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2007 |
Delphine Dahan; M. Gareth Gaskell The temporal dynamics of ambiguity resolution: Evidence from spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 483–501, 2007. @article{Dahan2007, Two experiments examined the dynamics of lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. In both, the key materials were pairs of onset-matched picturable nouns varying in frequency. Pictures associated with these words, plus two distractor pictures were displayed. A gating task, in which participants identified the picture associated with gradually lengthening fragments of spoken words, examined the availability of discriminating cues in the speech waveforms for these pairs. There was a clear frequency bias in participants' responses to short, ambiguous fragments, followed by a temporal window in which discriminating information gradually became available. A visual-world experiment examined speech contingent eye movements. Fixation analyses suggested that frequency influences lexical competition well beyond the point in the speech signal at which the spoken word has been fully discriminated from its competitor (as identified using gating). Taken together, these data support models in which the processing dynamics of lexical activation are a limiting factor on recognition speed, over and above the temporal unfolding of the speech signal. |
Meredyth Daneman; Tracy Lennertz; Brenda Hannon Shallow semantic processing of text: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 83–105, 2007. @article{Daneman2007, Evidence for shallow semantic processing has depended on paradigms that required readers to explicitly report whether they noticed an anomalous noun phrase (NP) after reading text such as 'Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquillizing sedatives in one day'. We replicated previous research by showing that readers frequently fail to report the anomaly, and that less-skilled readers have particular difficulty reporting locally anomalous NPs such as tranquillizing stimulants. In addition, we examined the time course of anomaly detection by monitoring readers' eye movements for spontaneous disruptions when encountering the anomalous NPs. The eye fixation data provided evidence for on-line detection of anomalies; however, the detection was delayed. Readers who later reported the anomaly did not spend longer processing the anomalous NP when first encountering it; however, they did spend longer refixating it. Our results challenge orthodox models of comprehension that assume that semantic analysis is exhaustive and complete. |
Denis Drieghe; Timothy Desmet; Marc Brysbaert How important are linguistic factors in word skipping during reading? Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 98, no. 1, pp. 157–171, 2007. @article{Drieghe2007, The probability of skipping a word is influenced by its processing ease. For instance, a word that is predictable from the preceding context is skipped more often than an unpredictable word. A meta-analysis of studies examining this predictability effect reported effect sizes ranging from 0 to 13%, with an average of 8%. One study does not fit within this picture and reported 23% more skipping of Dutch pronouns in sentences in which the pronoun had no disambiguating value (e.g. 'Mary was envious of Helen because she never looked so good') than in sentences where it did have a disambiguating value (e.g. 'Mary was envious of Albert because she never looked so good'). We re-examined this ambiguity in Dutch using a task that more closely resembles normal reading and observed only a 9% difference in skipping of the pronoun, bringing this linguistic effect in line with the other findings. |
Paola E. Dussias; Nuria Sagarra The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish - English bilinguals Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 101–116, 2007. @article{Dussias2007, An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish - English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish - English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The ambiguity concerned whether a relative clause (RC) that appeared after a complex noun phrase (NP) was interpreted as modifying the first or the second noun in the complex NP (El policía arrestó a la hermana del criado que estaba enferma desde hacía tiempo). The results showed that whereas the Spanish monolingual speakers and the Spanish - English bilinguals with limited exposure reliably attached the relative clause to the first noun, the Spanish - English bilingual with extensive exposure attached the relative to the second noun. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence parsing most consistent with the findings. © 2007 Cambridge University Press. |
Wouter Duyck; Eva Van Assche; Denis Drieghe; Robert J. Hartsuiker Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 663–679, 2007. @article{Duyck2007, Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. In the present study, the authors investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a 2nd language (L2) lexical decision task were faster to recognize identical and nonidentical cognate words (e.g., banaan-banana) presented in isolation than control words. A second experiment replicated this effect when the same set of cognates was presented as the final words of low-constraint sentences. In a third experiment that used eyetracking, the authors showed that early target reading time measures also yield cognate facilitation but only for identical cognates. These results suggest that a sentence context may influence, but does not nullify, cross-lingual lexical interactions during early visual word recognition by bilinguals. |
Géry D'Ydewalle; Wim De Bruycker Eye movements of children and adults while reading television subtitles Journal Article In: European Psychologist, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 196–205, 2007. @article{DYdewalle2007, Eye movements of children (Grade 5–6) and adults were monitored while they were watching a foreign language movie with either standard (foreign language soundtrack and native language subtitling) or reversed (foreign language subtitles and native language soundtrack) subtitling. With standard subtitling, reading behavior in the subtitle was observed, but there was a difference between one- and two-line subtitles. As two lines of text contain verbal information that cannot easily be inferred from the pictures on the screen, more regular reading occurred; a single text line is often redundant to the information in the picture, and accordingly less reading of one-line text was apparent. Reversed subtitling showed even more irregular reading patterns (e.g., more subtitles skipped, fewer fixations, longer latencies). No substantial age differences emerged, except that children took longer to shift attention to the subtitle at its onset, and showed longer fixations and shorter saccades in the text. On the whole, the results demonstrated the flexibility of the attentional system and its tuning to the several information sources available (image, soundtrack, and subtitles). |
Julie A. Van Dyke Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents during sentence processing Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 407–430, 2007. @article{Dyke2007, Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsis- tent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic interference occur in the earliest online measures in the region where the retrieval of a long-distance dependent occurs. Semantic interference effects occur in later online measures at the end of the sentence. Both effects endure in offline comprehension measures, suggesting that interfering items participate in incorrect interpretations that resist reanalysis. The data are discussed in terms of a cue-based retrieval account of parsing, which reconciles the fact that the parser must violate the grammar in order for these interference effects to occur. Broader implications of this research indicate a need for a precise specification of the interface between the parsing mechanism and the memory system that supports language comprehension. |
Gerry T. M. Altmann; Yuki Kamide In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 502–518, 2007. @article{Altmann2007, Two experiments explored the representational basis for anticipatory eye movements. Participants heard 'the man will drink ...' or 'the man has drunk ...' (Experiment 1) or 'the man will drink all of ...' or 'the man has drunk all of ...' (Experiment 2). They viewed a concurrent scene depicting a full glass of beer and an empty wine glass (amongst other things). There were more saccades towards the empty wine glass in the past tensed conditions than in the future tense conditions; the converse pattern obtained for looks towards the full glass of beer. We argue that these anticipatory eye movements reflect sensitivity to objects' affordances, and develop an account of the linkage between language processing and visual attention that can account not only for looks towards named objects, but also for those cases (including anticipatory eye movements) where attention is directed towards objects that are not being named. |
Manabu Arai; Roger P. G. Gompel; Christoph Scheepers Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 218–250, 2007. @article{Arai2007, Many studies have shown evidence for syntactic priming during language production (e.g., Bock, 1986). It is often assumed that comprehension and production share similar mechanisms and that priming also occurs during comprehension (e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Research investigating priming during comprehension (e.g., Branigan, Pickering, & McLean, 2005; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004) has mainly focused on syntactic ambiguities that are very different from the meaning-equivalent structures used in production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether priming during comprehension occurs in ditransitive sentences similar to those used in production research. When the verb was repeated between prime and target, we observed a priming effect similar to that in production. However, we observed no evidence for priming when the verbs were different. Thus, priming during comprehension occurs for very similar structures as priming during production, but in contrast to production, the priming effect is completely lexically dependent. |
Jennifer E. Arnold; Carla L. Hudson Kam; Michael K. Tanenhaus If you say thee uh you are describing something hard: The on-line attribution of disfluency during reference comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 914–930, 2007. @article{Arnold2007, Eye-tracking and gating experiments examined reference comprehension with fluent (Click on the red. . .) and disfluent (Click on [pause] thee uh red . . .) instructions while listeners viewed displays with 2 familiar (e.g., ice cream cones) and 2 unfamiliar objects (e.g., squiggly shapes). Disfluent instructions made unfamiliar objects more expected, which influenced listeners' on-line hypotheses from the onset of the color word. The unfamiliarity bias was sharply reduced by instructions that the speaker had object agnosia, and thus difficulty naming familiar objects (Experiment 2), but was not affected by intermittent sources of speaker distraction (beeps and construction noises; Experiments 3). The authors conclude that listeners can make situation-specific inferences about likely sources of disfluency, but there are some limitations to these attributions. |
Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Anne-Catherine Scherlen; Eric Castet Page mode reading with simulated scotomas: A modest effect of interline spacing on reading speed Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 47, no. 28, pp. 3447–3459, 2007. @article{Bernard2007, Crowding is thought to be one potent limiting factor of reading in peripheral vision. While several studies investigated how crowding between horizontally adjacent letters or words can influence eccentric reading, little attention has been paid to the influence of vertically adjacent lines of text. The goal of this study was to examine the dependence of page mode reading performance (speed and accuracy) on interline spacing. A gaze-contingent visual display was used to simulate a visual central scotoma while normally sighted observers read meaningful French sentences following MNREAD principles. The sensitivity of this new material to low-level factors was confirmed by showing strong effects of perceptual learning, print size and scotoma size on reading performance. In contrast, reading speed was only slightly modulated by interline spacing even for the largest range tested: a 26% gain for a 178% increase in spacing. This modest effect sharply contrasts with the dramatic influence of vertical word spacing found in a recent RSVP study. This discrepancy suggests either that vertical crowding is minimized when reading meaningful sentences, or that the interaction between crowding and other factors such as attention and/or visuo-motor control is dependent on the paradigm used to assess reading speed (page vs. RSVP mode). |
Christine Burton; Meredyth Daneman Compensating for a limited working memory capacity during reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Reading Psychology, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 163–186, 2007. @article{Burton2007, Although working memory capacity is an important contributor to reading comprehension performance, it is not the only contributor. Studies have shown that epistemic knowledge (or knowledge about knowledge and learning) is related to comprehension success and may enable low-span readers to compensate for their limited resources. By comparing the eye movements of epistemically mature versus epistemically naïve low-span readers, this study provided evidence for how the compensation occurs. Metacognitively mature low-span readers spent more time engaged in selective backtracking to unfamiliar and task-relevant text information. These selective look-backs would have reinstated the difficult and important information into working memory, thereby allowing these readers to offset some of the disadvantages of a limited temporary storage capacity. |
C. Christine Camblin; Peter C. Gordon; Tamara Y. Swaab The interplay of discourse congruence and lexical association during sentence processing: Evidence from ERPs and eye tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 103–128, 2007. @article{Camblin2007, Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was associated or not. Violations of discourse congruence had early and lingering effects on ERP and eye-tracking measures. This indicates that discourse representations have a rapid effect on lexical semantic processing even in locally congruous texts. In contrast, effects of association were more malleable: Very early effects of associative priming were only robust when the discourse context was absent or not cohesive. Together these results suggest that the global discourse model quickly influences lexical processing in sentences, and that spreading activation from associative priming does not contribute to natural reading in discourse contexts. |
Stephani Foraker; Brian McElree The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Active versus passive representations Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 357–383, 2007. @article{Foraker2007, A prominent antecedent facilitates anaphor resolution. Speed-accuracy tradeoff modeling in Experiments 1 and 3 indicated that clefting did not affect the speed of accessing an antecedent representation, which is inconsistent with claims that discourse-focused information is actively maintained in focal attention [e.g., Gundel, J. K. (1999). On different kinds of focus. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt, (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]. Rather, clefting simply increased the likelihood of retrieving the antecedent representation, suggesting that clefting only increases the strength of a representation in memory. Eye fixation measures in Experiment 2 showed that clefting did not affect early bonding of the pronoun and antecedent, but did ease later integration. Collectively, the results indicate that clefting made antecedent representations more distinctive in working memory, hence more available for subsequent discourse operations. Pronoun type also affected resolution processes. Gendered pronouns (he or she) were interpreted more accurately than an ungendered pronoun (it), and in one case, earlier in time-course. We argue that both effects are due to the greater ambiguity of it, as a cue to retrieve the correct antecedent representation. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
