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2011 |
Mara Breen; Charles Clifton Stress matters: Effects of anticipated lexical stress on silent reading Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 64, no. 2, pp. 153–170, 2011. @article{Breen2011,This paper presents findings from two eye-tracking studies designed to investigate the role of metrical prosody in silent reading. In Experiment 1, participants read stress-alternating noun-verb or noun-adjective homographs (e.g. PREsent, preSENT) embedded in limericks, such that the lexical stress of the homograph, as determined by context, either matched or mismatched the metrical pattern of the limerick. The results demonstrated a reading cost when readers encountered a mismatch between the predicted and actual stress pattern of the word. Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar cost of a mismatch in stress patterns in a context where the metrical constraint was mediated by lexical category rather than by explicit meter. Both experiments demonstrated that readers are slower to read words when their stress pattern does not conform to expectations. The data from these two eye-tracking experiments provide some of the first on-line evidence that metrical information is part of the default representation of a word during silent reading. |
Meredith Brown; Anne Pier Salverda; Laura C. Dilley; Michael K. Tanenhaus Expectations from preceding prosody influence segmentation in online sentence processing Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 1189–1196, 2011. @article{Brown2011,Previous work examining prosodic cues in online spoken-word recognition has focused primarily on local cues to word identity. However, recent studies have suggested that utterance-level prosodic patterns can also influence the interpretation of subsequent sequences of lexically ambiguous syllables (Dilley, Mattys, & Vinke, Journal of Memory and Language, 63:274–294, 2010; Dilley & McAuley, Journal of Memory and Language, 59:294–311, 2008). To test the hypothesis that these distal prosody effects are based on expectations about the organization of upcoming material, we conducted a visual-world experiment. We examined fixations to competing alternatives such as pan and panda upon hearing the target word panda in utterances in which the acoustic properties of the preceding sentence material had been manipulated. The proportions of fixations to the monosyllabic competitor were higher beginning 200 ms after target word onset when the preceding prosody supported a prosodic constituent boundary following pan-, rather than following panda. These findings support the hypothesis that expectations based on perceived prosodic patterns in the distal context influence lexical segmentation and word recognition. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Agnieszka E. Konopka Experimental Aapproaches to referential domains and the on-line processing of referring expressions in unscripted conversation Journal Article In: Information, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 302–326, 2011. @article{BrownSchmidt2011,This article describes research investigating the on-line processing of language in unscripted conversational settings. In particular, we focus on the process of formulating and interpreting definite referring expressions. Within this domain we present results of two eye-tracking experiments addressing the problem of how speakers interrogate the referential domain in preparation to speak, how they select an appropriate expression for a given referent, and how addressees interpret these expressions. We aim to demonstrate that it is possible, and indeed fruitful, to examine unscripted, conversational language using modified experimental designs and standard hypothesis testing procedures. |
Minglei Chen; Hwawei Ko Exploring the eye-movement patterns as Chinese children read texts: A developmental perspective Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 232–246, 2011. @article{Chen2011,This study was to investigate Chinese children's eye patterns while reading different text genres from a developmental perspective. Eye movements were recorded while children in the second through sixth grades read two expository texts and two narrative texts. Across passages, overall word frequency was not significantly different between the two genres. Results showed that all children had longer fixation durations for low-frequency words. They also had longer fixation durations on content words. These results indicate that children adopted a word-based processing strategy like skilled readers do. However, only older children's rereading times were affected by genre. Overall, eye-movement patterns of older children reported in this study are in accordance with those of skilled Chinese readers, but younger children are more likely to be responsive to word characteristics than text level when reading a Chinese text. |
Reinier Cozijn; Edwin Commandeur; Wietske Vonk; Leo G. M. Noordman The time course of the use of implicit causality information in the processing of pronouns: A visual world paradigm study Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 64, no. 4, pp. 381–403, 2011. @article{Cozijn2011,Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as "John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well" They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focusing and the integration account. The focusing account claims that the bias should be manifest soon after the verb has been processed, whereas the integration account claims that the interpretation is deferred until disambiguating information is encountered. Up to now, this issue has remained unresolved because materials or methods have failed to address it conclusively. We conducted two experiments that exploited the visual world paradigm and ambiguous pronouns in subordinate because clauses. The first experiment presented implicit causality sentences with the task to resolve the ambiguous pronoun. To exclude strategic processing, in the second experiment, the task was to answer simple comprehension questions and only a minority of the sentences contained implicit causality verbs. In both experiments, the implicit causality of the verb had an effect before the disambiguating information was available. This result supported the focusing account. |
Sarah C. Creel; Melanie A. Tumlin On-line acoustic and semantic interpretation of talker information Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 264–285, 2011. @article{Creel2011,Recent work demonstrates that listeners utilize talker-specific information in the speech signal to inform real-time language processing. However, there are multiple representational levels at which this may take place. Listeners might use acoustic cues in the speech signal to access the talker's identity and information about what they tend to talk about, which then immediately constrains processing. Alternatively, or simultaneously, listeners might compare the signal to acoustically-detailed representations of words, without awareness of the talker's identity. In a series of eye-tracked comprehension experiments, we explore the circumstances under which listeners utilize talker-specific information. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate talker-specific recognition benefits for newly-learned words both in isolation (Experiment 1) and with preceding context (Experiment 2), but suggest that listeners do not strongly semantically associate talkers with referents. Experiment 3 demonstrates that listeners can recognize talkers rapidly, almost as soon as acoustic information is available, and can associate talkers with multiple arbitrary referents. Experiment 4 demonstrates that if talker identity is highly diagnostic on each trial, listeners readily associate talkers with specific referents, but do not seem to make such associations when diagnostic value is low. Implications for speech processing, talker processing, and learning are discussed. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. |
Sebastian J. Crutch; Manja Lehmann; Nikos Gorgoraptis; Diego Kaski; Natalie Ryan; Masud Husain; Elizabeth K. Warrington Abnormal visual phenomena in posterior cortical atrophy Journal Article In: Neurocase, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 160–177, 2011. @article{Crutch2011,Individuals with posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) report a host of unusual and poorly explained visual disturbances. This preliminary report describes a single patient (CRO), and documents and investigates abnormally prolonged colour afterimages (concurrent and prolonged perception of colours complimentary to the colour of an observed stimulus), perceived motion of static stimuli, and better reading of small than large letters. We also evaluate CRO's visual and vestibular functions in an effort to understand the origin of her experience of room tilt illusion, a disturbing phenomenon not previously observed in individuals with cortical degenerative disease. These visual symptoms are set in the context of a 4-year longitudinal neuropsychological and neuroimaging investigation of CRO's visual and other cognitive skills. We hypothesise that prolonged colour after-images are attributable to relative sparing of V1 inhibitory interneurons; perceived motion of static stimuli reflects weak magnocellular function; better reading of small than large letters indicates a reduced effective field of vision; and room tilt illusion effects are caused by disordered integration of visual and vestibular information. This study contributes to the growing characterisation of PCA whose atypical early visual symptoms are often heterogeneous and frequently under-recognised. |
Chelsie L. Cushman; Rebecca L. Johnson Age-of-acquisition effects in pure alexia Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 64, no. 9, pp. 1726–1742, 2011. @article{Cushman2011,Pure alexia is an acquired reading disorder in which previously literate adults adopt a letter-by-letter processing strategy. Though these individuals display impaired reading, research shows that they are still able to use certain lexical information in order to facilitate visual word processing. The current experiment investigates the role that a word's age of acquisition (AoA) plays in the reading processes of an individual with pure alexia (G.J.) when other lexical variables have been controlled. Results from a sentence reading task in which eye movement patterns were recorded indicated that G.J. shows a strong effect of AoA, where late-acquired words are more difficult to process than early-acquired words. Furthermore, it was observed that the AoA effect is much greater for G.J. than for age-matched control participants. This indicates that patients with pure alexia rely heavily on intact top-down information, supporting the interactive activation model of reading. |
William S. Evans; David Caplan; Gloria Waters Effects of concurrent arithmetical and syntactic complexity on self-paced reaction times and eye fixations Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 1203–1211, 2011. @article{Evans2011,Two dual-task experiments (replications of Experiments 1 and 2 in Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 246-269 2007) were conducted to determine whether syntactic and arithmetical operations share working memory resources. Subjects read object- or subject-extracted relative clause sentences phrase by phrase in a self-paced task while simultaneously adding or subtracting numbers. Experiment 2 measured eye fixations as well as self-paced reaction times. In both experiments, there were main effects of syntax and of mathematical operation on self-paced reading times, but no interaction of the two. In the Experiment 2 eye-tracking results, there were main effects of syntax on first-pass reading time and total reading time and an interaction between syntax and math in total reading time on the noun phrase within the relative clause. The findings point to differences in the ways individuals process sentences under these dual-task conditions, as compared with viewing sentences during "normal" reading conditions, and do not support the view that arithmetical and syntactic integration operations share a working memory system. |
Ruth Filik; Emma Barber Inner speech during silent reading reflects the reader's regional accent Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 6, no. 10, pp. e25782, 2011. @article{Filik2011,While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech. However, there is currently little evidence regarding whether this inner voice resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. To investigate this issue, we compared reading behaviour of Northern and Southern English participants who have differing pronunciations for words like 'glass', in which the vowel duration is short in a Northern accent and long in a Southern accent. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they silently read limericks in which the end words of the first two lines (e.g., glass/class) would be pronounced differently by Northern and Southern participants. The final word of the limerick (e.g., mass/sparse) then either did or did not rhyme, depending on the reader's accent. Results showed disruption to eye movement behaviour when the final word did not rhyme, determined by the reader's accent, suggesting that inner speech resembles our own voice. |
Gemma Fitzsimmons; Denis Drieghe The influence of number of syllables on word skipping during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 736–741, 2011. @article{Fitzsimmons2011,In an eye-tracking experiment, participants read sentences containing a monosyllabic (e.g., grain) or a disyllabic (e.g., cargo) five-letter word. Monosyllabic target words were skipped more often than disyllabic target words, indicating that syllabic structure was extracted from the parafovea early enough to influence the decision of saccade target selection. Fixation times on the target word when it was fixated did not show an influence of number of syllables, demonstrating that number of syllables differentially impacts skipping rates and fixation durations during reading. |
Angélica Pérez Fornos; Jörg Sommerhalder; Marco Pelizzone Reading with a simulated 60-channel implant Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 5, pp. 57, 2011. @article{Fornos2011,First generation retinal prostheses containing 50-60 electrodes are currently in clinical trials. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the theoretical upper limit (best possible) reading performance attainable with a state-of-the-art 60-channel retinal implant and to find the optimum viewing conditions for the task. Four normal volunteers performed full-page text reading tasks with a low-resolution, 60-pixel viewing window that was stabilized in the central visual field. Two parameters were systematically varied: (1) spatial resolution (image magnification) and (2) the orientation of the rectangular viewing window. Performance was measured in terms of reading accuracy (% of correctly read words) and reading rates (words/min). Maximum reading performances were reached at spatial resolutions between 3.6 and 6 pixels/char. Performance declined outside this range for all subjects. In optimum viewing conditions (4.5 pixels/char), subjects achieved almost perfect reading accuracy and mean reading rates of 26 words/min for the vertical viewing window and of 34 words/min for the horizontal viewing window. These results suggest that, theoretically, some reading abilities can be restored with actual state-of-the-art retinal implant prototypes if "image magnification" is within an "optimum range." Future retinal implants providing higher pixel resolutions, thus allowing for a wider visual span might allow faster reading rates. |
Tom Foulsham; Geoffrey Underwood If visual saliency predicts search, then why? Evidence from normal and gaze-contingent search tasks in natural scenes Journal Article In: Cognitive Computation, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 48–63, 2011. @article{Foulsham2011a,The Itti and Koch (Vision Research 40: 14891506, 2000) saliency map model has inspired a wealth of research testing the claim that bottom-up saliency determines the placement of eye fixations in natural scenes. Although saliency seems to correlate with (although not necessarily cause) fixation in free-viewing or encoding tasks, it has been suggested that visual saliency can be overridden in a search task, with saccades being planned on the basis of target features, rather than being captured by saliency. Here, we find that target regions of a scene that are salient according to this model are found quicker than control regions (Experiment 1). However, this does not seem to be altered by filtering features in the periphery using a gaze-contingent display (Experiment 2), and a deeper analysis of the eye movements made suggests that the saliency effect is instead due to the meaning of the scene regions. Experiment 3 supports this interpretation, showing that scene inversion reduces the saliency effect. These results suggest that saliency effects on search may have nothing to do with bottom-up saccade guidance. |
