spanish monolinguals, the highly profi cient English-Spanish speakers showed evidence of using gender information during online process- ing, whereas the less profi cient learners did not. The results suggest that both profi ciency in the L2 and similarities between the L1 and the L2 modulate the usefulness of morphosyntactic information during speech processing. |
Miriam Ellert Resolving ambiguous pronouns in a second language: A visual-world eye-tracking study with dutch learners of German Journal Article In: International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 171–197, 2013. @article{Ellert2013,This study examined whether resolving ambiguous pronouns in a second language is guided by the L1 preferences of the learners. Given the fact that the typologically closely related languages, German and Dutch, have both been found to use personal pronouns (German er, Dutch hij; ‘he') to refer to topical antecedents, and d-pronouns (German der,Dutch die; ‘he') for non-topical co- reference (Ellert 2010; Kaiser 2011; Kaiser and Trueswell 2004), it was asked whether Dutch L2 learners of German would exhibit similar preferences when resolving the two pronominal forms in their L2. This was examined with the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm and an off-line referent assignment task. The results showed differences in resolution patterns: the Dutch learners of German showed an overall topic preference across pronouns which became more target-like at higher proficiency levels. This suggests that L2 information organization cannot be merely explained by L1 influences, but needs to take more more general L2 learner effects into account. |
Ashley Farris-Trimble; Bob McMurray Test–retest reliability of eye tracking in the visual world paradigm for the study of real-time spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 1328, 2013. @article{FarrisTrimble2013,Purpose: Researchers have begun to use eye tracking in the visual world paradigm (VWP) to study clinical differences in language processing, but the reliability of such laboratory tests has rarely been assessed. In this article, the authors assess test-retest reliability of the VWP for spoken word recognition. Methods: Participants performed an auditory VWP task in repeated sessions and a visual-only VWP task in a third session. The authors performed correlation and regression analyses on several parameters to determine which reflect reliable behavior and which are predictive of behavior in later sessions. Results: Results showed that the fixation parameters most closely related to timing and degree of fixations were moderately-to-strongly correlated across days, whereas the parameters related to rate of increase or decrease of fixations to particular items were less strongly correlated. Moreover, when including factors derived from the visual-only task, the performance of the regression model was at least moderately correlated with Day 2 performance on all parameters (R > .30). Conclusion: The VWP is stable enough (with some caveats) to serve as an individual measure. These findings suggest guidelines for future use of the paradigm and for areas of improvement in both methodology and analysis. |
Fernanda Ferreira; Alice Foucart; Paul E. Engelhardt Language processing in the visual world: Effects of preview, visual complexity, and prediction Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 165–182, 2013. @article{Ferreira2013,This study investigates how people interpret spoken sentences in the context of a relevant visual world by focusing on garden-path sentences, such as Put the book on the chair in the bucket, in which the prepositional phrase on the chair is temporarily ambiguous between a goal and modifier interpretation. In three comprehension experiments, listeners heard these types of sentences (along with disambiguated controls) while viewing arrays of objects. These experiments demonstrate that a classic garden-path effect is obtained only when listeners have a preview of the display and when the visual context contains relatively few objects. Results from a production experiment suggest that listeners accrue knowledge that may allow them to have certain expectations of the upcoming utterance based on visual information. Taken together, these findings have theoretical implications for both the role of prediction as an adaptive comprehension strategy, and for how comprehension tendencies change under variable visual and temporal processing demands. |
Ruth Filik; Hartmut Leuthold The role of character-based knowledge in online narrative comprehension: Evidence from eye movements and ERPs Journal Article In: Brain Research, vol. 1506, pp. 94–104, 2013. @article{Filik2013,Little is known about the on-line evaluation of information relating to well-known story characters during text comprehension. For example, it is not clear in how much detail readers represent character-based information, and the time course over which this information is utilized during on-line language comprehension. We describe an event-related potential (ERP) study (Experiment 1) and an eye-tracking study (Experiment 2) investigating whether, and when, readers utilize their prior knowledge of a character in processing event information. Participants read materials in which an event was described that either did or did not fit with the character's typical behavior. ERPs elicited by the critical word revealed an N400 effect when the action described did not fit with the character's typical behavior. Results from early eye movement measures supported these findings, and later measures suggested that such violations were more easily accommodated for well-known fictional characters than real-world characters. |
Gemma Fitzsimmons How fast can predictability influence word skipping during reading? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 1054–1063, 2013. @article{Fitzsimmons2013,Participants' eye movements were tracked when reading sentences in which target word predictability was manipulated to being unpredictable from the preceding context, predictable from the sentence preceding the one in which the target word was embedded, or predictable from the adjective directly preceding the target word. Results show that there was no difference in skipping rates between the 2 predictability conditions, which were skipped more often than the neutral condition. This suggests that predictability can impact the decision of whether to skip a word to a similar degree irrespective of whether the predictability originated from the prior word or the entire preceding sentence context. This finding can only be explained by models of eye-movement control during reading that assume that word n is processed up to a high level before the decision to skip word n + 1 is made. |
Tori E. Foster; Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder Underlying changes in repeated reading: An eye movement study Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 140–156, 2013. @article{Foster2013,Past research supports the use of repeated reading but does not provide conclusive evidence as to the mechanisms through which RR takes effect. Eye movement studies allow for precise examination of intervention effects. The current study examined underlying changes in elementar>' students' (A'^^ 43) reading behavior across four consecutive readings of the same passage. Passage- level analyses revealed that rereading yielded significant decreases in measures thought to reflect early processing (i.e., first fixation duration, gaze duration) and higher level processing (i.e., total fixation time, number of regressions, average number of fixations per word). Analyses based on embedded high- and low- frequency target words suggested that repeated reading mainly facilitates reading of low-frequency words, but that children remain sensitive to word frequency after rereading. Finally, results indicated that children who have completed repeated reading continue to focus on word-level (vs. passage-level) reading but devote less overall attention to individual words with repeated practice. |
Tom Foulsham; James Farley; Alan Kingstone Mind wandering in sentence reading: Decoupling the link between mind and eye Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 1, pp. 51–59, 2013. @article{Foulsham2013,When people read, their thoughts sometimes drift away from the task at hand: They are "mind wandering." Recent research suggests that this change in task focus is reflected in eye movements and this was tested in an experiment using controlled stimuli. Participants were presented with a series of sentences containing high- and low-frequency words, which they read while being eye-tracked, and they were sometimes probed to indicate whether they were on task or mind wandering. The results showed multiple differences between reading prior to a mind-wandering response and reading when on task: Mind wandering led to slower reading times, longer average fixation duration, and an absence of the word frequency effect on gaze duration. Collectively, these findings confirm that task focus could be inferred from eye movements, and they indicate that the link between word identification and eye scanning is decoupled when the mind wanders. |
Stefan L. Frank; Irene Fernandez Monsalve; Robin L. Thompson; Gabriella Vigliocco Reading time data for evaluating broad-coverage models of English sentence processing Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 1182–1190, 2013. @article{Frank2013,We make available word-by-word self-paced reading times and eye-tracking data over a sample of English sentences from narrative sources. These data are intended to form a gold standard for the evaluation of computational psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in English. We describe stimuli selection and data collection and present descriptive statistics, as well as comparisons between the two sets of reading times. |
Irene Ablinger; Walter Huber; Kerstin I. Schattka; Ralph Radach Recovery in a letter-by-letter reader: More efficiency at the expense of normal reading strategy Journal Article In: Neurocase, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 236–255, 2013. @article{Ablinger2013,Although changes in reading performance of recovering letter-by-letter readers have been described in some detail, no prior research has provided an in-depth analysis of the underlying adaptive word processing strategies. Our work examined the reading performance of a letter-by-letter reader, FH, over a period of 15 months, using eye movement methodology to delineate the recovery process at two different time points (T1, T2). A central question is whether recovery is characterized either by moving back towards normal word processing or by refinement and possibly automatization of an existing pathological strategy that was developed in response to the impairment. More specifically, we hypothesized that letter-by-letter reading may be executed with at least four different strategies and our work sought to distinguish between these alternatives. During recovery significant improvements in reading performance were achieved. A shift of fixation positions from the far left to the extreme right of target words was combined with many small and very few longer regressive saccades. Apparently, ‘letter-by-letter reading' took the form of local clustering, most likely corresponding to the formation ofsublexical units ofanalysis. This pattern was more pronounced at T2, suggesting that improvements in reading efficiency may come at the expense of making it harder to eventually return to normal reading. |
Bernhard Angele; Keith Rayner Processing the in the parafovea: Are articles skipped automatically? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 649–662, 2013. @article{Angele2013,One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article the. Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string t-h-e automatically. We tested whether skipping of articles in English is sensitive to context information or whether it is truly automatic in the sense that any occurrence of the letter string the will trigger a skip. This was done using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to provide readers with false parafoveal previews of the article the. All experimental sentences contained a short target verb, the preview of which could be correct (i.e., identical to the actual subsequent word in the sentence; e.g., ace), a nonword (tda), or an infelicitous article preview (the). Our results indicated that readers tended to skip the infelicitous the previews frequently, suggesting that, in many cases, they seemed to be unable to detect the syntactic anomaly in the preview and based their skipping decision solely on the orthographic properties of the article. However, there was some evidence that readers sometimes detected the anomaly, as they also showed increased skipping of the pretarget word in the the preview condition. |
Bernhard Angele; Keith Rayner Eye movements and parafoveal preview of compound words: Does morpheme order matter? Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 505–526, 2013. @article{Angele2013a,Recently, there has been considerable debate about whether readers can identify multiple words in parallel or whether they are limited to a serial mode of word identification, processing one word at a time (see, e.g., Reichle, Liversedge, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2009). Similar questions can be applied to bimorphemic compound words: Do readers identify all the constituents of a compound word in parallel, and does it matter which of the morphemes is identified first? We asked subjects to read compound words embedded in sentences while monitoring their eye movements. Using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), we manipulated the preview that subjects received of the compound word before they fixated it. In particular, the morpheme order of the preview was either normal (cowboy) or reversed (boycow). Additionally, we manipulated the preview availability for each of the morphemes separately. Preview was thus available for the first morpheme only (cowtxg), for the second morpheme only (enzboy), or for neither of the morphemes (enztxg). We report three major findings: First, there was an effect of morpheme order on gaze durations measured on the compound word, indicating that, as expected, readers obtained a greater preview benefit when the preview presented the morphemes in the correct order than when their order was reversed. Second, gaze durations on the compound word were influenced not only by preview availability for the first, but also by that for the second morpheme. Finally, and most importantly, the results show that readers are able to extract some morpheme information even from a reverse order preview. In summary, readers obtain preview benefit from both constituents of a short compound word, even when the preview does not reflect the correct morpheme order. |
Manabu Arai; Frank Keller The use of verb-specific information for prediction in sentence processing Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 525–560, 2013. @article{Arai2013,Recent research has shown that language comprehenders make predictions about upcoming linguistic information. These studies demonstrate that the processor not only analyses the input that it received but also predicts upcoming unseen elements. Two visual world experiments were conducted to examine the type of syntactic information this prediction process has access to. Experiment 1 examined whether the verb's subcategorization information is used for predicting a direct object, by comparing transitive verbs (e.g., punish) to intransitive verbs (e.g., disagree). Experiment 2 examined whether verb frequency information is used for predicting a reduced relative clause by contrasting verbs that are infrequent in the past participle form (e.g., watch) with ones that are frequent in that form (e.g., record). Both experiments showed that comprehenders used lexically specific syntactic information to predict upcoming syntactic structure; this information can be used to avoid garden paths in certain cases, as Experiment 2 demonstrated. |
Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder; Andrea M. Zawoyski; Tori E. Foster; Leslie A. Blevins Using eye-tracking procedures to evaluate generalization effects: Practicing target words during repeated readings within versus across texts Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 477–495, 2013. @article{Ardoin2013,Repeated readings is a frequently studied and recommended intervention for improving reading fluency. Typically, researchers investigate generalization of repeated readings interventions by assessing students' accuracy and rate on researcher-developed high word overlap passages. Unfortunately, this methodology may mask intervention effects given that the dependent measure is reflective of time spent by students reading both practiced and unpracticed words. Eye-tracking procedures have the potential to overcome this limitation. The current study examined the eye movements of participants who were (a) not provided with any intervention (n = 28), (b) provided with repeated readings on a single passage containing a set of target words (n = 28), or (c) provided the opportunity to read four different passages each containing the same set of target words (n = 28). Students' reading of a novel passage containing the target words provides evidence to support recommendations that schools use repeated readings. Copyright 2013 by the National Association of School Psychologists. |
