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2009 |
Sébastien Miellet; Patrick J. O'Donnell; Sara C. Sereno Parafoveal magnification: Visual acuity does not modulate the perceptual span in reading Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 721–728, 2009. @article{Miellet2009,Models of eye guidance in reading rely on the concept of the perceptual span—the amount of information perceived during a single eye fixation, which is considered to be a consequence of visual and attentional constraints. To directly investigate attentional mechanisms underlying the perceptual span, we implemented a new reading paradigm—parafoveal magnification (PM)— that compensates for how visual acuity drops off as a function of retinal eccentricity. On each fixation and in real time, parafoveal text is magnified to equalize its perceptual impact with that of concurrent foveal text. Experiment 1 demonstrated that PM does not increase the amount of text that is processed, supporting an attentional-based account ofeye movements in reading. Experiment 2 explored a contentious issue that differentiates competing models of eye movement control and showed that, even when parafoveal information is enlarged, visual attention in reading is allocated in a serial fashion from word to word. |
Holger Mitterer; James M. McQueen Processing reduced word-forms in speech perception using probabilistic knowledge about speech production Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 244–263, 2009. @article{Mitterer2009,Two experiments examined how Dutch listeners deal with the effects of connected-speech processes, specifically those arising from word-final /t/ reduction (e.g., whether Dutch [tas] is tas, bag, or a reduced-/t/ version of tast, touch). Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays containing 4 printed words, each associated with a geometrical shape. Minimal pairs (e.g., tas/tast) were either both above (boven) or both next to (naast) different shapes. Spoken instructions (e.g., “Klik op het woordje tas boven de ster,” [Click on the word bag above the star]) thus became unambiguous only on their final words. Prior to disambiguation, listeners' fixations were drawn to /t/-final words more when boven than when naast followed the ambiguous sequences. This behavior reflects Dutch speech- production data: /t/ is reduced more before /b/ than before /n/. We thus argue that probabilistic knowledge about the effect of following context in speech production is used prelexically in perception to help resolve lexical ambiguities caused by continuous-speech processes. |
Antje Nuthmann; Ralf Engbert Mindless reading revisited: An analysis based on the SWIFT model of eye-movement control Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 322–336, 2009. @article{Nuthmann2009,In this article, we revisit the mindless reading paradigm from the perspective of computational modeling. In the standard version of the paradigm, participants read sentences in both their normal version as well as the transformed (or mindless) version where each letter is replaced with a z. z-String scanning shares the oculomotor requirements with reading but none of the higher-level lexical and semantic processes. Here we use the z-string scanning task to validate the SWIFT model of saccade generation [Engbert, R., Nuthmann, A., Richter, E., & Kliegl, R. (2005). SWIFT: A dynamical model of saccade generation during reading. Psychological Review, 112(4), 777-813] as an example for an advanced theory of eye-movement control in reading. We test the central assumption of spatially distributed processing across an attentional gradient proposed by the SWIFT model. Key experimental results like prolonged average fixation durations in z-string scanning compared to normal reading and the existence of a string-length effect on fixation durations and probabilities were reproduced by the model, which lends support to the model's assumptions on visual processing. Moreover, simulation results for patterns of regressive saccades in z-string scanning confirm SWIFT's concept of activation field dynamics for the selection of saccade targets. |
Antje Nuthmann; Reinhold Kliegl An examination of binocular reading fixations based on sentence corpus data Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 31–31, 2009. @article{Nuthmann2009a,Binocular eye movements of normal adult readers were examined as they read single sentences. Analyses of horizontal and vertical fixation disparities indicated that the most prevalent type of disparate fixation is crossed (i.e., the left eye is located further to the right than the right eye) while the left eye frequently fixates somewhat above the right eye. The Gaussian distribution of the binocular fixation point peaked 2.6 cm in front of the plane of text, reflecting the prevalence of horizontally crossed fixations. Fixation disparity accumulates during the course of successive saccades and fixations within a line of text, but only to an extent that does not compromise single binocular vision. In reading, the version and vergence system interact in a way that is qualitatively similar to what has been observed in simple nonreading tasks. Finally, results presented here render it unlikely that vergence movements in reading aim at realigning the eyes at a given saccade target word. |
Daniele Panizza; Gennaro Chierchia; Charles Clifton On the role of entailment patterns and scalar implicatures in the processing of numerals Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 503–518, 2009. @article{Panizza2009,There has been much debate, in both the linguistics and the psycholinguistics literature, concerning numbers and the interpretation of number denoting determiners ('numerals'). Such debate concerns, in particular, the nature and distribution of upper-bounded ('exact') interpretations vs. lower-bounded ('at-least') construals. In the present paper we show that the interpretation and processing of numerals are affected by the entailment properties of the context in which they occur. Experiment 1 established off-line preferences using a questionnaire. Experiment 2 investigated the processing issue through an eye tracking experiment using a silent reading task. Our results show that the upper-bounded interpretation of numerals occurs more often in an upward entailing context than in a downward entailing context. Reading times of the numeral itself were longer when it was embedded in an upward entailing context than when it was not, indicating that processing resources were required when the context triggered an upper-bounded interpretation. However, reading of a following context that required an upper-bounded interpretation triggered more regressions towards the numeral when it had occurred in a downward entailing context than in an upward entailing one. Such findings show that speakers' interpretation and processing of numerals is systematically affected by the polarity of the sentence in which they occur, and support the hypothesis that the upper-bounded interpretation of numerals is due to a scalar implicature. |
Manuel Perea; Joana Acha Space information is important for reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 49, no. 15, pp. 1994–2000, 2009. @article{Perea2009,Reading a text without spaces in an alphabetic language causes disruption at the levels of word identification and eye movement control. In the present experiment, we examined how word discriminability affects the pattern of eye movements when reading unspaced text in an alphabetic language. More specifically, we designed an experiment in which participants read three types of sentences: normally written sentences, regular unspaced sentences, and alternatingbold unspaced sentences. Although there was a reading cost in the unspaced sentences relative to the normally written sentences, this cost was much smaller in alternatingbold unspaced sentences than in regular unspaced sentences. |
Manuel Perea; Joana Acha; Manuel Carreiras Eye movements when reading text messaging (txt msgng) Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 62, no. 8, pp. 1560–1567, 2009. @article{Perea2009a,The growing popularity of mobile-phone technology has led to changes in the way people–particularly younger people–communicate. A clear example of this is the advent of Short Message Service (SMS) language, which includes orthographic abbreviations (e.g., omitting vowels, as in wk, week) and phonetic respelling (e.g., using u instead of you). In the present study, we examined the pattern of eye movements during reading of SMS sentences (e.g., my hols wr gr8), relative to normally written sentences, in a sample of skilled "texters". SMS sentences were created by using (mostly) orthographic or phonological abbreviations. Results showed that there is a reading cost–both at a local level and at a global level–for individuals who are highly expert in SMS language. Furthermore, phonological abbreviations resulted in a greater cost than orthographic abbreviations. |
Tobias Pflugshaupt; Klemens Gutbrod; Pascal Wurtz; Roman Von Wartburg; Thomas Nyffeler; Bianca De Haan; Hans-Otto Karnath; René M. Mueri About the role of visual field defects in pure alexia Journal Article In: Brain, vol. 132, no. 7, pp. 1907–1917, 2009. @article{Pflugshaupt2009,Pure alexia is an acquired reading disorder characterized by a disproportionate prolongation of reading time as a function of word length. Although the vast majority of cases reported in the literature show a right-sided visual defect, little is known about the contribution of this low-level visual impairment to their reading difficulties. The present study was aimed at investigating this issue by comparing eye movement patterns during text reading in six patients with pure alexia with those of six patients with hemianopic dyslexia showing similar right-sided visual field defects. We found that the role of the field defect in the reading difficulties of pure alexics was highly deficit-specific. While the amplitude of rightward saccades during text reading seems largely determined by the restricted visual field, other visuo-motor impairments—particularly the pronounced increases in fixation frequency and viewing time as a function of word length—may have little to do with their visual field defect. In addition, subtracting the lesions of the hemianopic dyslexics from those found in pure alexics revealed the largest group differences in posterior parts of the left fusiform gyrus, occipito-temporal sulcus and inferior temporal gyrus. These regions included the coordinate assigned to the centre of the visual word form area in healthy adults, which provides further evidence for a relation between pure alexia and a damaged visual word form area. Finally, we propose a list of three criteria that may improve the differential diagnosis of pure alexia and allow appropriate therapy recommendations. |
Keith Rayner; Monica S. Castelhano; Jinmian Yang Eye movements and the perceptual span in older and younger readers Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 755–760, 2009. @article{rcy09,The size of the perceptual span (or the span of effective vision) in older readers was examined with the moving window paradigm (G. W. McConkie & K. Rayner, 1975). Two experiments demonstrated that older readers have a smaller and more symmetric span than that of younger readers. These 2 characteristics (smaller and more symmetric span) of older readers may be a consequence of their less efficient processing of nonfoveal information, which results in a riskier reading strategy. |
Annie Roy-Charland; Jean Saint-Aubin; Michael A. Lawrence; Raymond M. Klein Solving the chicken-and-egg problem of letter detection and fixation duration in reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 71, no. 7, pp. 1553–1562, 2009. @article{rslk09,When asked to detect target letters while reading a text, participants miss more letters in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. According to the truncation assumption that characterizes most models of this effect, misses occur when word-processing time is shorter than letter-processing time. Fixation durations for detections and omissions were compared with fixation durations from a baseline condition when participants were searching for a target letter embedded in different words. Although, as predicted by truncation, fixation durations were longer for detections than for omissions, fixation durations for detections were also longer than those for the same words in the baseline condition, demonstrating that longer fixation durations when targets are detected are more likely to be due to demands associated with producing a detection response than to truncation. Also, contrary to predictions from the truncation assumption, the standard deviation of fixation durations for detections was larger than that from the baseline condition. |
Heather Sheridan; Eyal M. Reingold; Meredyth Daneman Using puns to study contextual influences on lexical ambiguity resolution: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 875–881, 2009. @article{srd09,Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences containing biased homographs in either a single-meaning context condition that instantiated the subordinate meaning of the homograph without ruling out the dominant meaning (e.g., "The man with a toothache had a crown made by the best dentist in town") or a dual-meaning pun context condition that supported both the subordinate and dominant meanings (e.g., "The king with a toothache had a crown made by the best dentist in town"). In both of these conditions, the homographs were followed by disambiguating material that supported the subordinate meaning and ruled out the dominant meaning. Fixation times on the homograph were longer in the single-meaning condition than in the dual-meaning condition, whereas the reverse pattern was demonstrated for fixation times on the disambiguating region; these effects were observed as early as first-fixation duration. The findings strongly support the reordered access model of lexical ambiguity resolution. |
Timothy J. Slattery Word misperception, the neighbor frequency effect, and the role of sentence context: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 1969–1975, 2009. @article{s09,An eye movement experiment was conducted to investigate whether the processing of a word can be affected by its higher frequency neighbor (HFN). Target words with an HFN (birch) or without one (spruce) were embedded into 2 types of sentence frames: 1 in which the HFN (birth) could fit given the prior sentence context, and 1 in which it could not. The results suggest that words can be misperceived as their HFN, and that top-down information from sentence context strongly modulates this effect. Implications for models of word recognition and eye movements during reading are discussed. |