Tamar H. Gollan; Timothy J. Slattery; Diane Goldenberg; Eva Van Assche; Wouter Duyck; Keith Rayner Frequency drives lexical access in reading but not in speaking: The frequency-lag hypothesis Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 140, no. 2, pp. 186–209, 2011. @article{Gollan2011,To contrast mechanisms of lexical access in production versus comprehension we compared the effects of word frequency (high, low), context (none, low constraint, high constraint), and level of English proficiency (monolingual, Spanish-English bilingual, Dutch-English bilingual) on picture naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times. Semantic constraint effects were larger in production than in reading. Frequency effects were larger in production than in reading without constraining context but larger in reading than in production with constraining context. Bilingual disadvantages were modulated by frequency in production but not in eye fixation times, were not smaller in low-constraint contexts, and were reduced by high-constraint contexts only in production and only at the lowest level of English proficiency. These results challenge existing accounts of bilingual disadvantages and reveal fundamentally different processes during lexical access across modalities, entailing a primarily semantically driven search in production but a frequency-driven search in comprehension. The apparently more interactive process in production than comprehension could simply reflect a greater number of frequency-sensitive processing stages in production. |
Andreas Hartwig; Emma Gowen; W. Neil Charman; Hema Radhakrishnan Working distance and eye and head movements during near work in myopes and non-myopes Journal Article In: Clinical and Experimental Optometry, vol. 94, no. 6, pp. 536–544, 2011. @article{Hartwig2011a,PURPOSE: Reasons for the development and progression of myopia remain unclear. Some studies show a high prevalence of myopia in certain occupational groups. This might imply that certain head and eye movements lead to ocular elongation, perhaps as a result of forces from the extraocular muscles, lids or other structures. The present study aims to analyse head and eye movements in myopes and non-myopes for near-vision tasks. METHODS: The study analysed head and eye movements in a cohort of 14 myopic and 16 non-myopic young adults. Eye and head movements were monitored by an eye tracker and a motion sensor while the subjects performed three near tasks, which included reading on a screen, reading a book and writing. Horizontal eye and head movements were measured in terms of angular amplitudes. Vertical eye and head movements were analysed in terms of the range of the whole movement during the recording. Values were also assessed as a ratio based on the width of the printed text, which changed between participants due to individual working distances. RESULTS: Horizontal eye and head movements were significantly different among the three tasks (p = 0.03 and p = 0.014, for eye and head movements, respectively, repeated measures ANOVA). Horizontal and vertical eye and head movements did not differ significantly between myopes and non-myopes. As expected, eye movements preponderated over head movements for all tasks and in both meridians. A positive correlation was found between mean spherical equivalent and the working distance for reading a book (r = 0.41; p = 0.025). CONCLUSIONS: The results show a similar pattern of eye movements in all participating subjects, although the amplitude of these movements varied considerably between the individuals. It is likely that some individuals when exposed to certain occupational tasks might show different eye and head movement patterns. |
Yi Ting Huang; Peter C. Gordon Distinguishing the time course of lexical and discourse processes through context, coreference, and quantified expressions Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 966–978, 2011. @article{Huang2011,How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements indicated facilitated recognition of repeated expressions, suggesting that prior context can rapidly influence lexical processing. However, context effects at the discourse level affected later processing, appearing in longer regression-path durations 2 words after the anaphor and in greater rereading times of the antecedent expression. Experiments 2 and 3 explored the nature of this delay by examining the role of the preceding context in activating relevant representations. Offline and online interpretations confirmed that relevant referents were activated following the critical context. Nevertheless, their initial unavailability during comprehension suggests a robust temporal division between lexical and discourse-level processing. |
Falk Huettig; Gerry T. M. Altmann In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 122–145, 2011. @article{Huettig2011,Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the influence of stored colour knowledge, perceived surface colour, and conceptual category of visual objects on language-mediated overt attention. Participants heard spoken target words whose concepts are associated with a diagnostic colour (e.g., "spinach"; spinach is typically green) while their eye movements were monitored to (a) objects associated with a diagnostic colour but presented in black and white (e.g., a black-and-white line drawing of a frog), (b) objects associated with a diagnostic colour but presented in an appropriate but atypical colour (e.g., a colour photograph of a yellow frog), and (c) objects not associated with a diagnostic colour but presented in the diagnostic colour of the target concept (e.g., a green blouse; blouses are not typically green). We observed that colour-mediated shifts in overt attention are primarily due to the perceived surface attributes of the visual objects rather than stored knowledge about the typical colour of the object. In addition our data reveal that conceptual category information is the primary determinant of overt attention if both conceptual category and surface colour competitors are copresent in the visual environment. |
Falk Huettig; James M. Mcqueen The nature of the visual environment induces implicit biases during language-mediated visual search Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1068–1084, 2011. @article{Huettig2011a,Four eyetracking experiments examined whether semantic and visual-shape representations are routinely retrieved from printed word displays and used during language-mediated visual search. Participants listened to sentences containing target words that were similar semantically or in shape to concepts invoked by concurrently displayed printed words. In Experiment 1, the displays contained semantic and shape competitors of the targets along with two unrelated words. There were significant shifts in eye gaze as targets were heard toward semantic but not toward shape competitors. In Experiments 2-4, semantic competitors were replaced with unrelated words, semantically richer sentences were presented to encourage visual imagery, or participants rated the shape similarity of the stimuli before doing the eyetracking task. In all cases, there were no immediate shifts in eye gaze to shape competitors, even though, in response to the Experiment 1 spoken materials, participants looked to these competitors when they were presented as pictures (Huettig & McQueen, 2007). There was a late shape-competitor bias (more than 2,500 ms after target onset) in all experiments. These data show that shape information is not used in online search of printed word displays (whereas it is used with picture displays). The nature of the visual environment appears to induce implicit biases toward particular modes of processing during language-mediated visual search. |
Alex D. Hwang; Hsueh-Cheng Wang; Marc Pomplun Semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 51, no. 10, pp. 1192–1205, 2011. @article{Hwang2011,The perception of objects in our visual world is influenced by not only their low-level visual features such as shape and color, but also their high-level features such as meaning and semantic relations among them. While it has been shown that low-level features in real-world scenes guide eye movements during scene inspection and search, the influence of semantic similarity among scene objects on eye movements in such situations has not been investigated. Here we study guidance of eye movements by semantic similarity among objects during real-world scene inspection and search. By selecting scenes from the LabelMe object-annotated image database and applying latent semantic analysis (LSA) to the object labels, we generated semantic saliency maps of real-world scenes based on the semantic similarity of scene objects to the currently fixated object or the search target. An ROC analysis of these maps as predictors of subjects' gaze transitions between objects during scene inspection revealed a preference for transitions to objects that were semantically similar to the currently inspected one. Furthermore, during the course of a scene search, subjects' eye movements were progressively guided toward objects that were semantically similar to the search target. These findings demonstrate substantial semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes and show its importance for understanding real-world attentional control. |
Jukka Hyönä; Raymond Bertram Optimal viewing position effects in reading Finnish Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 51, no. 11, pp. 1279–1287, 2011. @article{Hyoenae2011,The present study examined effects of the initial landing position in words on eye behavior during reading of long and short Finnish compound words. The study replicated OVP and IOVP effects previously found in French, German and English - languages structurally distinct from Finnish, suggesting that the effects generalize across structurally different alphabetic languages. The results are consistent with the view that the landing position effects appear at the prelexical stage of word processing, as landing position effects were not modulated by word frequency. Moreover, the OVP effects are in line with a visuomotor explanation making recourse to visual acuity constraints. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Matthew S. Solomon; Ralph Radach; Bradley A. Seymour Temporal dynamics of the eye-voice span and eye movement control during oral reading Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 543–558, 2011. @article{Inhoff2011,The distance between eye movements and articulation during oral reading, commonly referred to as the eye?voice span, has been a classic issue of experimental reading research since Buswell (1921). To examine the influence of the span on eye movement control, synchronised recordings of eye position and speech production were obtained during fluent oral reading. The viewing of a word almost always preceded its articulation, and the interval between the onset of a word's fixation and the onset of its articulation was approximately 500 ms. The identification and articulation of a word were closely coupled, and the fixation?speech interval was regulated through immediate adjustments of word viewing duration, unless the interval was relatively long. In this case, the lag between identification and articulation was often reduced through a regression that moved the eyes back in the text. These results indicate that models of eye movement control during oral reading need to include a mechanism that maintains a close linkage between the identification and articulation of words through continuous oculomotor adjustments. |
Lisa Irmen; Eva Schumann Processing grammatical gender of role nouns: Further evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 998–1014, 2011. @article{Irmen2011,Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the effects of masculine versus feminine grammatical gender on the processing of role nouns and on establishing coreference relations. Participants read sentences with the basic structure My kinship term is a role noun prepositional phrase such as My brother is a singer in a band. Role nouns were either masculine or feminine. Kinship terms were lexically male or female and in this way specified referent gender, i.e., the sex of the person referred to. Experiment 1 tested a fully crossed design including items with an incorrect combination of lexically male kinship term and feminine role name. Experiment 2 tested only correct combinations of grammatical and lexical/referential gender to control for possible effects of the incorrect items of Experiment 1. In early stages of processing, feminine role nouns, but not masculine ones, were fixated longer when grammatical and referential gender were contradictory. In later stages of sentence wrap-up there were longer fixations for sentences with masculine than for those with feminine role nouns. Results of both experiments indicate that, for feminine role nouns, cues to referent gender are integrated immediately, whereas a late integration obtains for masculine forms. |
Marcus L. Johnson; Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon The sentence-composition effect : Processing of complex noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 140, no. 4, pp. 707–724, 2011. @article{Johnson2011,In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was reduced when the head NP was unusual relative to the embedded NP, as manipulated by lexical frequency. When both NPs were common or both were unusual, results showed strong effects of both commonness and sentence structure, but no interaction. In contrast, when 1 NP was common and the other was unusual, results showed the critical interaction. These results provide evidence for a sentence-composition effect analogous to the list-composition effect that has been well documented in memory research, in which the pattern of recall for common versus unusual items is different, depending on whether items are studied in a pure or mixed list context. This work represents an important step in integrating the list-memory and sentence-processing literatures and provides additional support for the usefulness of studying complex sentence processing from the perspective of memory-based models. |
Barbara J. Juhasz; Rachel N. Berkowitz Effects of morphological families on English compound word recognition: A multitask investigation Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 26, no. 4-6, pp. 653–682, 2011. @article{Juhasz2011,Three experiments examined the influence of first lexeme morphological family size on English compound word recognition. Concatenated compound words whose first lexemes were from large morphological families were responded to faster in word naming and lexical decision than compounds from small morphological families. In addition, an eye movement experiment showed that gaze durations were shorter on compounds from large morphological families during sentence reading. This was mainly due to more refixations on compounds from small morphological families. Posthoc analyses and re-analysis of past studies suggested that compounds with a larger number of higher frequency family members (HFFM) are read more slowly than compounds with fewer HFFM. Thus, while morphological family size is generally facilitative, the presence of HFFM has an inhibitory effect on eye movement behaviour. The time-course of these effects is discussed. |
Barbara J. Juhasz; Margaret M. Gullick; Leah W. Shesler The effects of age-of-Aacquisition on ambiguity resolution: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2011. @article{Juhasz2011a,Words that are rated as acquired earlier in life receive shorter fixation durations than later acquired words, even when word frequency is adequately controlled (Juhasz & Rayner, 2003; 2006). Some theories posit that age-of-acquisition (AoA) affects the semantic representation of words (e.g., Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005), while others suggest that AoA should have an influence at multiple levels in the mental lexicon (e.g. Ellis & Lambon Ralph, 2000). In past studies, early and late AoA words have differed from each other in orthography, phonology, and meaning, making it difficult to localize the influence of AoA. Two experiments are reported which examined the locus of AoA effects in reading. Both experiments used balanced ambiguous words which have two equally-frequent meanings acquired at different times (e.g. pot, tick). In Experiment 1, sentence context supporting either the early- or late-acquired meaning was presented prior to the ambiguous word; in Experiment 2, disambiguating context was presented after the ambiguous word. When prior context disambiguated the ambiguous word, meaning AoA influenced the processing of the target word. However, when disambiguating sentence context followed the ambiguous word, meaning frequency was the more important variable and no effect of meaning AoA was observed. These results, when combined with the past results of Juhasz and Rayner (2003; 2006) suggest that AoA influences access to multiple levels of representation in the mental lexicon. The results also have implications for theories of lexical ambiguity resolution, as they suggest that variables other than meaning frequency and context can influence resolution of noun-noun ambiguities. |