Antje S. Meyer; Eva Belke; Christine Häcker; Linda Mortensen Use of word length information in utterance planning Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 210–231, 2007. @article{Meyer2007, Griffin [Griffin, Z. M. (2003). A reversed length effect in coordinating the preparation and articulation of words in speaking. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 603-609.] found that speakers naming object pairs spent more time before utterance onset looking at the second object when the first object name was short than when it was long. She proposed that this reversed length effect arose because the speakers' decision when to initiate an utterance was based, in part, on their estimate of the spoken duration of the first object name and the time available during its articulation to plan the second object name. In Experiment 1 of the present study, participants named object pairs. They spent more time looking at the first object when its name was monosyllabic than when it was trisyllabic, and, as in Griffin's study, the average gaze-speech lag (the time between the end of the gaze to the first object and onset of its name, which corresponds closely to the pre-speech inspection time for the second object) showed a reversed length effect. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this effect was not due to a trade-off between the time speakers spent looking at the first and second object before speech onset. Experiment 4 yielded a reversed length effect when the second object was replaced by a symbol (x or +), which the participants had to categorise. We propose a novel account of the reversed length effect, which links it to the incremental nature of phonological encoding and articulatory planning rather than the speaker's estimate of the length of the first object name. |
Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert; Reinhold Kliegl The IOVP effect in mindless reading: Experiment and modeling Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 990–1002, 2007. @article{Nuthmann2007, Fixation durations in reading are longer for within-word fixation positions close to word center than for positions near word boundaries. This counterintuitive result was termed the Inverted-Optimal Viewing Position (IOVP) effect. We proposed an explanation of the effect based on error-correction of mislocated fixations [Nuthmann, A., Engbert, R., & Kliegl, R. (2005). Mislocated fixations during reading and the inverted optimal viewing position effect. Vision Research, 45, 2201-2217], that suggests that the IOVP effect is not related to word processing. Here we demonstrate the existence of an IOVP effect in "mindless reading", a z-string scanning task. We compare the results from experimental data with results obtained from computer simulations of a simple model of the IOVP effect and discuss alternative accounts. We conclude that oculomotor errors, which often induce mislocalized fixations, represent the most important source of the IOVP effect. |
Ulrich W. Weger; Albrecht W. Inhoff Long-range regressions to previously read words are guided by spatial and verbal memory Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 1293–1306, 2007. @article{Weger2007, To examine the nature of the information that guides eye movements to previously read text during reading (regressions), we used a relatively novel technique to request a regression to a particular target word when the eyes reached a predefined location during sentence reading. A regression was to be directed to a close or a distant target when either the first or the second line of a complex two-line sentence was read. In addition, conditions were created that pitted effects of spatial and linguistic distance against each other. Initial regressions were more accurate when the target was spatially near, and effects of spatial distance dominated effects of verbal distance. Initial regressions rarely moved the eyes onto the target, however, and subsequent "corrective" regressions that homed in on the target were subject to general linguistic processing demands, being more accurate during first-line reading than during second-line reading. The results suggest that spatial and verbal memory guide regressions in reading. Initial regressions are primarily guided by fixation-centered spatial memory, and corrective regressions are primarily guided by linguistic knowledge. |
Adrian Staub The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 550–569, 2007. @article{Staub2007, Several previous studies (B. C. Adams, C. Clifton, & D. C. Mitchell, 1998; D. C. Mitchell, 1987; R. P. G. van Gompel & M. J. Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eye-tracking experiments examined this issue in more detail. Experiment 1 replicated the finding that readers experience difficulty on this noun phrase in normal reading and found that this difficulty occurs even with intransitive verbs for which a direct object is categorically prohibited. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that this effect is not due to syntactic misanalysis but to disruption that occurs when a comma is absent at a subordinate clause/main clause boundary. Experiment 3 replicated the finding (M. J. Pickering & M. J. Traxler, 2003; M. J. Traxler & M. J. Pickering, 1996) that when a noun phrase "filler" is an implausible direct object for an optionally transitive relative clause verb, processing difficulty results; however, there was no evidence for such difficulty when the relative clause verb was strictly intransitive. Taken together, the 3 experiments undermine the support for the claim that the parser initially ignores a verb's subcategorization restrictions. |
Yung-Chi Sung; Da-Lun Tang Unconscious processing embedded in conscious processing: Evidence from gaze time on Chinese sentence reading Journal Article In: Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 339–348, 2007. @article{Sung2007, The current study aims to separate conscious and unconscious behaviors by employing both online and offline measures while the participants were consciously performing a task. Using an eye-movement tracking paradigm, we observed participants' response patterns for distinguishing within-word-boundary and across-word-boundary reverse errors while reading Chinese sentences (also known as the "word inferiority effect"). The results showed that when the participants consciously detected errors, their gaze time for target words associated with across-word-boundary reverse errors was significantly longer than that for targets words associated with within-word-boundary reverse errors. Surprisingly, the same gaze time pattern was found even when the readers were not consciously aware of the reverse errors. The results were statistically robust, providing converging evidence for the feasibility of our experimental paradigm in decoupling offline behaviors and the online, automatic, and unconscious aspects of cognitive processing in reading. |
2006 |
Meredyth Daneman; Brenda Hannon; Christine Burton Are There Age-Related Differences in Shallow Semantic Processing of Text? Evidence From Eye Movements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 177–203, 2006. @article{Daneman2006, After reading text such as Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquilizing sedatives in one day, young adult readers frequently fail to report that they noticed the anomalous noun phrase (NP). Although young readers of all skill levels are susceptible to this kind of shallow semantic processing, less-skilled readers are more susceptible and have particular difficulty detecting locally anomalous NPs such as tranquilizing stimulants. This article explores whether aging has a similar impact on a reader's propensity toward shallow semantic processing. Postreading responses showed that older readers frequently failed to report the anomalous NPs, but no more frequently than did younger readers. The eye-fixation behavior revealed that older readers actually detected the locally coherent anomalous NPs (e.g., tranquilizing sedatives) sooner than did younger readers, but had to allocate disproportionately more processing resources looking back to the locally incoherent anomalous NPs (tranquilizing stimulants) to achieve comparable levels of detection success as their younger counterparts. |
Anne Cutler; Andrea Weber; Takashi Otake Asymmetric mapping from phonetic to lexical representations in second-language listening Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 269–284, 2006. @article{Cutler2006, The mapping of phonetic information to lexical representations in second-language (L2) listening was examined using an eyetracking paradigm. Japanese listeners followed instructions in English to click on pictures in a display. When instructed to click on a picture of a rocket, they experienced interference when a picture of a locker was present, that is, they tended to look at the locker instead. However, when instructed to click on the locker, they were unlikely to look at the rocket. This asymmetry is consistent with a similar asymmetry previously observed in Dutch listeners' mapping of English vowel contrasts to lexical representations. The results suggest that L2 listeners may maintain a distinction between two phonetic categories of the L2 in their lexical representations, even though their phonetic processing is incapable of delivering the perceptual discrimination required for correct mapping to the lexical distinction. At the phonetic processing level, one of the L2 categories is dominant; the present results suggest that dominance is determined by acoustic-phonetic proximity to the nearest L1 category. At the lexical processing level, representations containing this dominant category are more likely than representations containing the non-dominant category to be correctly contacted by the phonetic input. |
Timothy Desmet; Constantijn De Baecke; Denis Drieghe; Marc Brysbaert; Wietske Vonk Relative clause attachment in Dutch: On-line comprehension corresponds to corpus frequencies when lexical variables are taken into account Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 453–485, 2006. @article{Desmet2006, Desmet, Brysbaert, and De Baecke (2002a) showed that the production of relative clauses following two potential attachment hosts (e.g., 'Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony') was influenced by the animacy of the first host. These results were important because they refuted evidence from Dutch against experience-based accounts of syntactic ambiguity resolution, such as the tuning hypothesis. However, Desmet et al. did not provide direct evidence in favour of tuning, because their study focused on production and did not include reading experiments. In the present paper this line of research was extended. A corpus analysis and an eye-tracking experiment revealed that when taking into account lexical properties of the NP host sites (i.e., animacy and concreteness) the frequency pattern and the on-line comprehension of the relative clause attachment ambiguity do correspond. The implications for exposure-based accounts of sentence processing are discussed. |
Jong-yoon Myung; Sheila E. Blumstein; Julie C. Sedivy Playing on the typewriter, typing on the piano: Manipulation knowledge of objects Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 98, no. 3, pp. 223–243, 2006. @article{Myung2006, Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster decision about the target word (e.g. 'typewriter') following a related prime that shared manipulation features with the target (e.g. 'piano') than an unrelated prime (e.g. 'blanket'). In Experiment 2, participants' eye movements were monitored when they viewed a visual display on a computer screen while listening to a concurrent auditory input. Participants were instructed to simply identify the auditory input and touch the corresponding object on the computer display. Participants fixated an object picture (e.g. "typewriter") related to a target word (e.g. 'piano') significantly more often than an unrelated object picture (e.g. "bucket") as well as a visually matched control (e.g. "couch"). Results of the two experiments suggest that manipulation knowledge of words is retrieved without conscious effort and that manipulation knowledge constitutes a part of the lexical-semantic representation of objects. |
Peter C. Gordon; Randall Hendrick; Marcus L. Johnson; Yoonhyoung Lee Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 1304–1321, 2006. @article{Gordon2006, The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing. |
Seth N. Greenberg; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Ulrich W. Weger The impact of letter detection on eye movement patterns during reading: Reconsidering lexical analysis in connected text as a function of task Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 59, no. 6, pp. 987–995, 2006. @article{Greenberg2006, A comparison was made between reading tasks performed with and without the additional requirement of detecting target letters. At issue was whether eye movement measures are affected by the additional requirement of detection. Global comparisons showed robust effects of task type with longer fixations and fewer word skippings when letter detection was required. Detailed analyses of target words, however, further showed that reading with and without letter detection yielded virtually identical effects of word class and text predictability for word-skipping rate and similar effects for different word viewing duration measures. The overall oculomotor pattern suggested that detection does not substantially shift normal reading movements in response to lexical cues and thereby indicated that detection tasks are informative about word and specifically word class processing in normal reading. |
Thomas Habekost; Randi Starrfelt Alexia and quadrant-amblyopia: Reading disability after a minor visual field deficit Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 44, no. 12, pp. 2465–2476, 2006. @article{Habekost2006, Reading difficulties caused by hemianopia are well described. We present a study of alexia in a patient (NT) with a milder visual field deficit. The patient had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage causing damage to the left occipital cortex and underlying white matter. NT's text reading was slow and prone to error, but recognition of single letters was preserved. Single word reading was accurate, but slower than normal. On perimetric testing NT initially showed an upper right quadrantanopia, but by attending covertly to this quadrant he could achieve luminance detection except in a small scotoma above the reading line. A whole report experiment showed that letter perception was severely compromised in the quadrant, consistent with cerebral amblyopia. On follow-up testing one and a half year post stroke, a clear spontaneous recovery had occurred, reflected in improved text reading with close to normal eye movements. Still, subtle reading difficulties and oculo-motor abnormalities remained. Overall, the study shows how amblyopia in one quadrant can lead to a characteristic form of alexia. |