Jane Ashby; Heather Dix; Morgan Bontrager Phonemic awareness contributes to text reading fluency: Evidence from eye movements. Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 157–170, 2013. @article{Ashby2013,Although phonemic awareness is a known predictor of early decoding and word recognition, less is known about relationships between phonemic awareness and text reading fluency. This longitudinal study is the first to inves-tigate this relationship by measuring eye movements during picture matching tasks and during silent sentence reading. Time spent looking at the correct target during phonemic awareness and receptive spelling tasks gauged the efficiency of phonological and orthographic processes. Children's eye movements during sen-tence reading provided a direct measure of silent reading fluency for compre-hended text. Results indicate that children who processed the phonemic awareness targets more slowly in Grade 2 tended to be slower readers in Grade 3. Processing difficulty during a receptive spelling task was related to reading fluency within Grade 2. Findings suggest that inefficient phonemic processing contributes to poor silent reading fluency after second grade. |
Xuejun Bai; Feifei Liang; Hazel I. Blythe; Chuanli Zang; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Interword spacing effects on the acquisition of new vocabulary for readers of Chinese as a second language Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 36, pp. S4–S17, 2013. @article{Bai2013,We examined whether interword spacing would facilitate acquisition of new vocabulary for second language learners of Chinese. Participants' eye movements were measured as they read new vocabulary embedded in sentences during a learning session and a test session. In the learning session, participants read sentences in traditional unspaced format and half-read sentences with interword spacing. In the test session, all participants read unspaced sentences. Participants in the spaced learning group read the target words more quickly than those in the unspaced learning group. This benefit was maintained at test, indicating that the manipulation enhanced learning of the novel words and was not a transient effect limited to occasions when interword spacing was present in the printed text. The insertion of interword spaces may allow readers to form a more fully specified representation of the novel word, or to strengthen connections between representations of the constituent characters and the multi-character word. |
Lesya Y. Ganushchak; Andrea Krott; Steven Frisson; Antje S. Meyer Processing words and Short Message Service shortcuts in sentential contexts: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 163–179, 2013. @article{Ganushchak2013,The present study investigated whether ShortMessage Service shortcuts are more difficult to process in sentence context than the spelled-out word equivalent and, if so, how any additional processing difficulty arises. Twenty-four student participants read 37 Short Message Service shortcuts and word equivalents embedded in semantically plausible and implausible contexts (e.g., He left/drank u/you a note) while their eye movements were recorded. There were effects of plausibility and spelling on early measures of processing difficulty (first fixation durations, gaze durations, skipping, and first-pass regression rates for the targets), but there were no interactions of plausibility and spelling. Late measures of processing difficulty (second run gaze duration and total fixation duration) were only affected by plausibility but not by spelling. These results suggest that shortcuts are harder to recognize, but that, once recognized, they are integrated into the sentence context as easily as ordinary words. |
Hanna S. Gauvin; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Falk Huettig Speech monitoring and phonologically-mediated eye gaze in language perception and production: A comparison using printed word eye-tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 7, pp. 818, 2013. @article{Gauvin2013,The Perceptual Loop Theory of speech monitoring assumes that speakers routinely inspect their inner speech. In contrast, Huettig and Hartsuiker (2010) observed that listening to one's own speech during language production drives eye-movements to phonologically related printed words with a similar time-course as listening to someone else's speech does in speech perception experiments. This suggests that speakers use their speech perception system to listen to their own overt speech, but not to their inner speech. However, a direct comparison between production and perception with the same stimuli and participants is lacking so far. The current printed word eye-tracking experiment therefore used a within-subjects design, combining production and perception. Displays showed four words, of which one, the target, either had to be named or was presented auditorily. Accompanying words were phonologically related, semantically related, or unrelated to the target. There were small increases in looks to phonological competitors with a similar time-course in both production and perception. Phonological effects in perception however lasted longer and had a much larger magnitude. We conjecture that this difference is related to a difference in predictability of one's own and someone else's speech, which in turn has consequences for lexical competition in other-perception and possibly suppression of activation in self-perception. |
Saeideh Ghahghaei; Karina J. Linnell; Martin H. Fischer; Amit Dubey; Robert Davis Effects of load on the time course of attentional engagement, disengagement, and orienting in reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 453–470, 2013. @article{Ghahghaei2013,We examined how the frequency of the fixated word influences the spatiotemporal distribution of covert attention during reading. Participants discriminated gaze-contingent probes that occurred with different spatial and temporal offsets from randomly chosen fixation points during reading. We found that attention was initially focused at fixation and that subsequent defocusing was slower when the fixated word was lower in frequency. Later in a fixation, attention oriented more towards the next saccadic target for high- than for low-frequency words. These results constitute the first report of the time course of the effect of load on attentional engagement and orienting in reading. They are discussed in the context of serial and parallel models of reading. |
Aline Godfroid; Frank Boers; Alex Housen An eye for words: Gauging the role of attention in incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition by means of eye-tracking Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 483–517, 2013. @article{Godfroid2013,This eye-tracking study tests the hypothesis that more attention leads to more learning, following claims that attention to new language elements in the input results in their initial representation in long-term memory (i.e., intake; Robinson, 2003; Schmidt, 1990, 2001). Twenty-eight advanced learners of English read English texts that contained 12 targets for incidental word learning. The target was a known word (control condition), a matched pseudoword, or that pseudoword preceded or followed by the known word (with the latter being a cue to the pseudoword's meaning). Participants' eye-fixation durations on the targets during reading served as a measure of the amount of attention paid (see Rayner, 2009). Results indicate that participants spent more time processing the unknown pseudowords than their matched controls. The longer participants looked at a pseudoword during reading, the more likely they were to recognize that word in an unannounced vocabulary posttest. Finally, the known, appositive cues were fixated longer when they followed the pseudowords than when they preceded them; however, their presence did not lead to higher retention of the pseudowords. We discuss how eye-tracking may add to existing methodologies for studying attention and noticing (Schmidt, 1990) in SLA. |
Aline Godfroid; Maren S. Uggen Attention to irregular verbs by beginning learners of German: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 291–322, 2013. @article{Godfroid2013a,This study focuses on beginning second language learners' attention to irregular verb morphology, an area of grammar that many adults fi nd diffi cult to acquire (e.g., DeKeyser, 2005 ; Larsen-Freeman, 2010 ). We measured beginning learners' eye movements during sentence processing to investigate whether or not they actually attend to irregular verb features and, if so, whether the amount of attention that they pay to these features predicts their acquisition. On the assumption that attention facilitates learning (e.g., Gass, 1997 ; Robinson, 2003 ; Schmidt, 2001 ), we expected more attention (i.e., longer fi xations or more frequent comparisons between verb forms) to lead to more learning of the irregular verbs. Forty beginning learners of German read 12 German sentence pairs with stem-changing verbs and 12 German sentence pairs with regular verbs while an Eyelink 1000. We recorded their eye movements. The stem-changing verbs consisted of six a → ä changing verbs and six e → i(e) changing verbs. Each verb appeared in a baseline sentence in the fi rst-person singular, which has no stem change, and a critical sentence in the second- or third-person singular, which have a stem change for the irregular but not the regular verbs, on the same screen. Productive pre- and posttests measured the effects of exposure on learning. Results indicate that learners looked longer overall at stem-changing verbs than regular verbs, revealing a late effect of verb irregularity on reading times. Longer total times had a modest, favorable effect on the subsequent production of the stem vowel. Finally, the production of only the a → ä verbs—not the e → i(e) verbs—benefi ted from direct visual comparisons during reading, possibly because of the umlaut in the former. We interpret the results with reference to recent theory and research on attention, noticing, and language learning and provide a more nuanced and empirically based understanding of the noticing construct. |
Peter C. Gordon; Patrick Plummer; Wonil Choi See before you jump: Full recognition of parafoveal words precedes skips during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 633–641, 2013. @article{Gordon2013,Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through prime-target pairs embedded within a sentence. The boundary technique (Rayner, 1975) was used to determine whether the target word was fully available during parafoveal preview or whether it was available with transposed letters (e.g., Herman changed to Hreman). With full parafoveal preview, the target word was skipped more frequently when it matched the earlier prime word (i.e., was repeated) than when it did not match the earlier prime word (i.e., was new). With transposed-letter (TL) preview, repetition had no effect on skipping rates despite the great similarity of the TL preview string to the target word and substantial evidence that TL strings activate the words from which they are derived (Perea & Lupker, 2003). These results show that lexically based skipping is based on full recognition of the letter string in parafoveal preview and does not involve using the contextual constraint to compensate for the reduced information available from the parafovea. These results are consistent with models of eye-movement control during reading in which successive words in a text are processed 1 at a time (serially) and in which word recognition strongly influences eye movements. |
Martin Groen; Jan Noyes Establishing goals and maintaining coherence in multiparty computer-mediated communication Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 85–106, 2013. @article{Groen2013,Communicating via text-only computer-mediated communication (CMC) channels is associated with a number of issues that would impair users in achieving dialogue coherence and goals. It has been suggested that humans have devised novel adaptive strategies to deal with those issues. However, it could be that humans rely on “classic” coherence devices too. In this study, we investigate whether relevancy markers, a subset of discourse markers, are relied on to assess dialogue coherence and goals. The results of two experiments showed that participants oriented systematically on the relevancy markers and that substitution of the original markers for other (dis)similar words affected eye movements and task performance. It appears that, despite the loosely connected dialogue contributions, the multiple concurrent dialogues, and the multiparty nature of text-only CMC dialogues, humans are able still to locate coherence- and goal-related information by relying on the presence of the relevancy markers. |
Katherine Guérard; Jean Saint-Aubin; Marilyne Maltais The role of verbal memory in regressions during reading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 122–136, 2013. @article{Guerard2013,During reading, a number of eye movements are made backward, on words that have already been read. Recent evidence suggests that such eye movements, called regressions, are guided by memory. Several studies point to the role of spatial memory, but evidence for the role of verbal memory is more limited. In the present study, we examined the factors that modulate the role of verbal memory in regressions. Participants were required to make regressions on target words located in sentences displayed on one or two lines. Verbal interference was shown to affect regressions, but only when participants executed a regression on a word located in the first part of the sentence, irrespective of the number of lines on which the sentence was displayed. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the effect of verbal interference on words located in the first part of the sentence disappeared when participants initiated the regression from the middle of the sentence. Our results suggest that verbal memory is recruited to guide regressions, but only for words read a longer time ago. |
Jesse A. Harris; Charles Clifton; Lyn Frazier Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 10, pp. 1519–1544, 2013. @article{Harris2013a,Three studies investigated how readers interpret sentences with variable quantificational domains, for example, The army was mostly in the capital, where mostly may quantify over individuals or parts (Most of the army was in the capital) or over times (The army was in the capital most of the time). It is proposed that a general conceptual economy principle, No Extra Times, discourages the postulation of potentially unnecessary times, and thus favours the interpretation quantifying over parts. Disambiguating an ambiguously quantified sentence to a quantification over times interpretation was rated as less natural than disambiguating it to a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 1). In an interpretation questionnaire, sentences with similar quantificational variability were constructed so that both interpretations of the sentence would require postulating multiple times; this resulted in the elimination of the preference for a quantification over parts interpretation, suggesting the parts preference observed in Experiment 1 is not reducible to a lexical bias of the adverb mostly (Experiment 2). An eye movement recording study showed that, in the absence of prior evidence for multiple times, readers exhibit greater difficulty when reading material that forces a quantification over times interpretation than when reading material that allows a quantification over parts interpretation (Experiment 3). These experiments contribute to understanding readers' default assumptions about the temporal properties of sentences, which is essential for understanding the selection of a domain for adverbial quantifiers and, more generally, for understanding how situational constraints influence sentence processing. |
Patrice Speeter Beddor; Kevin B. McGowan; Julie E. Boland; Andries W. Coetzee; Anthony Brasher The time course of perception of coarticulation Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 133, no. 4, pp. 2350–2366, 2013. @article{Beddor2013,The perception of coarticulated speech as it unfolds over time was investigated by monitoring eye movements of participants as they listened to words with oral vowels or with late or early onset of anticipatory vowel nasalization. When listeners heard [CVNC] and had visual choices of images of CVNC (e.g., send) and CVC (said) words, they fixated more quickly and more often on the CVNC image when onset of nasalization began early in the vowel compared to when the coarticulatory information occurred later. Moreover, when a standard eye movement programming delay is factored in, fixations on the CVNC image began to occur before listeners heard the nasal consonant. Listeners' attention to coarticulatory cues for velum lowering was selective in two respects: (a) listeners assigned greater perceptual weight to coarticulatory information in phonetic contexts in which [V] but not N is an especially robust property, and (b) individual listeners differed in their perceptual weights. Overall, the time course of perception of velum lowering in American English indicates that the dynamics of perception parallel the dynamics of the gestural information encoded in the acoustic signal. In real-time processing, listeners closely track unfolding coarticulatory information in ways that speed lexical activation. |
Nathalie N. Bélanger; Rachel I. Mayberry; Keith Rayner Orthographic and phonological preview benefits: Parafoveal processing in skilled and less-skilled deaf readers Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 11, pp. 2237–2252, 2013. @article{Belanger2013a,Many deaf individuals do not develop the high-level reading skills that will allow them to fully take part into society. To attempt to explain this widespread difficulty in the deaf population, much research has honed in on the use of phonological codes during reading. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers, though not well supported, still lingers in the literature. We investigated skilled and less-skilled adult deaf readers' processing of orthographic and phonological codes in parafoveal vision during reading by monitoring their eye movements and using the boundary paradigm. Orthographic preview benefits were found in early measures of reading for skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers, but only skilled hearing readers processed phonological codes in parafoveal vision. Crucially, skilled and less-skilled deaf readers showed a very similar pattern of preview benefits during reading. These results support the notion that reading difficulties in deaf adults are not linked to their failure to activate phonological codes during reading. |