Elsi Kaiser Focusing on pronouns: Consequences of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 26, no. 10, pp. 1625–1666, 2011. @article{Kaiser2011,We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated the effects of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus on the interpretation of pronouns in subsequent discourse. By probing the effects of these factors on real-time pronoun interpretation, we aim to contribute to our understanding of how topicality-related factors (subjecthood, givenness) interact with contrastive focus effects, and to investigate whether the seemingly mixed results obtained in prior work on topicality and focusing could be related to effects of subjecthood. Our results indicate that structural and semantic prominence (specifically, agentive subjects) influence pronoun interpretation even when separated from information-structural notions, and thus need to be taken into account when investigating topicality and focusing. We discuss how our results allow us to reconcile the distinct findings of prior studies. More generally, this research contributes to our understanding of how the language comprehension system integrates different kinds of information during real-time reference resolution.$backslash$nWe report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated the effects of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus on the interpretation of pronouns in subsequent discourse. By probing the effects of these factors on real-time pronoun interpretation, we aim to contribute to our understanding of how topicality-related factors (subjecthood, givenness) interact with contrastive focus effects, and to investigate whether the seemingly mixed results obtained in prior work on topicality and focusing could be related to effects of subjecthood. Our results indicate that structural and semantic prominence (specifically, agentive subjects) influence pronoun interpretation even when separated from information-structural notions, and thus need to be taken into account when investigating topicality and focusing. We discuss how our results allow us to reconcile the distinct findings of prior studies. More generally, this research contributes to our understanding of how the language comprehension system integrates different kinds of information during real-time reference resolution. |
Manizeh Khan; Meredyth Daneman How readers spontaneously interpret man-suffix words: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 40, no. 5, pp. 351–366, 2011. @article{Khan2011,This study investigated whether readers are more likely to assign a male referent to man-suffix terms (e.g. chairman) than to gender-neutral alternatives (e.g., chairperson) during reading, and whether this bias differs as a function of age. Younger and older adults' eye movements were monitored while reading passages containing phrases such as "The chairman/chairperson familiarized herself with…" On-line eye fixation data provided strong evidence that man-suffix words were more likely to evoke the expectation of a male referent in both age groups. Younger readers demonstrated inflated processing times when first encountering herself after chairman relative to chairperson, and they tended to make more regressive fixations to chairman. Older readers did not show the effect when initially encountering herself, but they spent disproportionately longer looking back to chairman and herself. The study provides empirical support for copy-editing policies that mandate the use of explicitly gender-neutral suffix terms in place of man-suffix terms. |
Stefanie E. Kuchinsky; Kathryn Bock; David E. Irwin Reversing the hands of time: Changing the mapping from seeing to saying Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 748–756, 2011. @article{Kuchinsky2011,To describe a scene, speakers must map visual information to a linguistic plan. Eye movements capture features of this linkage in a tendency for speakers to fixate referents just before they are mentioned. The current experiment examined whether and how this pattern changes when speakers create atypical mappings. Eye movements were monitored as participants told the time from analog clocks. Half of the participants did this in the usual manner. For the other participants, the denotations of the clock hands were reversed, making the big hand the hour and the little hand the minute. Eye movements revealed that it was not the visual features or configuration of the hands that determined gaze patterns, but rather top-down control from upcoming referring expressions. Differences in eye-voice spans further suggested a process in which scene elements are relationally structured before a linguistic plan is executed. This provides evidence for structural rather than lexical incrementality in planning and supports a "seeing-for-saying" hypothesis in which the visual system is harnessed to the linguistic demands of an upcoming utterance. |
Victor Kuperman; Julie A. Van Dyke Effects of individual differences in verbal skills on eye-movement patterns during sentence reading Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 42–73, 2011. @article{Kuperman2011,This study is a large-scale exploration of the influence that individual reading skills exert on eye-movement behavior in sentence reading. Seventy-one non-college-bound 16-24. year-old speakers of English completed a battery of 18 verbal and cognitive skill assessments, and read a series of sentences as their eye-movements were monitored. Statistical analyses were performed to establish what tests of reading abilities were predictive of eye-movement patterns across this population and how strong the effects were. We found that individual scores in rapid automatized naming and word identification tests (i) were the only participant variables with reliable predictivity throughout the time-course of reading; (ii) elicited effects that superceded in magnitude the effects of established predictors like word length or frequency; and (iii) strongly modulated the influence of word length and frequency on fixation times. We discuss implications of our findings for testing reading ability, as well as for research of eye-movements in reading. |
Eric Lambert; Denis Alamargot; Denis Larocque; Gilles Caporossi Dynamics of the spelling process during a copy task: Effects of regularity and frequency Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 141–150, 2011. @article{Lambert2011,This study investigated the time course of spelling, and its influence on graphomotor execution, in a successive word copy task. According to the cascade model, these two processes may be engaged either sequentially or in parallel, depending on the cognitive demands of spelling. In this experiment, adults were asked to copy a series of words varying in frequency and spelling regularity. A combined analysis of eye and pen movements revealed periods where spelling occurred in parallel with graphomotor execution, but concerned different processing units. The extent of this parallel processing depended on the words' orthographic characteristics. Results also highlighted the specificity of word recognition for copying purposes compared with recognition for reading tasks. The results confirm the validity of the cascade model and clarify the nature of the dependence between spelling and graphomotor processes. |
Jiyeon Lee; Cynthia K. Thompson Real-time production of unergative and unaccusative sentences in normal and agrammatic speakers: An eyetracking study Journal Article In: Aphasiology, vol. 25, no. 6-7, pp. 813–825, 2011. @article{Lee2011a,Background: Speakers with agrammatic aphasia have greater difficulty producing unaccusative (float) compared to unergative (bark) verbs (Kegl, 1995; Lee & Thompson, 2004; Thompson, 2003), putatively because the former involve movement of the theme to the subject position from the post-verbal position, and are therefore more complex than the latter (Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter, 1978). However, it is unclear if and how sentence production processes are affected by the linguistic distinction between these two types of verbs in normal and impaired speakers. Aims: This study examined real-time production of sentences with unergative (the black dog is barking) vs unaccusative (the black tube is floating) verbs in healthy young speakers and individuals with agrammatic aphasia, using eyetracking. Methods & Procedures: Participants' eye movements and speech were recorded while they produced a sentence using computer displayed written stimuli (e.g., black, dog, is barking). Outcomes & Results: Both groups of speakers produced numerically fewer unaccusative sentences than unergative sentences. However, the eye movement data revealed significant differences in fixations between the adjective (black) vs the noun (tube) when producing unaccusatives, but not when producing unergatives for both groups. Interestingly, whereas healthy speakers showed this difference during speech, speakers with agrammatism showed this difference prior to speech onset. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the human sentence production system differentially processes unaccusatives vs unergatives. This distinction is preserved in individuals with agrammatism; however, the time course of sentence planning appears to differ from healthy speakers (Lee & Thompson, 2010). |
Xingshan Li; Pingping Liu; Keith Rayner Eye movement guidance in Chinese reading: Is there a preferred viewing location? Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 51, pp. 1146–1156, 2011. @article{Li2011a,In this study, we examined eye movement guidance in Chinese reading. We embedded either a 2-character word or a 4-character word in the same sentence frame, and observed the eye movements of Chinese readers when they read these sentences. We found that when all saccades into the target words were considered that readers eyes tended to land near the beginning of the word. However, we also found that Chinese readers' eyes landed at the center of words when they made only a single fixation on a word, and that they landed at the beginning of a word when they made more than one fixation on a word. However, simulations that we carried out suggest that these findings cannot be taken to unambiguously argue for word-based saccade targeting in Chinese reading. We discuss alternative accounts of eye guidance in Chinese reading and suggest that eye movement target planning for Chinese readers might involve a combination of character-based and word-based targeting contingent on word segmentation processes. |
Andrea E. Martin; Brian McElree Direct-access retrieval during sentence comprehension: Evidence from Sluicing Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 64, no. 4, pp. 327–343, 2011. @article{Martin2011,Language comprehension requires recovering meaning from linguistic form, even when the mapping between the two is indirect. A canonical example is ellipsis, the omission of information that is subsequently understood without being overtly pronounced. Comprehension of ellipsis requires retrieval of an antecedent from memory, without prior prediction, a property which enables the study of retrieval in situ (Martin & McElree, 2008, 2009). Sluicing, or inflectional-phrase ellipsis, in the presence of a conjunction, presents a test case where a competing antecedent position is syntactically licensed, in contrast with most cases of nonadjacent dependency, including verb-phrase ellipsis. We present speed-accuracy tradeoff and eye-movement data inconsistent with the hypothesis that retrieval is accomplished via a syntactically guided search, a particular variant of search not examined in past research. The observed timecourse profiles are consistent with the hypothesis that antecedents are retrieved via a cue-dependent direct-access mechanism susceptible to general memory variables. |
Kazunaga Matsuki; Tracy Chow; Mary Hare; Jeffrey L. Elman; Christoph Scheepers; Ken McRae Event-based plausibility immediately influences on-line language comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 913–934, 2011. @article{Matsuki2011,In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional restriction violations. Specifically, we investigated whether instruments can combine with actions to influence comprehension of ensuing patients of (as in Rayner, Warren, Juhuasz, & Liversedge, 2004; Warren & McConnell, 2007). Instrument-verb-patient triplets were created in a norming study designed to tap directly into event knowledge. In self-paced reading (Experiment 1), participants were faster to read patient nouns, such as hair, when they were typical of the instrument-action pair (Donna used the shampoo to wash vs. the hose to wash). Experiment 2 showed that these results were not due to direct instrument-patient relations. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1 using eyetracking, with effects of event typicality observed in first fixation and gaze durations on the patient noun. This research demonstrates that conceptual event-based expectations are computed and used rapidly and dynamically during on-line language comprehension. We discuss relationships among plausibility and predictability, as well as their implications. We conclude that selectional restrictions may be best considered as event-based conceptual knowledge rather than lexical-grammatical knowledge. |
Daniel Mirman; Eiling Yee; Sheila E. Blumstein; James S. Magnuson Theories of spoken word recognition deficits in Aphasia: Evidence from eye-tracking and computational modeling Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 53–68, 2011. @article{Mirman2011,We used eye-tracking to investigate lexical processing in aphasic participants by examining the fixation time course for rhyme (e.g., carrot-. parrot) and cohort (e.g., beaker-. beetle) competitors. Broca's aphasic participants exhibited larger rhyme competition effects than age-matched controls. A re-analysis of previously reported data (Yee, Blumstein, & Sedivy, 2008) confirmed that Wernicke's aphasic participants exhibited larger cohort competition effects. Individual-level analyses revealed a negative correlation between rhyme and cohort competition effect size across both groups of aphasic participants. Computational model simulations were performed to examine which of several accounts of lexical processing deficits in aphasia might account for the observed effects. Simulation results revealed that slower deactivation of lexical competitors could account for increased cohort competition in Wernicke's aphasic participants; auditory perceptual impairment could account for increased rhyme competition in Broca's aphasic participants; and a perturbation of a parameter controlling selection among competing alternatives could account for both patterns, as well as the correlation between the effects. In light of these simulation results, we discuss theoretical accounts that have the potential to explain the dynamics of spoken word recognition in aphasia and the possible roles of anterior and posterior brain regions in lexical processing and cognitive control. |
Holger Mitterer The mental lexicon is fully specified: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 496–513, 2011. @article{Mitterer2011,Four visual-world experiments, in which listeners heard spoken words and saw printed words, compared an optimal-perception account with the theory of phonological underspecification. This theory argues that default phonological features are not specified in the mental lexicon, leading to asymmetric lexical matching: Mismatching input (pin) activates lexical entries with underspecified coronal stops (tin), but lexical entries with specified labial stops (pin) are not activated by mismatching input (tin). The eye-tracking data failed to show such a pattern. Although words that were phonologically similar to the spoken target attracted more looks than did unrelated distractors, this effect was symmetric in Experiment 1 with minimal pairs (tin-pin) and in Experiments 2 and 3 with words with an onset overlap (peacock-teacake). Experiment 4 revealed that /t/-initial words were looked at more frequently if the spoken input mismatched only in terms of place than if it mismatched in place and voice, contrary to the assumption that /t/ is unspecified for place and voice. These results show that speech perception uses signal-driven information to the fullest, as was predicted by an optimal perception account. |
Nikole D. Patson; Tessa Warren Building complex reference objects from dual sets Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 64, no. 4, pp. 443–459, 2011. @article{Patson2011,There has been considerable psycholinguistic investigation into the conditions that allow separately introduced individuals to be joined into a plural set and represented as a complex reference object (e.g., Eschenbach et al., 1989; Garrod & Sanford, 1982; Koh & Clifton, 2002; Koh et al., 2008; Moxey, Sanford, Sturt, & Morrow, 2004; Sanford & Lockhart, 1990). The current paper reports three eye-tracking experiments that investigate the less-well understood question of what conditions allow pointers to be assigned to the individuals within a previously undifferentiated set, turning it into a complex reference object. The experiments made use of a methodology used in Patson and Ferreira (2009) to distinguish between complex reference objects and undifferentiated sets. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that assigning different properties to the members of an undifferentiated dual set via a conjoined modifier or a comparative modifier transformed it into a complex reference object. Experiment 3 indicated that assigning a property to only one member of an undifferentiated dual set introduced pointers to both members. These results demonstrate that pointers can be established to referents within a plural set without picking them out via anaphors; they set boundaries on the kinds of implicit contrasts between referents that establish pointers; and they illustrate that extremely subtle properties of the semantic and referential context can affect early parsing decisions. |