Adrian Staub; Margaret Grant; Charles Clifton; Keith Rayner Phonological typicality does not influence fixation durations in normal reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 806–814, 2009. @article{Staub2009,Using a word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm, T. A. Farmer, M. H. Christiansen, and P. Monaghan (2006) reported faster reading times for words that are phonologically typical for their syntactic category (i.e., noun or verb) than for words that are phonologically atypical. This result has been taken to suggest that language users are sensitive to subtle relationships between sound and syntactic function and that they make rapid use of this information in comprehension. The present article reports attempts to replicate this result using both eyetracking during normal reading (Experiment 1) and word-by-word self-paced reading (Experiment 2). No hint of a phonological typicality effect emerged on any reading-time measure in Experiment 1, nor did Experiment 2 replicate Farmer et al.'s finding from self-paced reading. Indeed, the differences between condition means were not consistently in the predicted direction, as phonologically atypical verbs were read more quickly than phonologically typical verbs, on most measures. Implications for research on visual word recognition are discussed. |
Seppo Vainio; Jukka Hyönä; Anneli Pajunen Lexical predictability exerts robust effects on fixation duration, but not on initial landing position during reading Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 66–74, 2009. @article{Vainio2009,An eye movement experiment was conducted to examine effects of local lexical predictability on fixation durations and fixation locations during sentence reading. In the high-predictability condition, a verb strongly constrained the lexical identity of the following word, while in the low-predictability condition the target word could not be predicted on the basis of the verb. The results showed that first fixation and gaze duration on the target noun were reliably shorter in the high-predictability than in the low-predictability condition. However, initial fixation location was not affected by lexical predictability. As regards eye guidance in reading, the present study indicates that local lexical predictability influences when decisions but not where the initial fixation lands in a word. |
Eva Van Assche; Wouter Duyck; Robert J. Hartsuiker; Kevin Diependaele Does bilingualism change cognate effects in a sentence context Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 923–927, 2009. @article{VanAssche2009,Becoming a bilingual can change a person's cognitive functioning and language processing in a number of ways. This study focused on how knowledge of a second language influences how people read sentences written in their native language. We used the cognate-facilitation effect as a marker of cross-lingual activations in both languages. Cognates (e.g., Dutch-English schip [ship]) and controls were presented in a sentence context, and eye movements were monitored. Results showed faster reading times for cognates than for controls. Thus, this study shows that one of people's most automated skills, reading in one's native language, is changed by the knowledge of a second language. |
Menno Schoot; Alain L. Vasbinder; Tako M. Horsley; Albert Reijntjes; Ernest C. D. M. Lieshout Lexical ambiguity resolution in good and poor comprehenders: An eye fixation and self-paced reading study in primary school children Journal Article In: Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 101, no. 1, pp. 21–36, 2009. @article{Schoot2009a,To investigate the use of context and monitoring of comprehension in lexical ambiguity resolution in children, the authors asked 10- to 12-year-old good and poor comprehenders to read sentences consisting of 2 clauses, 1 containing the ambiguous word and the other the disambiguating information. The order of the clauses was reversed so that disambiguating information either preceded or followed the ambiguous word. Context use and comprehension monitoring were examined by measuring eye fixations (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading times (Experiment 2) on the ambiguous word and disambiguating region. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that poor comprehenders made use of prior context to facilitate lexical ambiguity resolution as effectively as good comprehenders but that they monitored their comprehension less effectively than good comprehenders. Good comprehenders corrected an initial interpretation error on an ambiguous word and restored comprehension once they encountered the disambiguating region. Poor comprehenders failed to deal with this type of comprehension failure. |
Marine Vernet Binocular motor coordination during saccades and fixations while reading: A magnitude and time analysis Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 9, no. 2009, pp. 1–13, 2009. @article{Vernet2009,Reading involves saccades and fixations. Misalignment of the eyes should be small enough to allow sensory fusion. Recent studies reported disparity of the eyes during fixations. This study examines disconjugacy, i.e. change in disparity over time, both during saccades and fixations. Text reading saccades and saccades to single targets of similar sizes (2.5-) are compared. Young subjects were screened to avoid problems of binocular vision and oculomotor vergence. The results show high quality of motor binocular coordination in both tasks: the amplitude difference between the saccade of the eyes was approximately 0.16-; during the fixation period, the drift difference was only 0.13-. The disconjugate drift occurred mainly during the first 48 ms of fixation, was equally distributed to the eyes and was often reducing the saccade disconjugacy. Quality of coordination regardless of the task is indicative of robust physiological mechanisms. We suggest the existence of active binocular control mechanisms in which vergence signals may have a central role. Even computation of saccades may be based on continuous interaction between saccade and vergence. |
Chin-An Wang; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Ralph Radach Is attention confined to one word at a time? The spatial distribution of parafoveal preview benefits during reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 71, no. 7, pp. 1487–1494, 2009. @article{Wang2009a,Eye movements were recorded while participants read declarative sentences. Each sentence contained a criti- cal three-word sequence with a three-letter target word (n), a spatially adjacent post-target word (n+1), and a subsequent nonadjacent post-target word (n+2). The parafoveal previews of words n and n+2 were manipulated so that they were either fully visible or masked until they were fixated. The results revealed longer word n and word n+1 viewing durations when word n had been masked in the parafovea, and this occurred irrespective of whether the target was skipped or fixated. Furthermore, masking of word n diminished the usefulness of the preview of word n+2. These results indicate that the effect of a parafoveally available target preview was not strictly localized. Instead, it influenced target viewing and the viewing of the two subsequent words in the text. These results are difficult to reconcile with the assumption that attention is confined to one word at a time until that word is recognized and that attention is then shifted from the recognized word to the next. |
Chin-An Wang; Jie-Li Tsai; Albrecht W. Inhoff; Ovid J. L. Tzeng Acquisition of linguistic information to the left of fixation during the reading of Chinese text Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 24, no. 7-8, pp. 1097–1123, 2009. @article{Wang2009b,The linguistic properties of the first (critical) character of a two-character Chinese word were manipulated when the eyes moved to the right of the critical character during reading to determine whether character processing is strictly unidirectional. In Experiment 1, the critical character was replaced with a congruent or incongruent character or left unchanged. Critical character changes did not influence the fixation duration, but incongruent changes led to more regressions than congruent changes. In Experiment 2, the critical character was replaced with either a homophonic or a non-homophonic character when it was to the left of fixation. The fixation following the change was now longer when the replaced character and the critical character were homophones than when they were phonologically dissimilar. These results indicate that readers obtain phonological and semantic information to the left of a fixated character and that the recognition of consecutive Chinese characters is not strictly unidirectional. |
Tessa Warren; Sarah J. White; Erik D. Reichle Investigating the causes of wrap-up effects: Evidence from eye movements and E-Z Reader Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 111, no. 1, pp. 132–137, 2009. @article{Warren2009,Wrap-up effects in reading have traditionally been thought to reflect increased processing associated with intra- and inter-clause integration (Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. Psychological Review, 87(4), 329-354; Rayner, K., Kambe, G., & Duffy, S. A. (2000). The effect of clause wrap-up on eye movements during reading. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53A(4), 1061-1080; cf. Hirotani, M., Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (2006). Punctuation and intonation effects on clause and sentence wrap-up: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 425-443). We report an eye-tracking experiment with a strong manipulation of integrative complexity at a critical word that was either sentence-final, ended a comma-marked clause, or was not comma-marked. Although both complexity and punctuation had reliable effects, they did not interact in any eye-movement measure. These results as well as simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control (Reichle, E. D., Warren, T., & McConnell, K. (2009). Using E-Z Reader to model the effects of higher-level language processing on eye movements during reading. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(1), 1-20) suggest that traditional accounts of clause wrap-up are incomplete. |
Heather Winskel Reading in Thai: the case of misaligned vowels Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1–24, 2009. @article{Winskel2009,Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in writing but follow it in speech, hence a mismatch between the spoken and written sequence occurs. In order to investigate if there is a processing cost associated with this discrepancy between spoken and written sequence for vowels and the implications this has in relation to the grain size used when reading Thai, eye movements of adults reading words with and without misaligned vowels in sentences using the EyeLink II tracking system was conducted. Twenty-four university students read 50 pairs of words with misaligned and aligned vowel words matched for length and frequency embedded in same sentence frames. In addition, rapid naming data from forty adults was collected. Data from forty children 6;6-8;6 years old reading and spelling comparable words was also collected and analysed for errors. Results revealed a processing cost due to the more severely misaligned words where the vowel operates across the syllable, and gives support for a syllabic level of segmentation rather than phonemic for reading and spelling in Thai adults and children. |
Heather Winskel; Ralph Radach; Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin Eye movements when reading spaced and unspaced Thai and English: A comparison of Thai-English bilinguals and English monolinguals Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 61, no. 3, pp. 339–351, 2009. @article{Winskel2009a,The study investigated the eye movements of Thai-English bilinguals when reading both Thai and English with and without interword spaces, in comparison with English monolinguals. Thai is an alphabetic orthography without interword spaces. Participants read sentences with high and low frequency target words embedded in same sentence frames with and without interword spaces. Interword spaces had a selective effect on reading in Thai, as they facilitated word recognition, but did not affect eye guidance and lexical segmentation. Initial saccade landing positions were similar in spaced and unspaced text. As expected, removal of spaces severely disrupted reading in English, as reflected by the eye movement measures, in both bilinguals and monolinguals. Here, initial landing positions were significantly nearer the beginning of the target words when reading unspaced rather than spaced text. Effects were more accentuated in the bilinguals. In sum, results from reading in Thai give qualified support for a facilitatory function of interword spaces. |
Ming Yan; Eike M. Richter; Hua Shu; Reinhold Kliegl Chinese readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 16, pp. 561–566, 2009. @article{Yan2009,Evidence for semantic preview benefit (PB) from parafoveal words has been elusive for reading alphabetic scripts such as English. Here we report semantic PB for noncompound characters in Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm. In addition, PBs for orthographic relatedness and, as a numeric trend, for phono- logical relatedness were obtained. Results are in agreement with other research suggesting that the Chinese writing system is based on a closer association between graphic form and meaning than is alphabetic script. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading. |
Ming Yan; Eike M. Richter; Hua Shu; Reinhold Kliegl Readers of Chinese extract semantic information from parafoveal words Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 561–566, 2009. @article{Yan2009a,Evidence for semantic preview benefit (PB) from parafoveal words has been elusive for reading alphabetic scripts such as English. Here we report semantic PB for noncompound characters in Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm. In addition, PBs for orthographic relatedness and, as a numeric trend, for phonological relatedness were obtained. Results are in agreement with other research suggesting that the Chinese writing system is based on a closer association between graphic form and meaning than is alphabetic script. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading. |