Nathalie N. Bélanger; Keith Rayner Frequency and predictability effects in eye fixations for skilled and less-skilled deaf readers Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 477–497, 2013. @article{Belanger2013,The illiteracy rate in the deaf population has been alarmingly high for several decades, despite the fact that deaf children go through the standard stages of schooling. Much research addressing this issue has focused on word-level processes, but in the recent years, little research has focused on sentence-levels processes. Previous research (Fischler, 1985) investigated word integration within context in college-level deaf and hearing readers in a lexical decision task following incomplete sentences with targets that were congruous or incongruous relative to the preceding context; it was found that deaf readers, as a group, were more dependent on contextual information than their hearing counterparts. The present experiment extended Fischler's results and investigated the relationship between frequency, predictability, and reading skill in skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers. Results suggest that only less-skilled deaf readers, and not all deaf readers, rely more on contextual cues to boost word processing. Additionally, early effects of frequency and predictability were found for all three groups of readers, without any evidence for an interaction between frequency and predictability. |
Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Girish Kumar; Jasmine Junge; Susana T. L. Chung The effect of letter-stroke boldness on reading speed in central and peripheral vision Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 84, pp. 33–42, 2013. @article{Bernard2013,People with central vision loss often prefer boldface print over normal print for reading. However, little is known about how reading speed is influenced by the letter-stroke boldness of font. In this study, we examined the reliance of reading speed on stroke boldness, and determined whether this reliance differs between the normal central and peripheral vision. Reading speed was measured using the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm, where observers with normal vision read aloud short single sentences presented on a computer monitor, one word at a time. Text was rendered in Courier at six levels of boldness, defined as the stroke-width normalized to that of the standard Courier font: 0.27, 0.72, 1, 1.48, 1.89 and 3.04× the standard. Testings were conducted at the fovea and 10° in the inferior visual field. Print sizes used were 0.8× and 1.4× the critical print size (smallest print size that can be read at the maximum reading speed). At the fovea, reading speed was invariant for the middle four levels of boldness, but dropped by 23.3% for the least and the most bold text. At 10° eccentricity, reading speed was virtually the same for all boldness <1, but showed a poorer tolerance to bolder text, dropping by 21.5% for 1.89× boldness and 51% for the most bold (3.04×) text. These results could not be accounted for by the changes in print size or the RMS contrast of text associated with changes in stroke boldness. Our results suggest that contrary to the popular belief, reading speed does not benefit from bold text in the normal fovea and periphery. Excessive increase in stroke boldness may even impair reading speed, especially in the periphery. |
Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä The role of hyphens at the constituent boundary in compound word identification: Facilitative for long, detrimental for short compound words Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 60, no. 3, pp. 157–163, 2013. @article{Bertram2013a,The current eye-movement study investigated whether a salient segmentation cue like the hyphen facilitates the identification of long and short compound words. The study was conducted in Finnish, where compound words exist in great abundance. The results showed that long hyphenated compounds (musiikki-ilta) are identified faster than concatenated ones (yllätystulos), but short hyphenated compounds (ilta-asu) are identified slower than their concatenated counterparts (kesäsää). This pattern of results is explained by the visual acuity principle (<citationReference id="cr1-1" rid="c1">Bertram & Hyönä, 2003</citationReference>): A long compound word does not fully fit in the foveal area, where visual acuity is at its best. Therefore, its identification begins with the access of the initial constituent and this sequential processing is facilitated by the hyphen. However, a short compound word fits in the foveal area, and consequently the hyphen slows down processing by encouraging sequential processing in cases where it is possible to extract and use information of the second constituent as well. |
Robert W. Booth; Ulrich W. Weger The function of regressions in reading: Backward eye movements allow rereading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 82–97, 2013. @article{Booth2013,Standard text reading involves frequent eye movements that go against normal reading order. The function of these "regressions" is still largely unknown. The most obvious explanation is that regressions allow for the rereading of previously fixated words. Alternatively, physically returning the eyes to a word's location could cue the reader's memory for that word, effectively aiding the comprehension process via location priming (the "deictic pointer hypothesis"). In Experiment 1, regression frequency was reduced when readers knew that information was no longer available for rereading. In Experiment 2, readers listened to auditorily presented text while moving their eyes across visual placeholders on the screen. Here, rereading was impossible, but deictic pointers remained available, yet the readers did not make targeted regressions in this experiment. In Experiment 3, target words in normal sentences were changed after reading. Where the eyes later regressed to these words, participants generally remained unaware of the change, and their answers to comprehension questions indicated that the new meaning of the changed word was what determined their sentence representations. These results suggest that readers use regressions to reread words and not to cue their memory for previously read words. |
Arielle Borovsky; Erin Burns; Jeffrey L. Elman; Julia L. Evans Lexical activation during sentence comprehension in adolescents with history of specific language impairment Journal Article In: Journal of Communication Disorders, vol. 46, no. 5-6, pp. 413–427, 2013. @article{Borovsky2013,One remarkable characteristic of speech comprehension in typically developing (TD) children and adults is the speed with which the listener can integrate information across multiple lexical items to anticipate upcoming referents. Although children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show lexical deficits (Sheng & McGregor, 2010) and slower speed of processing (Leonard et al., 2007), relatively little is known about how these deficits manifest in real-time sentence comprehension. In this study, we examine lexical activation in the comprehension of simple transitive sentences in adolescents with a history of SLI and age-matched, TD peers. Participants listened to sentences that consisted of the form, Article-Agent-Action-Article-Theme, (e.g., The pirate chases the ship) while viewing pictures of four objects that varied in their relationship to the Agent and Action of the sentence (e.g., Target, Agent-Related, Action-Related, and Unrelated). Adolescents with SLI were as fast as their TD peers to fixate on the sentence's final item (the Target) but differed in their post-action onset visual fixations to the Action-Related item. Additional exploratory analyses of the spatial distribution of their visual fixations revealed that the SLI group had a qualitatively different pattern of fixations to object images than did the control group. The findings indicate that adolescents with SLI integrate lexical information across words to anticipate likely or expected meanings with the same relative fluency and speed as do their TD peers. However, the failure of the SLI group to show increased fixations to Action-Related items after the onset of the action suggests lexical integration deficits that result in failure to consider alternate sentence interpretations.Learning outcomes: As a result of this paper, the reader will be able to describe several benefits of using eye-tracking methods to study populations with language disorders. They should also recognize several potential explanations for lexical deficits in SLI, including possible reduced speed of processing, and degraded lexical representations. Finally, they should recall the main outcomes of this study, including that adolescents with SLI show different timing and location of eye-fixations while interpreting sentences than their age-matched peers. © 2013. |
Oliver Bott The processing domain of aspectual interpretation Journal Article In: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 93, pp. 195–229, 2013. @article{Bott2013,In the semantic literature lexical aspect is often treated as a property of VPs or even of whole sentences. Does the interpretation of lexical aspect – contrary to the incrementality assumption commonly made in psycholinguistics – have to wait until the verb and all its arguments are present? To address this issue, we conducted an offline study, two self-paced reading experiments and an eyetracking experiment to investigate aspectual mismatch and aspectual coercion in German sentences while manipulating the position of the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Our findings provide evidence that mismatch detection and aspectual repair depend on a complete verb-argument structure. When the verb didn't receive all its (minimally required) arguments no mismatch or coercion effects showed up at the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Effects were delayed until a later point after all the arguments had been encountered. These findings have important consequences for semantic theory and for processing accounts of aspectual semantics. As far as semantic theory is concerned, it has to model lexical aspect as a supralexical property coming only into play at the sentence level. For theories of semantic processing the results are even more striking because they indicate that (at least some) semantic phenomena are processed on a more global level than it would be expected assuming incremental semantic interpretation. |
Mara Breen; Charles Clifton Stress matters revisited: A boundary change experiment Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 10, pp. 1896–1909, 2013. @article{Breen2013,Breen and Clifton (Stress matters: Effects of anticipated lexical stress on silent reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 2011, 64, 153-170) argued that readers' eye movements during silent reading are influenced by the stress patterns of words. This claim was supported by the observation that syntactic reanalysis that required concurrent metrical reanalysis (e.g., a change from the noun form of abstract to the verb form) resulted in longer reading times than syntactic reanalysis that did not require metrical reanalysis (e.g., a change from the noun form of report to the verb form). However, the data contained a puzzle: The disruption appeared on the critical word (abstract, report) itself, although the material that forced the part of speech change did not appear until the next region. Breen and Clifton argued that parafoveal preview of the disambiguating material triggered the revision and that the eyes did not move on until a fully specified lexical representation of the critical word was achieved. The present experiment used a boundary change paradigm in which parafoveal preview of the disambiguating region was prevented. Once again, an interaction was observed: Syntactic reanalysis resulted in particularly long reading times when it also required metrical reanalysis. However, now the interaction did not appear on the critical word, but only following the disambiguating region. This pattern of results supports Breen and Clifton's claim that readers form an implicit metrical representation of text during silent reading. |
Jon Brock; Samantha Bzishvili Deconstructing Frith and Snowling's homograph-reading task: Implications for autism spectrum disorders Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 9, pp. 1764–1773, 2013. @article{Brock2013,The poor performance of autistic individuals on a test of homograph reading is widely interpreted as evidence for a reduction in sensitivity to context termed "weak central coherence". To better understand the cognitive processes involved in completing the homograph-reading task, we monitored the eye movements of nonautistic adults as they completed the task. Using single trial analysis, we determined that the time between fixating and producing the homograph (eye-to-voice span) increased significantly across the experiment and predicted accuracy of homograph pronunciation, suggesting that participants adapted their reading strategy to minimize pronunciation errors. Additionally, we found evidence for interference from previous trials involving the same homograph. This progressively reduced the initial advantage for dominant homograph pronunciations as the experiment progressed. Our results identify several additional factors that contribute to performance on the homograph reading task and may help to reconcile the findings of poor performance on the test with contradictory findings from other studies using different measures of context sensitivity in autism. The results also undermine some of the broader theoretical inferences that have been drawn from studies of autism using the homograph task. Finally, we suggest that this approach to task deconstruction might have wider applications in experimental psychology. |
Susanne Brouwer; Holger Mitterer; Falk Huettig Discourse context and the recognition of reduced and canonical spoken words Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 519–539, 2013. @article{Brouwer2013,In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., 'puter') more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., 'computer'). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words. Target word recognition was assessed by measuring eye fixation proportions to four printed words on a visual display: the target, a "reduced form" competitor, a "canonical form" competitor and an unrelated distractor. Target sentences were presented in isolation or with a wider discourse context. Experiment 1 revealed that target recognition was facilitated by wider discourse information. Importantly, the recognition of reduced forms improved significantly when preceded by strongly rather than by weakly supportive discourse contexts. This was not the case for canonical forms: listeners' target word recognition was not dependent on the degree of supportive context. Experiment 2 showed that the differential context effects in Experiment 1 were not due to an additional amount of speaker information. Thus, these data suggest that in natural settings a strongly supportive discourse context is more important for the recognition of reduced forms than the recognition of canonical forms. |
Lei Cui; Denis Drieghe; Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Hui Chi; Simon P. Liversedge Parafoveal processing across different lexical constituents in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 2, pp. 403–416, 2013. @article{Cui2013a,We report a boundary paradigm eye movement experiment to investigate whether the linguistic category of a two-character Chinese string affects how the second character of that string is processed in the parafovea during reading. We obtained clear preview effects in all conditions but, more impor- tantly, found parafoveal-on-foveal effects whereby a nonsense preview of the second character influ- enced fixations on the first character. This effect occurred for monomorphemic words, but not for compound words or phrases. Also, in a word boundary demarcation experiment, we demonstrate that Chinese readers are not always consistent in their judgements of which characters in a sentence constitute words. We conclude that information regarding the combinatorial properties of characters in Chinese is used online to moderate the extent to which parafoveal characters are processed. |
Lei Cui; Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Jukka Hyönä; Suiping Wang; Simon P. Liversedge Processing of compound word characters in reading chinese: An eye movement contingent display change study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 527–547, 2013. @article{Cui2013b,Readers' eyemovements weremonitored as they read Chinese two-constituent compound words in sentence contexts. The first compound-word constituent was either an infrequent character with a highly predictable second constituent or a frequent character with an unpredictable second constituent. The parafoveal preview of the second constituent was manipulated, with four preview conditions: identical to the correct form; a semantically related character to the second constituent; a semantically unrelated character to the second constituent; and a pseudocharacter. An invisible boundary was set between the two constituents; when the eyes moved across the boundary, the previewed character was changed to its intended form. The main findings were that preview effects occurred for the second constituent of the compound word. Providing an incorrect preview of the second constituent affected fixations on the first constituent, but only when the second constituent was predictable from the first. The frequency of the initial character of the compound constrained the identity of the second character, and this in turnmodulated the extent to which the semantic characteristics of the preview influenced processing of the second constituent and the compound word as a whole. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of Chinese compound-word recognition and the constraint hypothesis of Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek (2004). We conclude that word identification in Chinese is flexible, and parafoveal processing of upcoming characters is influenced both by the characteristics of the fixated character and by its relationship with the characters in the parafovea. |