Manuel Perea; Chie Nakatani; Cees Leeuwen Transposition effects in reading Japanese Kana: Are they orthographic in nature? Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 700–707, 2011. @article{Perea2011,One critical question for the front end of models of visual-word recognition and reading is whether the stage of letter position coding is purely orthographic or whether phonology is (to some degree) involved. To explore this issue, we conducted a silent reading experiment in Japanese Kana–a script in which orthography and phonology can be easily separated–using a technique that is highly sensitive to phonological effects (i.e., Rayner's (1975) boundary technique). Results showed shorter fixation times on the target word when the parafoveal preview was a transposed-mora nonword (a.ri.me.ka [アリメカ]-a.me.ri.ka [アメリカ]) than when the preview was a replacement-mora nonword (a.ka.ho.ka [アカホカ] -a.me.ri.ka [アメリカ]). More critically, fixation times on the target word were remarkably similar when the parafoveal preview was a transposed-consonant nonword (a.re.mi.ka [アレミカ]-a.ri.me.ka [アリメカ]) and when the parafoveal preview was an orthographic control nonword (a.ke.hi.ka [アケヒカ]-a.me.ri.ka [アメリカ]). Thus, these findings offer strong support for the view that letter/mora position coding during silent reading is orthographic in nature. |
Alexander Pollatsek; Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä Processing novel and lexicalised Finnish compound words Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 23, no. 7, pp. 795–810, 2011. @article{Pollatsek2011,Participants read sentences in which novel and lexicalized two-constituent compound words appeared while their eye movements were measured. The frequency of the first constituent of the compounds was also varied factorially and the frequency of the lexicalized compounds was equated over the two conditions. The sentence frames prior to the target word were matched across conditions. Both lexicality and first constituent frequency had large and significant effects on gaze durations on the target word; moreover the constituent frequency effect was significantly larger for the novel words. These results indicate that first constituent frequency has an effect in two stages: in the initial encoding of the compound and in the construction of meaning for the novel compound. The difference between this pattern of results and those for English prefixed words (Pollatsek, Slattery, & Juhasz, 2008) is apparently due to differences in the construction of meaning stage. A general model of the relationship of the processing of polymorphemic words to how they are fixated is presented. |
Keith Rayner; Timothy J. Slattery; Denis Drieghe; Simon P. Liversedge Eye movements and word skipping during reading: Effects of word length and predictability Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 514–528, 2011. @article{Rayner2011,Eye movements were monitored as subjects read sentences containing high- or low-predictable target words. The extent to which target words were predictable from prior context was varied: Half of the target words were predictable, and the other half were unpredictable. In addition, the length of the target word varied: The target words were short (4–6 letters), medium (7–9 letters), or long (10–12 letters). Length and predictability both yielded strong effects on the probability of skipping the target words and on the amount of time readers fixated the target words (when they were not skipped). However, there was no interaction in any of the measures examined for either skipping or fixation time. The results demonstrate that word predictability (due to contextual constraint) and word length have strong and independent influences on word skipping and fixation durations. Furthermore, because the long words extended beyond the word identification span, the data indicate that skipping can occur on the basis of partial information in relation to word identity. |
Eva Reinisch; Alexandra Jesse; James M. McQueen Speaking rate from proximal and distal contexts is used during word segmentation Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 978–996, 2011. @article{Reinisch2011,A series of eye-tracking and categorization experiments investigated the use of speaking-rate information in the segmentation of Dutch ambiguous-word sequences. Juncture phonemes with ambiguous durations (e.g., [s] in 'eens (s)peer,' "once (s)pear," [t] in 'nooit (t)rap,' "never staircase/quick") were perceived as longer and hence more often as word-initial when following a fast than a slow context sentence. Listeners used speaking-rate information as soon as it became available. Rate information from a context proximal to the juncture phoneme and from a more distal context was used during on-line word recognition, as reflected in listeners' eye movements. Stronger effects of distal context, however, were observed in the categorization task, which measures the off-line results of the word-recognition process. In categorization, the amount of rate context had the greatest influence on the use of rate information, but in eye tracking, the rate information's proximal location was the most important. These findings constrain accounts of how speaking rate modulates the interpretation of durational cues during word recognition by suggesting that rate estimates are used to evaluate upcoming phonetic information continuously during prelexical speech processing. |
Ardi Roelofs Attention, exposure duration, and gaze shifting in naming performance Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 860–873, 2011. @article{Roelofs2011,Two experiments are reported in which the role of attribute exposure duration in naming performance was examined by tracking eye movements. Participants were presented with color-word Stroop stimuli and left- or right-pointing arrows on different sides of a computer screen. They named the color attribute and shifted their gaze to the arrow to manually indicate its direction. The color attribute (Experiment 1) or the complete color-word stimulus (Experiment 2) was removed from the screen 100 ms after stimulus onset. Compared with presentation until trial offset, removing the color attribute diminished Stroop interference, as well as facilitation effects in color naming latencies, whereas removing the complete stimulus diminished interference only. Attribute and stimulus removal reduced the latency of gaze shifting, which suggests decreased rather than increased attentional demand. These results provide evidence that limiting exposure duration contributes to attribute naming performance by diminishing the extent to which irrelevant attributes are processed, which reduces attentional demand. |
Anne Pier Salverda; Gerry T. M. Altmann Attentional capture of objects referred to by spoken language Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 1122–1133, 2011. @article{Salverda2011,Participants saw a small number of objects in a visual display and performed a visual detection or visual-discrimination task in the context of task-irrelevant spoken distractors. In each experiment, a visual cue was presented 400 ms after the onset of a spoken word. In experiments 1 and 2, the cue was an isoluminant color change and participants generated an eye movement to the target object. In experiment 1, responses were slower when the spoken word referred to the distractor object than when it referred to the target object. In experiment 2, responses were slower when the spoken word referred to a distractor object than when it referred to an object not in the display. In experiment 3, the cue was a small shift in location of the target object and participants indicated the direction of the shift. Responses were slowest when the word referred to the distractor object, faster when the word did not have a referent, and fastest when the word referred to the target object. Taken together, the results demonstrate that referents of spoken words capture attention. |
Hua Shu; Wei Zhou; Ming Yan; Reinhold Kliegl Font size modulates saccade-target selection in chinese reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 73, no. 2, pp. 482–490, 2011. @article{Shu2011,In alphabetic writing systems, saccade amplitude (a close correlate of reading speed) is independent of font size, presumably because an increase in the angular size of letters is compensated for by a decrease of visual acuity with eccentricity. We propose that this invariance may (also) be due to the presence of spaces between words, guiding the eyes across a large range of font sizes. Here, we test whether saccade amplitude is also invariant against manipulations of font size during reading Chinese, a character-based writing system without spaces as explicit word boundaries for saccade-target selection. In contrast to word-spaced alphabetic writing systems, saccade amplitude decreased significantly with increased font size, leading to an increase in the number of fixations at the beginning of words and in the number of refixations. These results are consistent with a model which assumes that word beginning (rather than word center) is the default saccade target if the length of the parafoveal word is not available. |
Anna Siyanova-Chanturia; Kathy Conklin; Norbert Schmitt Adding more fuel to the fire: An eye-tracking study of idiom processing by native and non-native speakers Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 251–272, 2011. @article{SiyanovaChanturia2011,Using eye-tracking, we investigate on-line processing of idioms in a biasing story context by native and non-native speakers of English. The stimuli are idioms used figuratively ("at the end of the day"–"eventually"), literally ("at the end of the day"–"in the evening"), and novel phrases ("at the end of the war"). Native speaker results indicate a processing advantage for idioms over novel phrases, as evidenced by fewer and shorter fixations. Further, no processing advantage is found for figurative idiom uses over literal ones in a full idiom analysis or in a recognition point analysis. Contrary to native speaker results, non-native findings suggest that L2 speakers process idioms at a similar speed to novel phrases. Further, figurative uses are processed more slowly than literal ones. Importantly, the recognition point analysis allows us to establish where non-natives slow down when processing the figurative meaning. |
Anna Siyanova-Chanturia; Kathy Conklin; Walter J. B. Heuven Seeing a phrase "time and again" matters: The role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword sequences Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 776–784, 2011. @article{SiyanovaChanturia2011a,Are speakers sensitive to the frequency with which phrases occur in language? The authors report an eye-tracking study that investigates this by examining the processing of multiword sequences that differ in phrasal frequency by native and proficient nonnative English speakers. Participants read sentences containing 3-word binomial phrases (bride and groom) and their reversed forms (groom and bride), which are identical in syntax and meaning but that differ in phrasal frequency. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that native speakers and nonnative speakers, across a range of proficiencies, are sensitive to the frequency with which phrases occur in English. Results also indicate that native speakers and higher proficiency nonnatives are sensitive to whether a phrase occurs in a particular configuration (binomial vs. reversed) in English, highlighting the contribution of entrenchment of a particular phrase in memory. |
Timothy J. Slattery; Bernhard Angele; Keith Rayner Eye movements and display change detection during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 1924–1938, 2011. @article{Slattery2011,In the boundary change paradigm (Rayner, 1975), when a reader's eyes cross an invisible boundary location, a preview word is replaced by a target word. Readers are generally unaware of such changes due to saccadic suppression. However, some readers detect changes on a few trials and a small percentage of them detect many changes. Two experiments are reported in which we combined eye movement data with signal detection analyses to investigate display change detection. On each trial, readers had to indicate if they saw a display change in addition to reading for meaning. On half the trials the display change occurred during the saccade (immediate condition); on the other half, it was slowed by 15-25 ms (delay condition) to increase the likelihood that a change would be detected. Sentences were presented in an alternating case fashion allowing us to investigate the influence of both letter identity and case. In the immediate condition, change detection was higher when letters changed than when case changed corroborating findings that word processing utilizes abstract (case independent) letter identities. However, in the delay condition (where d' was much higher than the immediate condition), detection was equal for letter and case changes. The results of both experiments indicate that sensitivity to display changes was related to how close the eyes were to the invalid preview on the fixation prior to the display change, as well as the timing of the completion of this change relative to the start of the post-change fixation. |
Timothy J. Slattery; Elizabeth R. Schotter; Raymond W. Berry; Keith Rayner Parafoveal and foveal processing of abbreviations during eye fixations in reading: Making a case for case Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 1022–1031, 2011. @article{Slattery2011a,The processing of abbreviations in reading was examined with an eye movement experiment. Abbreviations were of 2 distinct types: acronyms (abbreviations that can be read with the normal grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations in which the GPCs are letter names, such as NCAA). Parafoveal and foveal processing of these abbreviations was assessed with the use of the boundary change paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975). Using this paradigm, previews of the abbreviations were either identical to the abbreviation (NASA or NCAA), orthographically legal (NUSO or NOBA), or illegal (NRSB or NRBA). The abbreviations were presented as capital letter strings within normal, predominantly lowercase sentences and also sentences in all capital letters such that the abbreviations would not be visually distinct. The results indicate that acronyms and initialisms undergo different processing during reading and that readers can modulate their processing based on low-level visual cues (distinct capitalization) in parafoveal vision. In particular, readers may be biased to process capitalized letter strings as initialisms in parafoveal vision when the rest of the sentence is normal, lowercase letters. |
Adrian Staub The effect of lexical predictability on distributions of eye fixation durations Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 371–376, 2011. @article{Staub2011,A word's predictability in context has a well-established effect on fixation durations in reading. To investigate how this effect is manifested in distributional terms, an experiment was carried out in which subjects read each of 50 target words twice, once in a high-predictability context and once in a low-predictability context. The ex-Gaussian distribution was fit to each subject's first-fixation durations and single-fixation durations. For both measures, the μ parameter increased when a word was unpredictable, while the τ parameter was not significantly affected, indicating that a predictability manipulation shifts the distribution of fixation durations but does not affect the degree of skew. Vincentile plots showed that the mean ex-Gaussian parameters described the typical distribution shapes extremely well. These results suggest that the predictability and frequency effects are functionally distinct, since a frequency manipulation has been shown to influence both μ and τ. The results may also be seen as consistent with the finding from single-word recognition paradigms that semantic priming affects only μ. |
Adrian Staub Word recognition and syntactic attachment in reading: Evidence for a staged architecture Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 140, no. 3, pp. 407–433, 2011. @article{Staub2011a,In 3 experiments, the author examined how readers' eye movements are influenced by joint manipulations of a word's frequency and the syntactic fit of the word in its context. In the critical conditions of the first 2 experiments, a high- or low-frequency verb was used to disambiguate a garden-path sentence, while in the last experiment, a high- or low-frequency verb constituted a phrase structure violation. The frequency manipulation always influenced the early eye movement measures of first-fixation duration and gaze duration. The context manipulation had a delayed effect in Experiment 1, influencing only the probability of a regressive eye movement from later in the sentence. However, the context manipulation influenced the same early eye movement measures as the frequency effect in Experiments 2 and 3, though there was no statistical interaction between the effects of these variables. The context manipulation also influenced the probability of a regressive eye movement from the verb, though the frequency manipulation did not. These results are shown to confirm predictions emerging from the serial, staged architecture for lexical and integrative processing of the E-Z Reader 10 model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009). It is argued, more generally, that the results provide an important constraint on how the relationship between visual word recognition and syntactic attachment is treated in processing models. |