Sarah C. Creel; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin Consequences of lexical stress on learning an artificial lexicon Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 15–32, 2006. @article{Creel2006, Four experiments examined effects of lexical stress on lexical access for recently learned words. Participants learned artificial lexicons (48 words) containing phonologically similar items and were tested on their knowledge in a 4-alternative forced-choice (4AFC) referent-selection task. Lexical stress differences did not reduce confusions between cohort items: KAdazu and kaDAzeI were confused with one another in a 4AFC task and in gaze fixations as often as BOsapeI and BOsapaI. However, lexical stress did affect the relative likelihood of stress-initial confusions when words were embedded in running nonsense speech. Words with medial stress, regardless of initial vowel quality, were more prone to confusions than words with initial stress. The authors concluded that noninitial stress, particularly when word segmentation is difficult, may serve as “noise” that alters lexical learning and lexical access. |
Michael D. Crossland; Gary S. Rubin Eye movements and reading in macular disease: Further support for the shrinking perceptual span hypothesis Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 590–597, 2006. @article{Crossland2006, Reduced perceptual span is one factor which limits reading speed in patients with macular disease. This study measured the perceptual span and the number of saccades to locate a target in 18 patients with macular disease and seven control subjects on two occasions separated by up to 12 months. Perceptual span changed by up to two letters. Changes in perceptual span were significantly related to changes in reading speed (r2= 0.43, p < 0.005), and were independent of changes in the number of saccades used to observe a target (r2= 0.003 |
Gary Feng Eye movements as time-series random variables: A stochastic model of eye movement control in reading Journal Article In: Cognitive Systems Research, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 70–95, 2006. @article{Feng2006, Random variables and probabilistic decision making are important elements in most theories of reading eye movements, but they tend to receive little theoretical attention. This paper attempts to address this problem by introducing the Stochastic, Hierarchical Architecture for Reading Eye-movements (SHARE). The SHARE framework formalizes reading eye movements as observable outcomes of a latent stochastic process. By modeling eye movements as time-series random variables, the goal of the model is to uncover statistical regularities in the data, which help to identify conditions and constraints the underlying mechanism must satisfy. In the univariate analysis, it is shown that a 3-component Lognormal mixture model provides a good fit to the marginal distribution function of fixation duration, and a hierarchical model is required for modeling saccade length. As a comprehensive model of reading eye movements, SHARE was implemented as an Input-Output Hidden Markov model. With a few simple hypotheses, SHARE is able to capture reading eye-movement patterns of beginning readers and proficient adults, and to reproduce well-known psycholinguistic effects. The rationale of the model, its relations with other modeling endeavors, and its implications are discussed. |
Angélica Pérez Fornos; Jörg Sommerhalder; Benjamin Rappaz; Marco Pelizzone; Avinoam B. Safran Processes involved in oculomotor adaptation to eccentric reading Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 1439–1447, 2006. @article{Fornos2006, PURPOSE: Adaptation to eccentric viewing in subjects with a central scotoma remains poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to analyze the adaptation stages of oculomotor control to forced eccentric reading in normal subjects. METHODS: Three normal adults (25.7 +/- 3.8 years of age) were trained to read full-page texts using a restricted 10 degrees x 7 degrees viewing window stabilized at 15 degrees eccentricity (lower visual field). Gaze position was recorded throughout the training period (1 hour per day for approximately 6 weeks). RESULTS: In the first sessions, eye movements appeared inappropriate for reading, mainly consisting of reflexive vertical (foveating) saccades. In early adaptation phases, both vertical saccade count and amplitude dramatically decreased. Horizontal saccade frequency increased in the first experimental sessions, then slowly decreased after 7 to 15 sessions. Amplitude of horizontal saccades increased with training. Gradually, accurate line jumps appeared, the proportion of progressive saccades increased, and the proportion of regressive saccades decreased. At the end of the learning process, eye movements mainly consisted of horizontal progressions, line jumps, and a few horizontal regressions. CONCLUSIONS: Two main adaptation phases were distinguished: a "faster" vertical process aimed at suppressing reflexive foveation and a "slower" restructuring of the horizontal eye movement pattern. The vertical phase consisted of a rapid reduction in the number of vertical saccades and a rapid but more progressive adjustment of remaining vertical saccades. The horizontal phase involved the amplitude adjustment of horizontal saccades (mainly progressions) to the text presented and the reduction of regressions required. |
Eva Belke Visual determinants of preferred adjective order Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 261–294, 2006. @article{Belke2006, In referential communication, speakers refer to a target object among a set of context objects. The NPs they produce are characterized by a canonical order of prenominal adjectives: The dimensions that are easiest to detect (e.g., absolute dimensions) are commonly placed closer to the noun than other dimensions (e.g., relative dimensions). This stands in stark contrast to the assumption that language production is an incremental process. According to this incremental-procedural view, the dimensions that are easiest to detect should be named first. In the present paper, an alternative account of the canonical order effect is presented, suggesting that the prenominal adjective ordering rules are a result of the perceptual analysis processes underlying the evaluation of distinctive target features. Analyses of speakers' eye movements during referential communication (Experiment 1) and analyses of utterance formats produced under time pressure (Experiment 2) provide evidence for the suggested perceptual classification account. |
Stamatina A. Kabanarou; Gary S. Rubin Reading with central scotomas: Is there a binocular gain? Journal Article In: Optometry and Vision Science, vol. 83, no. 11, pp. 789–796, 2006. @article{Kabanarou2006a, PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to compare reading performance under binocular versus monocular viewing conditions in patients with bilateral age-related macular degeneration (AMD). METHODS: Twenty-two patients with AMD participated. Distance acuity, reading acuity, and contrast sensitivity were recorded binocularly and monocularly with the better eye. An infrared eye tracker recorded eye movements during reading. Reading speed and reading eye movement parameters, including number of fixations and regressions, fixation duration, and number of saccades to find the next line, were calculated for both viewing conditions. The difference between binocular and monocular performance (binocular gain) was computed. Regression analysis was used to determine whether intraocular differences in distance and reading acuity and contrast sensitivity were predictive of binocular gain. RESULTS: Reading speed when using both eyes was highly correlated with the reading speed for the better eye. There was a small, but not significant, advantage of binocular viewing (6.9 words/minute |
Reinhold Kliegl; Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert Tracking the mind during reading: The influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 135, no. 1, pp. 12–35, 2006. @article{Kliegl2006, Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes. |
Pia Knoeferle; Matthew W. Crocker The coordinated interplay of scene, utterance, and world knowledge: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 30, pp. 481–529, 2006. @article{Knoeferle2006, Two studies investigated the interaction between utterance and scene processing by monitoring eye movements in agent-action-patient events, while participants listened to related utterances. The aim of Experiment 1 was to determine if and when depicted events are used for thematic role assignment and structural disambiguation of temporarily ambiguous English sentences. Shortly after the verb identified relevant depicted actions, eye movements in the event scenes revealed disambiguation. Experiment 2 investigated the relative importance of linguistic/world knowledge and scene information. When the verb identified either only the stereotypical agent of a (nondepicted) action, or the (nonstereotypical) agent of a depicted action as relevant, verb-based thematic knowledge and depicted action each rapidly influenced comprehension. In contrast, when the verb identified both of these agents as relevant, the gaze pattern suggested a preferred reliance of comprehension on depicted events over stereotypical thematic knowledge for thematic interpretation. We relate our findings to language comprehension and acquisition theories. |
Marjolein Korvorst; Ardi Roelofs; Willem J. M. Levelt Incrementality in naming and reading complex numerals: Evidence from eyetracking Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 296–311, 2006. @article{Korvorst2006, Individuals speak incrementally when they interleave planning and articulation. Eyetracking, along with the measurement of speech onset latencies, can be used to gain more insight into the degree of incrementality adopted by speakers. In the current article, two eyetracking experiments are reported in which pairs of complex numerals were named (arabic format, Experiment 1) or read aloud (alphabetic format, Experiment 2) as house numbers and as clock times. We examined whether the degree of incrementality is differentially influenced by the production task (naming vs. reading) and mode (house numbers vs. clock time expressions), by comparing gaze durations and speech onset latencies. In both tasks and modes, dissociations were obtained between speech onset latencies (reflecting articulation) and gaze durations (reflecting planning), indicating incrementality. Furthermore, whereas none of the factors that determined gaze durations were reflected in the reading and naming latencies for the house numbers, the dissociation between gaze durations and response latencies for the clock times concerned mainly numeral length in both tasks. These results suggest that the degree of incrementality is influenced by the type of utterance (house number vs. clock time) rather than by task (reading vs. naming). The results highlight the importance of the utterance structure in determining the degree of incrementality. |
Scott A. McDonald Parafoveal preview benefit in reading is only obtained from the saccade goal Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 46, no. 26, pp. 4416–4424, 2006. @article{McDonald2006, Previous research has demonstrated that reading is less efficient when parafoveal visual information about upcoming words is invalid or unavailable; the benefit from a valid preview is realised as reduced reading times on the subsequently foveated word, and has been explained with reference to the allocation of attentional resources to parafoveal word(s). This paper presents eyetracking evidence that preview benefit is obtained only for words that are selected as the saccade target. Using a gaze-contingent display change paradigm (Rayner, K. (1975). The perceptual span and peripheral cues in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 65-81), the position of the triggering boundary was set near the middle of the pretarget word. When a refixation saccade took the eye across the boundary in the pretarget word, there was no reliable effect of the validity of the target word preview. However, when the triggering boundary was positioned just after the pretarget word, a robust preview benefit was observed, replicating previous research. The current results complement findings from studies of basic visual function, suggesting that for the case of preview benefit in reading, attentional and oculomotor processes are obligatorily coupled. |
Scott A. McDonald Effects of number-of-letters on eye movements during reading are independent from effects of spatial word length Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 89–98, 2006. @article{McDonald2006a, Word length is an important determinant of eye movement behaviour in reading. The current study is the first attempt to disconfound a word's number of letters from its spatial extent. In a sentence-reading experiment using closely matched stimuli, clear differences were observed between target words that subtended the same visual angle but differed in number of letters: the more letters in the word, the more fixations made on the word, and the longer the duration of these fixations. Analyses of the full set of sentence words confirmed these results for a wider range of word lengths, and are consistent with a role for number-of-letters distinct from spatial extent. The most plausible explanation for these findings is that long words are subject to a greater degree of visual crowding, which is costly for both temporal and spatial eye movement systems. |
Scott A. McDonald; Galina Spitsyna; Richard C. Shillcock; Richard J. S. Wise; Alexander P. Leff Patients with hemianopic alexia adopt an inefficient eye movement strategy when reading text Journal Article In: Brain, vol. 129, no. 1, pp. 158–167, 2006. @article{McDonald2006b, Patients with an acquired homonymous hemianopia often adapt over a period of a few months to compensate for some of the impairments caused by their visual field defect. Changes in their eye movement patterns have been demonstrated as performance on visual tasks improves with time; however, these patients often complain of persistent text reading problems. Using a video-based eye-movement tracking system, we investigated the text reading behaviour of patients with established hemianopic alexia (>6 months post deficit), a condition affecting left-to-right readers, with a homonymous field defect that encroaches into their right foveal/parafoveal visual field. Word-based analyses of text reading are standard in experiments involving normal readers, but this is the first time these methods have been extended to patients with hemianopic alexia. Using this method, we compared the patients' reading scanpaths to those generated by normal controls reading the same passages, and a random model generated by matching the patients' eye movement data to random permutations of the text they read. We demonstrate that patients adopt an inefficient reading strategy, fixating to the left of the preferred viewing location of words of four letters and longer. Fixating to the left of the normal preferred viewing location not only results in less of the fixated word being processed by the language system; ensuing fixations are also more likely to land within the same word (a refixation). It is this refixation rate that is the main factor in slowing reading times in these patients. Our data suggests that patients are able to extract some useful visual information from text to aid the planning of reading scanpaths as their behaviour differs critically from the random model. Potential reasons for this patient group failing to produce an effective reading strategy are discussed. |
Falk Huettig; Philip T. Quinlan; Scott A. McDonald; Gerry T. M. Altmann Models of high-dimensional semantic space predict language-mediated eye movements in the visual world Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 121, no. 1, pp. 65–80, 2006. @article{Huettig2006, In the visual world paradigm, participants are more likely to fixate a visual referent that has some semantic relationship with a heard word, than they are to fixate an unrelated referent [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language. A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 813-839]. Here, this method is used to examine the psychological validity of models of high-dimensional semantic space. The data strongly suggest that these corpus-based measures of word semantics predict fixation behavior in the visual world and provide further evidence that language-mediated eye movements to objects in the concurrent visual environment are driven by semantic similarity rather than all-or-none categorical knowledge. The data suggest that the visual world paradigm can, together with other methodologies, converge on the evidence that may help adjudicate between different theoretical accounts of the psychological semantics. |