Jinmian Yang; Suiping Wang; Hsuan-Chih Chen; Keith Rayner The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 37, no. 8, pp. 1164–1176, 2009. @article{Yang2009,In the present study, we examined the time course of semantic and syntactic processing when Chinese is read. Readers' eye movements were monitored, and the relation between a single-character critical word and the sentence context was manipulated such that three kinds of sentences were developed: (1) congruent, (2) those with a semantic violation, and (3) those with both a semantic and a syntactic violation. The eye movement data showed that the first-pass reading times were significantly longer for the target region in the two violation conditions than in the congruent condition. Moreover, the semantic+syntactic violation caused more severe disruption than did the pure semantic violation, as reflected by longer first-pass reading times for the target region and by longer go-past times for the target region and posttarget region in the former than in the latter condition. These results suggest that the effects of, at least, a semantic violation can be detected immediately by Chinese readers and that the processing of syntactic and semantic information is distinct in both first-pass and second-pass reading. Adapted from the source document. |
Jinmian Yang; Suiping Wang; Yimin Xu; Keith Rayner Do Chinese readers obtain preview benefit from word n + 2? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 1192–1204, 2009. @article{Yang2009d,The boundary paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975) was used to determine the extent to which Chinese readers obtain information from the right of fixation during reading. As characters are the basic visual unit in written Chinese, they were used as targets in Experiment 1 to examine whether readers obtain preview information from character n + 1 and character n + 2. The results from Experiment 1 suggest they do. In Experiment 2, 2-character target words were used to determine whether readers obtain preview information from word n + 2 as well as word n + 1. Robust preview effects were obtained for word n + 1. There was also evidence from gaze duration (but not first fixation duration), suggesting preview effects for word n + 2. Moreover, there was evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Chinese reading in both experiments. Implications of these results for models of eye movement control are discussed. |
Shun-Nan Yang Effects of gaze-contingent text changes on fixation duration in reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 49, no. 23, pp. 2843–2855, 2009. @article{Yang2009a,In reading, a text change during an eye fixation can increase the duration of that fixation. This increased fixation duration could be the result of disrupted text processing, or from the effect of perceiving the brief visual change (a visual transient). The present study was designed to test those two hypotheses. Subjects read multiple-line text while their eye movements were monitored. During randomly selected saccades, the text was masked with an alternate page, which was then replaced with a second alternate page, 75 or 150 ms after the onset of the subsequent (critical) fixation. The effect of the initial masking page, the text change during fixation, and the content of the second page on the likelihood of saccade initiation during the critical fixation, was measured. Results showed that a text change during fixation resulted in similar bilateral (forward and regressive) saccade suppression regardless of the nature of the first and second pages, or the timing of text change. This result likely reflects the effect of a low-level visual transient caused by text change. In addition, there was delay effect reflecting the content of the initial masking. How the suppression dissipated after text change depended on the nature of the first and second pages. These effects are attributed to high-level text processing. The present results suggest that in reading, visual and cognitive processes both can disrupt saccade initiation. The combination of processing difficulty and visually-induced saccade suppression is responsible for the change in fixation duration when gaze-contingent display change is utilized. Therefore, it is prudent to consider both factors when interpreting the effect of text change on eye movement patterns. |
Kiyomi Yatabe; Martin J. Pickering; Scott A. McDonald Lexical processing during saccades in text comprehension Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 62–66, 2009. @article{Yatabe2009,We asked whether people process words during saccades when reading sentences. Irwin (1998) demonstrated that such processing occurs when words are presented in isolation. In our experiment, participants read part of a sentence ending in a high- or low-frequency target word and then made a long (40 degrees) or short (10 degrees) saccade to the rest of the sentence. We found a frequency effect on the target word and the first word after the saccade, but the effect was greater for short than for long saccades. Readers therefore performed more lexical processing during long saccades than during short ones. Hence, lexical processing takes place during saccades in text comprehension. |
Eiling Yee; Eve Overton; Sharon L. Thompson-Schill Looking for meaning: Eye movements are sensitive to overlapping semantic features, not association Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 869–874, 2009. @article{Yee2009,Theories of semantic memory differ in the extent to which relationships among concepts are captured via associative or via semantic relatedness. We examined the contributions of these two factors, using a visual world paradigm in which participants selected the named object from a four-picture display. We controlled for semantic relatedness while manipulating associative strength by using the visual world paradigm's analogue to presenting asymmetrically associated pairs in either their forward or backward associative direction (e.g., ham-eggs vs. eggs-ham). Semantically related objects were preferentially fixated regardless of the direction of presentation (and the effect size was unchanged by presentation direction). However, when pairs were associated but not semantically related (e.g., iceberg-lettuce), associated objects were not preferentially fixated in either direction. These findings lend support to theories in which semantic memory is organized according to semantic relatedness (e.g., distributed models) and suggest that association by itself has little effect on this organization. |
Miao-Hsuan Yen; Ralph Radach; Ovid J. L. Tzeng; Daisy L. Hung; Jie-Li Tsai Early parafoveal processing in reading Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 131, no. 1, pp. 24–33, 2009. @article{Yen2009,The possibility that during Chinese reading information is extracted at the beginning of the current fixation was examined in this study. Twenty-four participants read for comprehension while their eye movements were being recorded. A pretarget-target two-character word pair was embedded in each sentence and target word visibility was manipulated in two time intervals (initial 140 ms or after 140 ms) during pretarget viewing. Substantial beginning- and end-of-fixation preview effects were observed together with beginning-of-fixation effects on the pretarget. Apparently parafoveal information at least at the character level can be extracted relatively early during ongoing fixations. Results are highly relevant for ongoing debates on spatially distributed linguistic processing and address fundamental questions about how the human mind solves the task of reading within the constraints of different writing systems. |
Peng Zhou; Liqun Gao Scope processing in Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 11–24, 2009. @article{Zhou2009,The standard view maintains that quantifier scope interpretation results from an interaction between different modules: the syntax, the semantics as well as the pragmatics. Thus, by examining the mechanism of quantifier scope interpretation, we will certainly gain some insight into how these different modules interact with one another. To observe it, two experiments, an offline judgment task and an eye-tracking experiment, were conducted to investigate the interpretation of doubly quantified sentences in Chinese, like Mei-ge qiangdao dou qiang-le yi-ge yinhang (Every robber robbed a bank). According to current literature, doubly quantified sentences in Chinese like the above are unambiguous, which can only be interpreted as "for every robber x, there is a bank y, such that x robbed y"(surface scope reading), contrary to their ambiguous English counterparts, which also allow the interpretation that "there is a bank y, such that for every robber x, x robbed y"(inverse scope reading). Specifically, three questions were examined, that is, (i) What is the initial reading of doubly quantified sentences in Chinese? (ii) Whether inverse scope interpretation can be available if appropriate contexts are provided? (iii) What are the processing time courses engaged in quantifier scope interpretation? The results showed that (i) Initially, the language processor computes the surface scope representation and the inverse scope representation in parallel, thus, doubly quantified sentences in Chinese are ambiguous; (ii) The discourse information is not employed in initial processing of relative scope, it serves to evaluate the two representations in reanalysis; (iii) The lexical information of verbs affects their scope-taking patterns. We suggest that these findings provide evidence for the Modular Model, one of the major contenders in the literature on sentence processing. |
2008 |
Joana Acha; Manuel Perea The effect of neighborhood frequency in reading: Evidence with transposed-letter neighbors Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 108, pp. 290–300, 2008. @article{Acha2008,Transposed-letter effects (e.g., jugde activates judge) pose serious models for models of visual-word recognition that use position-specific coding schemes. However, even though the evidence of transposed-letter effects with nonword stimuli is strong, the evidence for word stimuli is scarce and inconclusive. The present experiment examined the effect of neighborhood frequency during normal silent reading using transposed-letter neighbors (e.g., silver, sliver). Two sets of low-frequency words were created (equated in the number of substitution neighbors, word frequency, and number of letters), which were embedded in sentences. In one set, the target word had a higher frequency transposed-letter neighbor, and in the other set, the target word had no transposed-letter neighbors. An inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency was observed in measures that reflect late processing in words (number of regressions back to the target word, and total time). We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual-word recognition and reading. |
Bernhard Angele; Timothy J. Slattery; Jinmian Yang; Reinhold Kliegl; Keith Rayner Parafoveal processing in reading: Manipulating n+1 and n+2 previews simultaneously Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 697–707, 2008. @article{Angele2008,The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) with a novel preview manipulation was used to examine the extent of parafoveal processing of words to the right of fixation. Words n + 1 and n + 2 had either correct or incorrect previews prior to fixation (prior to crossing the boundary location). In addition, the manipulation utilized either a high or low frequency word in word n + 1 location on the assumption that it would be more likely that n + 2 preview effects could be obtained when word n + 1 was high frequency. The primary findings were that there was no evidence for a preview benefit for word n + 2 and no evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects when word n + 1 is at least four letters long. We discuss implications for models of eye-movement control in reading. |
Jennifer E. Arnold THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 108, no. 1, pp. 69–99, 2008. @article{Arnold2008,Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4- and 5-year-old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., the bacon) with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less accessible entities. Experiment 1 confirms that accenting is informative for adults, who show a bias toward previously-mentioned objects beginning 300 ms after the onset of unaccented nouns and pronouns. But contrary to findings in the literature, accented words produced no observable bias. In Experiment 2, 4 and 5 year olds were also biased toward previously-mentioned objects with unaccented nouns and pronouns. This builds on findings of limits on children's on-line reference comprehension [Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes], showing that children's interpretation of unaccented nouns and pronouns is constrained in contexts with one single highly accessible object. |
Jennifer E. Arnold; Shin-Yi C. Lao Put in last position something previously unmentioned: Word order effects on referential expectancy and reference comprehension Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 282–295, 2008. @article{Arnold2008a,Research has shown that the comprehension of definite referring expressions (e.g., "the triangle") tends to be faster for "given" (previously mentioned) referents, compared with new referents. This has been attributed to the presence of given information in the consciousness of discourse participants (e.g., Chafe, 1994) suggesting that given is always more accessible. By contrast, we find a bias toward new referents during the on-line comprehension of the direct object in heavy-NP-shifted word orders, e.g., "Put on the star the...." This order tends to be used for new direct objects; canonical unshifted orders are more common with given direct objects. Thus, word order provides probabilistic information about the givenness or newness of the direct object. Results from eyetracking and gating experiments show that the traditional given bias only occurs with unshifted orders; with heavy-NP-shifted orders, comprehenders expect the object to be new, and comprehension for new referents is facilitated. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.) |
Xuejun Bai; Guoli Yan; Simon P. Liversedge; Chuanli Zang; Keith Rayner Reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 1277–1287, 2008. @article{Bai2008,Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading. |
