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2012 |
Manuel Perea Revisiting Huey: On the importance of the upper part of words during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 1148–1153, 2012. @article{Perea2012,Recent research has shown that that the upper part of words enjoys an advantage over the lower part of words in the recognition of isolated words. The goal of the present article was to examine how removing the upper/lower part of the words influences eye movement control during silent normal reading. The participants' eye movements were monitored when reading intact sentences and when reading sentences in which the upper or the lower portion of the text was deleted. Results showed a greater reading cost (longer fixations) when the upper part of the text was removed than when the lower part of the text was removed (i.e., it influenced when to move the eyes). However, there was little influence on the initial landing position on a target word (i.e., on the decision as to where to move the eyes). In addition, lexical-processing difficulty (as inferred from the magnitude of the word frequency effect on a target word) was affected by text degradation. The implications of these findings for models of visual-word recognition and reading are discussed. |
Manuel Perea; Pablo Gomez Subtle increases in interletter spacing facilitate the encoding of words during normal reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 10, pp. e47568, 2012. @article{Perea2012a,BACKGROUND: Several recent studies have revealed that words presented with a small increase in interletter spacing are identified faster than words presented with the default interletter spacing (i.e., w a t e r faster than water). Modeling work has shown that this advantage occurs at an early encoding level. Given the implications of this finding for the ease of reading in the new digital era, here we examined whether the beneficial effect of small increases in interletter spacing can be generalized to a normal reading situation. METHODOLOGY: We conducted an experiment in which the participant's eyes were monitored when reading sentences varying in interletter spacing: i) sentences were presented with the default (0.0) interletter spacing; ii) sentences presented with a +1.0 interletter spacing; and iii) sentences presented with a +1.5 interletter spacing. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Results showed shorter fixation duration times as an inverse function of interletter spacing (i.e., fixation durations were briefest with +1.5 spacing and slowest with the default spacing). CONCLUSIONS: Subtle increases in interletter spacing facilitate the encoding of the fixated word during normal reading. Thus, interletter spacing is a parameter that may affect the ease of reading, and it could be adjustable in future implementations of e-book readers. |
Catherine I. Phillips; Christopher R. Sears; Penny M. Pexman An embodied semantic processing effect on eye gaze during sentence reading Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 99–114, 2012. @article{Phillips2012a,The present research examines the effects of body-object interaction (BOI) on eye gaze behaviour in a reading task. BOI measures perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. A set of high BOI words (e.g. cat) and a set of low BOI words (e.g. sun) were selected, matched on imageability and concreteness (as well as other lexical and semantic variables). Facilitatory BOI effects were observed: gaze durations and total fixation durations were shorter for high BOI words, and participants made fewer regressions to high BOI words. The results provide evidence of a BOI effect on non-manual responses and in a situation that taps normal reading processes. We discuss how the results (a) suggest that stored motor information (as measured by BOI ratings) is relevant to lexical semantics, and (b) are consistent with an embodied view of cognition (Wilson 2002). |
Patrick Plummer; Keith Rayner Effects of parafoveal word length and orthographic features on initial fixation landing positions in reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 74, no. 5, pp. 950–963, 2012. @article{Plummer2012,Previous research has demonstrated that readers use word length and word boundary information in targeting saccades into upcoming words while reading. Previous studies have also revealed that the initial landing positions for fixations on words are affected by parafoveal processing. In the present study, we examined the effects of word length and orthographic legality on targeting saccades into parafoveal words. Long (8-9 letters) and short (4-5 letters) target words, which were matched on lexical frequency and initial letter trigram, were paired and embedded into identical sentence frames. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to manipulate the parafoveal information available to the reader before direct fixation on the target word. The parafoveal preview was either identical to the target word or was a visually similar nonword. The nonword previews contained orthographically legal or orthographically illegal initial letters. The results showed that orthographic preprocessing of the word to the right of fixation affected eye movement targeting, regardless of word length. Additionally, the lexical status of an upcoming saccade target in the parafovea generally did not influence preprocessing. |
Eva Reinisch; Andrea Weber Adapting to suprasegmental lexical stress errors in foreign-accented speech Journal Article In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 132, no. 2, pp. 1165–1176, 2012. @article{rw12,Can native listeners rapidly adapt to suprasegmental mispronunciations in foreign-accented speech? To address this question, an exposure-test paradigm was used to test whether Dutch listeners can improve their understanding of non-canonical lexical stress in Hungarian-accented Dutch. During exposure, one group of listeners heard a Dutch story with only initially stressed words, whereas another group also heard 28 words with canonical second-syllable stress (e.g., EEKhorn, "squirrel" was replaced by koNIJN "rabbit"; capitals indicate stress). The 28 words, however, were non-canonically marked by the Hungarian speaker with high pitch and amplitude on the initial syllable, both of which are stress cues in Dutch. After exposure, listeners' eye movements were tracked to Dutch target-competitor pairs with segmental overlap but different stress patterns, while they listened to new words from the same Hungarian speaker (e.g., HERsens, herSTEL, "brain," "recovery"). Listeners who had previously heard non-canonically produced words distinguished target-competitor pairs better than listeners who had only been exposed to Hungarian accent with canonical forms of lexical stress. Even a short exposure thus allows listeners to tune into speaker-specific realizations of words' suprasegmental make-up, and use this information for word recognition. |
Kathleen Pirog Revill; Daniel H. Spieler The effect of lexical frequency on spoken word recognition in young and older listeners Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 80–87, 2012. @article{rs12,When identifying spoken words, older listeners may have difficulty resolving lexical competition or may place a greater weight on factors like lexical frequency. To obtain information about age differences in the time course of spoken word recognition, young and older adults' eye movements were monitored as they followed spoken instructions to click on objects displayed on a computer screen. Older listeners were more likely than younger listeners to fixate high-frequency displayed phonological competitors. However, degradation of auditory quality in younger listeners does not reproduce this result. These data are most consistent with an increased role for lexical frequency with age. |