Maria Staudte; Matthew W. Crocker Investigating joint attention mechanisms through spoken human-robot interaction Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 120, no. 2, pp. 268–291, 2011. @article{Staudte2011,Referential gaze during situated language production and comprehension is tightly coupled with the unfolding speech stream (Griffin, 2001; Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). In a shared environment, utterance comprehension may further be facilitated when the listener can exploit the speaker's focus of (visual) attention to anticipate, ground, and disambiguate spoken references. To investigate the dynamics of such gaze-following and its influence on utterance comprehension in a controlled manner, we use a human-robot interaction setting. Specifically, we hypothesize that referential gaze is interpreted as a cue to the speaker's referential intentions which facilitates or disrupts reference resolution. Moreover, the use of a dynamic and yet extremely controlled gaze cue enables us to shed light on the simultaneous and incremental integration of the unfolding speech and gaze movement.We report evidence from two eye-tracking experiments in which participants saw videos of a robot looking at and describing objects in a scene. The results reveal a quantified benefit-disruption spectrum of gaze on utterance comprehension and, further, show that gaze is used, even during the initial movement phase, to restrict the spatial domain of potential referents. These findings more broadly suggest that people treat artificial agents similar to human agents and, thus, validate such a setting for further explorations of joint attention mechanisms. |
Debra Titone; Maya R. Libben; Julie Mercier; Veronica Whitford; Irina Pivneva Bilingual lexical access during L1 sentence reading: The effects of L2 knowledge, semantic constraint, and L1-L2 intermixing Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 1412–1431, 2011. @article{Titone2011,Libben and Titone (2009) recently observed that cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference were attenuated by increased semantic constraint during bilingual second language (L2) reading, using eye movement measures. We now investigate whether cross-language activation also occurs during first language (L1) reading as a function of age of L2 acquisition and task demands (i.e., inclusion of L2 sentences). In Experiment 1, participants read high and low constraint English (L1) sentences containing interlingual homographs, cognates, or control words. In Experiment 2, we included French (L2) filler sentences to increase salience of the L2 during L1 reading. The results suggest that bilinguals reading in their L1 show nonselective activation to the extent that they acquired their L2 early in life. Similar to our previous work on L2 reading, high contextual constraint attenuated cross-language activation for cognates. The inclusion of French filler items promoted greater cross-language activation, especially for late stage reading measures. Thus, L1 bilingual reading is modulated by L2 knowledge, semantic constraint, and task demands. |
Annie Tremblay Learning to parse liaison-initial words: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 257–279, 2011. @article{Tremblay2011,This study investigates the processing of resyllabified words by native English speakers at three proficiency levels in French and by native French speakers. In particular, it examines non-native listeners' development of a parsing procedure for recognizing vowel-initial words in the context of liaison, a process that creates a misalignment of the syllable and word boundaries in French. The participants completed an eye-tracking experiment in which they identified liaison- and consonant-initial real and nonce words in auditory stimuli. The results show that the non-native listeners had little difficulty recognizing liaison-initial real words, and they recognized liaison-initial nonce words more rapidly than consonant-initial ones. By contrast, native listeners recognized consonant-initial real and nonce words more rapidly than liaison-initial ones. These results suggest that native and non-native listeners used different parsing procedures for recognizing liaison-initial words in the task, with the non-native listeners' ability to segment liaison-initial words being phonologically abstract rather than lexical. © Copyright Cambridge University Press 2011. |
Cara Tsang; Craig G. Chambers Appearances aren't everything: Shape classifiers and referential processing in cantonese Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 1065–1080, 2011. @article{Tsang2011,Cantonese shape classifiers encode perceptual information that is characteristic of their associated nouns, although certain nouns are exceptional. For example, the classifier tiu occurs primarily with nouns for long-narrow-flexible objects (e.g., scarves, snakes, and ropes) and also occurs with the noun for a (short, rigid) key. In 3 experiments, we explored how the semantic information encoded in shape classifiers influences language comprehension. When judging the fit between classifiers and depicted objects in an explicit ranking task, Cantonese speakers evaluated classifier-noun pairings solely in terms of grammatical well-formedness and showed no separate sensitivity to the shape features of objects. In an eye-tracking task (Experiment 2), we also found little sensitivity to shape classifier semantics during real-time comprehension. However, in a subsequent experiment in which referent objects lacked the prototypical features for their accompanying classifiers (Experiment 3), an influence of shape semantics was found in participants' incidental fixations to nontarget objects. We conclude that shape classifiers influence referential interpretation primarily through their grammatical constraints, consistent with the agreementlike nature of classifiers in general. The role of shape classifiers' semantics on processing is apparent only in specific circumstances. |
Gurmit Uppal; Mary P. Feely; Michael D. Crossland; Luke Membrey; John Lee; Lyndon Cruz; Gary S. Rubin Assessment of reading behavior with an infrared eye tracker after 360° macular translocation for age-related macular degeneration Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 52, no. 9, pp. 6486–6496, 2011. @article{Uppal2011,Purpose. Macular translocation (MT360) is complex surgery used to restore reading in exudative age-related macular degeneration (AMD). MT360 involves retinal rotation and subsequent oculomotor globe counterrotation and is not without significant surgical risk. This study attempts to gauge the optimal potential of MT360 in restoring reading ability and describe the quality and extent of recovery. Methods. The six best outcomes were examined from a consecutive series of 23 MT360 cases. Reading behavior and fixation characteristics were examined with an infrared eye tracker. Results were compared to age-matched normal subjects and patients with untreated exudative and nonexudative AMD. Retinal sensitivity was examined with microperimetry to establish threshold visual function. Results. MT360 produced significant improvements in visual function over untreated disease and approximated normal function for reading speed and fixation quality. Relative to the comparative groups, eye tracking revealed the MT360 cohort generated a greater number of horizontal and vertical saccades, of longer latency and reduced velocity. In contrast, saccadic behavior when reading (forward and regressive saccades) closely matched normal function. Microperimetry revealed a reduction in the central scotoma with three patients recovering normal foveal sensitivity. Conclusions. Near normal reading function is recovered despite profound surgical disruption to the anatomy (retinal/oculomotor). MT360 restores foveal function sufficient to produce a single stable locus of fixation, with marked reduction of the central scotoma. Despite the limitations on saccadic function, the quality of reading saccadic behavior is maintained with good reading ability. Oculomotor surgery appears not to limit reading ability, and the results of retinal surgery approximate normal macular function. |
Seppo Vainio; Raymond Bertram; Anneli Pajunen; Jukka Hyönä Processing modifier-head agreement in long Finnish words: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Acta Linguistica Hungarica, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 134–156, 2011. @article{Vainio2011,The present study investigates whether processing of an inflected Finnish noun is facilitated when preceded by a modifier in the same case ending. In Finnish, modifiers agree with their head nouns both in case and in number and the agreement is expressed by means of suffixes (e.g., vanha/ssa talo/ssa 'old/in house/in' –> 'in the old house'). Vainio et al. (2003; 2008) showed processing benefits for this kind of modifier-head agreement, when the head nouns were relatively short. However, the effect showed up relatively late in the processing stream, such that word n + 1, the word following the target noun talo/ssa, was read faster when it was preceded by an agreeing modifier (vanha/ssa) than when no modifier was present. This led Vainio et al. to the conclusion that agreement exerts its effect at a later stage, namely at the level of syntactic integration and not at the level of lexical access. The current study investigates whether the same holds when head nouns are considerably longer (e.g., kaupungin/talo/ssa 'city house/in' –> 'in the city hall'). Our results show that the effect of agreement is facilitative in case of longer head nouns as well, but – in contrast to what was found for shorter words – the effect not only appeared late, but was also observed in earlier processing measures. It thus seems that, in processing long words, benefits related to modifier-head agreement are not confined to post-lexical syntactic integration processes, but extend to lexical identification of the head. Adapted from the source document |
Eva Van Assche; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck; Marijke Welvaert; Robert J. Hartsuiker The influence of semantic constraints on bilingual word recognition during sentence reading Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 88–107, 2011. @article{VanAssche2011,The present study investigates how semantic constraint of a sentence context modulates language-non-selective activation in bilingual visual word recognition. We recorded Dutch-English bilinguals' eye movements while they read cognates and controls in low and high semantically constraining sentences in their second language. Early and late eye-movement measures yielded cognate facilitation, both for low- and high-constraint sentences. Facilitation increased gradually as a function of cross-lingual overlap between translation equivalents. A control experiment showed that the same stimuli did not yield cognate effects in English monolingual controls, ensuring that these effects were not due to any uncontrolled stimulus characteristics. The present study supports models of bilingual word recognition with a limited role for top-down influences of semantic constraints on lexical access in both early and later stages of bilingual word recognition. |
Lise Van der Haegen; Marc Brysbaert The mechanisms underlying the interhemispheric integration of information in foveal word recognition: Evidence for transcortical inhibition Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 118, no. 3, pp. 81–89, 2011. @article{VanderHaegen2011,Words are processed as units. This is not as evident as it seems, given the division of the human cerebral cortex in two hemispheres and the partial decussation of the optic tract. In two experiments, we investigated what underlies the unity of foveally presented words: A bilateral projection of visual input in foveal vision, or interhemispheric inhibition and integration as proposed by the SERIOL model of visual word recognition. Experiment 1 made use of pairs of words and nonwords with a length of four letters each. Participants had to name the word and ignore the nonword. The visual field in which the word was presented and the distance between the word and the nonword were manipulated. The results showed that the typical right visual field advantage was observed only when the word and the nonword were clearly separated. When the distance between them became smaller, the right visual field advantage turned into a left visual field advantage, in line with the interhemispheric inhibition mechanism postulated by the SERIOL model. Experiment 2, using 5-letters stimuli, confirmed that this result was not due to the eccentricity of the word relative to the fixation location but to the distance between the word and the nonword. |
Lise Van der Haegen; Qing Cai; Ruth Seurinck; Marc Brysbaert Further fMRI validation of the visual half field technique as an indicator of language laterality: A large-group analysis Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 49, no. 10, pp. 2879–2888, 2011. @article{VanderHaegen2011a,The best established lateralized cerebral function is speech production, with the majority of the population having left hemisphere dominance. An important question is how to best assess the laterality of this function. Neuroimaging techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) are increasingly used in clinical settings to replace the invasive Wada-test. We evaluated the usefulness of behavioral visual half field (VHF) tasks for screening a large sample of healthy left-handers. Laterality indices (LIs) calculated on the basis of the latencies in a word and picture naming VHF task were compared to the brain activity measured in a silent word generation task in fMRI (pars opercularis/BA44 and pars triangularis/BA45). Results confirmed the usefulness of the VHF-tasks as a screening device. None of the left-handed participants with clear right visual field (RVF) advantages in the picture and word naming task showed right hemisphere dominance in the scanner. In contrast, 16/20 participants with a left visual field (LVF) advantage in both word and picture naming turned out to have atypical right brain dominance. Results were less clear for participants who failed to show clear VHF asymmetries (below 20 ms RVF advantage and below 60 ms LVF advantage) or who had inconsistent asymmetries in picture and word naming. These results indicate that the behavioral tasks can mainly provide useful information about the direction of speech dominance when both VHF differences clearly point in the same direction. |
Julie A. Van Dyke; Brian McElree Cue-dependent interference in comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 247–263, 2011. @article{VanDyke2011,The role of interference as a primary determinant of forgetting in memory has long been accepted, however its role as a contributor to poor comprehension is just beginning to be understood. The current paper reports two studies, in which speed-accuracy tradeoff and eye-tracking methodologies were used with the same materials to provide converging evidence for the role of syntactic and semantic cues as mediators of both proactive (PI) and retroactive interference (RI) during comprehension. Consistent with previous work (e.g., Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003), we found that syntactic constraints at the retrieval site are among the cues that drive retrieval in comprehension, and that these constraints effectively limit interference from potential distractors with semantic/pragmatic properties in common with the target constituent. The data are discussed in terms of a cue-overload account, in which interference both arises from and is mediated through a direct-access retrieval mechanism that utilizes a linear, weighted cue-combinatoric scheme. |
Shravan Vasishth; Heiner Drenhaus Locality in German Journal Article In: Dialogue and Discourse, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 59–82, 2011. @article{Vasishth2011,Three experiments (self-paced reading, eyetracking and an ERP study) show that in relative clauses, increasing the distance between the relativized noun and the relative-clause verb makes it more difficult to process the relative-clause verb (the so-called locality effect). This result is consistent with the predictions of several theories (Gibson, 2000; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), and contradicts the recent claim (Levy, 2008) that in relative-clause structures increasing argument-verb distance makes processing easier at the verb. Levy's expectation-based account predicts that the expectation for a verb becomes sharper as distance is increased and therefore processing becomes easier at the verb. We argue that, in addition to expectation effects (which are seen in the eyetracking study in first-pass regression probability), processing load alsoincreases with increasing distance. This contradicts Levy's claim that heightened expectation leadsto lower processing cost. Dependency- resolution cost and expectation-based facilitation are jointly responsible for determining processing cost. |