M. S. Baptista; C. Bohn; Reinhold Kliegl; Ralf Engbert; Jürgen Kurths Reconstruction of eye movements during blinks Journal Article In: Chaos, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2008. @article{Baptista2008,In eye movement research in reading, the amount of data plays a crucial role for the validation of results. A methodological problem for the analysis of the eye movement in reading are blinks, when readers close their eyes. Blinking rate increases with increasing reading time, resulting in high data losses, especially for older adults or reading impaired subjects. We present a method, based on the symbolic sequence dynamics of the eye movements, that reconstructs the horizontal position of the eyes while the reader blinks. The method makes use of an observed fact that the movements of the eyes before closing or after opening contain information about the eyes movements during blinks. Test results indicate that our reconstruction method is superior to methods that use simpler interpolation approaches. In addition, analyses of the reconstructed data show no significant deviation from the usual behavior observed in readers. |
Dale J. Barr Pragmatic expectations and linguistic evidence: Listeners anticipate but do not integrate common ground Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 109, no. 1, pp. 18–40, 2008. @article{Barr2008,When listeners search for the referent of a speaker's expression, they experience interference from privileged knowledge, knowledge outside of their 'common ground' with the speaker. Evidence is presented that this interference reflects limitations in lexical processing. In three experiments, listeners' eye movements were monitored as they searched for the target of a speaker's referring expression in a display that also contained a phonological competitor (e.g., bucket/buckle). Listeners anticipated that the speaker would refer to something in common ground, but they did not experience less interference from a competitor in privileged ground than from a matched competitor in common ground. In contrast, interference from the competitor was eliminated when it was ruled out by a semantic constraint. These findings support a view of comprehension as relying on multiple systems with distinct access to information and present a challenge for constraint-based views of common ground. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Christine Gunlogson; Michael K. Tanenhaus Addressees distinguish shared from private information when interpreting questions during interactive conversation Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 107, no. 3, pp. 1122–1134, 2008. @article{BrownSchmidt2008,Two experiments examined the role of common ground in the production and on-line interpretation of wh-questions such as What's above the cow with shoes? Experiment 1 examined unscripted conversation, and found that speakers consistently use wh-questions to inquire about information known only to the addressee. Addressees were sensitive to this tendency, and quickly directed attention toward private entities when interpreting these questions. A second experiment replicated the interpretation findings in a more constrained setting. These results add to previous evidence that the common ground influences initial language processes, and suggests that the strength and polarity of common ground effects may depend on contributions of sentence type as well as the interactivity of the situation. |
Maria Nella Carminati; Roger P. G. Gompel; Christoph Scheepers; Manabu Arai Syntactic priming in comprehension: The role of argument order and animacy Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 1098–1110, 2008. @article{Carminati2008,Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension–specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison?") are due to anticipation of structural properties following the verb (send) in the target sentence or to anticipation of animacy properties of the first postverbal noun. Shortly following the target verb onset, listeners looked at the recipient more (relative to the theme) following DO than PO primes, indicating that the structure of the prime affected listeners' eye gazes on the target scene. Crucially, this priming effect was the same irrespective of whether the postverbal nouns in the prime sentences did ("The monarch will send the painting to the president") or did not ("The monarch will send the envoy to the president") differ in animacy, suggesting that PO/DO priming in comprehension occurs because structural properties, rather than animacy features, are being primed when people process the ditransitive target verb. |
Lillian Chen; Julie E. Boland Dominance and context effects on activation of alternative homophone meanings Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 1306–1323, 2008. @article{Chen2008,Two eyetracking-during-listening experiments showed frequency and context effects on fixation probability for pictures representing multiple meanings of homophones. Participants heard either an imperative sentence instructing them to look at a homophone referent (Experiment 1) or a declarative sentence that was either neutral or biased toward the homophone's subordinate meaning (Experiment 2). At homophone onset in both experiments, the participants viewed four pictures: (1) a referent of one homophone meaning, (2) a shape competitor for a nonpictured homophone meaning, and (3) two unrelated filler objects. In Experiment 1, meaning dominance affected looks to both the homophone referent and the shape competitor. In Experiment 2, as compared with neutral contexts, subordinatebiased contexts lowered the fixation probability for shape competitors of dominant meanings, but shape competitors still attracted more looks than would be expected by chance. We discuss the consistencies and discrepancies of these findings with the selective access and reordered access theories of lexical ambiguity resolution. |
Meghan Clayards; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin; Robert A. Jacobs Perception of speech reflects optimal use of probabilistic speech cues Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 108, no. 3, pp. 804–809, 2008. @article{Clayards2008,Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories for sounds and words. Here we show that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic nature of speech cues. We manipulated the probability distribution of one probabilistic cue, voice onset time (VOT), which differentiates word initial labial stops in English (e.g., "beach" and "peach"). Participants categorized words from distributions of VOT with wide or narrow variances. Uncertainty about word identity was measured by four-alternative forced-choice judgments and by the probability of looks to pictures. Both measures closely reflected the posterior probability of the word given the likelihood distributions of VOT, suggesting that listeners are sensitive to these distributions. |
Sarah C. Creel; Richard N. Aslin; Michael K. Tanenhaus Heeding the voice of experience: The role of talker variation in lexical access Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 106, no. 2, pp. 633–664, 2008. @article{Creel2008,Two experiments used the head-mounted eye-tracking methodology to examine the time course of lexical activation in the face of a non-phonemic cue, talker variation. We found that lexical competition was attenuated by consistent talker differences between words that would otherwise be lexical competitors. In Experiment 1, some English cohort word-pairs were consistently spoken by a single talker (male couch, male cows), while other word-pairs were spoken by different talkers (male sheep, female sheet). After repeated instances of talker-word pairings, words from different-talker pairs showed smaller proportions of competitor fixations than words from same-talker pairs. In Experiment 2, participants learned to identify black-and-white shapes from novel labels spoken by one of two talkers. All of the 16 novel labels were VCVCV word-forms atypical of, but not phonologically illegal in, English. Again, a word was consistently spoken by one talker, and its cohort or rhyme competitor was consistently spoken either by that same talker (same-talker competitor) or the other talker (different-talker competitor). Targets with different-talker cohorts received greater fixation proportions than targets with same-talker cohorts, while the reverse was true for fixations to cohort competitors; there were fewer erroneous selections of competitor referents for different-talker competitors than same-talker competitors. Overall, these results support a view of the lexicon in which entries contain extra-phonemic information. Extensions of the artificial lexicon paradigm and developmental implications are discussed. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
Ian Cunnings; Harald Clahsen The time-course of morphological constraints: A study of plurals inside derived words Journal Article In: The Mental Lexicon, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 149–175, 2008. @article{Cunnings2008,The avoidance of regular but not irregular plurals inside compounds (e.g., *rats eater vs. mice eater) has been one of the most widely studied morphological phenomena in the psycholinguistics literature. To examine whether the constraints that are responsible for this contrast have any general significance beyond compounding, we investigated derived word forms containing regular and irregular plurals in two experiments. Experiment 1 was an offline acceptability judgment task, and Experiment 2 measured eye movements during reading derived words containing regular and irregular plurals and uninflected base nouns. The results from both experiments show that the constraint against regular plurals inside compounds generalizes to derived words. We argue that this constraint cannot be reduced to phonological properties, but is instead morphological in nature. The eye-movement data provide detailed information on the time-course of processing derived word forms indicating that early stages of processing are affected by a general constraint that disallows inflected words from feeding derivational processes, and that the more specific constraint against regular plurals comes in at a subsequent later stage of processing. We argue that these results are consistent with stage-based models of language processing. |
Delphine Dahan; Sarah J. Drucker; Rebecca A. Scarborough Talker adaptation in speech perception: Adjusting the signal or the representations? Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 108, no. 3, pp. 710–718, 2008. @article{Dahan2008,Past research has established that listeners can accommodate a wide range of talkers in understanding language. How this adjustment operates, however, is a matter of debate. Here, listeners were exposed to spoken words from a speaker of an American English dialect in which the vowel /æ/ is raised before /g/, but not before /k/. Results from two experiments showed that listeners' identification of /k/-final words like back (which are unaffected by the dialect) was facilitated by prior exposure to their dialect-affected /g/-final counterparts, e.g., bag. This facilitation occurred because the competition between interpretations, e.g., bag or back, while hearing the initial portion of the input [bæ], was mitigated by the reduced probability for the input to correspond to bag as produced by this talker. Thus, adaptation to an accent is not just a matter of adjusting the speech signal as it is being heard; adaptation involves dynamic adjustment of the representations stored in the lexicon, according to the characteristics of the speaker or the context. |
Denis Drieghe Foveal processing and word skipping during reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 856–860, 2008. @article{Drieghe2008,An eyetracking experiment is reported examining the assumption that a word is skipped during sentence reading because parafoveal processing during preceding fixations has reached an advanced level in recognizing that word. Word n was presented with reduced contrast, with case alternation, or normally. Reingold and Rayner (2006) reported that, in comparison to the normal condition, reduced contrast increased viewing times on word n but not on word n+1, whereas case alternation increased viewing times on both words. These patterns were reflected in the fixation times of the present experiment, but a striking dissociation was observed in the skipping of word n+1: The reduced contrast of word n decreased skipping of word n+1, whereas case alternation did not. Apart from the amount of parafoveal processing, the decision to skip word n+1 is also influenced by the ease of processing word n: Difficulties in processing word n lead to a more conservative strategy in the decision to skip word n+1. |
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia; Alberto Avilés; Manuel Carreiras Noah's ark: Influence of the number of associates in visual word recognition Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 1072–1077, 2008. @article{Dunabeitia2008,The main aim of this study was to explore the extent to which the number of associates of a word (NoA) influences lexical access, in four tasks that focus on different processes of visual word recognition: lexical decision, reading aloud, progressive demasking, and online sentence reading. Results consistently showed that words with a dense associative neighborhood (high-NoA words) were processed faster than words with a sparse neighborhood (low-NoA words), extending previous findings from English lexical decision and categorization experiments. These results are interpreted in terms of the higher degree of semantic richness of high-NoA words as compared with low-NoA words. |
Ralf Engbert; Antje Nuthmann Self-consistent estimation of mislocated fixations during reading Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. e1534, 2008. @article{Engbert2008,During reading, we generate saccadic eye movements to move words into the center of the visual field for word processing. However, due to systematic and random errors in the oculomotor system, distributions of within-word landing positions are rather broad and show overlapping tails, which suggests that a fraction of fixations is mislocated and falls on words to the left or right of the selected target word. Here we propose a new procedure for the self-consistent estimation of the likelihood of mislocated fixations in normal reading. Our approach is based on iterative computation of the proportions of several types of oculomotor errors, the underlying probabilities for word-targeting, and corrected distributions of landing positions. We found that the average fraction of mislocated fixations ranges from about 10% to more than 30% depending on word length. These results show that fixation probabilities are strongly affected by oculomotor errors. |