Sarah Risse; Reinhold Kliegl Evidence for delayed parafoveal-on-foveal effects from word n+2 in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 1026–1042, 2012. @article{rk12,During reading information is acquired from word(s) beyond the word that is currently looked at. It is still an open question whether such parafoveal information can influence the current viewing of a word, and if so, whether such parafoveal-on-foveal effects are attributable to distributed processing or to mislocated fixations which occur when the eyes are directed at a parafoveal word but land on another word instead. In two display-change experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the preview and target difficulty of word n+2 to investigate the role of mislocated fixations on the previous word n+1. When the eyes left word n, an easy or difficult word n+2 preview was replaced by an easy or difficult n+2 target word. In Experiment 1, n+2 processing difficulty was manipulated by means of word frequency (i.e., easy high-frequency vs. difficult low-frequency word n+2). In Experiment 2, we varied the visual familiarity of word n+2 (i.e., easy lower-case vs. difficult alternating-case writing). Fixations on the short word n+1, which were likely to be mislocated, were nevertheless not influenced by the difficulty of the adjacent word n+2, the hypothesized target of the mislocated fixation. Instead word n+1 was influenced by the preview difficulty of word n+2, representing a delayed parafoveal-on-foveal effect. The results challenge the mislocated-fixation hypothesis as an explanation of parafoveal-on-foveal effects and provide new insight into the complex spatial and temporal effect structure of processing inside the perceptual span during reading. |
Annie Roy-Charland; Jean Saint-Aubin; Raymond M. Klein; Gregory H. MacLean; Amanda Lalande; Ashley Bélanger Eye movements when reading: The importance of the word to the left of fixation Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 328–355, 2012. @article{Roy-Charland2012,In reading, it is well established that word processing can begin in the parafovea while the eyes are fixating the previous word. However, much less is known about the processing of information to the left of fixation. In two experiments, this issue was explored by combining a gaze-contingent display procedure preventing parafoveal preview and a letter detection task. All words were displayed as a series of xs until the reader fixated them, thereby preventing forward parafoveal processing, yet enabling backward parafoveal or postview processing. Results from both experiments revealed that readers were able to detect a target letter embedded in a word that was skipped. In those cases, the letter could only have been identified in postview (to the left of fixation), and detection rate decreased as the distance between the target letter and the eyes' landing position increased. Most importantly, for those skipped words, the typical missing-letter effect was observed with more omissions for target letters embedded in function than in content words. This can be taken as evidence that readers can extract basic prelexical information, such as the presence of a letter, in the parafoveal area to the left of fixation. Implications of these results are discussed in relation to models of eye movement control in reading and also in relation to models of the missing-letter effect. |
Daniel J. Schad; Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert Your mind wanders weakly, your mind wanders deeply: Objective measures reveal mindless reading at different levels Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 125, no. 2, pp. 179–194, 2012. @article{sne12,When the mind wanders, attention turns away from the external environment and cognitive processing is decoupled from perceptual information. Mind wandering is usually treated as a dichotomy (dichotomy-hypothesis), and is often measured using self-reports. Here, we propose the levels of inattention hypothesis, which postulates attentional decoupling to graded degrees at different hierarchical levels of cognitive processing. To measure graded levels of attentional decoupling during reading we introduce the sustained attention to stimulus task (SAST), which is based on psychophysics of error detection. Under experimental conditions likely to induce mind wandering, we found that subjects were less likely to notice errors that required high-level processing for their detection as opposed to errors that only required low-level processing. Eye tracking revealed that before errors were overlooked influences of high- and low-level linguistic variables on eye fixations were reduced in a graded fashion, indicating episodes of mindless reading at weak and deep levels. Individual fixation durations predicted overlooking of lexical errors 5s before they occurred. Our findings support the levels of inattention hypothesis and suggest that different levels of mindless reading can be measured behaviorally in the SAST. Using eye tracking to detect mind wandering online represents a promising approach for the development of new techniques to study mind wandering and to ameliorate its negative consequences. |
Kilian G. Seeber; Dirk Kerzel Cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting: Model meets data Journal Article In: International Journal of Bilingualism, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 228–242, 2012. @article{Seeber2012,Seeber (2011) recently introduced a series of analytical cognitive load models, providing a detailed illustration of conjectured cognitive resource allocation during simultaneous interpreting. In this article, the authors set out to compare these models with data gathered in an experiment using task-evoked pupillary responses to measure online cognitive load during simultaneous interpreting when embedded in single-sentence context and discourse context. Verb-final and verb-initial constructions were analysed in terms of the load they cause to an inherently capacity-limited system when interpreted simultaneously into a verb-initial language like English. The results show larger pupil dilation with verb-final than with verb-initial constructions, suggesting higher cognitive load with asymmetrical structures. A tendency for reduced cognitive load in the discourse context compared to the sentence context was also found. These data support the models' prediction of an increase in cognitive load towards (and beyond) the end of verb-final constructions. |
Deli Shen; Simon P. Liversedge; Jin Tian; Chuanli Zang; Lei Cui; Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Keith Rayner Eye movements of second language learners when reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 192–202, 2012. @article{sltzcbyr,The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text. Also, participants' native languages were different in terms of their basic characteristics: English and Korean are spaced, whereas the other two are unspaced; Japanese is character based whereas the other three are alphabetic. Thus, we assessed whether any spacing effects were modulated by native language characteristics. Eye movement measures showed least disruption to reading for word-spaced text and longer reading times for unspaced than character-spaced text, with nonword-spaced text yielding the most disruption. These effects were uninfluenced by native language (though reading times differed between groups as a result of Chinese reading experience). Demarcation of word boundaries through spacing reduces non-native readers' uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby speeding lexical identification, and in turn, reading. More generally, the results indicate that words have psychological reality for those who are learning to read Chinese as a second language, and that segmentation of text into words is more beneficial to successful comprehension than is separating individual Chinese characters with spaces. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold The time course of contextual influences during lexical ambiguity resolution: Evidence from distributional analyses of fixation durations Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 40, no. 7, pp. 1122–1131, 2012. @article{sr12,In the lexical ambiguity literature, it is well-established that readers experience processing difficulties when they encounter biased homographs in a subordinate-instantiating prior context (i.e., the subordinate bias effect). To investigate the time course of this effect, the present study examined distributional analyses offirst-fixation durations on 60 biased homographs that were each read twice: once in a subordinate-instantiating context and once in a dominant-instantiating context. Ex-Gaussian fitting revealed that the subordinate context distribution was shifted to the right of the dominant context distribution, with no significant contextual differences in the degree of skew. In addition, a survival analysis technique showed a significant influence of the subordinate versus dominant contextual manipulation as early as 139 ms from the start of fixation. These results indicate that the contextual manipulation had a fast-acting influence on the majority of fixation durations, which is consistent with the reordered access model's assumption that prior context can affect the lexical access stage of reading. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold The time course of predictability effects in reading: Evidence from a survival analysis of fixation durations Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 733–745, 2012. @article{sr12b,To investigate the time course of predictability effects in reading, the present study examined distributions of first-fixation durations on target words in a low predictability versus a high predictability prior context. In a replication of Staub (2011), ex-Gaussian fitting demonstrated that the low predictability distribution was significantly shifted to the right of the high predictability distribution in the absence of any contextual differences in the degree of skew. Extending this finding, the present study used a survival analysis technique to demonstrate a significant influence of predictability on fixation duration as early as 140 ms from the start of fixation, which is similar to prior results obtained with the word frequency variable. These results provide convergent evidence that lexical variables have a fast acting influence on fixation durations during reading. Implications for models of eye- movement control are discussed. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold Perceptually specific and perceptually non-specific influences on rereading benefits for spatially transformed text: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 1739–1747, 2012. @article{sr12c,The present study used eye tracking methodology to examine rereading benefits for spatially transformed text. Eye movements were monitored while participants read the same target word twice, in two different low-constraint sentence frames. The congruency of perceptual processing was manipulated by either applying the same type of transformation to the word during the first and second presentations (i.e., the congruent condition), or employing two different types of transformations across the two presentations of the word (i.e., the incongruent condition). Perceptual specificity effects were demonstrated such that fixation times for the second presentation of the target word were shorter for the congruent condition compared to the incongruent condition. Moreover, we demonstrated an additional perceptually non-specific effect such that second reading fixation times were shorter for the incongruent condition relative to a baseline condition that employed a normal typography (i.e., non-transformed) during the first presentation and a transformation during the second presentation. Both of these effects (i.e., perceptually specific and perceptually non-specific) were similar in magnitude for high and low frequency words, and both effects persisted across a 1. week lag between the first and second readings. We discuss the present findings in the context of the distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, and the distinction between perceptually versus conceptually driven processing. |
Timothy J. Slattery; Adrian Staub; Keith Rayner Saccade launch site as a predictor of fixation durations in reading: Comments on Hand, Miellet, O'Donnell, and Sereno (2010) Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 251–261, 2012. @article{ssr12,An important question in research on eye movements in reading is whether word frequency and word predictability have additive or interactive effects on fixation durations. A fair number of studies have reported only additive effects of the frequency and predictability of a target word on reading times on that word, failing to show significant interactions. Recently, however, Hand, Miellet, O'Donnell, and Sereno (see record 2010-19099-001) reported interactive effects in a study that included the distance of the prior fixation from the target word (launch site). They reported that when the saccade into the target word was launched from very near to the word (within 3 characters), the predictability effect was larger for low frequency words, but when the saccade was launched from a medium distance (4-6 characters from the word) the predictability effect was larger for high frequency words. Hand et al. argued for the importance of including launch site in analyses of target word fixation durations. Here we describe several problems with Hand et al.'s use of analyses of variance in which launch site is divided into distinct ordinal levels. We describe a more appropriate way to analyze such data-linear mixed-effect models-and we use this method to show that launch site does not modulate the interaction between frequency and predictability in two other data sets. |
Adrian Staub; Matthew J. Abbott; Richard S. Bogartz Linguistically guided anticipatory eye movements in scene viewing Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 922–946, 2012. @article{Staub2012,The present study replicated the well-known demonstration by Altmann and Kamide (1999) that listeners make linguistically guided anticipatory eye movements, but used photographs of scenes rather than clip-art arrays as the visual stimuli. When listeners heard a verb for which a particular object in a visual scene was the likely theme, they made earlier looks to this object (e.g., looks to a cake upon hearing The boy will eat ?) than when they heard a control verb (The boy will move ?). New data analyses assessed whether these anticipatory effects are due to a linguistic effect on the targeting of saccades (i.e., the where parameter of eye movement control), the duration of fixations (i.e., the when parameter), or both. Participants made fewer fixations before reaching the target object when the verb was selectionally restricting (e.g., will eat). However, verb type had no effect on the duration of individual eye fixations. These results suggest an important constraint on the linkage between spoken language processing and eye movement control: Linguistic input may influence only the decision of where to move the eyes, not the decision of when to move them. |