Jukka Hyönä; Mika Koivisto The role of eye movements in lateralised word recognition Journal Article In: Laterality, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 155–169, 2006. @article{Hyoenae2006, The present study examined the role of eye movements and attention in lateralised word recognition, where words and pseudowords are presented to the right or left of the fixation point, and participants are asked to decide whether or not the presented letter string is a word. In the move condition, our participants were instructed to launch a saccade towards the target letter string, which was erased from the screen after 100 ms (i.e., prior to the eyes reaching the target). It was assumed that a preparation of an eye movement simultaneously with an attention shift results in the attention being more readily allocated to the target. In the fixate condition, participants were asked to fixate on the central fixation point throughout the trial. The data on response accuracy demonstrated that word recognition in the LVF benefited from a preparation to make an eye movement, whereas the performance in the RVF did not benefit. The results are consistent with the attentional advantage account (Mondor & Bryden, 1992), according to which the performance deficit of RH for verbal stimuli may be overcome by orienting attention to the LVF prior to the presentation of a letter string. |
Jukka Hyönä; Anna-Mari Nurminen Do adult readers know how they read ? Evidence from eye movement patterns and verbal reports Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 97, pp. 31–50, 2006. @article{Hyoenae2006a, The present study was carried out to investigate individual differences in reading styles among competent adult readers and to examine whether readers are aware of their reading style. Individual reading strategies were studied by having the participants read a long expository text while their eye fixation patterns were registered. A cluster analysis was performed on the eye movement data to distinguish between different reading styles. The analysis revealed three types of readers that were coined, following Hyönä, Lorch, and Kaakinen (2002), fast linear readers, slow linear readers, and topic structure processors. Readers' procedural awareness of their reading behaviour was assessed by a questionnaire. The verbal reports obtained by the questionnaire were then correlated with the corresponding eye behaviour to investigate the extent to which the readers behave the way they report doing. The correlations showed that adult readers are well aware of their general reading speed and reasonably aware of their lookback and rereading behaviour. The amount of time spent looking back in text also correlated positively with the relative success in recalling the main points expressed in the text. It is concluded that systematic and extensive looking back in text is indicative of strategic behaviour. |
Aulikki Hyrskykari Utilizing eye movements: Overcoming inaccuracy while tracking the focus of attention during reading Journal Article In: Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 657–671, 2006. @article{Hyrskykari2006, Even though eye movements during reading have been studied intensively for decades, applications that track the reading of longer passages of text in real time are rare. The problems encountered in developing such an application (a reading aid, iDict), and the solutions to the problems are described. Some of the issues are general and concern the broad family of Attention Aware Systems. Others are specific to the modality of interest: eye gaze. One of the most difficult problems when using eye tracking to identify the focus of visual attention is the inaccuracy of the eye trackers used to measure the point of gaze. The inaccuracy inevitably affects the design decisions of any application exploiting the point of gaze for localizing the point of visual attention. The problem is demonstrated with examples from our experiments. The principles of the drift correction algorithms that automatically correct the vertical inaccuracy are presented and the performance of the algorithms is evaluated. |
Christopher R. Sears; Crystal R. Campbell; Stephen J. Lupker Is there a neighborhood frequency effect in english? Evidence from reading and lexical decision Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 1040–1062, 2006. @article{Sears2006, What is the effect of a word's higher frequency neighbors on its identification time? According to activation-based models of word identification (J. Grainger & A. M. Jacobs, 1996; J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 1981), words with higher frequency neighbors will be processed more slowly than words without higher frequency neighbors because of the lexical competition mechanism embodied in these models. Although a critical prediction of these models, this inhibitory neighborhood frequency effect has been elusive in studies that have used English stimuli. In the present experiments, the effect of higher frequency neighbors was examined in the lexical decision task and when participants were reading sentences while their eye movements were monitored. Results suggest that higher frequency neighbors have little, if any, effect on the identification of English words. The implications for activation-based models of word identification are discussed. |
Keren B. Shatzman; James M. McQueen Segment duration as a cue to word boundaries in spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Perception and Psychophysics, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2006. @article{Shatzman2006a, In two eye-tracking experiments, we examined the degree to which listeners use acoustic cues to word boundaries. Dutch participants listened to ambiguous sentences in which stop-initial words (e.g., pot, jar) were preceded by eens (once); the sentences could thus also refer to cluster-initial words (e.g., een spot, a spotlight). The participants made fewer fixations to target pictures (e.g., ajar) when the target and the preceding [s] were replaced by a recording of the cluster-initial word than when they were spliced from another token of the target-bearing sentence (Experiment 1). Although acoustic analyses revealed several differences between the two recordings, only [s] duration correlated with the participants' fixations (more target fixations for shorter [s]s). Thus, we found that listeners apparently do not use all available acoustic differences equally. In Experiment 2, the participants made more fixations to target pictures when the [s] was shortened than when it was lengthened. Utterance interpretation can therefore be influenced by individual segment duration alone. |
Keren B. Shatzman; James M. McQueen Prosodic knowledge affects the recognition of newly acquired words Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 17, no. 5, pp. 372–377, 2006. @article{Shatzman2006b, An eye-tracking study examined the involvement of prosodic knowledge–specifically, the knowledge that monosyllabic words tend to have longer durations than the first syllables of polysyllabic words–in the recognition of newly learned words. Participants learned new spoken words (by associating them to novel shapes): bisyllables and onset-embedded monosyllabic competitors (e.g., baptoe and bap). In the learning phase, the duration of the ambiguous sequence (e.g., bap) was held constant. In the test phase, its duration was longer than, shorter than, or equal to its learning-phase duration. Listeners' fixations indicated that short syllables tended to be interpreted as the first syllables of the bisyllables, whereas long syllables generated more monosyllabic-word interpretations. Recognition of newly acquired words is influenced by prior prosodic knowledge and is therefore not determined solely on the basis of stored episodes of those words. |
Keren B. Shatzman; James M. Mcqueen The modulation of lexical competition by segment duration Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 966–971, 2006. @article{Shatzman2006, In an eye-tracking study, we examined how fine-grained phonetic detail, such as segment duration, influences the lexical competition process during spoken word recognition. Dutch listeners' eye movements to pictures of four objects were monitored as they heard sentences in which a stop-initial target word (e.g., pijp "pipe") was preceded by an [s]. The participants made more fixations to pictures of cluster-initial words (e.g., spijker "nail") when they heard a long [s] (mean duration, 103 msec) than when they heard a short [s] (mean duration, 73 msec). Conversely, the participants made more fixations to pictures of the stop-initial words when they heard a short [s] than when they heard a long [s]. Lexical competition between stop- and cluster-initial words, therefore, is modulated by segment duration differences of only 30 msec. |
Keith Rayner; Kathryn H. Chace; Timothy J. Slattery; Jane Ashby Eye movements as reflections of comprehension processes in reading Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 241–255, 2006. @article{Rayner2006, In this article, we discuss the use of eye movement data to assess moment-to-moment comprehension processes. We first review some basic characteristics of eye movements during reading and then present two studies in which eye movements are monitored to confirm that eye movements are sensitive to (a) global text passage difficulty and (b) inconsistencies in text. We demonstrate that processing times increased (and especially that the number of fixations increased) when text is difficult. When there is an inconsistency, readers fixated longer on the region where the inconsistency occurred. In both studies, the probability of making a regressive eye movement increased as well. Finally, we discuss the use of eye movement recording as a research tool to further study moment-to-moment comprehension processes and the possibility of using this tool in more applied school settings. Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. |
Keith Rayner; Simon P. Liversedge; Sarah J. White Eye movements when reading disappearing text: The importance of the word to the right of fixation Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 310–323, 2006. @article{Rayner2006a, In a series of experiments, the currently fixated word (word n) and/or the word to the right of fixation (word n + 1) either disappeared or was masked during readers' eye fixations. Consistent with prior research, when only word n disappeared or was masked, there was little disruption to reading. However, when word n + 1 either disappeared or was masked (either at the onset of fixation on word n or after 60 ms), there was considerable disruption to reading. Independent of whether word n and/or word n + 1 disappeared or was masked, there were robust frequency effects on the fixation on word n. These results not only confirm the robust influence of cognitive/linguistic processing on fixation times in reading, but also again confirm the importance of preprocessing the word to the right of fixation for fluent reading. |
Ronan G. Reilly; Ralph Radach Some empirical tests of an interactive activation model of eye movement control in reading Journal Article In: Cognitive Systems Research, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 34–55, 2006. @article{Reilly2006, This paper describes some empirical tests of an interactive activation model of eye movement control in reading (the "Glenmore" model). Qualitatively, the Glenmore model can account within one mechanism for preview and spillover effects, regressions, progressions, and refixations. It decouples the decision about when to move the eyes from the word recognition process. The time course of activity in a fixate centre (FC) determines the triggering of a saccade. The other main feature of the model is the use of a saliency map that acts as an arena for the interplay of bottom-up visual features of the text, and top-down lexical features. These factors combine to create a pattern of activation that selects one word as the saccade target. Even within the relatively simple framework proposed here, a coherent account can be provided for a range of eye movement control phenomena that have hitherto proved problematic to reconcile. The paper examines the performance of the model compared to data gathered in an empirical study of subjects reading a German text. The quantitative fit of the model, while reasonable, highlighted some limitations in the model that will need to be addressed in future versions. |
Eyal M. Reingold; Keith Rayner Examining the word identification stages hypothesized by the E-Z reader model Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 17, no. 9, pp. 742–746, 2006. @article{Reingold2006, A critical prediction of the E-Z Reader model is that experimental manipulations that disrupt early encoding of visual and orthographic features of the fixated word without affecting subsequent lexical processing should influence the processing difficulty of the fixated word without affecting the processing of the next word. We tested this prediction by monitoring participants' eye movements while they read sentences in which a target word was presented either normally or altered. In the critical condition, the contrast between the target word and the background was substantially reduced. Such a reduction in stimulus quality is typically assumed to have an impact that is largely confined to a very early stage of word recognition. Results were consistent with the E-Z Reader model: This faint presentation had a robust influence on the duration of fixations on the target word without substantially altering the processing of the next word. |
Guoli Yan; Hongjie Tian; Xuejun Bai; Keith Rayner The effect of word and character frequency on the eye movements of Chinese readers Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 97, no. 2, pp. 259–268, 2006. @article{Yan2006, Eye movements of Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing target words whose predictability from the preceding context was high, medium, or low. Readers fixated for less time on high- and medium-predictable target words than on low-predictable target words. They were also more likely to fixate on low-predictable target words than on high- or medium-predictable target words. The results were highly similar to those of a study by Rayner and Well (1996) with English read- ers and demonstrate that Chinese readers, like readers of English, exploit target word predictability during reading. |
Eiling Yee; Julie C. Sedivy Eye movements to pictures reveal transient semantic activation during spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2006. @article{Yee2006, Two experiments explore the activation of semantic information during spoken word recognition. Experiment 1 shows that as the name of an object unfolds (e.g., lock), eye movements are drawn to pictorial representations of both the named object and semantically related objects (e.g., key). Experiment 2 shows that objects semantically related to an uttered word's onset competitors become active enough to draw visual attention (e.g., if the uttered word is logs, participants fixate on key because of partial activation of lock), despite that the onset competitor itself is not present in the visual display. Together, these experiments provide detailed information about the activation of semantic information associated with a spoken word and its phonological competitors and demonstrate that transient semantic activation is sufficient to impact visual attention. |