Lei Cui; Guoli Yan; Xuejun Bai; Jukka Hyönä; Suiping Wang; Simon P. Liversedge Processing of compound-word characters in reading Chinese: An eye-movement-contingent display change study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 527–547, 2013. @article{Cui2013,Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read Chinese two-constituent compound words in sentence contexts. The first compound-word constituent was either an infrequent character with a highly predictable second constituent or a frequent character with an unpredictable second constituent. The parafoveal preview of the second constituent was manipulated, with four preview conditions: identical to the correct form; a semantically related character to the second constituent; a semantically unrelated character to the second constituent; and a pseudocharacter. An invisible boundary was set between the two constituents; when the eyes moved across the boundary, the previewed character was changed to its intended form. The main findings were that preview effects occurred for the second constituent of the compound word. Providing an incorrect preview of the second constituent affected fixations on the first constituent, but only when the second constituent was predictable from the first. The frequency of the initial character of the compound constrained the identity of the second character, and this in turn modulated the extent to which the semantic characteristics of the preview influenced processing of the second constituent and the compound word as a whole. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of Chinese compound-word recognition and the constraint hypothesis of Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek ( 2004 ). We conclude that word identification in Chinese is flexible, and parafoveal processing of upcoming characters is influenced both by the characteristics of the fixated character and by its relationship with the characters in the parafovea. |
Ian Cunnings; Claudia Felser The role of working memory in the processing of reflexives Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 9, pp. 188–219, 2013. @article{Cunnings2013,We report results from two eye-movement experiments that examined how differences in working memory (WM) capacity affect readers' application of structural constraints on reflexive anaphor resolution during sentence comprehension. We examined whether binding Principle A, a syntactic constraint on the interpretation of reflexives, is reducible to a memory friendly ‘‘recency'' strategy, and whether WM capacity influences the degree to which readers create anaphoric dependencies ruled out by binding theory. Our results indicate that low and high WM span readers applied Principle A early during processing. However, contrary to previous findings, low span readers also showed immediate intrusion effects of a linearly closer but structurally inaccessible competitor antecedent. We interpret these findings as indicating that although the relative prominence of potential antecedents in WM can affect online anaphor resolution, Principle A is not reducible to a processing or linear distance based ‘‘least effort'' constraint. |
Roberta Daini; Andrea Albonico; Manuela Malaspina; Marialuisa Martelli; Silvia Primativo; Lisa S. Arduino Dissociation in optokinetic stimulation sensitivity between omission and substitution reading errors in neglect dyslexia Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 7, pp. 581, 2013. @article{Daini2013,Although omission and substitution errors in neglect dyslexia (ND) patients have always been considered as different manifestations of the same acquired reading disorder, recently, we proposed a new dual mechanism model. While omissions are related to the exploratory disorder which characterizes unilateral spatial neglect (USN), substitutions are due to a perceptual integration mechanism. A consequence of this hypothesis is that specific training for omission-type ND patients would aim at restoring the oculo-motor scanning and should not improve reading in substitution-type ND. With this aim we administered an optokinetic stimulation (OKS) to two brain-damaged patients with both USN and ND, MA and EP, who showed ND mainly characterized by omissions and substitutions, respectively. MA also showed an impairment in oculo-motor behavior with a non-reading task, while EP did not. The two patients presented a dissociation with respect to their sensitivity to OKS, so that, as expected, MA was positively affected, while EP was not. Our results confirm a dissociation between the two mechanisms underlying omission and substitution reading errors in ND patients. Moreover, they suggest that such a dissociation could possibly be extended to the effectiveness of rehabilitative procedures, and that patients who mainly omit contralesional-sided letters would benefit from OKS. |
Michael Dambacher; Timothy J. Slattery; Jinmian Yang; Reinhold Kliegl; Keith Rayner Evidence for direct control of eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 1468–1484, 2013. @article{Dambacher2013,It is well established that fixation durations during reading vary with processing difficulty, but there are different views on how oculomotor control, visual perception, shifts of attention, and lexical (and higher cognitive) processing are coordinated. Evidence for a one-to-one translation of input delay into saccadic latency would provide a much needed constraint for current theoretical proposals. Here, we tested predictions of such a direct-control perspective using the stimulus-onset delay (SOD) paradigm. Words in sentences were initially masked and, on fixation, were individually unmasked with a delay (0-, 33-, 66-, 99-ms SODs). In Experiment 1, SODs were constant for all words in a sentence; in Experiment 2, SODs were manipulated on target words, while nontargets were unmasked without delay. In accordance with predictions of direct control, nonzero SODs entailed equivalent increases in fixation durations in both experiments. Yet, a population of short fixations pointed to rapid saccades as a consequence of low-level information at nonoptimal viewing positions rather than of lexical processing. Implications of these results for theoretical accounts of oculomotor control are discussed. |
Natasha Dare; Richard C. Shillcock Serial and parallel processing in reading: Investigating the effects of parafoveal orthographic information on nonisolated word recognition Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 487–504, 2013. @article{Dare2013,We present a novel lexical decision task and three boundary paradigm eye-tracking experiments that clarify the picture of parallel processing in word recognition in context. First, we show that lexical decision is facilitated by associated letter information to the left and right of the word, with no apparent hemispheric specificity. Second, we show that parafoveal preview of a repeat of word n at word n + 1 facilitates reading of word n relative to a control condition with an unrelated word at word n + 1. Third, using a version of the boundary paradigm that allowed for a regressive eye movement, we show no parafoveal ``postview'' effect on reading word n of repeating word n at word n - 1. Fourth, we repeat the second experiment but compare the effects of parafoveal previews consisting of a repeated word n with a transposed central bigram (e.g., caot for coat) and a substituted central bigram (e.g., ceit for coat), showing the latter to have a deleterious effect on processing word n, thereby demonstrating that the parafoveal preview effect is at least orthographic and not purely visual. |
Maria De Luca; Maria Pontillo; Silvia Primativo; Donatella Spinelli; Pierluigi Zoccolotti The eye-voice lead during oral reading in developmental dyslexia Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 7, pp. 696, 2013. @article{DeLuca2013,In reading aloud, the eye typically leads over voice position. In the present study, eye movements and voice utterances were simultaneously recorded and tracked during the reading of a meaningful text to evaluate the eye-voice lead in 16 dyslexic and 16 same-age control readers. Dyslexic children were slower than control peers in reading texts. Their slowness was characterized by a great number of silent pauses and sounding-out behaviors and a small lengthening of word articulation times. Regarding eye movements, dyslexic readers made many more eye fixations (and generally smaller rightward saccades) than controls. Eye movements and voice (which were shifted in time because of the eye-voice lead) were synchronized in dyslexic readers as well as controls. As expected, the eye-voice lead was significantly smaller in dyslexic than control readers, confirming early observations by Buswell (1921) and Fairbanks (1937). The eye-voice lead was significantly correlated with several eye movements and voice parameters, particularly number of fixations and silent pauses. The difference in performance between dyslexic and control readers across several eye and voice parameters was expressed by a ratio of about 2. We propose that referring to proportional differences allows for a parsimonious interpretation of the reading deficit in terms of a single deficit in word decoding. The possible source of this deficit may call for visual or phonological mechanisms, including Goswami's temporal sampling framework. |
Brian W. Dillon; Alan Mishler; Shayne Sloggett; Colin Phillips Contrasting interference profiles for agreement and anaphora: Experimental and modeling evidence Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 85–103, 2013. @article{Dillon2013,We investigated the relationship between linguistic representation and memory access by comparing the processing of two linguistic dependencies that require comprehenders to check that the subject of the current clause has the correct morphological features: subject–verb agreement and reflexive anaphors in English. In two eye-tracking experiments we examined the impact of structurally illicit noun phrases on the computation of reflexive and subject–verb agreement. Experiment 1 directly compared the two dependencies within participants. Results show a clear difference in the intrusion profile associated with each dependency: agreement resolution displays clear intrusion effects in comprehension (as found by Pearlmutter et al., 1999, Wagers et al., 2009), but reflexives show no such intrusion effect from illicit antecedents (Sturt, 2003, Xiang et al., 2009). Experiment 2 replicated the lack of intrusion for reflexives, confirming the reliability of the pattern and examining a wider range of feature combinations. In addition, we present modeling evidence that suggests that the reflexive results are best captured by a memory retrieval mechanism that uses primarily syntactic information to guide retrievals for the anaphor's antecedent, in contrast to the mixed morphological and syntactic cues used resolve subject–verb agreement dependencies. Despite the fact that agreement and reflexive dependencies are subject to a similar morphological agreement constraint, in online processing comprehenders appear to implement this constraint in distinct ways for the two dependencies. |
Stéphanie Ducrot; Joël Pynte; Alain Ghio; Bernard Lété Visual and linguistic determinants of the eyes' initial fixation position in reading development Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 142, no. 3, pp. 287–298, 2013. @article{Ducrot2013,Two eye-movement experiments with one hundred and seven first- through fifth-grade children were conducted to examine the effects of visuomotor and linguistic factors on the recognition of words and pseudowords presented in central vision (using a variable-viewing-position technique) and in parafoveal vision (shifted to the left or right of a central fixation point). For all groups of children, we found a strong effect of stimulus location, in both central and parafoveal vision. This effect corresponds to the children's apparent tendency, for peripherally located targets, to reach a position located halfway between the middle and the left edge of the stimulus (preferred viewing location, PVL), whether saccading to the right or left. For centrally presented targets, refixation probability and lexical-decision time were the lowest near the word's center, suggesting an optimal viewing position (OVP). The viewing-position effects found here were modulated (1) by print exposure, both in central and parafoveal vision; and (2) by the intrinsic qualities of the stimulus (lexicality and word frequency) for targets in central vision but not for parafoveally presented targets. |
Carolin Dudschig; Jan L. Souman; Martin Lachmair; Irmgard Vega; Barbara Kaup Reading "sun" and looking up: The influence of language on saccadic eye movements in the vertical dimension Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. e56872, 2013. @article{Dudschig2013,Traditionally, language processing has been attributed to a separate system in the brain, which supposedly works in an abstract propositional manner. However, there is increasing evidence suggesting that language processing is strongly interrelated with sensorimotor processing. Evidence for such an interrelation is typically drawn from interactions between language and perception or action. In the current study, the effect of words that refer to entities in the world with a typical location (e.g., sun, worm) on the planning of saccadic eye movements was investigated. Participants had to perform a lexical decision task on visually presented words and non-words. They responded by moving their eyes to a target in an upper (lower) screen position for a word (non-word) or vice versa. Eye movements were faster to locations compatible with the word's referent in the real world. These results provide evidence for the importance of linguistic stimuli in directing eye movements, even if the words do not directly transfer directional information. |
Magda L. Dumitru; Gitte H. Joergensen; Alice G. Cruickshank; Gerry T. M. Altmann Language-guided visual processing affects reasoning: The role of referential and spatial anchoring Journal Article In: Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 562–571, 2013. @article{Dumitru2013,Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene. The consequences of this atypical visual processing are yet to be determined. Here, we investigated the integration of visual and linguistic input during a reasoning task. Participants listened to sentences containing conjunctions or disjunctions (Nancy examined an ant and/. or a cloud) and looked at visual scenes containing two pictures that either matched or mismatched the nouns. Degree of match between nouns and pictures (referential anchoring) and between their expected and actual spatial positions (spatial anchoring) affected fixations as well as judgments. We conclude that language induces incremental processing of visual scenes, which in turn becomes susceptible to reasoning errors during the language-meaning verification process. |
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia; María Dimitropoulou; Adelina Estévez; Manuel Carreiras The influence of reading expertise in mirror-letter perception: Evidence from beginning and expert readers Journal Article In: Mind, Brain, and Education, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 124–135, 2013. @article{Dunabeitia2013,The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently discriminate letters and words. Therefore, it is supposed that this unlearning process takes place in a gradual way and that reading expertise modulates mirror-letter discrimination. However, to date no supporting evidence for this has been obtained. We present data from an eye-movement study that investigated the degree of sensitivity to mirror-letters in a group of beginning readers and a group of expert readers. Participants had to decide which of the two strings presented on a screen corresponded to an auditorily presented word. Visual displays always included the correct target word and one distractor word. Results showed that those distractors that were the same as the target word except for the mirror lateralization of two internal letters attracted participants' attention more than distractors created by replacement of two internal letters. Interestingly, the time course of the effects was found to be different for the two groups, with beginning readers showing a greater tolerance (decreased sensitivity) to mirror-letters than expert readers. Implications of these findings are discussed within the framework of preceding evidence showing how reading expertise modulates letter identification. |