Paola Escudero; Rachel Hayes-Harb; Holger Mitterer Novel second-language words and asymmetric lexical access Journal Article In: Journal of Phonetics, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 345–360, 2008. @article{Escudero2008,The lexical and phonetic mapping of auditorily confusable L2 nonwords was examined by teaching L2 learners novel words and by later examining their word recognition using an eye-tracking paradigm. During word learning, two groups of highly proficient Dutch learners of English learned 20 English nonwords, of which 10 contained the English contrast /ε/-æ/ (a confusable contrast for native Dutch speakers). One group of subjects learned the words by matching their auditory forms to pictured meanings, while a second group additionally saw the spelled forms of the words. We found that the group who received only auditory forms confused words containing /æ/ and /ε/ symmetrically, i.e., both /æ/ and /ε/ auditory tokens triggered looks to pictures containing both /æ/ and /ε/. In contrast, the group who also had access to spelled forms showed the same asymmetric word recognition pattern found by previous studies, i.e., they only looked at pictures of words containing /ε/ when presented with /ε/ target tokens, but looked at pictures of words containing both /æ/ and /ε/ when presented with /æ/ target tokens. The results demonstrate that L2 learners can form lexical contrasts for auditorily confusable novel L2 words. However, and most importantly, this study suggests that explicit information over the contrastive nature of two new sounds may be needed to build separate lexical representations for similar-sounding L2 words. |
Steven Frisson; Brian McElree Complement coercion is not modulated by competition: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2008. @article{Frisson2008a,An eye-movement study examined the processing of expressions requiring complement coercion (J. Pustejovsky, 1995), in which a noun phrase that does not denote an event (e.g., the book) appears as the complement of an event-selecting verb (e.g., began the book). Previous studies demonstrated that these expressions are more costly to process than are control expressions that can be processed with basic compositional operations (L. Pylkka ̈nen & B. McElree, 2006). Complement coercion is thought to be costly because comprehenders need to construct an event sense of the complement to satisfy the semantic restrictions of the verb (e.g., began writing the book). The reported experiment tests the alternative hypotheses that the cost arises from the need to select 1 interpretation from several or from competition between alternative interpretations. Expressions with weakly constrained interpretations (no dominant interpretation and several alternative interpretations) were not more costly to process than expressions with a strongly constrained interpretation (1 dominant interpretation and few alternative interpretations). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the cost reflects the on-line construction of an event sense for the complement. |
Steven Frisson; Elizabeth Niswander-Klement; Alexander Pollatsek The role of semantic transparency in the processing of English compound words Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 99, no. 1, pp. 87–107, 2008. @article{Frisson2008,Experiment 1 examined whether the semantic transparency of an English unspaced compound word affected how long it took to process it in reading. Three types of opaque words were each compared with a matched set of transparent words (i.e. matched on the length and frequency of the constituents and the frequency of the word as a whole). Two sets of the opaque words were partially opaque: either the first constituent was not related to the meaning of the compound (opaque-transparent) or the second constituent was not related to the meaning of the compound (transparent-opaque). In the third set (opaque-opaque), neither constituent was related to the meaning of the compound. For all three sets, there was no significant difference between the opaque and the transparent words on any eye-movement measure. This replicates an earlier finding with Finnish compound words (Pollatsek & Hyönä, 2005) and indicates that, although there is now abundant evidence that the component constituents play a role in the encoding of compound words, the meaning of the compound word is not constructed from the parts, at least for compound words for which a lexical entry exists. Experiment 2 used the same compounds but with a space between the constituents. This presentation resulted in a transparency effect, indicating that when an assembly route is 'forced', transparency does play a role. |
Jesse A. Harris; Liina Pylkkänen; Brian McElree; Steven Frisson The cost of question concealment: Eye-tracking and MEG evidence Journal Article In: Brain and Language, vol. 107, no. 1, pp. 44–61, 2008. @article{Harris2008,Although natural language appears to be largely compositional, the meanings of certain expressions cannot be straightforwardly recovered from the meanings of their parts. This study examined the online processing of one such class of expressions: concealed questions, in which the meaning of a complex noun phrase (the proof of the theorem) shifts to a covert question (what the proof of the theorem is) when mandated by a sub-class of question-selecting verbs (e.g., guess). Previous behavioral and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) studies have reported a cost associated with converting an entity denotation to an event. Our study tested whether both types of meaning-shift affect the same computational resources by examining the effects elicited by concealed questions in eye-tracking and MEG. Experiment 1 found evidence from eye-movements that verbs requiring the concealed question interpretation require more processing time than verbs that do not support a shift in meaning. Experiment 2 localized the cost of the concealed question interpretation in the left posterior temporal region, an area distinct from that affected by complement coercion. Experiment 3 presented the critical verbs in isolation and found no posterior temporal effect, confirming that the effect of Experiment 2 reflected sentential, and not lexical-level, processing. |
Falk Huettig; Robert J. Hartsuiker When you name the pizza you look at the coin and the bread: Eye movements reveal semantic activation during word production Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 341–360, 2008. @article{Huettig2008,Two eyetracking experiments tested for activation of category coordinate and perceptually related concepts when speakers prepare the name of an object. Speakers saw four visual objects in a 2 x 2 array and identified and named a target picture on the basis of either category (e.g., "What is the name of the musical instrument?") or visual-form (e.g., "What is the name of the circular object?") instructions. There were more fixations on visual-form competitors and category coordinate competitors than on unrelated objects during name preparation, but the increased overt attention did not affect naming latencies. The data demonstrate that eye movements are a sensitive measure of the overlap between the conceptual (including visual-form) information that is accessed in preparation for word production and the conceptual knowledge associated with visual objects. Furthermore, these results suggest that semantic activation of competitor concepts does not necessarily affect lexical selection, contrary to the predictions of lexical-selection-by-competition accounts (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Matthew S. Solomon; Bradley A. Seymour; Ralph Radach Eye position changes during reading fixations are spatially selective Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 48, no. 8, pp. 1027–1039, 2008. @article{Inhoff2008,Intra-fixation location changes were measured when one-line sentences written in lower or aLtErNaTiNg case were read. Intra-fixation location changes were common and their size was normally distributed except for a relatively high proportion of fixations without a discernible location change. Location changes that did occur were systematically biased toward the right when alternating case was read. Irrespective of case type, changes of the right eye were biased toward the right at the onset of sentence reading, and this spatial bias decreased as sentence reading progressed from left to right. The left eye showed a relatively stable right-directed bias. These results show that processing demands can pull the two fixated eyes in the same direction and that the response to this pull can differ for the right and left eye. |
Albrecht W. Inhoff; Matthew S. Starr; Matthew S. Solomon; Lars Placke Eye movements during the reading of compound words and the influence of lexeme meaning Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 675–687, 2008. @article{Inhoff2008a,We examined the use of lexeme meaning during the processing of spatially unified bilexemic compound words by manipulating both the location and the word frequency of the lexeme that primarily defined the meaning of a compound (i.e., the dominant lexeme). The semantically dominant and nondominant lexemes occupied either the beginning or the ending compound word location, and the beginning and ending lexemes could be either high- or low-frequency words. Three tasks were used–lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading–all of which focused on the effects of lexeme frequency as a function of lexeme dominance. The results revealed a larger word frequency effect for the dominant lexeme in all three tasks. Eye movements during sentence reading further revealed larger word frequency effects for the dominant lexeme via several oculomotor motor measures, including the duration of the first fixation on a compound word. These findings favor theoretical conceptions in which the use of lexeme meaning is an integral part of the compound recognition process. |
Manon W. Jones; Mateo Obregón; M. Louise Kelly; Holly P. Branigan Elucidating the component processes involved in dyslexic and non-dyslexic reading fluency: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 109, no. 3, pp. 389–407, 2008. @article{Jones2008,The relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading fluency is well documented (see Wolf, M. & Bowers, P.G. (1999). The double-deficit hypothesis for the developmental dyslexias. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(3), 415-438, for a review), but little is known about which component processes are important in RAN, and why developmental dyslexics show longer latencies on these tasks. Researchers disagree as to whether these delays are caused by impaired phonological processing or whether extra-phonological processes also play a role (e.g., Clarke, P., Hulme, C., & Snowling, M. (2005). Individual differences in RAN and reading: A response timing analysis. Journal of Research in Reading, 28(2), 73-86; Wolf, M., Bowers, P.G., & Biddle, K. (2000). Naming-speed processes, timing, and reading: A conceptual review. Journal of learning disabilities, 33(4), 387-407). We conducted an eye-tracking study that manipulated phonological and visual information (as representative of extra-phonological processes) in RAN. Results from linear mixed (LME) effects analyses showed that both phonological and visual processes influence naming-speed for both dyslexic and non-dyslexic groups, but the influence on dyslexic readers is greater. Moreover, dyslexic readers' difficulties in these domains primarily emerge in a measure that explicitly includes the production phase of naming. This study elucidates processes underpinning RAN performance in non-dyslexic readers and pinpoints areas of difficulty for dyslexic readers. We discuss these findings with reference to phonological and extra-phonological hypotheses of naming-speed deficits. |
Johanna K. Kaakinen; Jukka Hyönä Perspective-driven text comprehension Journal Article In: Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 22, pp. 319–334, 2008. @article{Kaakinen2008,The present article reports results of an eye‐tracking experiment, which examines whether the perspective‐driven text comprehension framework applies to comprehension of narrative text. Sixty‐four participants were instructed to adopt either a burglar's or an interior designer's perspective. A pilot test showed that readers have more overlapping prior knowledge with the burglar‐relevant than with the interior designer‐relevant information of the experimental text. Participants read either a transparent text version where the (ir)relevance of text segments to the perspective was made apparent, or an opaque text version where no direct mention of the perspective was made. After reading participants wrote a free recall of the text. The results showed that perspective‐related prior knowledge modulates the perspective effects observed in on‐line text processing and that signalling of (ir)relevance helps in encoding relevant information to memory. It is concluded that the proposed framework generalizes to the on‐line comprehension of narrative texts. |
Victor Kuperman; Raymond Bertram; R. Harald Baayen Morphological dynamics in compound processing Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 23, no. 7-8, pp. 1089–1132, 2008. @article{Kuperman2008,This paper explores the time-course of morphological processing of trimorphemic Finnish compounds. We find evidence for the parallel access to full- forms and morphological constituents diagnosed by the early effects of compound frequency, as well as early effects of left constituent frequency and family size. We also observe an interaction between compound frequency and both the left and the right constituent family sizes. Furthermore, our data show that suffixes embedded in the derived left constituent of a compound are efficiently used for establishing the boundary between compounds' constituents. The success of segmentation of a compound is demonstrably modulated by the affixal salience of the embedded suffixes. We discuss implications of these findings for current models of morphological processing and propose a new model that views morphemes, combinations of morphemes and morphological paradigms as probabilistic sources of information that are interactively used in recognition of complex words. |