Simone Sulpizio; James M. McQueen Italians use abstract knowledge about lexical stress during spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 177–193, 2012. @article{Sulpizio2012,In two eye-tracking experiments in Italian, we investigated how acoustic information and stored knowledge about lexical stress are used during the recognition of tri-syllabic spoken words. Experiment 1 showed that Italians use acoustic cues to a word's stress pattern rapidly in word recognition, but only for words with antepenultimate stress. Words with penultimate stress - the most common pattern - appeared to be recognized by default. In Experiment 2, listeners had to learn new words from which some stress cues had been removed, and then recognize reduced- and full-cue versions of those words. The acoustic manipulation affected recognition only of newly-learnt words with antepenultimate stress: Full-cue versions, even though they were never heard during training, were recognized earlier than reduced-cue versions. Newly-learnt words with penultimate stress were recognized earlier overall, but recognition of the two versions of these words did not differ. Abstract knowledge (i.e., knowledge generalized over the lexicon) about lexical stress - which pattern is the default and which cues signal the non-default pattern - appears to be used during the recognition of known and newly-learnt Italian words. |
Joseph C. Toscano; Bob McMurray Cue-integration and context effects in speech: Evidence against speaking-rate normalization Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 74, no. 6, pp. 1284–1301, 2012. @article{Toscano2012,Listeners are able to accurately recognize speech despite variation in acoustic cues across contexts, such as different speaking rates. Previous work has suggested that listeners use rate information (indicated by vowel length; VL) to modify their use of context-dependent acoustic cues, like voice-onset time (VOT), a primary cue to voicing. We present several experiments and simulations that offer an alternative explanation: that listeners treat VL as a phonetic cue rather than as an indicator of speaking rate, and that they rely on general cue-integration principles to combine information from VOT and VL. We demonstrate that listeners use the two cues independently, that VL is used in both naturally produced and synthetic speech, and that the effects of stimulus naturalness can be explained by a cue-integration model. Together, these results suggest that listeners do not interpret VOT relative to rate information provided by VL and that the effects of speaking rate can be explained by more general cue-integration principles. |
Alison M. Trude; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Talker-specific perceptual adaptation during online speech perception Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 27, no. 7-8, pp. 979–1001, 2012. @article{Trude2012,Despite the ubiquity of between-talker differences in accent and dialect, little is known about how listeners adjust to this source of variability as language is perceived in real time. In three experiments, we examined whether, and when, listeners can use specific knowledge of a particular talker's accent during on-line speech processing. Listeners were exposed to the speech of two talkers, a male who had an unfamiliar regional dialect of American English, in which the /æ/ vowel is raised to /ei/ only before /g/ (e.g., bag is pronounced /beig/), and a female talker without the dialect. In order to examine how knowledge of a particular talker's accent influenced language processing, we examined listeners' interpretation of unaccented words such as back and bake in contexts that included a competitor like bag. If interpretation processes are talker-specific, the pattern of competition from bag should vary depending on how that talker pronounces the competitor word. In all three experiments, listeners rapidly used their knowledge of how the talker would have pronounced bag to either rule out or include bag as a temporary competitor. Providing a cue to talker identity prior to the critical word strengthened these effects. These results are consistent with views of language processing in which multiple sources of information, including previous experience with the current talker and contextual cues, are rapidly integrated during lexical activation and selection processes.$backslash$nDespite the ubiquity of between-talker differences in accent and dialect, little is known about how listeners adjust to this source of variability as language is perceived in real time. In three experiments, we examined whether, and when, listeners can use specific knowledge of a particular talker's accent during on-line speech processing. Listeners were exposed to the speech of two talkers, a male who had an unfamiliar regional dialect of American English, in which the /æ/ vowel is raised to /ei/ only before /g/ (e.g., bag is pronounced /beig/), and a female talker without the dialect. In order to examine how knowledge of a particular talker's accent influenced language processing, we examined listeners' interpretation of unaccented words such as back and bake in contexts that included a competitor like bag. If interpretation processes are talker-specific, the pattern of competition from bag should vary depending on how that talker pronounces the competitor word. In all three experiments, listeners rapidly used their knowledge of how the talker would have pronounced bag to either rule out or include bag as a temporary competitor. Providing a cue to talker identity prior to the critical word strengthened these effects. These results are consistent with views of language processing in which multiple sources of information, including previous experience with the current talker and contextual cues, are rapidly integrated during lexical activation and selection processes. |
Jie-Li Tsai; Reinhold Kliegl; Ming Yan Parafoveal semantic information extraction in traditional Chinese reading Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 141, no. 1, pp. 17–23, 2012. @article{Tsai2012,Semantic information extraction from the parafovea has been reported only in simplified Chinese for a special subset of characters and its generalizability has been questioned. This study uses traditional Chinese, which differs from simplified Chinese in visual complexity and in mapping semantic forms, to demonstrate access to parafoveal semantic information during reading of this script. Preview duration modulates various types (identical, phonological, and unrelated) of parafoveal information extraction. Parafoveal semantic extraction is more elusive in English; therefore, we conclude that such effects in Chinese are presumably caused by substantial cross-language differences from alphabetic scripts. The property of Chinese characters carrying rich lexical information in a small region provides the possibility of semantic extraction in the parafovea. |
Annelie Tuinman; Holger Mitterer; Anne Cutler Resolving ambiguity in familiar and unfamiliar casual speech Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 530–544, 2012. @article{Tuinman2012,In British English, the phrase . Canada aided can sound like . Canada raided if the speaker links the two vowels at the word boundary with an intrusive /r/. There are subtle phonetic differences between an onset /r/ and an intrusive /r/, however. With cross-modal priming and eye-tracking, we examine how native British English listeners and non-native (Dutch) listeners deal with the lexical ambiguity arising from this language-specific connected speech process. Together the results indicate that the presence of /r/ initially activates competing words for both listener groups; however, the native listeners rapidly exploit the phonetic cues and achieve correct lexical selection. In contrast, The Dutch-native advanced L2 listeners to English failed to recover from the /r/-induced competition, and failed to match native performance in either task. The /r/-intrusion process, which adds a phoneme to speech input, thus causes greater difficulty for L2 listeners than connected-speech processes which alter or delete phonemes. |