Anneloes R. Canestrelli; Willem M. Mak; Ted J. M. Sanders Causal connectives in discourse processing: How differences in subjectivity are reflected in eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 9, pp. 1394–1413, 2013. @article{Canestrelli2013,Causal connectives are often considered to provide crucial information about the discourse structure; they signal a causal relation between two text segments. However, in many languages of the world causal connectives specialise in either subjective or objective causal relations. We investigate whether this type of (discourse) information is used during the online processing of causal connectives by focusing on the Dutch connectives want and omdat, both translated by because. In three eye-tracking studies we demonstrate that the Dutch connective want, which is a prototypical marker of subjective CLAIM-ARGUMENT relations, leads to an immediate processing disadvantage compared to omdat, a prototypical marker of objective CONSEQUENCE-CAUSE relations. This effect was observed at the words immediately following the connective, at which point readers cannot yet establish the causal relation on the basis of the content, which means that the effect is solely induced by the connectives. In Experiment 2 we demonstrate that this effect is related to the representation of the first clause of a want relation as a mental state. In Experiment 3, we show that the use of omdat in relations that do not allow for a CONSEQUENCE-CAUSE interpretation leads to serious processing difficulties at the end of those relations. On the basis of these results, we argue that want triggers a subjective mental state interpretation of S1, whereas omdat triggers the construction of an objective CONSEQUENCE-CAUSE relation. These results illustrate that causal connectives provide subtle information about semantic-pragmatic distinctions between types of causal relations, which immediately influences online processing. |
Maria Nella Carminati; Pia Knoeferle Effects of speaker emotional facial expression and listener age on incremental sentence processing Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 9, pp. e72559, 2013. @article{Carminati2013,We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated how and with which time course emotional information from a speaker's face affects younger (N = 32, Mean age = 23) and older (N = 32, Mean age = 64) listeners' visual attention and language comprehension as they processed emotional sentences in a visual context. The age manipulation tested predictions by socio-emotional selectivity theory of a positivity effect in older adults. After viewing the emotional face of a speaker (happy or sad) on a computer display, participants were presented simultaneously with two pictures depicting opposite-valence events (positive and negative; IAPS database) while they listened to a sentence referring to one of the events. Participants' eye fixations on the pictures while processing the sentence were increased when the speaker's face was (vs. wasn't) emotionally congruent with the sentence. The enhancement occurred from the early stages of referential disambiguation and was modulated by age. For the older adults it was more pronounced with positive faces, and for the younger ones with negative faces. These findings demonstrate for the first time that emotional facial expressions, similarly to previously-studied speaker cues such as eye gaze and gestures, are rapidly integrated into sentence processing. They also provide new evidence for positivity effects in older adults during situated sentence processing. |
Cindy Chamberland; Jean Saint-Aubin; Marie Andrée Légère The impact of text repetition on content and function words during reading: Further evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 94–99, 2013. @article{Chamberland2013,There is ample evidence that reading speed increases when participants read the same text more than once. However, less is known about the impact of text repetition as a function of word class. Some authors suggested that text repetition would mostly benefit content words with little or no effect on function words. In the present study, we examined the effect of multiple readings on the processing of content and function words. Participants were asked to read a short text two times in direct succession. Eye movement analyses revealed the typical multiple readings effect: Repetition decreased the time readers spent fixating words and the probability of fixating critical words. Most importantly, we found that the effect of multiple readings was of the same magnitude for content and function words, and for low- and high-frequency words. Such findings suggest that lexical variables have additive effects on eye movement measures in reading. |
Wonil Choi; Peter C. Gordon Coordination of word recognition and oculomotor control during reading: The role of implicit lexical decisions Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 1032–1046, 2013. @article{Choi2013,The coordination of word-recognition and oculomotor processes during reading was evaluated in eye-tracking experiments that examined how word skipping, where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading, is affected by the lexical status of a letter string in the parafovea and ease of recognizing that string. Ease of lexical recognition was manipulated through target-word frequency (Experiment 1) and through repetition priming between prime-target pairs embedded in a sentence (Experiment 2). Using the gaze-contingent boundary technique the target word appeared in the parafovea either with full preview or with transposed-letter (TL) preview. The TL preview strings were nonwords in Experiment 1 (e.g., bilnk created from the target blink), but were words in Experiment 2 (e.g., sacred created from the target scared). Experiment 1 showed greater skipping for high-frequency than low-frequency target words in the full preview condition, but not in the TL preview (nonword) condition. Experiment 2 showed greater skipping for target words that repeated an earlier prime word than for those that did not, with this repetition priming occurring both with preview of the full target and with preview of the target's TL neighbor word. However, time to progress from the word after the target was greater following skips of the TL preview word, whose meaning was anomalous in the sentence context, than following skips of the full preview word whose meaning fit sensibly into the sentence context. Together, the results support the idea that coordination between word-recognition and oculomotor processes occurs at the level of implicit lexical decisions. |
Harald Clahsen; Loay Balkhair; John Sebastian Schutter; Ian Cunnings The time course of morphological processing in a second language Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 7–31, 2013. @article{Clahsen2013,We report findings from psycholinguistic experiments investigating the detailed timing of processing morphologically complex words by proficient adult second (L2) language learners of English in comparison to adult native (L1) speakers of English. The first study employed the masked priming technique to investigate -ed forms with a group of advanced Arabic-speaking learners of English. The results replicate previously found L1/L2 differences in morphological priming, even though in the present experiment an extra temporal delay was offered after the presentation of the prime words.$backslash$nThe second study examined the timing of constraints against inflected forms inside derived words in English using the eye-movement monitoring technique and an additional acceptability judgment task with highly advanced Dutch L2 learners of English in comparison to adult L1 English controls. Whilst offline the L2 learners performed native-like, the eye-movement data showed that their online processing was not affected by the morphological constraint against regular plurals inside derived words in the same way as in native speakers. Taken together, these findings indicate that L2 learners are not just slower than native speakers in processing morphologically complex words, but that the L2 comprehension system employs real-time grammatical analysis (in this case, morphological information) less than the L1 system. |
Alasdair D. F. Clarke; Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller The impact of attentional, linguistic, and visual features during object naming Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 4, pp. 927, 2013. @article{Clarke2013,Object detection and identification are fundamental to human vision, and there is mounting evidence that objects guide the allocation of visual attention. However, the role of objects in tasks involving multiple modalities is less clear. To address this question, we investigate object naming, a task in which participants have to verbally identify objects they see in photorealistic scenes. We report an eye-tracking study that investigates which features (attentional, visual, and linguistic) influence object naming. We find that the amount of visual attention directed toward an object, its position and saliency, along with linguistic factors such as word frequency, animacy, and semantic proximity, significantly influence whether the object will be named or not. We then ask how features from different modalities are combined during naming, and find significant interactions between saliency and position, saliency and linguistic features, and attention and position. We conclude that when the cognitive system performs tasks such as object naming, it uses input from one modality to constraint or enhance the processing of other modalities, rather than processing each input modality independently. |
Charles Clifton Situational context affects definiteness preferences: Accommodation of presuppositions Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 487–501, 2013. @article{Clifton2013,In 4 experiments, we used self-paced reading and eye tracking to demonstrate that readers are, under some conditions, sensitive to the presuppositions of definite versus indefinite determiner phrases (DPs). Reading was faster when the context stereotypically provided a single possible referent for a definite DP or multiple possible referents for an indefinite DP than when context and DP definiteness were mismatched. This finding goes beyond previous evidence that definite DPs are processed more rapidly than are indefinite DPs when there is a unique or familiar referent in the context, showing that readers are sensitive to the semantics and pragmatics of (in)definiteness. However, the finding was obtained only when readers had to perform a simple arithmetic task between reading a sentence and seeing a question about it. The intervening task may have encouraged them to process the sentence more deeply in order to form a representation that would persist while doing the arithmetic. The methodological implications of this observation are discussed. |
Stefan Hawelka; Sarah Schuster; Benjamin Gagl; Florian Hutzler Beyond single syllables: The effect of first syllable frequency and orthographic similarity on eye movements during silent reading Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1134–1153, 2013. @article{Hawelka2013,The study assessed the eye movements of 60 adult German readers during silent reading of target words, consisting of two and three syllables, embedded in sentences. The first objective was to assess whether the inhibitory effect of first syllable frequency, which was up to now primarily shown for isolated words, generalises to natural reading. The second objective was to assess the effect of orthographic similarity. First syllable frequency was defined phonologically and was based on the SUBTLEX norms for spoken language [Brysbaert et al. (2011). The word frequency effect: A review of recent developments and implications for the choice of frequency estimates in German. Experimental Psychology, 58, 412?424]. Orthographic similarity was indexed by orthographic Levenshtein distance neighbourhood frequency (NF) [Yarkoni, T., Balota, D. & Yap, M. (2008). Moving beyond Coltheart's N: A new measure of orthographic similarity. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 971?979]. We found inhibitory effects for first syllable frequency and for orthographic NF. First syllable frequency affected first fixation duration which was considered as reflecting early effects in visual word recognition. Orthographic NF affected ?late? measures. These findings show that, first, the effect of first syllable frequency does generalise to silent reading. Second, the effect of orthographic NF, up to now investigated only for short words in the context of English, does generalise to multisyllabic words in the German orthography. Relating the effects to the individual reading rate of the participants revealed that the effects were consistent in fast readers but highly variable in slow readers.$backslash$nThe study assessed the eye movements of 60 adult German readers during silent reading of target words, consisting of two and three syllables, embedded in sentences. The first objective was to assess whether the inhibitory effect of first syllable frequency, which was up to now primarily shown for isolated words, generalises to natural reading. The second objective was to assess the effect of orthographic similarity. First syllable frequency was defined phonologically and was based on the SUBTLEX norms for spoken language [Brysbaert et al. (2011). The word frequency effect: A review of recent developments and implications for the choice of frequency estimates in German. Experimental Psychology, 58, 412?424]. Orthographic similarity was indexed by orthographic Levenshtein distance neighbourhood frequency (NF) [Yarkoni, T., Balota, D. & Yap, M. (2008). Moving beyond Coltheart's N: A new measure of orthographic similarity. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 971?979]. We found inhibitory effects for first syllable frequency and for orthographic NF. First syllable frequency affected first fixation duration which was considered as reflecting early effects in visual word recognition. Orthographic NF affected ?late? measures. These findings show that, first, the effect of first syllable frequency does generalise to silent reading. Second, the effect of orthographic NF, up to now investigated only for short words in the context of English, does generalise to multisyllabic words in the German orthography. Relating the effects to the individual reading rate of the participants revealed that the effects were consistent in fast readers but highly variable in slow readers. |
Ulrike Hochpöchler; Wolfgang Schnotz; Thorsten Rasch; Mark Ullrich; Holger Horz; Nele McElvany; Jürgen Baumert Dynamics of mental model construction from text and graphics Journal Article In: European Journal of Psychology of Education, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 1105–1126, 2013. @article{Hochpoechler2013,When students read for learning, they frequently are required to integrate text and graphics information into coherent knowledge structures. The following study aimed at analyzing how students deal with texts and how they deal with graphics when they try to integrate the two sources of information. Furthermore, the study investigated differences between students from different school types and grades. Forty students from grades 5 and 8 from higher track and lower track of the German school system were asked to process and integrate texts and graphics in order to answer items from different levels of a text-picture integration taxonomy. Students' eye movements were recorded and analyzed. Results suggest fundamentally different functions of text and graphics, which are associated with different processing strategies. Texts are more likely to be used according to a coherence-formation strategy, whereas graphics are more likely to be used on demand as visual cognitive tools according to an information-selection strategy. Students from different tracks of schooling revealed different adaptivity with regard to the requirements of combining text and graphic information. |
Edward Holsinger Representing idioms: Syntactic and contextual effects on idiom processing Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 373–394, 2013. @article{Holsinger2013,Recent work on the processing of idiomatic expressions argues against the idea that idioms are simply big words. For example, hybrid models of idiom representation, originally investigated in the context of idiom production, propose a priority of literal computation, and a principled relationship between the conceptual meaning of an idiom, its literal lemmas and its syntactic structure. We examined the predictions of the hybrid representation hypothesis in the domain of idiom comprehension. We conducted two experiments to examine the role of syntactic, lexical and contextual factors on the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Experiment I examines the role of syntactic compatibility and lexical compatibility on the real-time processing of potentially idiomatic strings. Experiment 2 examines the role of contextual information on idiom processing and how context interacts with lexical information during processing. We find evidence that literal computation plays a causal role in the retrieval of idiomatic meaning and that contextual, lexical and structural information influence the processing of idiomatic strings at early stages during processing, which provide support for the hybrid model of idiom representation in the domain of idiom comprehension. |
Yueh-Nu Hung "What are you looking at?" An eye movement exploration in science text reading Journal Article In: International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, vol. 12, pp. 241–260, 2013. @article{Hung2013,The main purpose of this research was to investigate how Taiwanese grade 6 readers selected and used information from different print (main text, headings, captions) and visual elements (decorational, representational, interpretational) to comprehend a science text through tracking their eye movement behaviors. Six grade 6 students read a double page of science text written in Chinese during which their eye movements were documented and analyzed using an EyeLink 1000 eye tracker. The results suggest that illustrations received less attention than print; however, readers who had more fixations on illustrations had better comprehension. While both headings and captions were in the print category, the headings received much less attention than did the captions. The article concludes with implications for teaching science reading and suggestions for future research beyond this exploratory case study. |