Angelika Lingnau; Jens Schwarzbach; Dirk Vorberg Adaptive strategies for reading with a forced retinal location Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 1–18, 2008. @article{Lingnau2008,Forcing normal-sighted participants to use a distinct parafoveal retinal location for reading, we studied which part of the visual field is best suited to take over functions of the fovea during early stages of macular degeneration (MD). A region to the right of fixation lead to best reading performance and most natural gaze behavior, whereas reading performance was severely impaired when a region to the left or below fixation had to be used. An analysis of the underlying oculomotor behavior revealed that practice effects were accompanied by a larger number of saccades in text direction and decreased fixation durations, whereas no adjustment of saccade amplitudes was observed. We provide an explanation for the observed performance differences at different retinal locations based on the interplay of attention and eye movements. Our findings have important implications for the development of training methods for MD patients targeted at reading, suggesting that it would be beneficial for MD patients to use a region to the right of their central scotoma. |
James S. Magnuson; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin Immediate effects of form-class constraints on spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 108, no. 3, pp. 866–873, 2008. @article{Magnuson2008,In many domains of cognitive processing there is strong support for bottom-up priority and delayed top-down (contextual) integration. We ask whether this applies to supra-lexical context that could potentially constrain lexical access. Previous findings of early context integration in word recognition have typically used constraints that can be linked to pair-wise conceptual relations between words. Using an artificial lexicon, we found immediate integration of syntactic expectations based on pragmatic constraints linked to syntactic categories rather than words: phonologically similar "nouns" and "adjectives" did not compete when a combination of syntactic and visual information strongly predicted form class. These results suggest that predictive context is integrated continuously, and that previous findings supporting delayed context integration stem from weak contexts rather than delayed integration. |
Andrea E. Martin; Brian McElree A content-addressable pointer mechanism underlies comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 879–906, 2008. @article{Martin2008,Interpreting a verb-phrase ellipsis (VP ellipsis) requires accessing an antecedent in memory, and then integrating a representation of this antecedent into the local context. We investigated the online interpretation of VP ellipsis in an eye-tracking experiment and four speed-accuracy tradeoff experiments. To investigate whether the antecedent for a VP ellipsis is accessed with a search or direct-access retrieval process, Experiments 1 and 2 measured the effect of the distance between an ellipsis and its antecedent on the speed and accuracy of comprehension. Accuracy was lower with longer distances, indicating that interpolated material reduced the quality of retrieved information about the antecedent. However, contra a search process, distance did not affect the speed of interpreting ellipsis. This pattern suggests that antecedent representations are content-addressable and retrieved with a direct-access process. To determine whether interpreting ellipsis involves copying antecedent information into the ellipsis site, Experiments 3-5 manipulated the length and complexity of the antecedent. Some types of antecedent complexity lowered accuracy, notably, the number of discourse entities in the antecedent. However, neither antecedent length nor complexity affected the speed of interpreting the ellipsis. This pattern is inconsistent with a copy operation, and it suggests that ellipsis interpretation may involve a pointer to extant structures in memory. |
Bob McMurray; Richard N. Aslin; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Michael J. Spivey; Dana Subik Gradient sensitivity to within-category variation in words and syllables Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 1609–1631, 2008. @article{McMurray2008,Five experiments monitored eye movements in phoneme and lexical identification tasks to examine the effect of within-category subphonetic variation on the perception of stop consonants. Experiment 1 demonstrated gradient effects along voice-onset time (VOT) continua made from natural speech, replicating results with synthetic speech (B. McMurray, M. K. Tanenhaus, & R. N. Aslin, 2002). Experiments 2-5 used synthetic VOT continua to examine effects of response alternatives (2 vs. 4), task (lexical vs. phoneme decision), and type of token (word vs. consonant-vowel). A gradient effect of VOT in at least one half of the continuum was observed in all conditions. These results suggest that during online spoken word recognition, lexical competitors are activated in proportion to their continuous distance from a category boundary. This gradient processing may allow listeners to anticipate upcoming acoustic-phonetic information in the speech signal and dynamically compensate for acoustic variability. |
Bob McMurray; Meghan Clayards; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin Tracking the time course of phonetic cue integration during spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 1064–1071, 2008. @article{McMurray2008a,Speech perception requires listeners to integrate multiple cues that each contribute to judgments about a phonetic category. Classic studies of trading relations assessed the weights attached to each cue but did not explore the time course of cue integration. Here, we provide the first direct evidence that asynchronous cues to voicing (/b/ vs. /p/) and manner (/b/ vs. /w/) contrasts become available to the listener at different times during spoken word recognition. Using the visual world paradigm, we show that the probability of eye movements to pictures of target and of competitor objects diverge at different points in time after the onset of the target word. These points of divergence correspond to the availability of early (voice onset time or formant transition slope) and late (vowel length) cues to voicing and manner contrasts. These results support a model of cue integration in which phonetic cues are used for lexical access as soon as they are available. |
Antje S. Meyer; Marc Ouellet; Christine Häcker Parallel processing of objects in a naming task Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 982–987, 2008. @article{Meyer2008,The authors investigated whether speakers who named several objects processed them sequentially or in parallel. Speakers named object triplets, arranged in a triangle, in the order left, right, and bottom object. The left object was easy or difficult to identify and name. During the saccade from the left to the right object, the right object shown at trial onset (the interloper) was replaced by a new object (the target), which the speakers named. Interloper and target were identical or unrelated objects, or they were conceptually unrelated objects with the same name (e.g., bat [animal] and [baseball] bat). The mean duration of the gazes to the target was shorter when interloper and target were identical or had the same name than when they were unrelated. The facilitatory effects of identical and homophonous interlopers were significantly larger when the left object was easy to process than when it was difficult to process. This interaction demonstrates that the speakers processed the left and right objects in parallel. |
Don C. Mitchell; Xingjia Shen; Matthew J. Green; Timothy L. Hodgson Accounting for regressive eye-movements in models of sentence processing: A reappraisal of the Selective Reanalysis hypothesis Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 266–293, 2008. @article{Mitchell2008,When people read temporarily ambiguous sentences, there is often an increased prevalence of regressive eye-movements launched from the word that resolves the ambiguity. Traditionally, such regressions have been interpreted at least in part as reflecting readers' efforts to re-read and reconfigure earlier material, as exemplified by the Selective Reanalysis hypothesis [Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178-210]. Within such frameworks it is assumed that the selection of saccadic landing-sites is linguistically supervised. As an alternative to this proposal, we consider the possibility (dubbed the Time Out hypothesis) that regression control is partly decoupled from linguistic operations and that landing-sites are instead selected on the basis of low-level spatial properties such as their proximity to the point from which the regressive saccade was launched. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to compare the explanatory potential of these two accounts. Experiment 1 manipulated the formatting of linguistically identical sentences and showed, contrary to purely linguistic supervision, that the landing site of the first regression from a critical word was reliably influenced by the physical layout of the text. Experiment 2 used a fixed physical format but manipulated the position in the display at which reanalysis-relevant material was located. Here the results showed a highly reliable linguistic influence on the overall distribution of regression landing sites (though with few effects being apparent on the very first regression). These results are interpreted as reflecting mutually exclusive forms of regression control with fixation sequences being influenced both by spatially constrained, partially decoupled supervision systems as well as by some kind of linguistic guidance. The findings are discussed in relation to existing computational models of eye-movements in reading. |
Jane L. Morgan; Gus Elswijk; Antje S. Meyer Extrafoveal processing of objects in a naming task: Evidence from word probe experiments Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 561–565, 2008. @article{Morgan2008,In two experiments, we investigated the processing of extrafoveal objects in a double-object naming task. On most trials, participants named two objects; but on some trials, the objects were replaced shortly after trial onset by a written word probe, which participants had to name instead of the objects. In Experiment 1, the word was presented in the same location as the left object either 150 or 350 msec after trial onset and was either phonologically related or unrelated to that object name. Phonological facilitation was observed at the later but not at the earlier SOA. In Experiment 2, the word was either phonologically related or unrelated to the right object and was presented 150 msec after the speaker had begun to inspect that object. In contrast with Experiment 1, phonological facilitation was found at this early SOA, demonstrating that the speakers had begun to process the right object prior to fixation. |
Alexander Pollatsek; Timothy J. Slattery; Barbara J. Juhasz The processing of novel and lexicalised prefixed words in reading Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 23, no. 7-8, pp. 1133–1158, 2008. @article{Pollatsek2008,Two experiments compared how relatively long novel prefixed words (e.g., overfarm) and existing prefixed words were processed in reading. The use of novel prefixed words allows one to examine the roles of whole-word access and decompositional processing in the processing of non-novel prefixed words. The two experiments found that, although there was a large cost to novelty (e.g., gaze durations were about 100 ms longer for novel prefixedwords), the effect of the frequency of the root morpheme on fixation measures was about the same for novel and non-novel prefixed words for most measures. This finding rules out a (‘‘horse-race'') dual-route model of processing for existing prefixed words in which the whole-word and decompositional route are parallel and independent, as such a model would predict a substantially larger root frequency effect for novel words (where whole-word processes do not exist). The most likely model to explain the processing of prefixed words is a parallel interactive one. |
Ralph Radach; Lynn Huestegge; Ronan G. Reilly The role of global top-down factors in local eye-movement control in reading Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 72, no. 6, pp. 675–688, 2008. @article{Radach2008,Although the development of the field of reading has been impressive, there are a number of issues that still require much more attention. One of these concerns the variability of skilled reading within the individual. This paper explores the topic in three ways: (1) it quantifies the extent to which, two factors, the specific reading task (comprehension vs. word verification) and the format of reading material (sentence vs. passage) influence the temporal aspects of reading as expressed in word-viewing durations; (2) it examines whether they also affect visuomotor aspects of eye-movement control; and (3) determine whether they can modulate local lexical processing. The results reveal reading as a dynamic, interactive process involving semi-autonomous modules, with top-down influences clearly evident in the eye-movement record. |
Kathleen Pirog Revill; Michael K. Tanenhaus; Richard N. Aslin Context and spoken word recognition in a novel lexicon Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 1207–1223, 2008. @article{rta08,Three eye movement studies with novel lexicons investigated the role of semantic context in spoken word recognition, contrasting 3 models: restrictive access, access–selection, and continuous integration. Actions directed at novel shapes caused changes in motion (e.g., looming, spinning) or state (e.g., color, texture). Across the experiments, novel names for the actions and the shapes varied in frequency, cohort density, and whether the cohorts referred to actions (Experiment 1) or shapes with action-congruent or action-incongruent affordances (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiment 1 demonstrated effects of frequency and cohort competition from both displayed and non-displayed competitors. In Experiment 2, a biasing context induced an increase in anticipatory eye movements to congruent referents and reduced the probability of looks to incongruent cohorts, without the delay predicted by access–selection models. In Experiment 3, context did not reduce competition from non-displayed incompatible neighbors as predicted by restrictive access models. The authors conclude that the results are most consistent with continuous integration models. |