Eduardo Vidal-Abarca; Tomás Martinez; Ladislao Salmerón; Raquel Cerdán; Ramiro Gilabert; Laura Gil; Amelia Mañá; Ana C. Llorens; Ricardo Ferris Recording online processes in task-oriented reading with Read&Answer Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 179–192, 2011. @article{VidalAbarca2011,We present an application to study task-oriented reading processes called Read&Answer. The application mimics paper-and-pencil situations in which a reader interacts with one or more documents to perform a specific task, such as answering questions, writing an essay, or similar activities. Read&Answer presents documents and questions with a mask. The reader unmasks documents and questions so that only a piece of information is available at a time. This way the entire interaction between the reader and the documents on the task is recorded and can be analyzed. We describe Read&Answer and present its applications for research and assessment. Finally, we explain two studies that compare readers' performance on Read&Answer with students' reading times and comprehension levels on a paper-and-pencil task, and on a computer task recorded with eye-tracking. The use of Read&Answer produced similar comprehension scores, although it changed the pattern of reading times. |
Tessa Warren; Erik D. Reichle; Nikole D. Patson Lexical and post-lexical complexity effects on eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2011. @article{Warren2011,The current study investigated how a post-lexical complexity manipulation followed by a lexical complexity manipulation affects eye movements during reading. Both manipula- tions caused disruption in all measures on the manipulated words, but the patterns of spill- over differed. Critically, the effects of the two kinds of manipulations did not interact, and there was no evidence that post-lexical processing difficulty delayed lexical processing on the next word (c.f. Henderson & Ferreira, 1990). This suggests that post-lexical processing of one word and lexical processing of the next can proceed independently and likely in parallel. This finding is consistent with the assumptions of the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009). |
Sarah J. White; Tessa Warren; Erik D. Reichle Parafoveal preview during reading: Effects of sentence position Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 1221–1238, 2011. @article{White2011,Two experiments examined parafoveal preview for words located in the middle of sentences and at sentence boundaries. Parafoveal processing was shown to occur for words at sentence-initial, mid-sentence, and sentence-final positions. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed reduced effects of preview on regressions out for sentence-initial words. In addition, Experiment 2 showed reduced preview effects on first-pass reading times for sentence-initial words. These effects of sentence position on preview could result from either reduced parafoveal processing for sentence-initial words or other processes specific to word reading at sentence boundaries. In addition to the effects of preview, the experiments also demonstrate variability in the effects of sentence wrap-up on different reading measures, indicating that the presence and time course of wrap-up effects may be modulated by text-specific factors. We also report simulations of Experiment 2 using version 10 of E-Z Reader (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009), designed to explore the possible mechanisms underlying parafoveal preview at sentence boundaries. |
Heather Winskel Orthographic and phonological parafoveal processing of consonants, vowels, and tones when reading Thai Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 739–759, 2011. @article{Winskel2011,Four eye movement experiments investigated whether readers use parafoveal input to gain information about the phonological or orthographic forms of consonants, vowels, and tones in word recognition when reading Thai silently. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which consonant, vowel, or tone information was manipulated. Previews of homophonous consonants (Experiment I) and concordant vowels (Experiment 2) did not substantially facilitate processing of the target word, whereas the identical previews did. Hence, orthography appears to be playing the prominent role in early word recognition for consonants and vowels. Incorrect tone marker previews (Experiment 3) substantially retarded the subsequent processing of the target word, indicating that lexical tone plays an important role in early word recognition. Vowels in VOP (Experiment 4) did not facilitate processing, which points to vowel position being a significant factor. Primarily, orthographic codes of consonants and vowels (HOP) in conjunction with tone information are assembled from parafoveal input and used for early lexical access. |
Lynsey Wolter; Kristen Skovbroten Gorman; Michael K. Tanenhaus Scalar reference, contrast and discourse: Separating effects of linguistic discourse from availability of the referent Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 299–317, 2011. @article{Wolter2011,Listeners expect that a definite noun phrase with a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., the big ...) will refer to an entity that is part of a set of objects contrasting on the scalar dimension, e.g., size (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Carlson, 1999). Two visual world experiments demonstrate that uttering a referring expression with a scalar adjective makes all members of the relevant contrast set more salient in the discourse model, facilitating subsequent reference to other members of that contrast set. Moreover, this discourse effect is caused primarily by linguistic mention of a scalar adjective and not by the listener's prior visual or perceptual experience. These experiments demonstrate that language processing is sensitive to which information was introduced by linguistic mention, and that the visual world paradigm can be use to tease apart the separate contributions of visual and linguistic information to reference resolution. |
Bo Yao; Christoph Scheepers Contextual modulation of reading rate for direct versus indirect speech quotations Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 121, no. 3, pp. 447–453, 2011. @article{Yao2011,In human communication, direct speech (e.g., Mary said: " I'm hungry" ) is perceived to be more vivid than indirect speech (e.g., Mary said [that] she was hungry). However, the processing consequences of this distinction are largely unclear. In two experiments, participants were asked to either orally (Experiment 1) or silently (Experiment 2, eye-tracking) read written stories that contained either a direct speech or an indirect speech quotation. The context preceding those quotations described a situation that implied either a fast-speaking or a slow-speaking quoted protagonist. It was found that this context manipulation affected reading rates (in both oral and silent reading) for direct speech quotations, but not for indirect speech quotations. This suggests that readers are more likely to engage in perceptual simulations of the reported speech act when reading direct speech as opposed to meaning-equivalent indirect speech quotations, as part of a more vivid representation of the former. |
Eiling Yee; Stacy Huffstetler; Sharon L. Thompson-Schill Function follows form: Activation of shape and function features during object identification Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 140, no. 3, pp. 348–363, 2011. @article{Yee2011,Most theories of semantic memory characterize knowledge of a given object as comprising a set of semantic features. But how does conceptual activation of these features proceed during object identification? We present the results of a pair of experiments that demonstrate that object recognition is a dynamically unfolding process in which function follows form. We used eye movements to explore whether activating one object's concept leads to the activation of others that share perceptual (shape) or abstract (function) features. Participants viewed 4-picture displays and clicked on the picture corresponding to a heard word. In critical trials, the conceptual representation of 1 of the objects in the display was similar in shape or function (i.e., its purpose) to the heard word. Importantly, this similarity was not apparent in the visual depictions (e.g., for the target Frisbee, the shape-related object was a triangular slice of pizza, a shape that a Frisbee cannot take); preferential fixations on the related object were therefore attributable to overlap of the conceptual representations on the relevant features. We observed relatedness effects for both shape and function, but shape effects occurred earlier than function effects. We discuss the implications of these findings for current accounts of the representation of semantic memory. |
Li-Hao Yeh; Ana I. Schwartz; Aaron L. Baule The impact of text-structure strategy instruction on the text recall and eye-movement patterns of second language English readers Journal Article In: Reading Psychology, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 495–519, 2011. @article{Yeh2011,Previous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the Text Structure Strategy for improving text recall. The strategy emphasizes the identification of text structure for encoding and recalling information. Traditionally, the efficacy of this strategy has been measured through free recall. The present study examined whether recall and eye-movement patterns of second language English readers would benefit from training on the strategy. Participants' free recall and eye-movement patterns were measured before and after training. There was a significant increase in recall at posttest and a change in eye-movement patterns, reflecting additional processing time of phrases and words signaling the text structure. |
2010 |
Denis Alamargot; Sylvie Plane; Eric Lambert; David Chesnet In: Reading and Writing, vol. 23, no. 7, pp. 853–888, 2010. @article{Alamargot2010,This study was designed to enhance our understanding of the changing relationship between low- and high-level writing processes in the course of development. A dual description of writing processes was undertaken, based on (a) the respective time courses of these processes, as assessed by an analysis of eye and pen movements, and (b) the semantic characteristics of the writers' scripts. To conduct a more fine-grained description of processing strategies, a ‘‘case study'' approach was adopted, whereby a comprehensive range of measures was used to assess processes within five writers with different levels of expertise. The task was to continue writing a story based on excerpt from a source document (incipit). The main results showed two developmental patterns linked to expertise: (a) a gradual acceleration in low- and high-level processing (pauses, flow), associated with (b) changes in the way the previous text was (re)read. |
David Caplan Task effects on BOLD signal correlates of implicit syntactic processing Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 866–901, 2010. @article{Caplan2010,BOLD signal was measured in sixteen participants who made timed font change detection judgments in visually presented sentences that varied in syntactic structure and the order of animate and inanimate nouns. Behavioral data indicated that sentences were processed to the level of syntactic structure. BOLD signal increased in visual association areas bilaterally and left supramarginal gyrus in the contrast of sentences with object- and subject-extracted relative clauses without font changes in which the animacy order of the nouns biased against the syntactically determined meaning of the sentence. This result differs from the findings in a non-word detection task (Caplan et al, 2008a), in which the same contrast led to increased BOLD signal in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The difference in areas of activation indicates that the sentences were processed differently in the two tasks. These differences were further explored in an eye tracking study using the materials in the two tasks. Issues pertaining to how parsing and interpretive operations are affected by a task that is being performed, and how this might affect BOLD signal correlates of syntactic contrasts, are discussed. |
Martin Corley Making predictions from speech with repairs: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 706–727, 2010. @article{Corley2010,When listeners hear a spoken utterance, they are able to predict upcoming information on the basis of what they have already heard. But what happens when the speaker changes his or her mind mid-utterance? The present paper investigates the immediate effects of repairs on listeners' linguistic predictions. Participants listened to sentences like the boy will eat/move the cake while viewing scenes depicting the agent, the theme, and distractor objects (which were not edible). Over 25% of items included conjoined verbs (eat and move) and 25% included repairs (eat- uh, move). Participants were sensitive to repairs: where eat was overridden by move, fixations on the theme patterned with the plain move condition, but where there was a conjunct, fixations patterned with eat. However, once the theme had been heard, there were more fixations to the cake in all conditions including eat, showing that the first verb maintained an influence on prediction, even following a repair. The results are compatible with the view that prediction during comprehension is updated incrementally, but not completely, as the linguistic input unfolds. |
Francesca Delogu; Francesco Vespignani; Anthony J. Sanford Effects of intensionality on sentence and discourse processing: Evidence from eye-movements Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 352–379, 2010. @article{Delogu2010,Intensional verbs like want select for clausal complements expressing propositions, though they can be perfectly natural when combined with a direct object. There are two interesting phenomena associated with intensional transitive expressions. First, it has been suggested that their interpretation requires enriched compositional operations, similarly to expressions like began the book (e.g., Pustejovsky, 1995). Secondly, when the object position is filled by an indefinite NP, it preferentially receives an unspecific reading, under which definite anaphora is not supported (e.g., Moltmann, 1997). We report three eye-tracking experiments investigating the time-course of processing of sentence pairs like John wanted a beer. The beer was warm. Consistent with the enriched composition hypothesis, results showed that intensional transitive constructions (e.g., wanted a beer) take longer to process than control expressions (e.g., drank/wanted to drink a beer). However, contrary to previous findings, the processing of the continuation sentence appears to be not affected by whether the definite NP (the beer) can be interpreted as coreferential with the indefinite or not. We interpret the results with respect to accounts of semantic processing relying on the notions of enriched composition and non-actuality implicature. |
Denis Drieghe; Alexander Pollatsek; Barbara J. Juhasz; Keith Rayner Parafoveal processing during reading is reduced across a morphological boundary Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 136–142, 2010. @article{Drieghe2010,A boundary change manipulation was implemented within a monomorphemic word (e.g., fountaom as a preview for fountain), where parallel processing should occur given adequate visual acuity, and within an unspaced compound (bathroan as a preview for bathroom), where some serial processing of the constituents is likely. Consistent with that hypothesis, there was no effect of the preview manipulation on fixation time on the 1st constituent of the compound, whereas there was on the corresponding letters of the monomorphemic word. There was also a larger preview disruption on gaze duration on the whole monomorphemic word than on the compound, suggesting more parallel processing within monomorphemic words. |
Brianna M. Eiter; Albrecht W. Inhoff Visual word recognition during reading is followed by subvocal articulation Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 457–470, 2010. @article{Eiter2010,Three experiments examined whether the identification of a visual word is followed by its subvocal articulation during reading. An irrelevant spoken word (ISW) that was identical, phonologically similar, or dissimilar to a visual target word was presented when the eyes moved to the target in the course of sentence reading. Sentence reading was further accompanied by either a sequential finger tapping task (Experiment 1) or an articulatory suppression task (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 revealed sound-specific interference from a phonologically similar ISW during posttarget viewing. This interference was absent in Experiment 2, where similar and dissimilar ISWs impeded target and posttarget reading equally. Experiment 3 showed that articulatory suppression left the lexical processing of visual words intact and that it did not diminish the influence of visual word recognition on eye guidance. The presence of sound-specific interference during posttarget reading in Experiment 1 is attributed to deleterious effects of a phonologically similar ISW on the subvocal articulation of a target. Its absence in Experiment 2 is attributed to the suppression of a target's subvocal articulation. |