Araceli Valle; Katherine S. Binder; Caitlin B. Walsh; Carolyn Nemier; Kathryn E. Bangs Eye movements, prosody, and word frequency among average-and high-skilled second-grade readers Journal Article In: School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. October, pp. 171–190, 2012. @article{Valle2012,The present study explored how average-and high-skilled second-grade readers (as identified by their Woodcock-Johnson III Test of Academic Achieve-ment Broad Reading scores) differed on behavioral measures of reading related to comprehension: eye movements during silent reading and prosody during oral reading. Results from silent reading implicate word processing efficiency: high skilled readers had fewer fixations and intraword regressions, and shorter first fixation, gaze duration, and total word reading times. Their skipping and regres-sion patterns during silent reading were representative of a more systematic approach to passage reading, suggesting that meta-cognitive or motivational factors may also differentiate the groups. Compared to high-skilled readers, average readers' oral reading was characterized by longer pauses, less differen-tiation across pause types, and more intrusions. Counter to prior research, aspects of prosody associated with expressivity favored average readers: they had a sharper pitch declination at the end of declarative sentences and used a wider range of pitch within sentences. High-and low-frequency target words yielded frequency effects during both silent and oral reading. Interactions with skill level on the oral reading task are discussed in terms of potential differences in strategic approaches to reading challenges. |
Menno Schoot; Albert Reijntjes; Ernest C. D. M. Van Lieshout How do children deal with inconsistencies in text? An eye fixation and self-paced reading study in good and poor reading comprehenders Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 7, pp. 1665–1690, 2012. @article{Schoot2012,In two experiments, we investigated comprehension monitoring in 10-12 years old children differing in reading comprehension skill. The children's self-paced reading times (Experiment 1) and eye fixations and regressions (Experiment 2) were measured as they read narrative texts in which an action of the protagonist was consistent or inconsistent with a description of the protagonist's character given earlier. The character description and action were adjacent (local condition) or separated by a long filler paragraph (global condition). The self-paced reading data (Experiment 1), the initial reading and rereading data (Experiment 2), together with the comprehension question data (both experiments), are discussed within the situation model framework and suggest that poor comprehenders find difficulty in constructing a richly elaborated situation model. Poor comprehenders presumably fail to represent character information in the model as a consequence of which they are not able to detect inconsistencies in the global condition (in which the character information is lost from working memory). The patterns of results rule out an explanation in terms of impaired situation model updating ability. |
Andrea Weber; Matthew W. Crocker On the nature of semantic constraints on lexical access Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 195–214, 2012. @article{Weber2012,We present two eye-tracking experiments that investigate lexical frequency and semantic context constraints in spoken-word recognition in German. In both experiments, the pivotal words were pairs of nouns overlapping at onset but varying in lexical frequency. In Experiment 1, German listeners showed an expected frequency bias towards high-frequency competitors (e.g., Blume, 'flower') when instructed to click on low-frequency targets (e.g., Bluse, 'blouse'). In Experiment 2, semantically constraining context increased the availability of appropriate low-frequency target words prior to word onset, but did not influence the availability of semantically inappropriate high-frequency competitors at the same time. Immediately after target word onset, however, the activation of high-frequency competitors was reduced in semantically constraining sentences, but still exceeded that of unrelated distractor words significantly. The results suggest that (1) semantic context acts to downgrade activation of inappropriate competitors rather than to exclude them from competition, and (2) semantic context influences spoken-word recognition, over and above anticipation of upcoming referents. |
Sarah J. White; Adrian Staub The distribution of fixation durations during reading: Effects of stimulus quality Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 603–617, 2012. @article{White2012,Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read single sentences presented normally, presented entirely in faint text, or presented normally except for a single faint word. Fixations were longer when the entire sentence was faint than when the sentence was presented normally. In addition, fixations were much longer on a single faint word embedded in normal text, compared to when the entire sentence was faint. The primary aim of the study was to examine the influence of stimulus quality on the distribution of fixation durations. Ex-Gaussian fitting revealed that stimulus quality affected the mean of the Normal component, but in contrast to results from single-word tasks (Plourde & Besner, 1997), stimulus quality did not affect the exponential component, regardless of whether one or all words were faint. The results also contrast with the finding (Staub, White, Drieghe, Hollway, & Rayner, 2010) that the word frequency effect on fixation durations is an effect on both of the critical distributional parameters. These findings are argued to have implications for the interpretation of the role of stimulus quality in word recognition, and for models of eye movement control in reading. |
Veronica Whitford; Debra Titone In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 73–80, 2012. @article{Whitford2012,We used eye movement measures of first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph reading to investigate whether the degree of current L2 exposure modulates the relative size of L1 and L2 frequency effects (FEs). The results showed that bilinguals displayed larger L2 than L1 FEs during both early-and late-stage eye movement measures, which are taken to reflect initial lexical access and postlexical access, respectively. More-over, the magnitude of L2 FEs was inversely related to current L2 exposure, such that lower levels of L2 exposure led to larger L2 FEs. In contrast, during early-stage reading measures, bilinguals with higher levels of current L2 exposure showed larger L1 FEs than did bilinguals with lower levels of L2 exposure, suggesting that increased L2 experience modifies the earliest stages of L1 lexical access. Taken together, the findings are consistent with implicit learning accounts (e.g., Monsell, 1991), the weaker links hypothesis (Gollan, Montoya, Cera, Sandoval, Journal of Memory and Language, 58:787–814, 2008), and current bilingual visual word recognition models (e.g., the bilingual interactive activation model plus [BIA+]; Dijkstra & van Heuven, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5:175– 197, 2002). Thus, amount of current L2 exposure is a key determinant of FEs and, thus, lexical activation, in both the L1 and L2. |
Heather Winskel; Manuel Perea; Theeraporn Ratitamkul On the flexibility of letter position coding during lexical processing: Evidence from eye movements when reading Thai Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 65, no. 8, pp. 1522–1536, 2012. @article{Winskel2012,Previous research supports the view that initial letter position has a privileged role in comparison to internal letters for visual-word recognition in Roman script. The current study examines whether this is the case for Thai. Thai is an alphabetic script in which ordering of the letters does not necessarily correspond to the ordering of a word's phonemes. Furthermore, Thai does not normally have interword spaces. We examined whether the position of transposed letters (internal, e.g., porblem, vs. initial, e.g., rpoblem) within a word influences how readily those words are processed when interword spacing and demarcation of word boundaries (using alternating bold text) is manipulated. The eye movements of 54 participants were recorded while they were reading sentences silently. There was no apparent difference in degree of disruption caused when reading initial and internal transposed-letter nonwords. These findings give support to the view that letter position encoding in Thai is relatively flexible and that actual identity of the letter is more critical than letter position. This flexible encoding strategy is in line with the characteristics of Thai–that is, the flexibility in the ordering of the letters and the lack of interword spaces, which creates a certain level of ambiguity in relation to the demarcation of word boundaries. These findings point to script-specific effects operating in letter encoding in visual-word recognition and reading. |