Ming Yan; Jinger Pan; Jochen Laubrock; Reinhold Kliegl; Hua Shu Parafoveal processing efficiency in rapid automatized naming: A comparison between Chinese normal and dyslexic children Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 115, no. 3, pp. 579–589, 2013. @article{Yan2013,Dyslexic children are known to be slower than normal readers in rapid automatized naming (RAN). This suggests that dyslexics encounter local processing difficulties, which presumably induce a narrower perceptual span. Consequently, dyslexics should suffer less than normal readers from removing parafoveal preview. Here we used a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm in a RAN task to experimentally test this prediction. Results indicate that dyslexics extract less parafoveal information than control children. We propose that more attentional resources are recruited to the foveal processing because of dyslexics' less automatized translation of visual symbols into phonological output, thereby causing a reduction of the perceptual span. This in turn leads to less efficient preactivation of parafoveal information and, hence, more difficulty in processing the next foveal item. |
Jinmian Yang Preview effects of plausibility and character order in reading Chinese transposed words: evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 36, no. SUPPL.1, pp. S18–S34, 2013. @article{Yang2013a,The current paper examined the role of plausibility information in the parafovea for Chinese readers by using two-character transposed words (in which the order of the component characters is reversed but are still words). In two eye-tracking experiments, readers received a preview of a target word that was (1) identical to the target word, (2) a reverse word that was the target word with the order of its characters reversed or (3) a control word different from the target word. Reading times on target words were comparable between the identical and the reverse preview conditions when the reverse preview words were plausible. This plausibility preview effect was independent of whether the reverse word shared the meaning with the target word or not. Furthermore, the reverse preview words yielded shorter fixation durations than the control preview words. Implications of these results for preview processing during Chinese reading are discussed. |
Chun Po Yin; Feng-Yang Kuo A study of how information system professionals comprehend indirect and direct speech acts in project communication Journal Article In: IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 226–241, 2013. @article{Yin2013,Research problem: Indirect communication is prevalent in business communication practices. For information systems (IS) projects that require professionals from multiple disciplines to work together, the use of indirect communication may hinder successful design, implementation, and maintenance of these systems. Drawing on the Speech Act Theory (SAT), this study investigates how direct and indirect speech acts may influence language comprehension in the setting of communication problems inherent in IS projects. Research questions: (1) Do participating subjects, who are IS professionals, differ in their comprehension of indirect and direct speech acts? (2) Do participants display different attention processes in their comprehension of indirect and direct speech acts? (3) Do participants' attention processes influence their comprehension of indirect and direct speech acts? Literature review: We review two relevant areas of theory—polite speech acts in professional communication and SAT. First, a broad review that focuses on literature related to the use of polite speech acts in the workplace and in information system (IS) projects suggests the importance of investigating speech acts by professionals. In addition, the SAT provides the theoretical framework guiding this study and the development of hypotheses. Methodology: The current study uses a quantitative approach. A between-groups experiment design was employed to test how direct and indirect speech acts influence the language comprehension of participants. Forty-three IS professionals participated in the experiment. In addition, through the use of eye-tracking technology, this study captured the attention process and analyzed the relationship between attention and comprehension. Results and discussion: The results show that the directness of speech acts significantly influences participants' attention process, which, in turn, significantly affects their comprehension. In addition, the findings indicate that indirect speech acts, if employed by IS professionals to communicate with others, may easily be distorted or misunderstood. Professionals and managers of organizations should be aware that effective communication in interdisciplinary projects, such as IS development, is not easy, and that reliance on polite or indirect communication may inhibit the generation of valid information. |
Si On Yoon; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Lexical differentiation in language production and comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 397–416, 2013. @article{Yoon2013,This paper presents the results of three experiments that explore the breadth of the relevant discourse context in language production and comprehension. Previous evidence from language production suggests the relevant context is quite broad, based on findings that speakers differentiate new discourse referents from similar referents discussed in past contexts (Van Der Wege, 2009). Experiment 1 replicated and extended this "lexical differentiation" effect by demonstrating that speakers used two different mechanisms, modification, and the use of subordinate level nouns, to differentiate current from past referents. In Experiments 2 and 3, we examined whether addressees expect speakers to differentiate. The results of these experiments did not support the hypothesis that listeners expect differentiation, for either lexically differentiated modified expressions (Experiment 2), nor for subordinate level nouns (Experiment 3). Taken together, the present findings suggest that the breadth of relevant discourse context differs across language production and comprehension. Speakers show more sensitivity to things they have said before, possibly due to better knowledge of the relevant context. In contrast, listeners have the task of inferring what the speaker believes is the relevant context; this inferential process may be more error-prone. |
Chuanli Zang; Feifei Liang; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge Interword spacing and landing position effects during Chinese reading in children and adults Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 720–734, 2013. @article{Zang2013,The present study examined children and adults' eye movement behavior when reading word spaced and unspaced Chinese text. The results showed that interword spacing reduced children and adults' first pass reading times and refixation probabilities indicating spaces between words facilitated word identification. Word spacing effects occurred to a similar degree for both children and adults, though there were differential landing position effects for single and multiple fixation situations in both groups; clear preferred viewing location effects occurred for single fixations, whereas landing positions were closer to word beginnings, and further into the word for adults than children for multiple fixation situations. Furthermore, adults targeted refixations contingent on initial landing positions to a greater degree than did children. Overall, the results indicate that some aspects of children's eye movements during reading show similar levels of maturity to adults, while others do not. |
Nuria Sagarra; Nick C. Ellis From seeing adverbs to seeing verbal morphology Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 261–290, 2013. @article{Sagarra2013,Adult learners have persistent difficulty processing second language (L2) inflectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the first language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., proficiency). Sagarra (2008 ) and Ellis and Sagarra (2010b ) found that, unlike Spanish monolinguals, intermediate English-Spanish learners rely more on salient adverbs than on less salient verb inflections, but it is not clear whether this preference is a result of a default or a L1-based strategy. To address this question, 120 English (poor morphology) and Romanian (rich morphology) learners of Spanish (rich morphology) and 98 English, Romanian, and Spanish monolinguals read sentences in L2 Spanish (or their L1 in the case of the monolinguals) containing adverb-verb and verb-adverb congruencies or incongruencies and chose one of four pictures after each sentence (i.e., two that competed for meaning and two for form). Eye-tracking data revealed signifi cant effects for (a) sensitivity (all participants were sensitive to tense incongruencies), (b) cue location in the sentence (participants spent more time at their preferred cue, regardless of its position), (c) L1 experience (morphologically rich L1 learners and monolinguals looked longer at verbs than morphologically poor L1 learners and monolinguals), and (d) L2 experience (low-proficiency learners read more slowly and regressed longer than high-proficiency learners). We conclude that intermediate and advanced learners are sensitive to tense incongruencies and—like native speakers—tend to rely more heavily on verbs if their L1 is morphologically rich. These findings reinforce theories that support transfer effects such as the unifi ed competition model and the associative learning model but do not contradict Clahsen and Felser's ( 2006a ) shallow structure hypothesis because the target structure was morphological agreement rather than syntactic agreement. |
Christoph Scheepers; Sibylle Mohr; Martin H. Fischer; Andrew M. Roberts Listening to limericks: A pupillometry investigation of perceivers' expectancy Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 9, pp. e74986, 2013. @article{Scheepers2013,What features of a poem make it captivating, and which cognitive mechanisms are sensitive to these features? We addressed these questions experimentally by measuring pupillary responses of 40 participants who listened to a series of Limericks. The Limericks ended with either a semantic, syntactic, rhyme or metric violation. Compared to a control condition without violations, only the rhyme violation condition induced a reliable pupillary response. An anomaly-rating study on the same stimuli showed that all violations were reliably detectable relative to the control condition, but the anomaly induced by rhyme violations was perceived as most severe. Together, our data suggest that rhyme violations in Limericks may induce an emotional response beyond mere anomaly detection. |
Matthew H. Schneps; Jenny M. Thomson; Gerhard Sonnert; Marc Pomplun; Chen Chen; Amanda Heffner-Wong Shorter lines facilitate reading in those who struggle Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. e71161, 2013. @article{Schneps2013,People with dyslexia, who ordinarily struggle to read, sometimes remark that reading is easier when e-readers are used. Here, we used eye tracking to observe high school students with dyslexia as they read using these devices. Among the factors investigated, we found that reading using a small device resulted in substantial benefits, improving reading speeds by 27%, reducing the number of fixations by 11%, and importantly, reducing the number of regressive saccades by more than a factor of 2, with no cost to comprehension. Given that an expected trade-off between horizontal and vertical regression was not observed when line lengths were altered, we speculate that these effects occur because sluggish attention spreads perception to the left as the gaze shifts during reading. Short lines eliminate crowded text to the left, reducing regression. The effects of attention modulation by the hand, and of increased letter spacing to reduce crowding, were also found to modulate the oculomotor dynamics in reading, but whether these factors resulted in benefits or costs depended on characteristics, such as visual attention span, that varied within our sample. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter Synonyms provide semantic preview benefit in English Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 4, pp. 619–633, 2013. @article{Schotter2013a,While orthographic and phonological preview benefits in reading are uncontroversial (see Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012 for a review), researchers have debated the existence of semantic preview benefit with positive evidence in Chinese and German, but no support in English. Two experiments, using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), show that semantic preview benefit can be observed in English when the preview and target are synonyms (share the same or highly similar meaning, e.g., curlers-rollers). However, no semantic preview benefit was observed for semantic associates (e.g., curlers-styling). These different preview conditions represent different degrees to which the meaning of the sentence changes when the preview is replaced by the target. When this continuous variable (determined by a norming procedure) was used as the predictor in the analyses, there was a significant relationship between it and all reading time measures, suggesting that similarity in meaning between what is accessed parafoveally and what is processed foveally may be an important influence on the presence of semantic preview benefit. Why synonyms provide semantic preview benefit in reading English is discussed in relation to (1) previous failures to find semantic preview benefit in English and (2) the fact that semantic preview benefit is observed in other languages even for non-synonymous words. Semantic preview benefit is argued to depend on several factors-attentional resources, depth of orthography, and degree of similarity between preview and target. |
Naveed A. Sheikh; Debra A. Titone Sensorimotor and linguistic information attenuate emotional word processing benefits: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Emotion, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 1107–1121, 2013. @article{Sheikh2013,Recent studies have reported that emotional words are processed faster than neutral words, though emotional benefits may not depend solely on words' emotionality. Drawing on an embodied approach to representation, we examined interactions between emotional, sensorimotor, and linguistic sources of information for target words embedded in sentential contexts. Using eye-movement measures for 43 native English speakers, we observed emotional benefits for negative and positive words and sensorimotor benefits for words high in concreteness, but only when target words were low in frequency. Moreover, emotional words were maximally faster than neutral words when words were low in concreteness (i.e., highly abstract), and sensorimotor benefits occurred only when words were not emotionally charged (i.e., emotionally neutral). Furthermore, emotional and concreteness benefits were attenuated by individual differences that attenuate and amplify emotional and sensorimotor information, respectively. Our results suggest that behavior is functionally modulated by embodied information (i.e., emotional and sensorimotor) when linguistic contributions to representation are not enhanced by high frequency. Furthermore, emotional benefits are maximal when words are not already embodied by sensorimotor contributions to representation (and vice versa). Our work is consistent with recent studies that have suggested that abstract words are grounded in emotional experiences, analogous to how concrete words are grounded in sensorimotor experiences. |
Jing Shen; Diana Deutsch; Keith Rayner On-line perception of Mandarin Tones 2 and 3: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 133, no. 5, pp. 3016–3029, 2013. @article{Shen2013,Using the visual world paradigm, the present study investigated on-line processing of fine-grained pitch information prior to lexical access in a tone language; specifically how lexical tone perception of Mandarin Tones 2 and 3 was influenced by the pitch height of the tone at onset, turning point, and offset. Native speakers of Mandarin listened to manipulated tone tokens and selected the corresponding word from four visually presented words (objects in Experiment 1 and characters in Experiment 2) while their eye movements were monitored. The results showed that 87% of ultimate tone judgments were made according to offset pitch height. Tokens with high offset pitch were identified as Tone 2, and low offset pitch as Tone 3. A low turning point pitch served as a pivotal cue for Tone 3, and prompted more eye fixations on Tone 3 items, until the offset pitch directed significantly more fixations to the final tone choice. The findings support the view that lexical tone perception is an incremental process, in which pitch height at critical points serves as an important cue. |