Andrea Weber; Bettina Braun; Matthew W. Crocker Finding referents in time: Eye-tracking evidence for the role of contrastive accents Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 367–392, 2006. @article{Weber2006, In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair (red scissors, given purple scissors) when instructions to click on it carried a contrastive accent on the color adjective (L + H*) than when the adjective was not accented. In addition to this prosodic facilitation, a general preference to interpret adjectives contrastively was found in Experiment 1: Along with the contrast pair, a noncontrastive referent was displayed (red vase) and listeners looked more often at the contrastive referent than at the noncontrastive referent even when the adjective was not focused. Experiment 2 differed from Experiment 1 in that the first member of the contrast pair (purple scissors) was introduced with a contrastive accent, thereby strengthening the salience of the contrast. In Experiment 2, listeners no longer preferred a contrastive interpretation of adjectives when the accent in a subsequent instruction was not contrastive. In sum, the results support both an early role for prosody in reference determination and an interpretation of contrastive focus that is dependent on preceding prosodic context. |
Andrea Weber; Martine Grice; Matthew W. Crocker The role of prosody in the interpretation of structural ambiguities: A study of anticipatory eye movements Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 99, no. 2, pp. B63–B72, 2006. @article{Weber2006a, An eye-tracking experiment examined whether prosodic cues can affect the interpretation of grammatical functions in the absence of clear morphological information. German listeners were presented with scenes depicting three potential referents while hearing temporarily ambiguous SVO and OVS sentences. While case marking on the first noun phrase (NP) was ambiguous, clear case marking on the second NP disambiguated sentences towards SVO or OVS. Listeners interpreted case-ambiguous NP1s more often as Subject, and thus expected an Object as upcoming argument, only when sentence beginnings carried an SVO-type intonation. This was revealed by more anticipatory eye movements to suitable Patients (Objects) than Agents (Subjects) in the visual scenes. No such preference was found when sentence beginnings had an OVS-type intonation. Prosodic cues were integrated rapidly enough to affect listeners' interpretation of grammatical function before disambiguating case information was available. We conclude that in addition to manipulating attachment ambiguities, prosody can influence the interpretation of constituent order ambiguities. |
Ulrich W. Weger; Albrecht W. Inhoff Attention and eye movements in reading: Inhibition of return predicts the size of regressive saccades Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 187–191, 2006. @article{Weger2006, A spatial cuing task was used to identify two types of readers, those with a relatively fast and those with a relatively slow buildup of inhibition of return (IOR). Backward-directed eye movements (regressions) during sentence reading were then examined as a function of the two IOR types. The results revealed that readers with fast IOR executed larger regressions than readers with slow IOR, as they directed the eyes away from the most recently attended area of text. Forward-directed eye movements (saccades), by contrast, were not a function of IOR type. Ease of sentence comprehension influenced the size of regressions, but this effect was also independent of IOR type. Multiple mechanisms of spatial attention, including IOR, bias eye movements toward upcoming words in the text during reading. |
2005 |
Eva Belke; Antje S. Meyer; Markus F. Damian Refractory effects in picture naming as assessed in a semantic blocking paradigm Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 667–692, 2005. @article{Belke2005, In the cyclic semantic blocking paradigm participants repeatedly name sets of objects with semantically related names (homogeneous sets) or unrelated names (heterogeneous sets). The naming latencies are typically longer in related than in unrelated sets. In Experiment 1 we replicated this semantic blocking effect and demonstrated that the effect only arose after all objects of a set had been shown and named once. In Experiment 2, the objects of a set were presented simultaneously (instead of on successive trials). Evidence for semantic blocking was found in the naming latencies and in the gaze durations for the objects, which were longer in homogeneous than in heterogeneous sets. For the gaze-to-speech lag between the offset of gaze on an object and the onset of the articulation of its name, a repetition priming effect was obtained but no blocking effect. Experiment 3 showed that the blocking effect for speech onset latencies generalized to new, previously unnamed lexical items. We propose that the blocking effect is due to refractory behaviour in the semantic system. |
Delphine Dahan; Michael K. Tanenhaus Looking at the rope when looking for the snake: Conceptually mediated eye mov ... Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 453–459, 2005. @article{Dahan2005, Participants' eye movements to four objects displayed on a computer screen were monitored as the participants clicked on the object named in a spoken instruction. The display contained pictures of the referent (e.g., a snake), a competitor that shared features with the visual representation associated with the referent's concept (e.g., a rope), and two distractor objects (e.g., a couch and an umbrella). As the first sounds of the referent's name were heard, the participants were more likely to fixate the visual competitor than to fixate either of the distractor objects. Moreover, this effect was not modulated by the visual similarity between the referent and competitor pictures, independently estimated in a visual similarity rating task. Because the name of the visual competitor did not overlap with the phonetic input, eye movements reflected word-object matching at the level of lexically activated perceptual features and not merely at the level of preactivated sound forms. |
Denis Drieghe; Marc Brysbaert; Timothy Desmet Parafoveal-on-foveal effects on eye movements in text reading: Does an extra space make a difference? Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 45, no. 13, pp. 1693–1706, 2005. @article{Drieghe2005, Schiepers [Schiepers (1980). Response latency and accuracy in visual word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 27, 71-81] proposed that in text reading, the currently fixated word and the next word are processed in parallel but with a time delay of 90 ms per degree of eccentricity. In his model, the benefit of seeing the upcoming word is due to the fact that the parafoveal information from fixation n is combined with the foveal information from fixation n + 1 to boost word recognition, at least when the fixation on word n is of an optimal duration (between 210 and 270 ms). We tested this assumption by adding an extra blank space between the foveal and the parafoveal word. According to the model, this should result in a 30 ms longer processing time for the foveal word. However, reading time was shorter for a word followed by a double space than for a word followed by a single space. An effect of parafoveal word length was also observed with a longer word in the parafovea leading to shorter fixation times on the foveal word. Implications of these low-level parafoveal-on-foveal effects are discussed. |
Jane L. Morgan; Antje S. Meyer Processing of extrafoveal objects during multiple-object naming Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 428–442, 2005. @article{Morgan2005, In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the extent to which objects that are about to be named are processed prior to fixation. Participants named pairs or triplets of objects. One of the objects, initially seen extrafoveally (the interloper), was replaced by a different object (the target) during the saccade toward it. The interloper-target pairs were identical or unrelated objects or visually and conceptually unrelated objects with homophonous names (e.g., animal- baseball bat). The mean latencies and gaze durations for the targets were shorter in the identity and homophone conditions than in the unrelated condition. This was true when participants viewed a fixation mark until the interloper appeared and when they fixated on another object and prepared to name it while viewing the interloper. These results imply that objects that are about to be named may undergo far-reaching processing, including access to their names, prior to fixation. |
Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert; Reinhold Kliegl Mislocated fixations during reading and the inverted optimal viewing position effect Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 45, no. 17, pp. 2201–2217, 2005. @article{Nuthmann2005, Refixation probability during reading is lowest near the word center, suggestive of an optimal viewing position (OVP). Counterintuitively, fixation durations are largest at the OVP, a result called the inverted optimal viewing position (IOVP) effect [Vitu, McConkie, Kerr, & O'Regan, (2001). Vision Research 41, 3513-3533]. Current models of eye-movement control in reading fail to reproduce the IOVP effect. We propose a simple mechanism for generating this effect based on error-correction of mislocated fixations due to saccadic errors. First, we propose an algorithm for estimating proportions of mislocated fixations from experimental data yielding a higher probability for mislocated fixations near word boundaries. Second, we assume that mislocated fixations trigger an immediate start of a new saccade program causing a decrease of associated durations. Thus, the IOVP effect could emerge as a result of a coupling between cognitive and oculomotor processes. |
Susanne Ferber; Linda J. Murray Are perceptual judgments dissociated from motor processes? - A prism adaptation study Journal Article In: Cognitive Brain Research, vol. 23, no. 2-3, pp. 453–456, 2005. @article{Ferber2005, When asked to choose which of two chimeric faces composed of 'smiling' and 'neutral' half-faces is happier, healthy adults select the face in which the left half is smiling. Here, we show that this perceptual leftward bias is associated with a bias in eye movements to the same side. However, when we shifted the pattern of eye movements towards the right side by using prismatic lenses, we did not observe a concurrent shift in the perceptual judgments. Therefore, we argue that overt motor responses are not necessary for perceptual judgments. Furthermore, we argue that while prism adaptation influences performance on motor tasks, it cannot influence higher-order representational processes. |
John Archibald Second language phonology as redeployment of L1 phonological knowledge Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 285–314, 2005. @article{Archibald2005, This article presents research showing that second language (L2) learners do not have deficient representations and they are capable of acquiring structures that are absent from their first language (L1). The Redeployment Hypothesis—which claims that L2 phonologies include novel representations created via redeployment of L1 phonological components—is consistent with data from several domains, including acquisition of phonological features, syllable structure, moraic structure, and metrical structure. Moreover, it is shown that input prominence plays a role in L2 acquisition, and that language learners are sensitive to robust phonetic cues. Finally, studies done on interlingual homographs and homophones argue for non-selective access to the bilingual lexicon, suggesting that the language processing capacity is always engaged. |
Keith Rayner; Rebecca L. Johnson Letter-by-letter acquired dyslexia is due to the serial encoding of letters Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 7, pp. 530–534, 2005. @article{Rayner2005, Letter-by-letter acquired dyslexia (pure alexia) is assumed to be related to the serial encoding of letters, but the evidence for this assumption is somewhat indirect. Here, we demonstrate that the deficit is indeed due to serial encoding by comparing the performance of a letter-by-letter dyslexic reader with the performance of normal readers who were forced to read letter by letter; the data patterns are remarkably similar. |
Falk Huettig; Gerry T. M. Altmann Word meaning and the control of eye fixation: Semantic competitor effects and the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 96, no. 1, pp. B23–B32, 2005. @article{Huettig2005, When participants are presented simultaneously with spoken language and a visual display depicting objects to which that language refers, participants spontaneously fixate the visual referents of the words being heard [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6(1), 84-107; Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268(5217), 1632-1634]. We demonstrate here that such spontaneous fixation can be driven by partial semantic overlap between a word and a visual object. Participants heard the word 'piano' when (a) a piano was depicted amongst unrelated distractors; (b) a trumpet was depicted amongst those same distractors; and (c), both the piano and trumpet were depicted. The probability of fixating the piano and the trumpet in the first two conditions rose as the word 'piano' unfolded. In the final condition, only fixations to the piano rose, although the trumpet was fixated more than the distractors. We conclude that eye movements are driven by the degree of match, along various dimensions that go beyond simple visual form, between a word and the mental representations of objects in the concurrent visual field. |
Jukka Hyönä; Tuomo Häikiö Is emotional content obtained from parafoveal words during reading? An eye movement analysis Journal Article In: Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 475–483, 2005. @article{Hyoenae2005, An eye-movement-contingent display change technique was employed to study whether adult readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words during reading. Three types of parafoveal preview conditions were contrasted: an emotional word, a neutral word, and an identical word condition. To have a maximally effective parafoveal manipulation, high-arousal emotional words (sex- and threat-related and curse words) were used as parafoveal previews. Readers' eye fixation patterns around the target word revealed no evidence for parafoveal semantic processing. Furthermore, the pupil size showed no signs for an emotional response triggered by an emotional word previewed parafoveally. These results are consistent with the view that, as a rule, only the fixated word is processed to a semantic level during reading. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Brianna M. Eiter; Ralph Radach Time course of linguistic information extraction from consecutive words during eye fixations in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 979–995, 2005. @article{Inhoff2005, Sequential attention shift models of reading predict that an attended (typically fixated) word must be recognized before useful linguistic information can be obtained from the following (parafoveal) word. These models also predict that linguistic information is obtained from a parafoveal word immediately prior to a saccade toward it. To test these assumptions, sentences were constructed with a critical pretarget-target word sequence, and the temporal availability of the (parafoveal) target preview was manipulated while the pretarget word was fixated. Target viewing effects, examined as a function of prior target visibility, revealed that extraction of linguistic target information began 70-140 ms after the onset of pretarget viewing. Critically, acquisition of useful linguistic information from a target was not confined to the ending period of pretarget viewing. These results favor theoretical conceptions in which there is some temporal overlap in the linguistic processing of a fixated and parafoveally visible word during reading. |