Leah Roberts; Marianne Gullberg; Peter Indefrey Online pronoun resolution in L2 discouse: L1 influence and general learner effects Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 30, pp. 333–357, 2008. @article{rgi08,This study investigates whether advanced second language (L2) learners of a nonnull subject language (Dutch) are influenced by their null subject first language (L1) (Turkish) in their offline and online resolution of subject pronouns in L2 discourse. To tease apart potential L1 effects from possible general L2 processing effects, we also tested a group of German L2 learners of Dutch who were predicted to perform like the native Dutch speakers. The two L2 groups differed in their offline interpretations of subject pronouns. The Turkish L2 learners exhibited a L1 influence, because approximately half the time they interpreted Dutch subject pronouns as they would overt pronouns in Turkish, whereas the German L2 learners performed like the Dutch controls, interpreting pronouns as coreferential with the current discourse topic. This L1 effect was not in evidence in eye-tracking data, however. Instead, the L2 learners patterned together, showing an online processing disadvantage when two potential antecedents for the pronoun were grammatically available in the discourse. This processing disadvantage was in evidence irrespective of the properties of the learners' L1 or their final interpretation of the pronoun. Therefore, the results of this study indicate both an effect of the L1 on the L2 in offline resolution and a general L2 processing effect in online subject pronoun resolution. |
Ardi Roelofs Attention, gaze shifting, and dual-task interference from phonological encoding in spoken word planning Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 1580–1598, 2008. @article{r08,Controversy exists about whether dual-task interference from word planning reflects structural bottleneck or attentional control factors. Here, participants named pictures whose names could or could not be phonologically prepared, and they manually responded to arrows presented away from (Experiment 1), or superimposed onto, the pictures (Experiments 2 and 3); or they responded to tones (Experiment 4). Pictures and arrows/tones were presented at stimulus onset asynchronies of 0, 300, and 1,000 ms. Earlier research showed that vocal responding hampers auditory perception, which predicts earlier shifts of attention to the tones than to the arrows. Word planning yielded dual-task interference. Phonological preparation reduced the latencies of picture naming and gaze shifting. The preparation benefit was propagated into the latencies of the manual responses to the arrows but not to the tones. The malleability of the interference supports the attentional control account. This conclusion was corroborated by computer simulations showing that an extension of WEAVER++ (A. Roelofs, 2003) with assumptions about the attentional control of tasks quantitatively accounts for the latencies of vocal responding, gaze shifting, and manual responding. |
Ardi Roelofs Tracing attention and the activation flow in spoken word planning using eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 353–368, 2008. @article{r08b,The flow of activation from concepts to phonological forms within the word production system was examined in 3 experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed distractor pictures that were semantically related, phonologically related, or unrelated. Eye movements and naming latencies were recorded. The distractor pictures affected the latencies of gaze shifting and vocal naming. The magnitude of the phonological effects increased linearly with latency, excluding lapses of attention as the cause of the effects. In Experiment 2, no distractor effects were obtained when both pictures were named. When pictures with superimposed distractor words were named or the words were read in Experiment 3, the words influenced the latencies of gaze shifting and picture naming, but the pictures yielded no such latency effects in word reading. The picture-word asymmetry was obtained even with equivalent reading and naming latencies. The picture-picture effects suggest that activation spreads continuously from concepts to phonological forms, whereas the picture-word asymmetry indicates that the amount of activation is limited and task dependent. |
Christoph Scheepers; Frank Keller; Mirella Lapata Evidence for serial coercion: A time course analysis using the visual-world paradigm Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 1–29, 2008. @article{skl08,Metonymic verbs like start or enjoy often occur with artifact-denoting complements (e.g., The artist started the picture) although semantically they require event-denoting complements (e.g., The artist started painting the picture). In case of artifact-denoting objects, the complement is assumed to be type shifted (or coerced) into an event to conform to the verb's semantic restrictions. Psycholinguistic research has provided evidence for this kind of enriched composition: readers experience processing difficulty when faced with metonymic constructions compared to non-metonymic controls. However, slower reading times for metonymic constructions could also be due to competition between multiple interpretations that are being entertained in parallel whenever a metonymic verb is encountered. Using the visual-world paradigm, we devised an experiment which enabled us to determine the time course of metonymic interpretation in relation to non-metonymic controls. The experiment provided evidence in favor of a non-competitive, serial coercion process. |
Anne-Catherine Scherlen; Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Aurélie Calabrèse; Eric Castet Page mode reading with simulated scotomas: Oculo-motor patterns Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 48, no. 18, pp. 1870–1878, 2008. @article{sbcc08,This study investigated the relationship between reading speed and oculo-motor parameters when normally sighted observers had to read single sentences with an artificial macular scotoma. Using multiple regression analysis, our main result shows that two significant predictors, number of saccades per sentence followed by average fixation duration, account for 94% of reading speed variance: reading speed decreases when number of saccades and fixation duration increase. The number of letters per forward saccade (L/FS), which was measured directly in contrast to previous studies, is not a significant predictor. The results suggest that, independently of the size of saccades, some or all portions of a sentence are temporally integrated across an increasing number of fixations as reading speed is reduced. |
Seppo Vainio; Jukka Hyönä; Anneli Pajunen Processing modifier-head agreement in reading: Evidence for a delayed effect of agreement Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 329–340, 2008. @article{Vainio2008,The present study examined whether type of inflectional case (semantic or grammatical) and phonological and morphological transparency affect the processing of Finnish modifier-head agreement in reading. Readers' eye movement patterns were registered. In Experiment 1, an agreeing modifier condition (agreement was transparent) was compared with a no-modifier condition, and in Experiment 2, similar constructions with opaque agreement were used. In both experiments, agreement was found to affect the processing of the target noun with some delay. In Experiment 3, unmarked and case-marked modifiers were used. The results again demonstrated a delayed agreement effect, ruling out the possibility that the agreement effects observed in Experiments 1 and 2 reflect a mere modifier-presence effect. We concluded that agreement exerts its effect at the level of syntactic integration but not at the level of lexical access. |
Matteo Valsecchi; Sven Saage; Brian J. White; Karl R. Gegenfurtner Advantage in reading lexical bundles is reduced in non-native speakers Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 6, no. 5:2, pp. 1–15, 2008. @article{Valsecchi2008,Formulaic sequences such as idioms, collocations, and lexical bundles, which may be processed as holistic units, make up a large proportion of natural language. For language learners, however, formulaic patterns are a major barrier to achieving native like compe- tence. The present study investigated the processing of lexical bundles by native speakers and less advanced non-native English speakers using corpus analysis for the identification of lexical bundles and eye-tracking to measure the reading times. The participants read sentences containing 4-grams and control phrases which were matched for sub-string fre- quency. The results for native speakers demonstrate a processing advantage for formulaic sequences over the matched control units. We do not find any processing advantage for non-native speakers which suggests that native like processing of lexical bundles comes only late in the acquisition process |
Suiping Wang; Hsuan-Chih Chen; Jinmian Yang; Lei Mo Immediacy of integration in discourse comprehension: Evidence from Chinese readers' eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 241–257, 2008. @article{Wang2008a,An eye-movement study was conducted to examine whether Chinese readers immediately activate and integrate related background information during discourse comprehension. Participants were asked to read short passages, each containing a critical word that fitted well within the local context but was inconsistent or neutral with background information from the early part of the passage. This manipulation of textual consistency produced reliable effects on both first-pass reading fixations in the target region and second-pass reading times in the pre-target and target regions. These results indicate that integration processes start very rapidly in reading text in a writing system with properties that encourage delayed processing, suggesting that immediate processing is likely a universal principle in discourse comprehension. |
Tessa Warren; Kerry McConnell; Keith Rayner Effects of context on eye movements when reading about possible and impossible events Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 1001–1010, 2008. @article{Warren2008,Plausibility violations resulting in impossible scenarios lead to earlier and longer lasting eye movement disruption than violations resulting in highly unlikely scenarios (K. Rayner, T. Warren, B. J. Juhasz, & S. P. Liversedge, 2004; T. Warren & K. McConnell, 2007). This could reflect either differences in the timing of availability of different kinds of information (e.g., selectional restrictions, world knowledge, and context) or differences in their relative power to guide semantic interpretation. The authors investigated eye movements to possible and impossible events in real-world and fantasy contexts to determine when contextual information influences detection of impossibility cued by a semantic mismatch between a verb and an argument. Gaze durations on a target word were longer to impossible events independent of context. However, a measure of the time elapsed from first fixating the target word to moving past it showed disruption only in the real-world context. These results suggest that contextual information did not eliminate initial disruption but moderated it quickly thereafter. |
Sarah J. White; Raymond Bertram; Jukka Hyönä Semantic processing of previews within compound words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 988–993, 2008. @article{White2008a,Previous studies have suggested that previews of words prior to fixation can be processed orthographically, but not semantically, during reading of sentences (K. Rayner, D. A. Balota, & A. Pollatsek, 1986). The present study tested whether semantic processing of previews can occur within words. The preview of the second constituent of 2-constituent Finnish compound nouns was manipulated. The previews were either identical to the 2nd constituent or they were incorrect in the form of a semantically related word, a semantically unrelated word, or a semantically meaningless nonword. The results indicate that previews of 2nd constituents within compound words can be semantically processed. The results have important implications for understanding the nature of preview and compound word processing. These issues are crucial to developing comprehensive models of eye-movement control and word recognition during reading. |
Elizabeth Wonnacott; Elissa L. Newport; Michael K. Tanenhaus Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 165–209, 2008. @article{Wonnacott2008,Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur. Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing and on the role of semantics in this process. The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings. |
Mark Yates; John Friend; Danielle M. Ploetz The effect of phonological neighborhood density on eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 107, no. 2, pp. 685–692, 2008. @article{Yates2008,Recent research has indicated that phonological neighbors speed processing in a variety of isolated word recognition tasks. Nevertheless, as these tasks do not represent how we normally read, it is not clear if phonological neighborhood has an effect on the reading of sentences for meaning. In the research reported here, we evaluated whether phonological neighborhood density influences reading of target words embedded in sentences. The eye movement data clearly revealed that phonological neighborhood facilitated reading. This was evidenced by shorter fixations for words with large neighborhoods relative to words with small neighborhoods. These results are important in indicating that phonology is a crucial component of reading and that it affects early lexical processing. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
Eiling Yee; Sheila E. Blumstein; Julie C. Sedivy Lexical-semantic activation in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 592–612, 2008. @article{Yee2008,Lexical processing requires both activating stored representations, and selecting among active candidates. The current work uses an eye-tracking paradigm to conduct a detailed temporal investigation of lexical processing. Patients with Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia are studied to shed light on the roles of anterior and posterior brain regions in lexical processing as well as the effects of lexical competition on such processing. Experiment 1 investigates whether objects semantically related to an uttered word are preferentially fixated, e.g., given the auditory target 'hammer', do participants fixate a picture of a nail? Results show that, like normals, both groups of patients are more likely to fixate on an object semantically related to the target than an unrelated object. Experiment 2 explores whether Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics show competition effects when words share onsets with the uttered word, e.g., given the auditory target 'hammer', do participants fixate a picture of a hammock? Experiment 3 investigates whether these patients activate words semantically related to onset competitors of the uttered word, e.g., given the auditory target 'hammock' do participants fixate a nail due to partial activation of the onset competitor hammer? Results of Experiments 2 and 3 show pathological patterns of performance for both Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics under conditions of lexical onset competition. However, the patterns of deficit differed, suggesting different functional and computational roles for anterior and posterior areas in lexical processing. Implications of the findings for the functional architecture of the lexical processing system and its potential neural substrates are considered. |