Heather Sheridan; Keith Rayner; Eyal M. Reingold Unsegmented text delays word identification: Evidence from a survival analysis of fixation durations Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 38–60, 2013. @article{Sheridan2013b,The present study employed distributional analyses of fixation times to examine the impact of removing spaces between words during reading. Specifically, we presented high and low frequency target words in a normal text condition that contained spaces (e.g., "John decided to sell the table in the garage sale") and in an unsegmented text condition that contained random numbers instead of spaces (e.g., "John4decided8to5sell9the7table2in3the9garage6sale"). The unsegmented text con- dition produced larger word frequency effects relative to the normal text condition for the gaze duration and total time measures (for similar findings, see Rayner, Fischer, & Pollatsek, 1998), which indicates that removing spaces can impact the word identification stage of reading. To further examine the effect of spacing on word identification, we used distributional analyses of first-fixation durations to contrast the time course of word frequency effects in the normal versus the unsegmented text conditions. In replication of prior findings (Reingold, Reichle, Glaholt, & Sheridan, 2012; Staub, White, Drieghe, Hollway, & Rayner, 2010), ex-Gaussian fitting revealed that the word frequency variable impacted both the shift and the skew of the distributions, and this pattern of results occurred for both the normal and unsegmented text conditions. In addition, a survival analysis technique revealed a later time course ofword frequency effects in the unsegmented relative to the normal condition, such that the earliest discernible influence of word frequency was 112 ms from the start of fixation in the normal text condition, and 152 ms in the unsegmented text condition. This delay in the temporal onset of word frequency effects in the unsegmented text condition strongly suggests that removing spaces delays the word identification stage of reading. Possible underlying mechanisms are discussed, including lateral masking and word segmentation. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold A further examination of the lexical-processing stages hypothesized by the E-Z Reader model Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 407–414, 2013. @article{Sheridan2013a,Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences in which high- and low-frequency target words were presented normally (i.e., the normal condition) or with either reduced stimulus quality (i.e., the faint condition) or alternating lower- and uppercase letters (i.e., the case-alternated condition). Both the stimulus quality and case alternation manipulations interacted with word frequency for the gaze duration measure, such that the magnitude of word frequency effects was increased relative to the normal condition. However, stimulus quality (but not case alternation) interacted with word frequency for the early fixation time measures (i.e., first fixation, single fixation), whereas case alternation (but not stimulus quality) interacted with word frequency for the later fixation time measures (i.e., total time, go-past time). We interpret this pattern of results as evidence that stimulus quality influences an earlier stage of lexical processing than does case alternation, and we discuss the implications of our results for models of eye movement control during reading. |
Joseph C. Toscano; Nathaniel D. Anderson; Bob McMurray Reconsidering the role of temporal order in spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 981–987, 2013. @article{Toscano2013,Models of spoken word recognition assume that words are represented as sequences of phonemes. We evaluated this assumption by examining phonemic anadromes, words that share the same phonemes but differ in their order (e.g., sub and bus). Using the visual-world paradigm, we found that listeners show more fixations to anadromes (e.g., sub when bus is the target) than to unrelated words (well) and to words that share the same vowel but not the same set of phonemes (sun). This contrasts with the predictions of existing models and suggests that words are not defined as strict sequences of phonemes. |
David J. Townsend Aspectual coercion in eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 281–306, 2013. @article{Townsend2013,Comprehension includes interpreting sentences in terms of aspectual categories such as processes (Harry climbed) and culminations (Harry reached the top). Adding a verbal modifier such as for many years to a culmination coerces its interpretation from one to many culminations. Previous studies have found that coercion increases lexical decision and meaning judgment time, but not eye fixation time. This study recorded eye movements as participants read sentences in which a coercive adverb increased the interpretation of multiple events. Adverbs appeared at the end of a clause and line; the post-adverb region appeared at the beginning of the next line; follow-up questions occasionally asked about aspectual meaning; and clause type varied systematically. Coercive adverbs increased eye fixation time in the post-adverb region and in the adverb and post-adverb regions combined. Factors that influence the appearance of aspectual coercion may include world knowledge, follow-up questions, and the location and ambiguity of adverbs. |
Annie Tremblay; Elsa Spinelli Segmenting liaison-initial words: The role of predictive dependencies Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1093–1113, 2013. @article{Tremblay2013,Listeners use several cues to segment speech into words. However, it is unclear how these cues work together. This study examines the relative weight of distributional and (natural) acoustic-phonetic cues in French listeners' recognition of temporarily ambiguous vowel-initial words in liaison contexts (e.g., parfai t [t]abri "perfect shelter") and corresponding consonant-initial words (e.g., parfait tableau "perfect painting"). Participants completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which they heard adjective-noun sequences where the pivotal consonant was /t/ (more frequent as word-initial consonant and thus expected advantage for consonant-initial words), /z/ (more frequent as liaison consonant and thus expected advantage for liaison-initial words), or /n/ (roughly as frequent as word-initial and liaison consonants and thus no expected advantage). The results for /t/ and /z/ were as expected, but those for /n/ showed an advantage for consonant-initial words over liaison-initial ones. These results are consistent with speech segmentation theories in which distributional information supersedes acoustic-phonetic information, but they also suggest a privileged status for consonant-initial words when the input does not strongly favour liaison-initial words. |
Alison M. Trude; Annie Tremblay; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Limitations on adaptation to foreign accents Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 349–367, 2013. @article{Trude2013,Although foreign accents can be highly dissimilar to native speech, existing research suggests that listeners readily adapt to foreign accents after minimal exposure. However, listeners often report difficulty understanding non-native accents, and the time-course and specificity of adaptation remain unclear. Across five experiments, we examined whether listeners could use a newly learned feature of a foreign accent to eliminate lexical competitors during on-line speech perception. Participants heard the speech of a native English speaker and a native speaker of Québec French who, in English, pronounces /i/ as [. i] (e.g., weak as wick) before all consonants except voiced fricatives. We examined whether listeners could learn to eliminate a shifted /i/-competitor (e.g., weak) when interpreting the accented talker produce an unshifted word (e.g., wheeze). In four experiments, adaptation was strikingly limited, though improvement across the course of the experiment and with stimulus variations indicates learning was possible. In a fifth experiment, adaptation was not improved when a native English talker produced the critical vowel shift, demonstrating that the limitation is not simply due to the fact the accented talker was non-native. These findings suggest that although listeners can arrive at the correct interpretation of a foreign accent, this process can pose significant difficulty. |
Matteo Valsecchi; Karl R. Gegenfurtner; Alexander C. Schutz Saccadic and smooth-pursuit eye movements during reading of drifting texts Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 13, no. 10, pp. 8–8, 2013. @article{Valsecchi2013a,Reading is a complex visuomotor behavior characterized by an alternation of fixations and saccadic eye movements. Despite the widespread use of drifting texts in various settings, very little is known about eye movements under these conditions. Here we investigated oculomotor behavior during reading of texts which were drifting horizontally or vertically at different speeds. Consistent with previous reports, drifting texts were read by an alternation of smooth-pursuit and saccadic eye movements. Detailed analysis revealed several interactions between smooth pursuit and saccades. On one side, the gain of smooth pursuit was increased after the execution of a saccade. On the other side, the peak velocity of saccades was reduced for the horizontally drifting text, in which saccades and pursuit were executed in opposite directions. In addition, we show that well-known findings from the reading of static texts extend to drifting text, such as the preferred viewing location, the inverted optimal viewing position, and the correlation between saccade amplitude and subsequent pursuit/fixation duration. In general, individual eye-movement parameters such as saccade amplitude and fixation/pursuit durations were correlated across self-paced reading of static text and time-constrained reading of static and drifting texts. These results show that findings from basic oculomotor research also apply to the reading of drifting texts. Similarly, basic reading principles apply to the reading of static and drifting texts in a similar way. This exemplifies the reading of drifting text as a visuomotor behavior which is influenced by low-level eye-movement control as well as by cognitive and linguistic processing. |
Eva Van Assche; Wouter Duyck; Marc Brysbaert Verb processing by bilinguals in sentence contexts: The effect of cognate status and verb tense Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 237–259, 2013. @article{VanAssche2013,Many studies on bilingual language processing have shown that lexical access is not selective with respect to language. These studies typically used nouns as word stimuli. The aim of the present study was to extend the previous findings on noun processing to verb processing. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in their second language and were faster to recognize cognate verbs (e.g., Dutch-English geven-give) presented out of context than control words. This verb cognate facilitation effect was not modulated by verb tense. In a second experiment, cognates and controls were presented in sentence contexts while eye movements were recorded. In contrast to the strong cognate facilitation effects on early and later reading time measures for nouns found in earlier studies, cognate facilitation was only observed on a later reading time measure (i.e., go-past time). An interpretation of the results within current models of bilingual language processing and lexical organization is provided. |
Hadas Velan; Avital Deutsch; Ram Frost The flexibility of letter-position flexibility: Evidence from eye movements in reading Hebrew Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 1143–1152, 2013. @article{Velan2013,Hebrew provides an intriguing contrast to European languages. On the one hand, like any European language, it has an alphabetic script. On the other hand, being a Semitic language, it differs in the structure of base words. By monitoring eye movements, we examined the time-course of processing letter transpositions in Hebrew and assessed their impact on reading different types of Hebrew words that differ in their internal structure. We found that letter transposition resulted in dramatic reading costs for words with Semitic word structure, and much smaller costs for non-Semitic words. Moreover, the strongest impact of transposition occurred where root–letter transposition resulted in a pseudo-root, where significant interference emerged already in first fixation duration. Our findings thus suggest that Hebrew readers differentiate between Semitic and non-Semitic forms already at first fixation, at the early phase of word recognition. Moreover, letters are differentially processed across the visual array, given their morphological structure and their contribution to recovering semantic meaning. We conclude that flexibility or rigidity in encoding letter position is determined by cues regarding the internal structure of printed words. |
Titus Malsburg; Shravan Vasishth Scanpaths reveal syntactic underspecification and reanalysis strategies Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 10, pp. 1545–1578, 2013. @article{Malsburg2013,What theories best characterise the parsing processes triggered upon encountering ambiguity, and what effects do these processes have on eye movement patterns in reading? The present eye-tracking study, which investigated processing of attachment ambiguities of an adjunct in Spanish, suggests that readers sometimes underspecify attachment to save memory resources, consistent with the good-enough account of parsing. Our results confirm a surprising prediction of the good-enough account: high-capacity readers commit to an attachment decision more often than low-capacity participants, leading to more errors and a greater need to reanalyse in garden-path sentences. These results emerged only when we separated functionally different types of regressive eye movements using a scanpath analysis; conventional eye-tracking measures alone would have led to different conclusions. The scanpath analysis also showed that rereading was the dominant strategy for recovering from garden-pathing. Our results may also have broader implications for models of reading processes: reanalysis effects in eye movements occurred late, which suggests that the coupling of oculo-motor control and the parser may not be as tight as assumed in current computational models of eye movement control in reading. |
Hsueh-Cheng Wang; Elizabeth R. Schotter; Bernhard Angele; Jinmian Yang; Dan Simovici; Marc Pomplun; Keith Rayner Using singular value decomposition to investigate degraded Chinese character recognition: Evidence from eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 36, no. SUPPL.1, pp. S35–S50, 2013. @article{Wang2013a,Previous research indicates that removing initial strokes from Chinese characters makes them harder to read than removing final or internal ones. In the present study, we examined the contribution of important components to character configuration via singular value decomposition. The results indicated that when the least important segments, which did not seriously alter the configuration (contour) of the character, were deleted, subjects read as fast as when no segments were deleted. When the most important segments, which are located in the left side of a character and written first, were deleted, reading speed was greatly slowed. These results suggest that singular value decomposition, which has no information about stroke writing order, can identify the most important strokes for Chinese character identification. Furthermore, they also suggest that contour may be correlated with stroke writing order. |
Timothy J. Slattery; Keith Rayner Effects of intraword and interword spacing on eye movements during reading: Exploring the optimal use of space in a line of text Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 75, no. 6, pp. 1275–1292, 2013. @article{Slattery2013,Two eye movement experiments investigated intraword spacing (the space between letters within words) and interword spacing (the space between words) to explore the influence these variables have on eye movement control during reading. Both variables are important factors in determining the optimal use of space in a line of text, and fonts differ widely in how they employ these spaces. Prior research suggests that the proximity of flanking letters influences the identification of a central letter via lateral inhibition or crowding. If so, decrements in intraword spacing may produce inhibition in word processing. Still other research suggests that increases in intraword spacing can disrupt the integrity of word units. In English, interword spacing has a large influence on word segmentation and is important for saccade target selection. The results indicate an interplay between intra- and interword spacing that influences a font's readability. Additionally, these studies highlight the importance of word segmentation processes and have implications for the nature of lexical processing (serial vs. parallel). |
Timothy J. Slattery; Patrick Sturt; Kiel Christianson; Masaya Yoshida; Fernanda Ferreira Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 104–120, 2013. @article{Slattery2013a,Recent work has suggested that readers' initial and incorrect interpretation of temporarily ambiguous ("garden path") sentences (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001) sometimes lingers even after attempts at reanalysis. These lingering effects have been attributed to incomplete reanalysis. In two eye tracking experiments, we distinguish between two types of incompleteness: the language comprehension system might not build a faithful syntactic structure, or it might not fully erase the structure built during an initial misparse. The first experiment used reflexive binding and the gender mismatch paradigm to show that a complete and faithful structure is built following processing of the garden-path. The second experiment used two-sentence texts to examine the extent to which the garden-path meaning from the first sentence interferes with reading of the second. Together, the results indicate that misinterpretation effects are attributable not to failure in building a proper structure, but rather to failure in cleaning up all remnants of earlier attempts to build that syntactic representation. |
Adrian Staub; Ashley Benatar Individual differences in fixation duration distributions in reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 1304–1311, 2013. @article{Staub2013,The present study investigated the relationship between the location and skew of an individual reader's fixation duration distribution. The ex-Gaussian distribution was fit to eye fixation data from 153 subjects in five experiments, four previously presented and one new. The τ parameter was entirely uncorrelated with the μ and σ parameters; by contrast, there was a modest positive correlation between these parameters for lexical decision and speeded pronunciation response times. The conclusion that, for fixation durations, the degree of skew is uncorrelated with the location of the distribution's central tendency was also confirmed nonparametrically, by examining vincentile plots for subgroups of subjects. Finally, the stability of distributional parameters for a given subject was demonstrated to be relatively high. Taken together with previous findings of selective influence on the μ parameter of the fixation duration distribution, the present results suggest that in reading, the location and the skew of the fixation duration distribution may reflect functionally distinct processes. The authors speculate that the skew parameter may specifically reflect the frequency of processing disruption. |