Juhani Järvikivi; Roger P. G. Van Gompel; Jukka Hyönä; Raymond Bertram; Juhani Jarvikivi; Roger P. G. Van Gompel; Jukka Hyona; Raymond Bertram Ambiguous pronoun resolution: Contrasting the first-mention and subject-preference accounts Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 260–264, 2005. @article{Jaervikivi2005, A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first- mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents ofeach pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Jukka Hyönä Perspective effects on expository text comprehension: Evidence from think-aloud protocols, eyetracking, and recall Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 239–257, 2005. @article{Kaakinen2005, In this study, 36 participants read an expository text describing 4 rare illnesses from a given perspective. Their eye movements were recorded during reading, and think-alouds were probed after 10 relevant and 10 irrelevant sentences. A free recall was collected after reading. The results showed that in addition to increasing the fixation time and recall for relevant in comparison to irrelevant text information, a reading perspective guides readers to use slightly different comprehension processes for relevant text information, as shown by think-aloud protocols. Repetitions were more frequent responses after relevant than after irrelevant target sentences. Verbally reported processing strategies were associated with the eye-fixation patterns. Verbal responses indicative of deeper processing were associated with longer first-pass fixation times than those indicative of shallower processing. It is concluded that a "triangulation" using complementary measures is a worthwhile endeavor when studying text-comprehension processes. |
Reinhold Kliegl; Ralf Engbert Fixation durations before word skipping in reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 132–138, 2005. @article{Kliegl2005, We resolve a controversy about reading fixations before word-skipping saccades which were reported as longer or shorter than control fixations in earlier studies. Our statistics are based on resampling of matched sets of fixations before skipped and nonskipped words, drawn from a database of 121,321 single fixations contributed by 230 readers of the Potsdam sentence corpus. Matched fixations originated from single-fixation forward-reading patterns and were equated for their positions within words. Fixations before skipped words were shorter before short or high-frequency words and longer before long or low-frequency words in comparison with control fixations. Reasons for inconsistencies in past research and implications for computational models are discussed. |
Pia Knoeferle; Matthew W. Crocker; Christoph Scheepers; Martin J. Pickering The influence of the immediate visual context on incremental thematic role-assignment: Evidence from eye-movements in depicted events Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 95, pp. 95–127, 2005. @article{Knoeferle2005, Studies monitoring eye-movements in scenes containing entities have provided robust evidence for incremental reference resolution processes. This paper addresses the less studied question of whether depicted event scenes can affect processes of incremental thematic role-assignment. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants inspected agent-action-patient events while listening to German verb-second sentences with initial structural and role ambiguity. The experiments investigated the time course with which listeners could resolve this ambiguity by relating the verb to the depicted events. Such verb-mediated visual event information allowed early disambiguation on-line, as evidenced by anticipatory eye-movements to the appropriate agent/patient role filler. We replicated this finding while investigating the effects of intonation. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when the verb was sentence-final and thus did not establish early reference to the depicted events, linguistic cues alone enabled disambiguation before people encountered the verb. Our results reveal the on-line influence of depicted events on incremental thematic role-assignment and disambiguation of local structural and role ambiguity. In consequence, our findings require a notion of reference that includes actions and events in addition to entities (e.g. Semantics and Cognition, 1983), and argue for a theory of on-line sentence comprehension that exploits a rich inventory of semantic categories. |
Alexander Pollatsek; Jukka Hyönä The role of semantic transparency in the processing of Finnish compound words Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 20, no. 1-2, pp. 261–290, 2005. @article{Pollatsek2005, Three experiments examined whether the semantic transparency of a long Finnish compound word has any influence on how the compound word is encoded in reading. The frequency of the first constituent (as a separate word) was manipulated, while matching for the frequencies of the compound word and of the second constituent. The effect of this frequency manipulation on encoding time served as a ‘marker' that the compound word was processed, at least in part, componentially. In Experiment 1, each high-frequency transparent compound was paired with a low-frequency transparent compound, and each high-frequency opaque compound was paired with a low-frequency opaque compound. A sentence frame was created for each pair that was identical up to the word following the target word. In Experiments 2 and 3, the matching was done between transparent and opaque word pairs. In addition, Experiment 3 had a display change manipulation in which most of the second constituent was not visible until it was fixated. Readers' eye fixation patterns on and immediately after the target word were examined. Reliable first constituent frequency effects were observed in the fixation duration measures on the target word, but there were no effects of transparency. In addition, a comparison of the display change condition to the standard condition indicated that the constituents of the compound word were processed sequentially. It thus appears that the identification of both transparent and opaque long compound words takes place, at least in part, by accessing the constituent lexemes and does not rely on constructing the meaning from the components. |
2004 |
Jukka Hyönä; Raymond Bertram; Alexander Pollstsek Are long compound words identified serially via their constituents? Evidence from an eye-movement contingent display change study Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 523–532, 2004. @article{Hyoenae2004a, The processing of two-constituent 12- to 18-letter Finnish compound nouns was studied by using an eye-movement–contingent display change technique. In the display change condition, all but the first 2 letters of the second constituent were replaced by visually similar letters until the eyes moved across an invisible boundary. When the eyes crossed the boundary, the second constituent was changed to its intended form. In the control condition, there was no display change. The frequency of the first con- stituent was also varied. The major findings were that (1) fixation time on the first constituent was strongly affected by the frequency of the first constituent but was not at all affected by whether the second constituent was visible, but (2) fixation time on the word subsequent to the first constituent's having been left was strongly affected by the display change. These results are most parsimoniously explained by the serial access of the two constituents for these long compound words. |
Jukka Hyönä; Robert F. Lorch Effects of topic headings on text processing: Evidence from adult readers' eye fixation patterns Journal Article In: Learning and Instruction, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 131–152, 2004. @article{Hyoenae2004, Effects of topic headings on the processing of multiple-topic expository texts were examined with the help of readers' eye fixation patterns. Adult participants read two texts, one in which topic shifts were signaled by topic headings and one in which topic headings were excluded. The presence of topic headings facilitated the processing of topic sentences and increased the number of topics mentioned in the text summaries written after reading the texts. The facilitatory effect of headings was reflected both in the fixations made during the first-pass reading as well as in the later look-backs directed to the topic sentences. A framework is outlined to depict the process of reading and comprehending multiple-topic expository texts. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Cynthia M. Connine; Brianna M. Eiter; Ralph Radach; Dieter Heller Phonological representation of words in working memory during sentence reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 320–325, 2004. @article{Inhoff2004, The temporal dynamics of a visual target word's phonological representation was examined by presentation of an irrelevant spoken companion word when the participant's eyes reached the target's location during sentence reading. The spoken word was identical, similar, or dissimilar to the phonological specification of the visual target. All spoken words increased the time spent viewing the target, with larger effects in the similar and dissimilar spoken word conditions than in the identical condition. The reading of posttarget text was disrupted when the spoken word was similar but not when it was identical or dissimilar to the target. Phonological interference indicates that a word's phonological representation remains active after it has been identified during sentence reading. |
Ralph Radach; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Dieter Heller Orthographic regularity gradually modulates saccade amplitudes in reading Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 27–51, 2004. @article{Radach2004, The present research tested the hypothesis that variations in the orthographic regularity of word beginnings influence landing positions and amplitudes of interword saccades in continuous reading. Participants were asked to read sentences including target words of low, medium, and high frequency of initial quadrigrams that were either single‐root nouns or noun‐noun compounds. Saccades landed further into words with more regular beginnings, irrespective of whether the target was a compound word or not. Critically, the orthographic landing site effect was graded, suggesting that orthographic information continuously modulates saccade amplitude before and after the decision to move has been made. |
Min Ju; Paul A. Luce Falling on sensitive ears. Constraints on bilingual lexical activation Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 314–318, 2004. @article{Ju2004, Spoken word recognition is characterized by multiple activation of sound patterns that are consistent with the acoustic-phonetic input. Recently, an extreme form of multiple activation was observed: Bilingual listeners activated words from both languages that were consistent with the input. We explored the degree to which bilingual multiple activation may be constrained by fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information. In a head-mounted eyetracking experiment, we presented Spanish-English bilinguals with spoken Spanish words having word-initial stop consonants with either English- or Spanish-appropriate voice onset times. Participants fixated interlingual distractors (nontarget pictures whose English names shared a phonological similarity with the Spanish targets) more frequently than control distractors when the target words contained English-appropriate voice onset times. These results demonstrate that fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information and a precise match between input and representation are critical for parallel activation of two languages. |
Reinhold Kliegl; Ellen Grabner; Martin Rolfs; Ralf Engbert Length, frequency, and predictability effects of words on eye movements in reading Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 262–284, 2004. @article{Kliegl2004, We tested the effects of word length, frequency, and predictability on inspection durations (first fixation, single fixation, gaze duration, and reading time) and inspection probabilities during first-pass reading (skipped, once, twice) for a corpus of 144 German sentences (1138 words) and a subset of 144 target words uncorrelated in length and frequency, read by 33 young and 32 older adults. For corpus words, length and frequency were reliably related to inspection durations and probabilities, predictability only to inspection probabilities. For first-pass reading of target words all three effects were reliable for inspection durations and probabilities. Low predictability was strongly related to second-pass reading. Older adults read slower than young adults and had a higher frequency of regressive movements. The data are to serve as a benchmark for computational models of eye movement control in reading. |
Jörg Sommerhalder; Benjamin Rappaz; Raoul Haller; Angélica Pérez Fornos; Avinoam B. Safran; Marco Pelizzone Simulation of artificial vision: Eccentric reading of full-page text and the learning of this task Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 44, no. 14, pp. 1693–1706, 2004. @article{Sommerhalder2004, Reading of isolated words in conditions mimicking artificial vision has been found to be a difficult but feasible task. In particular at relatively high eccentricities, a significant adaptation process was required to reach optimal performances [Vision Res. 43 (2003) 269]. The present study addressed the task of full-page reading, including page navigation under control of subject's own eye movements. Conditions of artificial vision mimicking a retinal implant were simulated by projecting stimuli with reduced information content (lines of pixelised text) onto a restricted and eccentric area of the retina. Three subjects, naïve to the task, were trained for almost two months (about 1 h/day) to read full-page texts. Subjects had to use their own eye movements to displace a 10°×7°viewing window, stabilised at 15°eccentricity in their lower visual field. Initial reading scores were very low for two subjects (about 13% correctly read words), and astonishingly high for the third subject (86% correctly read words). However, all of them significantly improved their performance with time, reaching close to perfect reading scores (ranging from 86% to 98% correct) at the end of the training process. Reading rates were as low as 1-5 words/min at the beginning of the experiment and increased significantly with time to 14-28 words/min. Qualitative text understanding was also estimated. We observed that reading scores of at least 85% correct were necessary to achieve 'good' text understanding. Gaze position recordings, made during the experimental sessions, demonstrated that the control of eye movements, especially the suppression of reflexive vertical saccades, constituted an important part of the overall adaptive learning process. Taken together, these results suggest that retinal implants might restore full-page text reading abilities to blind patients. About 600 stimulation contacts, distributed on an implant surface of 3×2 mm2, appear to be a minimum to allow for useful reading performance. A significant learning process will however be required to reach optimal performance with such devices, especially if they have to be placed outside the foveal area. |
Andrea Weber; Anne Cutler Lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 1–25, 2004. @article{Weber2004, Four eye-tracking experiments examined lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Dutch listeners hearing English fixated longer on distractor pictures with names containing vowels that Dutch listeners are likely to confuse with vowels in a target picture name (pencil, given target panda) than on less confusable distractors (beetle, given target bottle). English listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The confusability was asymmetric: given pencil as target, panda did not distract more than distinct competitors. Distractors with Dutch names phonologically related to English target names (deksel, 'lid,' given target desk) also received longer fixations than distractors with phonologically unrelated names. Again, English listeners showed no differential effect. With the materials translated into Dutch, Dutch listeners showed no activation of the English words (desk, given target deksel). The results motivate two conclusions: native phonemic categories capture second-language input even when stored representations maintain a second-language distinction; and lexical competition is greater for non-native than for native listeners. |