Paul E. Engelhardt; Fernanda Ferreira; Elena G. Patsenko Pupillometry reveals processing load during spoken language comprehension Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 639–645, 2010. @article{Engelhardt2010,This study investigated processing effort by measuring peoples' pupil diameter as they listened to sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. In the first experiment, we manipulated prosody. The results showed that when prosodic structure conflicted with syntactic structure, pupil diameter reliably increased. In the second experiment, we manipulated both prosody and visual context. The results showed that when visual context was consistent with the correct interpretation, prosody had very little effect on processing effort. However, when visual context was inconsistent with the correct interpretation, prosody had a large effect on processing effort. The interaction between visual context and prosody shows that visual context has an effect on online processing and that it can modulate the influence of linguistic sources of information, such as prosody. Pupillometry is a sensitive measure of processing effort during spoken language comprehension. |
Cara R. Featherstone; Patrick Sturt Because there was a cause for concern: An investigation into a word-specific prediction account of the implicit-causality effect Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 3–15, 2010. @article{Featherstone2010,In Koornneef and Van Berkum's (2006) eye-tracking study of implicit causality (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates, 1977), midsentence delays were observed in the processing of sentences such as "David blamed Linda because she(bias-congruent)/he(bias-incongruent) . . . " when the pronoun following because was incongruent with the bias of the implicit-causality verb. The authors suggested that these immediate delays could be attributed to participants predicting a bias-congruent pronoun after because. According to this explanation, any other word placed after because should cause processing delays. The present investigation aimed to test this explanation by using sentences of the form "David blamed Linda because she(bias-congruent)/he(bias-incongruent)/there(bias-neutral) . . . ". Since significant immediate delays were observed in sentences containing a bias-incongruent pronoun (relative to a bias-congruent pronoun) but not in sentences containing there, the results of this study support an immediate integration effect but pose a problem to the word-specific prediction account of the implicit causality effect. |
Heather J. Ferguson; Christoph Scheepers; Anthony J. Sanford Expectations in counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 297–346, 2010. @article{Ferguson2010,During language comprehension, information about the world is exchanged and processed. Two essential ingredients of everyday cognition that are employed during language comprehension are the ability to reason counterfactually, and the ability to understand and predict other peoples' behaviour by attributing independent mental states to them (theory of mind).We report two visual-world studies investigating the extent to which the constraints of world knowledge and prior context, as established by a counterfactual (Exp. 1) or a false belief situation (Exp. 2), influence eye-movements directed towards objects in a visual field. Proportions of anticipatory eye-movements indicated an initial visual bias towards contextually supported referents in both studies. Thus, we propose that when visual information is available to reinforce linguistic input, participants expect a context-relevant continuation. Shortly after the critical word onset, the linguistically supported referent was visually favoured, with counterfactual (but not false belief) contexts revealing a temporal delay in integrating factually inconsistent language input. Results are discussed in relation to accounts of discourse processing and the processing relationship between counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning. Finally, we compare findings across different experimental paradigms and propose a novel cluster-analytic procedure to identify time-windows of interest in visual-world data. |
Ruth Filik; Linda M. Moxey The on-line processing of written irony Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 116, no. 3, pp. 421–436, 2010. @article{Filik2010,We report an eye-tracking study in which we investigate the on-line processing of written irony. Specifically, participants' eye movements were recorded while they read sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic (or non-ironic) phrase. Results showed longer reading times for ironic comments compared to a non-ironic baseline, suggesting that additional processing was required in ironic compared to non-ironic conditions. Reading times for subsequent pronominal reference indicated that for ironic materials, both the ironic and literal interpretations of the text were equally accessible during on-line language comprehension. This finding is most in-line with predictions of the graded salience hypothesis, which, in conjunction with the retention hypothesis, states that readers represent both the literal and ironic interpretation of an ironic utterance. |
Cheryl Frenck-Mestre; Nathalie Zardan; Annie Colas; Alain Ghio Eye-movement patterns of readers with down syndrome during sentence-processing: An exploratory study Journal Article In: American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, vol. 115, no. 3, pp. 193–206, 2010. @article{FrenckMestre2010,Eye movements were examined to determine how readers with Down syndrome process sentences online. Participants were 9 individuals with Down syndrome ranging in reading level from Grades 1 to 3 and a reading-level-matched control group. For syntactically simple sentences, the pattern of reading times was similar for the two groups, with longer reading times found at sentence end. This "wrap-up" effect was also found in the first reading of more complex sentences for the control group, whereas it only emerged later for the readers with Down syndrome. Our results provide evidence that eye movements can be used to investigate reading in individuals with Down syndrome and underline the need for future studies. |
Daniel J. Grodner; Natalie M. Klein; Kathleen M. Carbary; Michael K. Tanenhaus "Some," and possibly all, scalar inferences are not delayed: Evidence for immediate pragmatic enrichment Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 42–55, 2010. @article{Grodner2010,Scalar inferences are commonly generated when a speaker uses a weaker expression rather than a stronger alternative, e.g., John ate some of the apples implies that he did not eat them all. This article describes a visual-world study investigating how and when perceivers compute these inferences. Participants followed spoken instructions containing the scalar quantifier some directing them to interact with one of several referential targets (e.g., Click on the girl who has some of the balloons). Participants fixated on the target compatible with the implicated meaning of some and avoided a competitor compatible with the literal meaning prior to a disambiguating noun. Further, convergence on the target was as fast for some as for the non-scalar quantifiers none and all. These findings indicate that the scalar inference is computed immediately and is not delayed relative to the literal interpretation of some. It is argued that previous demonstrations that scalar inferences increase processing time are not necessarily due to delays in generating the inference itself, but rather arise because integrating the interpretation of the inference with relevant information in the context may require additional time. With sufficient contextual support, processing delays disappear. |
Tuomo Häikiö; Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä Development of parafoveal processing within and across words in reading: Evidence from the boundary paradigm Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 10, pp. 1982–1998, 2010. @article{Haeikioe2010,In this study we used the boundary paradigm to examine whether readers extract more parafoveal information within than across words. More specifically, we examined whether readers extract more parafoveal information from a compound word's second constituent than from the same word when it is the noun in an adjective-noun phrase (kummitustarina "ghost story" vs. lennokas tarina "vivid story"). We also examined whether the processing of compound word constituents is serial or parallel and how parafoveal word processing develops over the elementary school years. Participants were Finnish adults and 8-year-old second-, 10-year-old fourth-, and 12-year-old sixth-graders. The results showed that for all age groups more parafoveal information is extracted from the second constituent within compounds than from the noun in adjective-noun phrases. Moreover, for all age groups we found evidence for parallel processing of constituents within compounds, but only when the compounds were of high frequency. In sum, the present study shows that attentional allocation extends further to the right and is more simultaneous when words are linguistically and spatially unified, providing evidence that attention in text processing is flexible in nature. |
Stefan Hawelka; Benjamin Gagl; Heinz Wimmer A dual-route perspective on eye movements of dyslexic readers Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 115, no. 3, pp. 367–379, 2010. @article{Hawelka2010,This study assessed eye movement abnormalities of adolescent dyslexic readers and interpreted the findings by linking the dual-route model of single word reading with the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control during silent sentence reading. A dysfunction of the lexical route was assumed to account for a reduced number of words which received only a single fixation or which were skipped and for the increased number of words with multiple fixations and a marked effect of word length on gaze duration. This pattern was interpreted as a frequent failure of orthographic whole-word recognition (based on orthographic lexicon entries) and on reliance on serial sublexical processing instead. Inefficiency of the lexical route was inferred from prolonged gaze durations for singly fixated words. These findings were related to the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control. Slow activation of word phonology accounted for the low skipping rate of dyslexic readers. Frequent reliance on sublexical decoding was inferred from a tendency to fixate word beginnings and from short forward saccades. Overall, the linkage of the dual-route model of single word reading and a model of eye movement control led to a useful framework for understanding eye movement abnormalities of dyslexic readers. |
Sven Hohenstein; Jochen Laubrock; Reinhold Kliegl Semantic preview benefit in eye movements during reading: A parafoveal fast-priming study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 1150–1170, 2010. @article{Hohenstein2010,Eye movements in reading are sensitive to foveal and parafoveal word features. Whereas the influence of orthographic or phonological parafoveal information on gaze control is undisputed, there has been no reliable evidence for early parafoveal extraction of semantic information in alphabetic script. Using a novel combination of the gaze-contingent fast-priming and boundary paradigms, we demonstrate semantic preview benefit when a semantically related parafoveal word was available during the initial 125 ms of a fixation on the pretarget word (Experiments 1 and 2). When the target location was made more salient, significant parafoveal semantic priming occurred only at 80 ms (Experiment 3). Finally, with short primes only (20, 40, 60 ms), effects were not significant but were numerically in the expected direction for 40 and 60 ms (Experiment 4). In all experiments, fixation durations on the target word increased with prime durations under all conditions. The evidence for extraction of semantic information from the parafoveal word favors an explanation in terms of parallel word processing in reading. |
Lynn Huestegge Effects of vowel length on gaze durations in silent and oral reading Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 1–18, 2010. @article{Huestegge2010a,Vowel length is known to affect reaction times in single word reading. Eye movement studies involving silent sentence reading showed that phonological information of a word can be acquired even before it is fixated. However, it remained an open question whether vowel length directly influences oculomotor control in sentence reading. In the present eye tracking study, subjects read sentences that included target words of varying vowel length and frequency. In Experiment 1, subjects read silently for comprehension, whereas Experiment 2 involved oral reading. Experiments 3 and 4 additionally included an articulatory suppression task and a foot tapping task. Results indicated that in conditions that did not require additional articulation (Experiments 1 and 4) gaze durations were increased for words with long vowels compared to words with short vowels. Conditions that required simultaneous articulation (Experiments 2 and 3) did not yield a vowel length effect. The results point to an influence of phonetic properties on oculomotor control during silent reading around the time of the completion of lexical access. |
Lynn Huestegge; Diana Bocianski Effects of syntactic context on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Advances in Cognitive Psychology, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 79–87, 2010. @article{Huestegge2010b,Previous research has demonstrated that properties of a currently fixated word and of adjacent words influence eye movement control in reading. In contrast to such local effects, little is known about the global effects on eye movement control, for example global adjustments caused by processing difficulty of previous sentences. In the present study, participants read text passages in which voice (active vs. passive) and sentence structure (embedded vs. non-embedded) were manipulated. These passages were followed by identical target sentences. The results revealed effects of previous sentence structure on gaze durations in the target sentence, implying that syntactic properties of previously read sentences may lead to a global adjustment of eye movement control. |
Lynn Huestegge; Hanns Jürgen Kunert; Ralph Radach Long-term effects of cannabis on eye movement control in reading Journal Article In: Psychopharmacology, vol. 209, no. 1, pp. 77–84, 2010. @article{Huestegge2010d,INTRODUCTION: Cannabis is known to produce substantial acute effects on human cognition and visuomotor skills. Many recent studies additionally revealed rather long-lasting effects on basic oculomotor control, especially after chronic use. However, it is still unknown to what extent these deficits play a role in everyday tasks that strongly rely on an efficient saccade system, such as reading. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In the present study, eye movements during sentence reading of 20 healthy long-term cannabis users (without acute tetrahydrocannabinol-intoxication) and 20 control participants were compared. Analyses focused on both spatial and temporal parameters of oculomotor control during reading. RESULTS: Long-term cannabis users exhibited increased fixation durations, more revisiting of previously inspected text, and a substantial prolongation of word viewing times, which were highly inflated for longer and less frequent words. DISCUSSION: The results indicate that relatively subtle performance deficits on the level of basic oculomotor control scale up as task complexity and cognitive demands increase. |
Falk Huettig; Jidong Chen; Melissa Bowerman; Asifa Majid In: Journal of Cognition and Culture, vol. 10, no. 1-2, pp. 39–58, 2010. @article{Huettig2010a,In two eye-tracking studies we investigated the influence of Mandarin numeral classifiers – a grammatical category in the language – on online overt attention. Mandarin speakers were presented with simple sentences through headphones while their eye-movements to objects presented on a computer screen were monitored. The crucial question is what participants look at while listening to a pre-specified target noun. If classifier categories influence Mandarin speakers' general conceptual processing, then on hearing the target noun they should look at objects that are members of the same classifier category – even when the classifier is not explicitly present (cf., Huettig and Altmann, 2005). The data show that when participants heard a classifier (e.g., ba3, Experiment 1) they shifted overt attention significantly more to classifiermatch objects (e.g., chair) than to distractor objects, but when the classifier was not explicitly presented in speech, overt attention to classifier-match objects and distractor objects did not differ (Experiment 2). This suggests that although classifier distinctions do influence eye-gaze behavior, they do so only during linguistic processing of that distinction and not in moment-to-moment general conceptual processing. |