Andrew J. Stewart; Matthew Haigh; Heather J. Ferguson Sensitivity to speaker control in the online comprehension of conditional tips and promises: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 1022–1036, 2013. @article{Stewart2013,Statements of the form if… then… can be used to communicate conditional speech acts such as tips and promises. Conditional promises require the speaker to have perceived control over the outcome event, whereas conditional tips do not. In an eye-tracking study, we examined whether readers are sensitive to information about perceived speaker control during processing of conditionals embedded in context. On a number of eye-tracking measures, we found that readers are sensitive to whether or not the speaker of a conditional has perceived control over the consequent event; conditional promises (which require the speaker to have perceived control over the consequent) result in processing disruption for contexts where this control is absent. Conditional tips (which do not require perceived control) are processed equivalently easily regardless of context. These results suggest that readers rapidly utilize pragmatic information related to perceived control in order to represent conditional speech acts as they are read. |
Mallory C. Stites; Kara D. Federmeier; Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow Cross-age comparisons reveal multiple strategies for lexical ambiguity resolution during natural reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1823–1841, 2013. @article{Stites2013a,Eye tracking was used to investigate how younger and older (60 or more years) adults use syntactic and semantic information to disambiguate noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park). In event-related potential (ERP) work using the same materials, Lee and Federmeier (2009, 2011) found that young adults elicited a sustained frontal negativity to NV homographs when only syntactic cues were available (i.e., in syntactic prose); this effect was eliminated by semantic constraints. The negativity was only present in older adults with high verbal fluency. The current study shows parallel findings: Young adults exhibit inflated first fixation durations to NV homographs in syntactic prose, but not semantically congruent sentences. This effect is absent in older adults as a group. Verbal fluency modulates the effect in both age groups: High fluency is associated with larger first fixation effects in syntactic prose. Older, but not younger, adults also show significantly increased rereading of the NV homographs in syntactic prose. Verbal fluency modulates this effect as well: High fluency is associated with a reduced tendency to reread, regardless of age. This relationship suggests a trade-off between initial and downstream processing costs for ambiguity during natural reading. Together the eye-tracking and ERP data suggest that effortful meaning selection recruits mechanisms important for suppressing contextually inappropriate meanings, which also slow eye movements. Efficacy of frontotemporal circuitry, as captured by verbal fluency, predicts the success of engaging these mechanisms in both young and older adults. Failure to recruit these processes requires compensatory rereading or leads to comprehension failures (Lee & Federmeier, 2012). |
Mallory C. Stites; Steven G. Luke; Kiel Christianson The psychologist said quickly, "Dialogue descriptions modulate reading speed!" Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 137–151, 2013. @article{Stites2013,In the present study, we investigated whether the semantic content of a dialogue description can affect reading times on an embedded quote, to determine whether the speed at which a character is described as saying a quote influences how quickly it is read. Yao and Scheepers (Cognition, 121:447-453, 2011) previously found that readers were faster to read direct quotes when the preceding context implied that the talker generally spoke quickly, an effect attributed to perceptual simulation of talker speed. For the present study, we manipulated the speed of a physical action performed by the speaker independently from character talking rate to determine whether these sources have separable effects on perceptual simulation of a direct quote. The results showed that readers spent less time reading direct quotes described as being said quickly, as compared to those described as being said slowly (e.g., John walked/bolted into the room and said energetically/nonchalantly, "I finally found my car keys."), an effect that was not present when a nearly identical phrase was presented as an indirect quote (e.g., John . . . said energetically that he finally found his car keys.). The speed of the character's movement did not affect direct-quote reading times. Furthermore, fast adverbs were themselves read significantly faster than slow adverbs, an effect that we attribute to implicit effects on the eye movement program stemming from automatically activated semantic features of the adverbs. Our findings add to the literature on perceptual simulation by showing that these effects can be instantiated with only a single adverb and are strong enough to override the effects of global sentence speed. |
Karine Tadros; Nicolas Dupuis-Roy; Daniel Fiset; Martin Arguin; Frédéric Gosselin Reading laterally: The cerebral hemispheric use of spatial frequencies in visual word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2013. @article{Tadros2013,It is generally accepted that the left hemisphere (LH) is more capable for reading than the right hemisphere (RH). Left hemifield presentations (initially processed by the RH) lead to a globally higher error rate, slower word identification, and a significantly stronger word length effect (i.e., slower reaction times for longer words). Because the visuo-perceptual mechanisms of the brain for word recognition are primarily localized in the LH (Cohen et al., 2003), it is possible that this part of the brain possesses better spatial frequency (SF) tuning for processing the visual properties of words than the RH. The main objective of this study is to determine the SF tuning functions of the LH and RH for word recognition. Each word image was randomly sampled in the SF domain using the SF bubbles method (Willenbockel et al., 2010) and was presented laterally to the left or right visual hemifield. As expected, the LH requires less visual information than the RH to reach the same level of performance, illustrating the well-known LH advantage for word recognition. Globally, the SF tuning of both hemispheres is similar. However, these seemingly identical tuning functions hide important differences. Most importantly, we argue that the RH requires higher SFs to identify longer words because of crowding. |
Suiping Wang; Deyuan Mo; Ming Xiang; Ruiping Xu; Hsuan-Chih Chen The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in reading Chinese: Evidence from ERPs Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 577–596, 2013. @article{Wang2013c,The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in reading Chinese was examined by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as native Chinese speakers read individually presented sentences for comprehension and performed semantic plausibility judgments. The transitivity of the verbs in Chinese ba/bei constructions was manipulated to form three types of stimuli: Congruent sentences (CON), sentences with semantic violation (SEM), and sentences with combined semantic and syntactic violation (SEM'SYN). Compared with the critical words in CON, those in SEM and SEM'SYN elicited an N400-P600 biphasic pattern. The N400 effects in both violation conditions were of similar size and distribution, but the P600 in SEM'SYN was bigger than that in SEM. Overall, the lack of a difference between SEM and SEM'SYN in the earlier time window (i.e., N400 window) suggested that syntactic processing in Chinese does not necessarily occur earlier than semantic processing. |
Wei Wei; Xingshan Li; Alexander Pollatsek Word properties of a fixated region affect outgoing saccade length in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 80, pp. 1–6, 2013. @article{Wei2013,In two experiments, we investigated how forward saccades are targeted in Chinese reading. In Experiment 1, the critical region was a 4-character string which was either a word (one-word condition) or two 2-character word phrases (two-word condition). In Experiment 2, the critical region was either a high frequency word or a low frequency word. The outgoing saccade length from the last fixation on the critical region was longer in the one-word condition than the two-word condition in Experiment 1 and was longer in the high frequency condition than in the low frequency condition in Experiment 2. These results indicate that the properties of words in a fixated region affect the length of the outgoing saccade. We propose a processing-based strategy for saccade target selection in Chinese reading in which readers estimate how many characters they can process on each fixation, and then program their next saccade so that the eyes fixate somewhere beyond them. As a consequence, the easier the processing of the fixated region is, the longer the outgoing saccade is. |
Kristin M. Weingartner; Jerome L. Myers Effects of changes in narrative time on eye movements and recognition responses Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 283–298, 2013. @article{Weingartner2013,In two experiments we examined how temporal aspects of narrative events influence comprehension. In Experiment 1 participants read paragraphs in which a critical event was followed by a phrase that signaled a time shift (After an hour versus After a moment). Consistent with earlier findings (e.g., Zwaan, 1996), fixation durations were longer on the phrase that signaled a larger time shift. However, there was no evidence that a larger time shift affected the accessibility of event information in Experiment 1, when the dependent measure was ease of anaphor comprehension, or in Experiment 2, when a recognition probe task was used. Although the discontinuation of an event (Maurice stopped versus was painting) did not affect anaphor reading times, it did lead to longer recognition times for the event. These results indicate that at least some event aspects remain accessible following a change in time and that the dependent measure can have a critical impact on the conclusions. |
Katherine S. White; Eiling Yee; Sheila E. Blumstein; James L. Morgan Adults show less sensitivity to phonetic detail in unfamiliar words, too Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 68, no. 4, pp. 362–378, 2013. @article{White2013a,Young word learners fail to discriminate phonetic contrasts in certain situations, an observation that has been used to support arguments that the nature of lexical representation and lexical processing changes over development. An alternative possibility, however, is that these failures arise naturally as a result of how word familiarity affects lexical processing. In the present work, we explored the effects of word familiarity on adults' use of phonetic detail. Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard single-segment onset mispronunciations of words drawn from a newly learned artificial lexicon. In Experiment 1, single-feature onset mispronunciations were presented; in Experiment 2, participants heard two-feature onset mispronunciations. Word familiarity was manipulated in both experiments by presenting words with various frequencies during training. Both word familiarity and degree of mismatch affected adults' use of phonetic detail: in their looking behavior, participants did not reliably differentiate single-feature mispronunciations and correct pronunciations of low frequency words. For higher frequency words, participants differentiated both 1- and 2-feature mispronunciations from correct pronunciations. However, responses were graded such that 2-feature mispronunciations had a greater effect on looking behavior. These experiments demonstrate that the use of phonetic detail in adults, as in young children, is affected by word familiarity. Parallels between the two populations suggest continuity in the architecture underlying lexical representation and processing throughout development. |
Veronica Whitford; Gillian A. O'Driscoll; Christopher C. Pack; Ridha Joober; Ashok Malla; Debra Titone In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 142, no. 1, pp. 57–75, 2013. @article{Whitford2013,Language and oculomotor disturbances are 2 of the best replicated findings in schizophrenia. However, few studies have examined skilled reading in schizophrenia (e.g., Arnott, Sali, Copland, 2011; Hayes & O'Grady, 2003; Revheim et al., 2006; E. O. Roberts et al., 2012), and none have examined the contribution of cognitive and motor processes that underlie reading performance. Thus, to evaluate the relationship of linguistic processes and oculomotor control to skilled reading in schizophrenia, 20 individuals with schizophrenia and 16 demographically matched controls were tested using a moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). Linguistic skills supporting reading (phonological awareness) were assessed with the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (R. K. Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999). Eye movements were assessed during reading tasks and during nonlinguistic tasks tapping basic oculomotor control (prosaccades, smooth pursuit) and executive functions (predictive saccades, antisaccades). Compared with controls, schizophrenia patients exhibited robust oculomotor markers of reading difficulty (e.g., reduced forward saccade amplitude) and were less affected by reductions in window size, indicative of reduced perceptual span. Reduced perceptual span in schizophrenia was associated with deficits in phonological processing and reduced saccade amplitudes. Executive functioning (antisaccade errors) was not related to perceptual span but was related to reading comprehension. These findings suggest that deficits in language, oculomotor control, and cognitive control contribute to skilled reading deficits in schizophrenia. Given that both language and oculomotor dysfunction precede illness onset, reading may provide a sensitive window onto cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia vulnerability and be an important target for cognitive remediation. |
Paula Winke; Susan M. Gass; Tetyana Sydorenko Factors influencing the use of captions by foreign language learners: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: The Modern Language Journal, vol. 97, no. 1, pp. 254–275, 2013. @article{Winke2013,This study investigates caption-reading behavior by foreign language (L2) learners and, through eye-tracking methodology, explores the extent to which the relationship between the native and target language affects that behavior. Second-year (4th semester) English-speaking learners of Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish watched 2 videos differing in content familiarity, each dubbed and captioned in the target language. Results indicated that time spent on captions differed significantly by language: Arabic learners spent more time on captions than learners of Spanish and Russian. A significant interaction between language and content familiarity occurred: Chinese learners spent less time on captions in the unfamiliar content video than the familiar, while others spent comparable times on each. Based on dual‐processing and cognitive load theories, we posit that the Chinese learners experienced a split‐attention effect when verbal processing was difficult and that, overall, captioning benefits during the 4th semester of language learning are constrained by L2 differences, including differences in script, vocabulary knowledge, concomitant L2 proficiency, and instructional methods. Results are triangulated with qualitative findings from interviews |
Heather Winskel; Manuel Perea Consonant/vowel asymmetries in letter position coding during normal reading: Evidence from parafoveal previews in Thai Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 119–130, 2013. @article{Winskel2013a,Studies have revealed that consonants and vowels serve different roles$backslash$nduring linguistic processing. Masked transposed-letter priming effects (i.e., faster word-identification times for words preceded by a transposed-letter than substitution-letter prime) occur for consonants but not for vowels in lexical decision (Perea & Lupker, 2004).Potential differences in letter position coding for consonants and vowels during silent normal reading were investigated in Thai using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). Thai has a distinctive alphabetic script with vowels taking a relatively subsidiary role in relation to consonants. Parafoveal processing of nonadjacent transposed-letter effects involving consonants and vowels was examined. Results for gaze durations revealed a transposition effect involving consonants but not vowelsthus extending previous findings with the masked priming technique but in a more ecological setting. Similar differential effects for consonants and vowels for first and single fixations were not found. An explanation is that consonants and vowels are not differentiated at this initial low level stage of processing (Johnson, 2007; Perea & Acha, 2009); it is only later in processing (as measured by gaze durations) that consonant/vowel status comes into play. Results support the claim that there are some fundamental processing asymmetries between vowels and consonants in normal reading. |