S. -N. Yang; George W. McConkie Saccade generation during reading: Are words necessary? Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 226–261, 2004. @article{Yang2004, Most current theories of eye movement control during reading are word based in multiple ways: They assume that saccade onset times result from word-based processes, & that words are involved in selecting a saccade target. In the current study the role of words was examined by occasionally replacing the text with one of five alternate stimulus patterns for a single fixation during reading, & observing the effects on the time, direction, & length of the saccade that ends that fixation. The onset times of many saccades are unaffected by replacing spaces with random letters, thus removing visible word-units; also, the effects of this removal on saccade length is not different than that of having space-delimited nonwords. It does not appear that words play a critical role in generating saccades. The results are compatible with the Competition/Interaction theory of eye movement control during reading (Yang & McConkie, 2001). |
Jie-Li Tsai; Chia-Ying Lee; Ovid J. L. Tzeng; Daisy L. Hung; Nai-Shing Yen Use of phonological codes for Chinese characters: Evidence from processing of parafoveal preview when reading sentences Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 91, no. 2, pp. 235–244, 2004. @article{Tsai2004, The role of phonological coding for character identification was examined with the benefit of processing parafoveal characters in eye fixations while reading Chinese sentences. In Experiment 1, the orthogonal manipulation of phonological and orthographic similarity can separate two types of phonological benefits for homophonic previews, according to whether these previews share the same phonetic radical with the targets or not. The significant phonological benefits indicate that phonological coding is activated early when the character is in the parafovea. Experiment 2 manipulated the character's consistency value and found that the phonological preview benefits are reliable only when the targets are high consistency characters. The results of two experiments suggest that phonological computation is rapid and early at both character and radical levels for Chinese character identification. |
Gerry T. M. Altmann Language-mediated eye movements in the absence of a visual world: The 'blank screen paradigm' Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 93, no. 2, pp. B79–87, 2004. @article{Altmann2004a, The 'visual world paradigm' typically involves presenting participants with a visual scene and recording eye movements as they either hear an instruction to manipulate objects in the scene or as they listen to a description of what may happen to those objects. In this study, participants heard each target sentence only after the corresponding visual scene had been displayed and then removed. For a scene depicting a man, a woman, a cake, and a newspaper, the eyes were subsequently directed, during 'eat' in 'the man will eat the cake', towards where the cake had previously been located even though the screen had been blank for over 2 s. The rapidity of these movements mirrored the anticipatory eye movements observed in previous studies [Cognition 73 (1999) 247; J. Mem. Lang. 49 (2003) 133]. Thus, anticipatory eye movements are not dependent on a concurrent visual scene, but are dependent on a mental record of the scene that is independent of whether the visual scene is still present. |
Sally Andrews; Brett Miller; Keith Rayner Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words: There is a mouse in mousetrap Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 285–311, 2004. @article{Andrews2004, In two experiments, readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing compound words. In Experiment 1, the frequency of the first and second morpheme was manipulated in compound words of low whole word frequency. Experiment 2 compared pairs of low frequency compounds with high and low frequency first morphemes but identical second morphemes that were embedded in the same sentence frames. The results showed significant effects of the frequency of both morphemes on gaze duration and total fixation time on the compound words. Regression analyses revealed an influence of whole word frequency on the same measures. The results suggest that morphemic constituents of compound words are activated in the course of retrieving the representation of the whole compound word. The fact that the frequency effects were not confined to fixations on the morphemic constituents themselves implies that saccadic eye movements are implemented before morphemic retrieval has been completed. The results highlight the importance of developing more precise models of the perceptual processes underlying reading and how they interact with the processes involved in lexical retrieval and comprehension. |
Delphine Dahan; Michael K. Tanenhaus Continuous mapping from sound to meaning in spoken-language comprehension: Immediate effects of verb-based thematic constraints Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 498–513, 2004. @article{Dahan2004, The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based competitor set. |
Denis Drieghe; Marc Brysbaert; Timothy Desmet; Constantijn De Baecke Word skipping in reading: On the interplay of linguistic and visual factors Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 79–103, 2004. @article{Drieghe2004, An eye movement experiment is reported in which target words of two and four letters were presented in sentences that strongly raised the expectation of a particular word. There were three possible conditions: The expected word was present in the sentence, an unexpected word of the same length was present, or an unexpected word of a different length was present (all continuations were acceptable, but the latter two were difficult to predict). Our first purpose was to test one of the core assumptions of the Extended Optimal Viewing Position model of eye guidance in reading (Brysbaert & Vitu, 1998). This model states that word skipping is primarily a function of the length of the upcoming word. It leads to the prediction that an unpredicted two-letter word will be skipped more often than a predicted four-letter word, which is indeed what we observed. Our second aim was to determine if we could obtain an interaction between context predictability and parafoveal word length, by looking at what happens when the length of the parafoveal word does not agree with the length of the expected word. No such interaction was observed although the effects of both word length and predictability were substantial. These findings are interpreted as evidence for the hypothesis that visual and language-related factors independently affect word skipping |
Paola E. Dussias Parsing a first language like a second: The erosion of L1 parsing strategies in Spanish-English Bilinguals Journal Article In: International Journal of Bilingualism, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 355–371, 2004. @article{Dussias2004, Past research suggests that parsing processes in a bilingual's first language (L1) can undergo changes as a function of exposure to a second language (L2). Evidence for this claim comes from studies that have examined how Spanish-English bilinguals resolve temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, as is the case in "Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California." Previous studies indicate that whereas monolingual Spanish speakers attach the relative clause to the first noun in the complex noun phrase (non-local attachment), monolingual English speakers interpret the relative clause locally (ie, attach the relative clause to the noun immediately preceding it). With respect to bilinguals, recent research with Spanish-English bilinguals & professional translators (eg, Dussias, 2001, 2003; Parede, 2004) have shown that bilinguals attach the relative clause to the second noun in the complex noun phrase, when reading in Spanish, their first language. The differences observed between monolingual & bilingual speakers have been attributed to experience in a second language immersion environment. For example, Dussias (2003) argues that extensive exposure to a preponderance of English constructions resolved in favor of local attachment can render this interpretation more available, resulting in the low attachment preference observed in Spanish-English bilinguals. Of interest in the present paper is to assess whether speakers with fewer years of immersion experience in the L2 environment than those reported in previous studies employ the correct strategy in each of their languages. To this end, eye-movement data was collected while proficient L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers read ambiguous sentences of the type described above, in their first language, & their performance was compared to a monolingual Spanish group. Analyses revealed that the L1 Spanish speakers of English favored local over non-local attachment when reading in their first languages. The results are most congruent with exposure-based or parallel interactive models of sentence parsing as postulated by Brysbaert & Mitchell (1996), Mitchell & Cuetos (1991), & Mitchell, Cuetos, Corley, & Brysbaert (1995), given the assumption within these models that frequency-based exposure affects parsing decisions. |
Raymond Bertram; Alexander Pollatsek; Jukka Hyönä Morphological parsing and the use of segmentation cues in reading Finnish compounds Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 325–345, 2004. @article{Bertram2004, This eye movement study investigated the use of two types of segmentation cues in processing long Finnish compounds. The cues were related to the vowel quality properties of the constituents and properties of the consonant starting the second constituent. In Finnish, front vowels never appear with back vowels in a lexeme, but different quality vowels can appear in different constituents in compounds. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that compounds with different vowel quality constituents are processed faster than those with same vowel quality constituents, but only if the first constituent is long. This indicates that the use of segmentation cues in processing long compounds depends on the ease of encoding the first constituent. Experiment 3 established that (a) the effect does not depend on the crucial vowels being adjacent and (b) processing is affected by the type of consonant beginning the second constituent (i.e., whether or not it could end a first constituent). |
Antje S. Meyer; Femke Meulen; Adrian Brooks Eye movements during speech planning: Talking about present and remembered objects Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 553–576, 2004. @article{Meyer2004, Earlier work has shown that speakers naming several objects usually look at each of them before naming them (e.g., Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998). In the present study, participants saw pictures and described them in utterances such as "The chair next to the cross is brown'', where the colour of the first object was mentioned after another object had been mentioned. In Experiment 1, we examined whether the speakers would look at the first object (the chair) only once, before naming the object, or twice (before naming the object and before naming its colour). In Experiment 2, we examined whether speakers about to name the colour of the object would look at the object region again when the colour or the entire object had been removed while they were looking elsewhere. We found that speakers usually looked at the target object again before naming its colour, even when the colour was not displayed any more. Speakers were much less likely to fixate upon the target region when the object had been removed from view. We propose that the object contours may serve as a memory cue supporting the retrieval of the associated colour information. The results show that a speaker's eye movements in a picture description task, far from being random, depend on the available visual information and the content and structure of the planned utterance. |
Benjamin Munson; Nancy Solomon The effect of phonological neighborhood density on vowel articulation Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 47, pp. 1048–1058, 2004. @article{Munson2004, Recent literature suggests that phonological neighborhood density and word frequency can affect speech production, in addition to the well-documented effects that they have on speech perception. This article describes 2 experiments that examined how phonological neighborhood density influences the durations and formant frequencies of adults' productions of vowels in real words. In Experiment 1, 10 normal speakers produced words that covaried in phonological neighborhood density and word frequency. Infrequent words with many phonological neighbors were produced with shorter durations and more expanded vowel spaces than frequent words with few phonological neighbors. Results of this experiment confirmed that this effect was not related to the duration of the vowels constituting the high- and low-density words. In Experiment 2, 15 adults produced words that varied in both word frequency and neighborhood density. Neighborhood density affected vowel articulation in both high- and low-frequency words. Moreover, frequent words were produced with more contracted vowel spaces than infrequent words. There was no interaction between these factors, and the vowel duration did not vary as a function of neighborhood density. Taken together, the results suggest that neighborhood density affects vowel production independent of word frequency and vowel duration. |
Tatjana A. Nazir; Nadia Ben-Boutayab; Nathalie Decoppet; Avital Deutsch; Ram Frost Reading habits, perceptual learning, and recognition of printed words Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 88, no. 3, pp. 294–311, 2004. @article{Nazir2004, The present work aims at demonstrating that visual training associated with the act of reading modifies the way we perceive printed words. As reading does not train all parts of the retina in the same way but favors regions on the side in the direction of scanning, visual word recognition should be better at retinal locations that are frequently used during reading. In two studies that probed word and letter discriminations we provided evidence for a correlation between eye fixation pattern during reading and performance. We showed that effects of reading-related visual training were stimulus-specific in the sense that it affected the perception of words but not that of visually unfamiliar non-words. This stimulus specificity was also evident in the legibility of individual characters of the Roman and the Hebrew scripts - two scripts that are read in opposing directions. When displayed within a sequence of homogenous letters (e.g., xxexx) the legibility of a target character varied with the location of the sequence in the visual field and with the serial position of the target within the sequence. This retinal location- and context-dependency differed between Roman and Hebrew characters. These results seem to indicate that reading modifies the functional structure of early stages in the visual pathway. The cortical network that supports reading seems to comprise components of the visual cortex of both hemispheres before it lateralizes to the left hemisphere. Expanding the reading network to include these visual regions will shed a different light on the potential role of the visual word form area (e.g., Cohen et al., 2000) in word recognition and on the organization of the reading system in general. |