Falk Huettig; Robert J. Hartsuiker Listening to yourself is like listening to others: External, but not internal, verbal self-monitoring is based on speech perception Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 347–374, 2010. @article{Huettig2010,Theories of verbal self-monitoring generally assume an internal (pre-articu- latory) monitoring channel, but there is debate about whether this channel relies on speech perception or on production-internal mechanisms. Perception- based theories predict that listening to one's own inner speech has similar behavioural consequences as listening to someone else's speech. Our experi- ment therefore registered eye-movements while speakers named objects accompanied by phonologically related or unrelated written words. The data showed that listening to one's own speech drives eye-movements to phonolo- gically related words, just as listening to someone else's speech does in perception experiments. The time-course of these eye-movements was very similar to that in other-perception (starting 300 ms post-articulation), which demonstrates that these eye-movements were driven by the perception of overt speech, not inner speech. We conclude that external, but not internal monitoring, is based on speech perception. |
Jukka Hyönä; Raymond Bertram Do frequency characteristics of nonfixated words influence the processing of fixated words during reading? Journal Article In: European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 16, no. 1-2, pp. 104–127, 2010. @article{Hyoenae2010,Are readers capable of lexically processing more than one word at a time? In five eye movement experiments, we examined to what extent lexical characteristics of the nonfixated word to the right of fixation influenced readers' eye behavior on the fixated word. In three experiments, we varied the frequency of the initial constituent of two-noun compounds, while in two experiments the whole-word frequency was manipulated. The results showed that frequency characteristics of the parafoveal word sometimes affected eye behavior prior to fixating it, but the direction of effects was not consistent & the effects were not replicated across all experiments. Follow-up regression analyses suggested that foveal & parafoveal word length as well as the frequency of the word-initial trigram of the parafoveal word may modulate the parafoveal-on-foveal effects. It is concluded that low-frequency words or lexemes may under certain circumstances serve as a magnet to attract an early eye movement to them. However, further corroborative evidence is clearly needed. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Bradley A. Seymour; Daniel J. Schad; Seth N. Greenberg The size and direction of saccadic curvatures during reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 50, no. 12, pp. 1117–1130, 2010. @article{Inhoff2010,Eye movements during the reading of multi-line pages of texts were analyzed to determine the trajectory of reading saccades. The results of two experiments showed that the trajectory of the majority of forward-directed saccades was negatively biased, i.e., the trajectory fell below the start and end location of the saccadic movement. This is attributed to a global top-to-bottom orienting of attention. The curvature size and the proportion of negative trajectories were diminished when linguistic processing demands were high and when the beginning lines of a page were read. Longer pre-saccadic fixations also yielded smaller saccadic curvatures, and they resulted in fewer negatively curved forward-directed saccades in Experiment 1 although not in Experiment 2. These findings indicate that the top-to-bottom pull of saccadic trajectories is modulated by processing demands and processing opportunities. The results are in general agreement with a time-locked attraction–inhibition hypothesis, according to which the horizontal movement component of a saccade is initially subject to an automatic top-to-bottom orienting of attention that is subsequently inhibited. |
Angela M. Isaacs; Duane G. Watson Accent detection is a slippery slope: Direction and rate of F0 change drives listeners' comprehension Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 25, no. 7-9, pp. 1178–1200, 2010. @article{Isaacs2010,The present study tests whether listeners use F0, duration, or some combination of the two to identify the presence of an accented word in a short discourse. Participants' eye movements to previously mentioned and new objects were monitored as participants listened to instructions to move objects in a display. The name of the target object on critical trials was resynthesized from naturally-produced utterances so that it had either high or low F0 and either long or short duration. Fixations to the new object were highest when there was a steep rise in F0. Fixations to the previously mentioned object were highest when there was a steep drop in F0. These results suggest that listeners use F0 slope to make decisions about the presence of an accent, and that F0 and duration by themselves do not solely determine accent interpretation. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Jukka Hyönä Task effects on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 1561–1566, 2010. @article{Kaakinen2010,The present study examined how proofreading and reading-for-comprehension instructions influence eye movements during reading. Thirty-seven participants silently read sentences containing compound words as target words while their eye movements were being recorded. We manipulated word length and frequency to examine how task instructions influence orthographic versus lexical-semantic processing during reading. Task instructions influenced both temporal and spatial aspects of eye movements: The initial landing position in words was shifted leftward, the saccade length was shorter, first fixation and gaze duration were longer, and refixation probability was higher during proofreading than during reading for comprehension. Moreover, in comparison to instructions for reading for comprehension, proofreading instructions increased both orthographic and lexical-semantic processing. This became apparent in a greater word length and word frequency effect in gaze duration during proofreading than during reading for comprehension. The present study suggests that the allocation of attentional resources during reading is significantly modulated by task demands. |
André Krügel; Ralf Engbert On the launch-site effect for skipped words during reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 50, no. 16, pp. 1532–1539, 2010. @article{Kruegel2010,The launch-site effect, a systematic variation of within-word landing position as a function of launch-site distance, is among the most important oculomotor phenomena in reading. Here we show that the launch-site effect is strongly modulated in word skipping, a finding which is inconsistent with the view that the launch-site effect is caused by a saccadic-range error. We observe that distributions of landing positions in skipping saccades show an increased leftward shift compared to non-skipping saccades at equal launch-site distances. Using an improved algorithm for the estimation of mislocated fixations, we demonstrate the reliability of our results. |
Victor Kuperman; Michael Dambacher; Antje Nuthmann; Reinhold Kliegl The effect of word position on eye-movements in sentence and paragraph reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 63, no. 9, pp. 1838–1857, 2010. @article{Kuperman2010a,The present study explores the role of the word position-in-text in sentence and paragraph reading. Three eye-movement data sets based on the reading of Dutch and German unrelated sentences reveal a sizeable, replicable increase in reading times over several words at the beginning and the end of sentences. The data from the paragraph-based English-language Dundee corpus replicate the pattern and also indicate that the increase in inspection times is driven by the visual boundaries of the text organized in lines, rather than by syntactic sentence boundaries. We argue that this effect is independent of several established lexical, contextual, and oculomotor predictors of eye-movement behaviour. We also provide evidence that the effect of word position-in-text has two independent components: a start-up effect, arguably caused by a strategic oculomotor programme of saccade planning over the line of text, and a wrap-up effect, originating in cognitive processes of comprehension and semantic integration. |
Debra Malpass; Antje S. Meyer The time course of name retrieval during multiple-object naming: Evidence from extrafoveal-on-foveal effects Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 523–537, 2010. @article{Malpass2010,The goal of the study was to examine whether speakers naming pairs of objects would retrieve the names of the objects in parallel or in sequence. To this end, we recorded the speakers' eye movements and determined whether the difficulty of retrieving the name of the 2nd object affected the duration of the gazes to the 1st object. Two experiments, which differed in the spatial arrangement of the objects, showed that the speakers looked longer at the 1st object when the name of the 2nd object was easy than when it was more difficult to retrieve. Thus, the easy 2nd-object names interfered more with the processing of the 1st object than the more difficult 2nd-object names. In the 3rd experiment, the processing of the 1st object was rendered more difficult by presenting it upside down. No effect of 2nd-object difficulty on the gaze duration for the 1st object was found. These results suggest that speakers can retrieve the names of a foveated and an extrafoveal object in parallel, provided that the processing of the foveated object is not too demanding. |
Bob Mcmurray; Vicki M. Samelson; Sung H. Lee; J. Bruce Tomblin Individual differences in spoken word recognition: A processing approach with implications for SLI Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 1–39, 2010. @article{Mcmurray2010,Thirty years of research has uncovered the broad principles that characterize spoken word processing across listeners. However, there have been few systematic investigations of individual differences. Such an investigation could help refine models of word recognition by indicating which processing parameters are likely to vary, and could also have important implications for work on language impairment. The present study begins to fill this gap by relating individual differences in overall language ability to variation in online word recognition processes. Using the visual world paradigm, we evaluated online spoken word recognition in adolescents who varied in both basic language abilities and non-verbal cognitive abilities. Eye movements to target, cohort and rhyme objects were monitored during spoken word recognition, as an index of lexical activation. Adolescents with poor language skills showed fewer looks to the target and more fixations to the cohort and rhyme competitors. These results were compared to a number of variants of the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986) that were constructed to test a range of theoretical approaches to language impairment: impairments at sensory and phonological levels; vocabulary size, and generalized slowing. None of the existing approaches were strongly supported, and variation in lexical decay offered the best fit. Thus, basic word recognition processes like lexical decay may offer a new way to characterize processing differences in language impairment. |
Bob McMurray; Vicki M. Samelson; Sung Hee Lee; J. Bruce Tomblin Individual differences in online spoken word recognition: Implications for SLI Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 1–39, 2010. @article{McMurray2010b,Thirty years of research has uncovered the broad principles that characterize spoken word processing across listeners. However, there have been few systematic investigations of individual differences. Such an investigation could help refine models of word recognition by indicating which processing parameters are likely to vary, and could also have important implications for work on language impairment. The present study begins to fill this gap by relating individual differences in overall language ability to variation in online word recognition processes. Using the visual world paradigm, we evaluated online spoken word recognition in adolescents who varied in both basic language abilities and non-verbal cognitive abilities. Eye movements to target, cohort and rhyme objects were monitored during spoken word recognition, as an index of lexical activation. Adolescents with poor language skills showed fewer looks to the target and more fixations to the cohort and rhyme competitors. These results were compared to a number of variants of the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986) that were constructed to test a range of theoretical approaches to language impairment: impairments at sensory and phonological levels; vocabulary size, and generalized slowing. None of the existing approaches were strongly supported, and variation in lexical decay offered the best fit. Thus, basic word recognition processes like lexical decay may offer a new way to characterize processing differences in language impairment. |
Linda M. Moxey; Ruth Filik The effects of character desire on focus patterns and pronominal reference following quantified statements Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 588–616, 2010. @article{Moxey2010,Following a positively quantified statement such as, oA few of the children sang the chorus,o a plural pronoun is likely to refer to the set of children who sang (the reference set). Negative natural language quantifiers (NLQs) such as few or not many, on the other hand, are more likely to be followed by reference to the complement set of children who did not sing. According to the presupposition-denial account of negative NLQs, the complement set is available for pronominal reference following these expressions because they imply a shortfall between the amount denoted and a presupposed larger amount. Focus on the shortfall set is effectively focus on the complement set. Previous support for this account is largely based on a series of experiments which show that complement set focus is also possible following positive NLQs if a previously mentioned character expects a larger amount, thereby creating a shortfall between the character's expectations and the amount denoted by the NLQ. It is not clear, however, whether the shortfall implied by a negative NLQ must be based on expectation per se, or whether the NLQ-based implication is more general. This article reports 3 experiments which show that a shortfall can also be created between an NLQ and a character's desire for a particular quantity. Results suggest that the implication of negative NLQs that a larger amount is denied need not be based on expectation, but may be less specific. |
Jong-yoon Myung; Sheila E. Blumstein; Eiling Yee; Julie C. Sedivy; Sharon L. Thompson-Schill; Laurel J. Buxbaum Impaired access to manipulation features in Apraxia: Evidence from eyetracking and semantic judgment tasks Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 112, no. 2, pp. 101–112, 2010. @article{Myung2010,Apraxic patients are known for deficits in producing and comprehending skilled movements. Two experiments tested their implicit and explicit knowledge about manipulable objects in order to examine whether such deficits accompany impairment in the conceptual representation of manipulation features. An eyetracking method was used to test implicit knowledge (Experiment 1): participants viewed a visual display on a computer screen and touched the corresponding object in response to an auditory input. Manipulation relationship among objects was not task-relevant, and thus the assessment of manipulation knowledge was implicit. Like the non-apraxic control patients, apraxic patients fixated on an object picture (e.g., " typewriter" ) that was manipulation-related to a target word (e.g., 'piano') significantly more often than an unrelated object picture (e.g., " bucket" ) as well as a visual control (e.g., " couch" ). However, this effect emerged later than in the non-apraxic control group, suggesting impaired access to manipulation features in the apraxic group. In the semantic judgment task (Experiment 2), participants were asked to make an explicit judgment about the relationship of picture triplets of manipulable objects by choosing the pair with similar manipulation features. Apraxic patients performed significantly worse on this task than the non-apraxic control group. Both implicit and explicit measures of manipulation knowledge show that apraxia is not merely a perceptuomotor deficit of skilled movements, but results in a concomitant impairment in representing manipulation features and accessing them for cognitive processing. |