Ming Yan; Sarah Risse; Xiaolin Zhou; Reinhold Kliegl Preview fixation duration modulates identical and semantic preview benefit in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1093–1111, 2012. @article{Yan2012a,Semantic preview benefit from parafoveal words is critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. Semantic preview benefit has been demonstrated for Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm in which unrelated or semantically related previews of a target word "N" + 1 are replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word "N" (Yan et al., 2009); for the target word in position "N" + 2, only identical compared to unrelated-word preview led to shorter fixation times on the target word (Yan et al., in press). A reanalysis of these data reveals that identical and semantic preview benefits depend on preview duration (i.e., the fixation duration on the preboundary word). Identical preview benefit from word "N" + 1 increased with preview duration. The identical preview benefit was also significant for "N" + 2, but did not significantly interact with preview duration. The previously reported semantic preview benefit from word "N" + 1 was mainly due to single- or first-fixation durations following short previews. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading. |
Ming Yan; Wei Zhou; Hua Shu; Reinhold Kliegl Lexical and sublexical semantic preview benefits in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 1069–1075, 2012. @article{Yan2012b,Semantic processing from parafoveal words is an elusive phenomenon in alphabetic languages, but it has been demonstrated only for a restricted set of noncompound Chinese characters. Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, this experiment examined whether parafoveal lexical and sublexical semantic information was extracted from compound preview characters. Results generalized parafoveal semantic processing to this representative set of Chinese characters and extended the parafoveal processing to radical (sublexical) level semantic information extraction. Implications for notions of parafoveal information extraction during Chinese reading are discussed. |
Jinmian Yang; Keith Rayner; Nan Li; Suiping Wang Is preview benefit from word n + 2 a common effect in reading Chinese? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1079–1091, 2012. @article{Yang2012,Although most studies of reading English (and other alphabetic languages) have indicated that readers do not obtain preview benefit from word n + 2, Yang, Wang, Xu, and Rayner (2009) reported evidence that Chinese readers obtain preview benefit from word n + 2. However, this effect may not be common in Chinese because the character prior to the target word in Yang et al.'s experiment was always a very high frequency function word. In the current experiment, we utilized a relatively low frequency word n + 1 to examine whether an n + 2 preview benefit effect would still exist and failed to find any preview benefit from word n + 2. These results are consistent with a recent study which indicated that foveal load modulates the perceptual span during Chinese reading (Yan, Kliegl, Shu, Pan, & Zhou, 2010). Implications of these results for models of eye movement control are discussed. |
Jinmian Yang; Adrian Staub; Nan Li; Suiping Wang; Keith Rayner Plausibility effects when reading one-and two-character words in Chinese: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 1801–1809, 2012. @article{Yang2012b,Eye movements of Chinese readers were monitored as they read sentences containing a critical character that was either a 1-character word or the initial character of a 2-character word. Due to manipulation of the verb prior to the target word, the 1-character target word (or the first character of the 2-character target word) was either plausible or implausible, as an independent word, at the point at which it appeared, whereas the 2-character word was always plausible. The eye movement data showed that the plausibility manipulation did not exert an influence on the reading of the 2-character word or its component characters. However, plausibility significantly influenced reading of the 1-character target word. These results suggest that processes of semantic integration in reading Chinese are performed at a word level, instead of a character level, and that word segmentation must take place very early in the course of processing. |
Jinmian Yang; Suiping Wang; Xiuhong Tong; Keith Rayner Semantic and plausibility effects on preview benefit during eye fixations in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1031–1052, 2012. @article{Yang2012c,The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to examine whether high level information affects preview benefit during Chinese reading. In two experiments, readers read sentences with a 1-character target word while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, the semantic relatedness between the target word and the preview word was manipulated so that there were semantically related and unrelated preview words, both of which were not plausible in the sentence context. No significant differences between these two preview conditions were found, indicating no effect of semantic preview. In Experiment 2, we further examined semantic preview effects with plausible preview words. There were four types of previews: identical, related & plausible, unrelated & plausible, and unrelated & implausible. The results revealed a significant effect of plausibility as single fixation and gaze duration on the target region were shorter in the two plausible conditions than in the implausible condition. Moreover, there was some evidence for a semantic preview benefit as single fixation duration on the target region was shorter in the related & plausible condition than the unrelated & plausible condition. Implications of these results for processing of high level information during Chinese reading are discussed. |
Miao-Hsuan Yen; Ralph Radach; Ovid J. L. Tzeng; Jie-Li Tsai Usage of statistical cues for word boundary in reading Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 1007–1029, 2012. @article{Yen2012,The present study examined the use of statistical cues for word boundaries during Chinese reading. Participants were instructed to read sentences for comprehension with their eye movements being recorded. A two-character target word was embedded in each sentence. The contrast between the probabilities of the ending character (C2) of the target word (C12) being used as word beginning and ending in all words containing it was manipulated. In addition, by using the boundary paradigm, parafoveal overlapping ambiguity in the string C123 was manipulated with three types of preview of the character C3, which was a single-character word in the identical condition. During preview, the combination of C23′ was a legal word in the ambiguous condition and was not a word in the control condition. Significant probability and preview effects were observed. In the low-probability condition, inconsistency in the frequent within-word position (word beginning) and the present position (word ending) lengthened gaze durations and increased refixation rate on the target word. Although benefits from the identical previews were apparent, effects of overlapping ambiguity were negligible. The results suggest that the probability of within-word positions had an influence during character-to-word assignment, which was mainly verified during foveal processing. Thus, the overlapping ambiguity between parafoveal words did not interfere with reading. Further investigation is necessary to examine whether current computational models of eye movement control should incorporate statistical cues for word boundaries together with other linguistic factors in their word processing system to account for Chinese reading. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. |