Susana T. L. Chung Reading speed benefits from increased vertical Journal Article In: Optometry and Vision Science, vol. 81, no. 7, pp. 525–535, 2004. @article{Chung2004, Purpose. Crowding, the adverse spatial interaction due to proximity of adjacent targets, has been suggested as an explanation for slow reading in peripheral vision. The purposes of this study were to (1) demonstrate that crowding exists at the word level and (2) examine whether or not reading speed in central and peripheral vision can be enhanced with increased vertical word spacing. Methods. Five normal observers read aloud sequences of six unrelated four-letter words presented on a computer monitor, one word at a time, using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Reading speeds were calculated based on the RSVP exposure durations yielding 80% correct. Testing was conducted at the fovea and at 5° and 10° in the inferior visual field. Critical print size (CPS) for each observer and at each eccentricity was first determined by measuring reading speeds for four print sizes using unflanked words. We then presented words at 0.8x or 1.4x CPS, with each target word flanked by two other words, one above and one below the target word. Reading speeds were determined for vertical word spacings (baseline-to-baseline separation between two vertically separated words) ranging from 0.8x to 2x the standard single-spacing, as well as the unflanked condition. Results. At the fovea, reading speed increased with vertical word spacing up to about 1.2x to 1.5x the standard spacing and remained constant and similar to the unflanked reading speed at larger vertical word spacings. In the periphery, reading speed also increased with vertical word spacing, but it remained below the unflanked reading speed for all spacings tested. At 2x the standard spacing, peripheral reading speed was still about 25% lower than the unflanked reading speed for both eccentricities and print sizes. Results from a control experiment showed that the greater reliance of peripheral reading speed on vertical word spacing was also found in the right visual field. Conclusions. Increased vertical word spacing, which presumably decreases the adverse effect of crowding between adjacent lines of text, benefits reading speed. This benefit is greater in peripheral than central vision. |
Susana T. L. Chung; Gordon E. Legge; Sing Hang Cheung Letter-recognition and reading speed in peripheral vision benefit from perceptual learning Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 44, no. 7, pp. 695–709, 2004. @article{Chung2004a, Visual-span profiles are plots of letter-recognition accuracy as a function of letter position left or right of the midline. Previously, we have shown that contraction of these profiles in peripheral vision can account for slow reading speed in peripheral vision. In this study, we asked two questions: (1) can we modify visual-span profiles through training on letter-recognition, and if so, (2) are these changes accompanied by changes in reading speed? Eighteen normally sighted observers were randomly assigned to one of three groups: training at 10° in the upper visual field, training at 10° in the lower visual field and a no-training control group. We compared observers' characteristics of reading (maximum reading speed and critical print size) and visual-span profiles (peak amplitude and bits of information transmitted) before and after training, and at trained and untrained retinal locations (10° upper and lower visual fields). Reading speeds were measured for six print sizes at each retinal location, using the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Visual-span profiles were measured using a trigram letter-recognition task, for a letter size equivalent to 1.4× the critical print size for reading. Training consisted of the repeated measurement of 20 visual-span profiles (over four consecutive days) in either the upper or lower visual field. We also tracked the changes in performance in a sub-group of observers for up to three months following training. We found that the visual-span profiles can be expanded (bits of information transmitted increased by 6 bits) through training with a letter-recognition task, and that there is an accompanying increase (41%) in the maximum reading speed. These improvements transferred, to a large extent, from the trained to an untrained retinal location, and were retained, to a large extent, for at least three months following training. Our results are consistent with the view that the visual span is a bottleneck on reading speed, but a bottleneck that can be increased with practice. |
David Crundall; Claire Shenton; Geoffrey Underwood Eye movements during intentional car following Journal Article In: Perception, vol. 33, no. 8, pp. 975–986, 2004. @article{Crundall2004, Does intentional car following capture visual attention to the extent that driving may be impaired? We tested fifteen participants on a rudimentary driving simulator. Participants were either instructed to follow a vehicle ahead through a simulated version of London, or were given verbal instructions on where to turn during the route. The presence or absence of pedestrians, and the simulated time of the drive (day or night) were varied across the trials. Eye movements were recorded along with behavioural measures including give-way violations, give-way accidents, and kerb impacts. The results revealed that intentional car following reduced the spread of search and increased fixation durations, with a dramatic increase in the time spent processing the vehicle ahead (controlled for exposure). The effects were most pronounced during nighttime drives. During the car-following trials participants were also less aware of pedestrians, produced more give-way violations, and were involved in more give-way accidents. The results draw attention to the problems encountered during car following, and we relate this to the cognitive demands placed on drivers, especially police drivers who often engage in intentional car following and pursuits. |
2003 |
Timothy Desmet; Edward Gibson Disambiguation preferences and corpus frequencies in noun phrase conjunction Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 353–374, 2003. @article{Desmet2003, Gibson and Schütze (1999) showed that on-line disambiguation preferences do not always mirror corpus frequencies. When presented with a syntactic ambiguity involving the conjunction of a noun phrase to three possible attachment sites, participants were faster to read attachments to the first site than attachments to the second one, although the latter were shown to be more frequent in text corpora. In the present study, we investigated whether a particular feature in their items - disambiguation using the pronoun 'one'-could account for this discrepancy. The results of a corpus analysis and two on-line reading experiments showed that the presence of this pronoun is indeed responsible for the high attachment preference in the conjunction ambiguity. We conclude that for this syntactic ambiguity there is no discrepancy between on-line preferences and corpus frequencies. Consequently, there is no need to assume different processes underlying sentence comprehension and sentence production on the basis of the noun phrase conjunction ambiguity. |
Avital Deutsch; Ram Frost; Sharon Pelleg; Alexander Pollatsek; Keith Rayner Early morphological effects in reading: Evidence from parafoveal preview benefit in Hebrew Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 415–422, 2003. @article{Deutsch2003, Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern.We examined the role of the root morpheme in word identificationby assessingthe benefit of presentation of a parafoveal previewword derived from the same root as a target word. Although the letter information of the preview was not consciously perceived, a preview of a word derived from the same root morpheme as the foveal target word facilitated eye-movement measures of first-pass reading (i.e., first fixation and gaze duration). These results are the first to demonstrate early morphological effects in the context of sentence reading in which no external task is imposed on the reader, and converge with previous findings of morphemic priming in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, and morphemic parafoveal preview benefit effects in a single-word identification task. |
Antje S. Meyer; Ardi Roelofs; Willem J. M. Levelt Word length effects in object naming: The role of a response criterion Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 48, pp. 131–147, 2003. @article{Meyer2003, According to Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) speakers generate the phonological and phonetic representations of successive syllables of a word in sequence and only begin to speak after having fully planned at least one complete phonological word. Therefore, speech onset latencies should be longer for long than for short words. We tested this prediction in four experiments in which Dutch participants named or categorized objects with monosyllabic or di- syllabic names. Experiment 1 yielded a length effect on production latencies when objects with long and short names were tested in separate blocks, but not when they were mixed. Experiment 2 showed that the length effect was not due to a difference in the ease of object recognition. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using a within-participants design. In Experiment 4, the long and short target words appeared in a phrasal context. In addition to the speech onset latencies, we obtained the viewing times for the target objects, which have been shown to depend on the time necessary to plan the form of the target names. We found word length effects for both dependent variables, but only when objects with short and long names were presented in separate blocks. We argue that in pure and mixed blocks speakers used different response deadlines, which they tried to meet by either generating the motor programs for one syllable or for all syllables of the word before speech onset. Computer simulations using WEAVER++ support this view. |
Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 48, pp. 615–634, 2003. @article{Bertram2003, This study explored whether the length of a complex word modifies the role of morphological structure in lexical processing: Does morphological structure play a similar role in short complex words that typically elicit one eye fixation (e.g., eyelid) as it does in long complex words that typically elicit two or more eye fixations (e.g., watercourse)? Two eye movement experiments with short vs. long Finnish compound words in context were conducted to find an answer to this question. In Experiment 1, a first-constituent frequency manipulation revealed solid effects for long compounds in early and late processing measures, but no effects for short compounds. In contrast, in Experiment 2, a whole-word frequency manipulation elicited solid effects for short compounds in early and late processing measures, but mainly late effects for long compounds. A race model, incorporating a headstart for the decomposition route, in case whole-word information of complex words cannot be extracted in a single fixation can explain the pattern of results. |
Jörg Sommerhalder; Evelyne Oueghlani; Marc Bagnoud; Ute Leonards; Avinoam B. Safran; Marco Pelizzone Simulation of artificial vision: I. Eccentric reading of isolated words, and perceptual learning Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 269–283, 2003. @article{Sommerhalder2003, Simulations of artificial vision were performed to assess "minimum requirements for useful artificial vision". Retinal prostheses will be implanted at a fixed (and probably eccentric) location of the retina. To mimic this condition on normal observers, we projected stimuli of various sizes and content on a defined stabilised area of the visual field. In experiment 1, we asked subjects to read isolated 4-letter words presented at various degrees of pixelisation and at various eccentricities. Reading performance dropped abruptly when the number of pixels was reduced below a certain threshold. For central reading, a viewing area containing about 300 pixels was necessary for close to perfect reading (>90% correctly read words). At eccentricities beyond 10°, close to perfect reading was never achieved even if more than 300 pixels were used. A control experiment using isolated letter recognition in the same conditions suggested that lower reading performance at high eccentricity was in part due to the "crowding effect". In experiment 2, we investigated whether the task of eccentric reading under such specific conditions could be improved by training. Two subjects, naive to this task, were trained to read pixelised 4-letter words presented at 15° eccentricity. Reading performance of both subjects increased impressively throughout the experiment. Low initial reading scores (range 6%-23% correct) improved impressively (range 64%-85% correct) after about one month of training (about 1 h/day). Control tests demonstrated that the learning process consisted essentially in an adaptation to use an eccentric area of the retina for reading. These results indicate that functional retinal implants consisting of more than 300 stimulation contacts will be needed. They might successfully restore some reading abilities in blind patients, even if they have to be placed outside the foveal area. Reaching optimal performance may, however, require a significant adaptation process. |
Frank A. Proudlock; Himanshu Shekhar; Irene Gottlob Coordination of eye and head movements during reading Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 44, no. 7, pp. 2991–2998, 2003. @article{Proudlock2003, PURPOSE. There is little information regarding the characteristics of head movements during reading. This study was undertaken to investigate horizontal and vertical head movements during two different reading tasks. METHODS. Head and eye movements were monitored with an infrared pupil and head tracker in 15 subjects during repeated reading of text from an A4-sized card and a card 90 degrees wide. In addition, head and eye movements were recorded in 45 subjects to compare head movement propensity during an A4 text-reading task and a saccadic task of an equivalent gaze shift. RESULTS. During the A4 standard reading task, horizontal and vertical head movements accounted for 4.7% and 28.7% of the gaze shift, respectively. During the 90 degrees text reading, horizontal head movements accounted for 40.3% of the gaze amplitude, and vertical head movements accounted for 28.4%. Horizontal gaze velocities increased significantly on repeated A4 and 90degrees text readings, as did horizontal head velocities and amplitudes. Reading head movement propensities were significantly smaller than saccadic head movement propensities (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS. Head movement strategies are rapidly switched between the A4 and 90 degrees text-reading paradigms. They are minimized during A4 text reading but actively assist the gaze strategy during 90degrees text reading. Horizontal head movement is reduced during A4 reading compared to the equivalent saccadic task and may be suppressed to improve fixation stability. The results support the view that the head and eye movement system is a highly coupled but extremely flexible system. |
Mike Rinck; Elena Gámez; José M. Díaz; Manuel De Vega Processing of temporal information: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 77–86, 2003. @article{Rinck2003, In two experiments, we recorded eye movements to study how readers monitor temporal order information contained in narrative texts. Participants read short texts containing critical temporal information in the sixth sentence, which could be either consistent or inconsistent with temporal order information given in the second sentence. In Experiment 1, inconsistent sentences yielded more regressions to the second sentence and longer refixations of it. In Experiment 2, this pattern of eye movements was shown only by readers who noticed the inconsistency and were able to report it. Theoretical and methodological implications of the results for research on text comprehension are discussed. |