Jun-Yun Zhang; Gong-Liang Zhang; Lei Liu; Cong Yu Whole report uncovers correctly identified but incorrectly placed target information under visual crowding Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 1–11, 2012. @article{Zhang2012b,Multiletter identification studies often find correctly identified letters being reported in wrong positions. However, how position uncertainty impacts crowding in peripheral vision is not fully understood. The observation of a flanker being reported as the central target cannot be taken as unequivocal evidence for position misperception because the observers could be biased to report a more identifiable flanker when failing to identify the central target. In addition, it has never been reported whether a correctly identified central target can be perceived at a flanker position under crowding. Empirical investigation into this possibility holds the key to demonstrating letter-level position uncertainty in crowding, because the position errors of the least identifiable central target cannot be attributed to response bias. We asked normally-sighted observers to report either the central target of a trigram (partial report) or all three characters (whole report). The results showed that, for radially arranged trigrams, the rate of reporting the central target regardless of the reported position in the whole report was significantly higher than the partial report rate, and the extra target reports mostly ended up in flanker positions. Error analysis indicated that target-flanker position swapping and misalignment (lateral shift of the target and one flanker) underlay this target misplacement. Our results thus establish target misplacement as a source of crowding errors and ascertain the role of letter-level position uncertainty in crowding. |
2011 |
Gerry T. M. Altmann Language can mediate eye movement control within 100milliseconds, regardless of whether there is anything to move the eyes to Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 137, no. 2, pp. 190–200, 2011. @article{Altmann2011,The delay between the signal to move the eyes, and the execution of the corresponding eye movement, is variable, and skewed; with an early peak followed by a considerable tail. This skewed distribution renders the answer to the question "What is the delay between language input and saccade execution?" problematic; for a given task, there is no single number, only a distribution of numbers. Here, two previously published studies are reanalysed, whose designs enable us to answer, instead, the question: How long does it take, as the language unfolds, for the oculomotor system to demonstrate sensitivity to the distinction between "signal" (eye movements due to the unfolding language) and "noise" (eye movements due to extraneous factors)? In two studies, participants heard either 'the man. .' or 'the girl. .', and the distribution of launch times towards the concurrently, or previously, depicted man in response to these two inputs was calculated. In both cases, the earliest discrimination between signal and noise occurred at around 100. ms. This rapid interplay between language and oculomotor control is most likely due to cancellation of about-to-be executed saccades towards objects (or their episodic trace) that mismatch the earliest phonological moments of the unfolding word. |
Richard Andersson; Fernanda Ferreira; John M. Henderson I see what you're saying: The integration of complex speech and scenes during language comprehension Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 137, no. 2, pp. 208–216, 2011. @article{Andersson2011,The effect of language-driven eye movements in a visual scene with concurrent speech was examined using complex linguistic stimuli and complex scenes. The processing demands were manipulated using speech rate and the temporal distance between mentioned objects. This experiment differs from previous research by using complex photographic scenes, three-sentence utterances and mentioning four target objects. The main finding was that objects that are more slowly mentioned, more evenly placed and isolated in the speech stream are more likely to be fixated after having been mentioned and are fixated faster. Surprisingly, even objects mentioned in the most demanding conditions still show an effect of language-driven eye-movements. This supports research using concurrent speech and visual scenes, and shows that the behavior of matching visual and linguistic information is likely to generalize to language situations of high information load. |
Bernhard Angele; Keith Rayner Parafoveal processing of word n + 2 during reading: Do the preceding words matter? Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 1210–1220, 2011. @article{Angele2011,We used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to test two hypotheses that might explain why no conclusive evidence has been found for the existence of n + 2 preprocessing effects. In Experiment 1, we tested whether parafoveal processing of the second word to the right of fixation (n + 2) takes place only when the preceding word (n + 1) is very short (Angele, Slattery, Yang, Kliegl, & Rayner, 2008); word n + 1 was always a three-letter word. Before crossing the boundary, preview for both words n + 1 and n + 2 was either incorrect or correct. In a third condition, only the preview for word n + 1 was incorrect. In Experiment 2, we tested whether word frequency of the preboundary word (n) had an influence on the presence of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effects. Additionally, Experiment 2 contained a condition in which only preview of n + 2 was incorrect. Our findings suggest that effects of parafoveal n + 2 preprocessing are not modulated by either n + 1 word length or n frequency. Furthermore, we did not observe any evidence of parafoveal lexical preprocessing of word n + 2 in either experiment. |
Keith S. Apfelbaum; Sheila E. Blumstein; Bob Mcmurray Semantic priming is affected by real-time phonological competition: Evidence for continuous cascading systems Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 141–149, 2011. @article{Apfelbaum2011,Lexical-semantic access is affected by the phonological structure of the lexicon. What is less clear is whether such effects are the result of continuous activation between lexical form and semantic processing or whether they arise from a more modular system in which the timing of accessing lexical form determines the timing of semantic activation. This study examined this issue using the visual world paradigm by investigating the time course of semantic priming as a function of the number of phonological competitors. Critical trials consisted of high or low density auditory targets (e.g., horse) and a visual display containing a target, a semantically related object (e.g., saddle), and two phonologically and semantically unrelated objects (e.g., chimney, bikini). Results showed greater magnitude of priming for semantically related objects of low than of high density words, and no differences for high and low density word targets in the time course of looks to the word semantically related to the target. This pattern of results is consistent with models of cascading activation, which predict that lexical activation has continuous effects on the level of semantic activation, with no delays in the onset of semantic activation for phonologically competing words. |
Brian Bartek; Richard L. Lewis; Shravan Vasishth; Mason R. Smith In search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 1178–1198, 2011. @article{Bartek2011,Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such locality effects are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties and limitations of the short-term memory system that supports comprehension. Despite their theoretical importance and putative ubiquity, however, evidence for on-line locality effects is quite narrow linguistically and methodologically: It is restricted almost exclusively to self-paced reading of complex structures involving a particular class of syntactic relation. We present 4 experiments (2 self-paced reading and 2 eyetracking experiments) that demonstrate locality effects in the course of establishing subject-verb dependencies; locality effects are seen even in materials that can be read quickly and easily. These locality effects are observable in the earliest possible eye-movement measures and are of much shorter duration than previously reported effects. To account for the observed empirical patterns, we outline a processing model of the adaptive control of button pressing and eye movements. This model makes progress toward the goal of eliminating linking assumptions between memory constructs and empirical measures in favor of explicit theories of the coordinated control of motor responses and parsing. |
Vanessa Baudiffier; David Caplan; Daniel Gaonac'h; David Chesnet The effect of noun animacy on the processing of unambiguous sentences: Evidence from French relative clauses Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 64, no. 10, pp. 1896–1905, 2011. @article{Baudiffier2011,Two experiments, one using self-paced reading and one using eye tracking, investigated the influence of noun animacy on the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses, object relative (OR) clauses, and object relative clauses with stylistic inversion (OR-SI) in French. Each sentence type was presented in two versions: either with an animate relative clause (RC) subject and an inanimate object (AS/IO), or with an inanimate RC subject and an animate object (IS/AO). There was an interaction between the RC structure and noun animacy. The advantage of SR sentences over OR and OR-SI sentences disappeared in AS/IO sentences. The interaction between animacy and structure occurred in self-paced reading times and in total fixation times on the RCs, but not in first-pass reading times. The results are consistent with a late interaction between animacy and structural processing during parsing and provide data relevant to several models of parsing. |
Boaz M. Ben-David; Craig G. Chambers; Meredyth Daneman; M. Kathleen Pichora-Fuller; Eyal M. Reingold; Bruce A. Schneider Effects of aging and noise on real-time spoken word recognition: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 54, pp. 243–262, 2011. @article{BenDavid2011,PURPOSE: To use eye tracking to investigate age differences in real-time lexical processing in quiet and in noise in light of the fact that older adults find it more difficult than younger adults to understand conversations in noisy situations. METHOD: Twenty-four younger and 24 older adults followed spoken instructions referring to depicted objects, for example, "Look at the candle." Eye movements captured listeners' ability to differentiate the target noun (candle) from a similar-sounding phonological competitor (e.g., candy or sandal). Manipulations included the presence/absence of noise, the type of phonological overlap in target-competitor pairs, and the number of syllables. RESULTS: Having controlled for age-related differences in word recognition accuracy (by tailoring noise levels), similar online processing profiles were found for younger and older adults when targets were discriminated from competitors that shared onset sounds. Age-related differences were found when target words were differentiated from rhyming competitors and were more extensive in noise. CONCLUSIONS: Real-time spoken word recognition processes appear similar for younger and older adults in most conditions; however, age-related differences may be found in the discrimination of rhyming words (especially in noise), even when there are no age differences in word recognition accuracy. These results highlight the utility of eye movement methodologies for studying speech processing across the life span. |
Raymond Bertram; Victor Kuperman; R. Harald Baayen; Jukka Hyönä The hyphen as a segmentation cue in triconstituent compound processing: It's getting better all the time Journal Article In: Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 530–544, 2011. @article{Bertram2011,Inserting a hyphen in Dutch and Finnish compounds is most often illegal given spelling conventions. However, the current two eye movement experiments on triconstituent Dutch compounds like voetbalbond "footballassociation" (Experiment 1) and triconstituent Finnish compounds like lentokenttätaksi "airporttaxi" (Experiment 2) show that inserting a hyphen at constituent boundaries does not have to be detrimental to compound processing. In fact, when hyphens were inserted at the major constituent boundary (voetbal-bond "football-association"; lentokenttä-taksi "airport-taxi"), processing of the first part (voetbal "football"; lentokenttä "airport") turns out to be faster when it is followed by a hyphen than when it is legally concatenated. Inserting a hyphen caused a delay in later eye movement measures, which is probably due to the illegality of inserting hyphens in normally concatenated compounds. However, in both Dutch and Finnish we found a learning effect in the course of the experiment, such that by the end of the experiments hyphenated compounds are read faster than in the beginning of the experiment. By the end of the experiment, compounds with a hyphen at the major constituent boundary were actually processed equally fast as (Dutch) or even faster than (Finnish) their concatenated counterparts. In contrast, hyphenation at the minor constituent boundary (voet-balbond "foot-ballassociation"; lento-kenttätaksi "air-porttaxi") was detrimental to compound processing speed throughout the experiment. The results imply that the hyphen may be an efficient segmentation cue and that spelling illegalities can be overcome easily, as long as they make sense. |
Hazel I. Blythe; Tuomo Häikiö; Raymond Bertam; Simon P. Liversedge; Jukka Hyönä Reading disappearing text: Why do children refixate words? Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 84–92, 2011. @article{Blythe2011,We compared Finnish adults' and children's eye movements on long (8-letter) and short (4-letter) target words embedded in sentences, presented either normally or as disappearing text. When reading disappearing text, where refixations did not provide new information, the 8- to 9-year-old children made fewer refixations but more regressions back to long words compared to when reading normal text. This difference was not observed in the adults or 10- to 11-year-old children. We conclude that the younger children required a second visual sample on the long words, and they adapted their eye movement behaviour when reading disappearing text accordingly. |
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{rsj11,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{rjm11,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{r11,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{sa11,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{szyk11,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{scs11,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{scv11,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{sar11,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{ssbr11,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. |