Miao-Hsuan Yen; Jie-Li Tsai; Ovid J. L. Tzeng; Daisy L. Hung Eye movements and parafoveal word processing in reading Chinese Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 1033–1045, 2008. @article{Yen2008,In two experiments, a parafoveal lexicality effect in the reading of Chinese (a script that does not physically mark word boundaries) was examined. Both experiments used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) and indicated that the lexical properties of parafoveal words influenced eye movements. In Experiment 1, the preview stimulus was either a real word or a pseudoword. Targets with word previews, even unrelated ones, were more likely to be skipped than were those with pseudowords. In Experiment 2, all of the preview stimuli had the same first character as the target. Target words with same-morpheme previews were fixated for less time than were those with pseudoword previews, suggesting that morphological processing may be involved in extracting information from parafoveal words in Chinese reading. Together, the two experiments dealing with how words are processed in Chinese may provide some constraints on current computational models of reading. |
2007 |
Gerry T. M. Altmann; Yuki Kamide In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 502–518, 2007. @article{Altmann2007,Two experiments explored the representational basis for anticipatory eye movements. Participants heard 'the man will drink ...' or 'the man has drunk ...' (Experiment 1) or 'the man will drink all of ...' or 'the man has drunk all of ...' (Experiment 2). They viewed a concurrent scene depicting a full glass of beer and an empty wine glass (amongst other things). There were more saccades towards the empty wine glass in the past tensed conditions than in the future tense conditions; the converse pattern obtained for looks towards the full glass of beer. We argue that these anticipatory eye movements reflect sensitivity to objects' affordances, and develop an account of the linkage between language processing and visual attention that can account not only for looks towards named objects, but also for those cases (including anticipatory eye movements) where attention is directed towards objects that are not being named. |
Manabu Arai; Roger P. G. Gompel; Christoph Scheepers Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 218–250, 2007. @article{Arai2007,Many studies have shown evidence for syntactic priming during language production (e.g., Bock, 1986). It is often assumed that comprehension and production share similar mechanisms and that priming also occurs during comprehension (e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Research investigating priming during comprehension (e.g., Branigan, Pickering, & McLean, 2005; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004) has mainly focused on syntactic ambiguities that are very different from the meaning-equivalent structures used in production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether priming during comprehension occurs in ditransitive sentences similar to those used in production research. When the verb was repeated between prime and target, we observed a priming effect similar to that in production. However, we observed no evidence for priming when the verbs were different. Thus, priming during comprehension occurs for very similar structures as priming during production, but in contrast to production, the priming effect is completely lexically dependent. |
Jennifer E. Arnold; Carla L. Hudson Kam; Michael K. Tanenhaus If you say thee uh you are describing something hard: The on-line attribution of disfluency during reference comprehension Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 914–930, 2007. @article{Arnold2007,Eye-tracking and gating experiments examined reference comprehension with fluent (Click on the red. . .) and disfluent (Click on [pause] thee uh red . . .) instructions while listeners viewed displays with 2 familiar (e.g., ice cream cones) and 2 unfamiliar objects (e.g., squiggly shapes). Disfluent instructions made unfamiliar objects more expected, which influenced listeners' on-line hypotheses from the onset of the color word. The unfamiliarity bias was sharply reduced by instructions that the speaker had object agnosia, and thus difficulty naming familiar objects (Experiment 2), but was not affected by intermittent sources of speaker distraction (beeps and construction noises; Experiments 3). The authors conclude that listeners can make situation-specific inferences about likely sources of disfluency, but there are some limitations to these attributions. |
Jean-Baptiste Bernard; Anne-Catherine Scherlen; Eric Castet Page mode reading with simulated scotomas: A modest effect of interline spacing on reading speed Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 47, no. 28, pp. 3447–3459, 2007. @article{Bernard2007,Crowding is thought to be one potent limiting factor of reading in peripheral vision. While several studies investigated how crowding between horizontally adjacent letters or words can influence eccentric reading, little attention has been paid to the influence of vertically adjacent lines of text. The goal of this study was to examine the dependence of page mode reading performance (speed and accuracy) on interline spacing. A gaze-contingent visual display was used to simulate a visual central scotoma while normally sighted observers read meaningful French sentences following MNREAD principles. The sensitivity of this new material to low-level factors was confirmed by showing strong effects of perceptual learning, print size and scotoma size on reading performance. In contrast, reading speed was only slightly modulated by interline spacing even for the largest range tested: a 26% gain for a 178% increase in spacing. This modest effect sharply contrasts with the dramatic influence of vertical word spacing found in a recent RSVP study. This discrepancy suggests either that vertical crowding is minimized when reading meaningful sentences, or that the interaction between crowding and other factors such as attention and/or visuo-motor control is dependent on the paradigm used to assess reading speed (page vs. RSVP mode). |
Christine Burton; Meredyth Daneman Compensating for a limited working memory capacity during reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Reading Psychology, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 163–186, 2007. @article{Burton2007,Although working memory capacity is an important contributor to reading comprehension performance, it is not the only contributor. Studies have shown that epistemic knowledge (or knowledge about knowledge and learning) is related to comprehension success and may enable low-span readers to compensate for their limited resources. By comparing the eye movements of epistemically mature versus epistemically naïve low-span readers, this study provided evidence for how the compensation occurs. Metacognitively mature low-span readers spent more time engaged in selective backtracking to unfamiliar and task-relevant text information. These selective look-backs would have reinstated the difficult and important information into working memory, thereby allowing these readers to offset some of the disadvantages of a limited temporary storage capacity. |
C. Christine Camblin; Peter C. Gordon; Tamara Y. Swaab The interplay of discourse congruence and lexical association during sentence processing: Evidence from ERPs and eye tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 103–128, 2007. @article{Camblin2007,Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was associated or not. Violations of discourse congruence had early and lingering effects on ERP and eye-tracking measures. This indicates that discourse representations have a rapid effect on lexical semantic processing even in locally congruous texts. In contrast, effects of association were more malleable: Very early effects of associative priming were only robust when the discourse context was absent or not cohesive. Together these results suggest that the global discourse model quickly influences lexical processing in sentences, and that spreading activation from associative priming does not contribute to natural reading in discourse contexts. |
Aoju Chen; Els Den Os; Jan Peter De Ruiter Pitch accent type matters for online processing of information status: Evidence from natural and synthetic speech Journal Article In: The Linguistic Review, vol. 24, no. 2-3, pp. 317–344, 2007. @article{Chen2007,Adopting an eyetracking paradigm, we investigated the role of H*L, L*HL, L*H, H*LH, and deaccentuation at the intonational phrase-final position in online processing of information status in British English in natural speech. The role of H*L, L*H and deaccentuation was also examined in diphonesynthetic speech. It was found that H*L and L*HL create a strong bias towards newness, whereas L*H, like deaccentuation, creates a strong bias towards givenness. In synthetic speech, the same effect was found for H*L, L*H and deaccentuation, but it was delayed. The delay may not be caused entirely by the difference in the segmental quality between synthetic and natural speech. The pitch accent H*LH, however, appears to bias participants' interpretation to the target word, independent of its information status. This finding was explained in the light of the effect of durational information at the segmental level on word recognition. © Walter de Gruyter 2007. |
Ed H. Chi; Michelle Gumbrecht; Lichan Hong Visual foraging of highlighted text: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 589–598, 2007. @article{Chi2007,The wide availability of digital reading material online is causing a major shift in everyday reading activities. Readers are skimming instead of reading in depth [Nielson 1997]. Highlights are increasingly used in digital interfaces to direct attention toward relevant passages within texts. In this paper, we study the eye-gaze behavior of subjects using both keyword highlighting and ScentHighlights [Chi et al. 2005]. In this first eye-tracking study of highlighting interfaces, we show that there is direct evidence of the von Restorff isolation effect [VonRestorff 1933] in the eye-tracking data, in that subjects focused on highlighted areas when highlighting cues are present. The results point to future design possibilities in highlighting interfaces. |
Ian Cunnings; Harald Clahsen The time-course of morphological constraints: Evidence from eye-movements during reading Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 104, no. 3, pp. 476–494, 2007. @article{Cunnings2007,Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. *rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over plural forms inside compounds (e.g. mouse eater vs. mice eater), a contrast that has been ascribed to the semantics of compounds. Measuring eye-movements during reading, this study examined how morphological and semantic information become available over time during the processing of a compound. We found that the morphological constraint affected both early and late eye-movement measures, whereas the semantic constraint for singular non-heads only affected late measures of processing. These results indicate that morphological information becomes available earlier than semantic information during the processing of compounds. |
Delphine Dahan; M. Gareth Gaskell The temporal dynamics of ambiguity resolution: Evidence from spoken-word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 483–501, 2007. @article{Dahan2007,Two experiments examined the dynamics of lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. In both, the key materials were pairs of onset-matched picturable nouns varying in frequency. Pictures associated with these words, plus two distractor pictures were displayed. A gating task, in which participants identified the picture associated with gradually lengthening fragments of spoken words, examined the availability of discriminating cues in the speech waveforms for these pairs. There was a clear frequency bias in participants' responses to short, ambiguous fragments, followed by a temporal window in which discriminating information gradually became available. A visual-world experiment examined speech contingent eye movements. Fixation analyses suggested that frequency influences lexical competition well beyond the point in the speech signal at which the spoken word has been fully discriminated from its competitor (as identified using gating). Taken together, these data support models in which the processing dynamics of lexical activation are a limiting factor on recognition speed, over and above the temporal unfolding of the speech signal. |
Meredyth Daneman; Tracy Lennertz; Brenda Hannon Shallow semantic processing of text: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognitive Processes, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 83–105, 2007. @article{Daneman2007,Evidence for shallow semantic processing has depended on paradigms that required readers to explicitly report whether they noticed an anomalous noun phrase (NP) after reading text such as 'Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquillizing sedatives in one day'. We replicated previous research by showing that readers frequently fail to report the anomaly, and that less-skilled readers have particular difficulty reporting locally anomalous NPs such as tranquillizing stimulants. In addition, we examined the time course of anomaly detection by monitoring readers' eye movements for spontaneous disruptions when encountering the anomalous NPs. The eye fixation data provided evidence for on-line detection of anomalies; however, the detection was delayed. Readers who later reported the anomaly did not spend longer processing the anomalous NP when first encountering it; however, they did spend longer refixating it. Our results challenge orthodox models of comprehension that assume that semantic analysis is exhaustive and complete. |
Denis Drieghe; Timothy Desmet; Marc Brysbaert How important are linguistic factors in word skipping during reading? Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 98, no. 1, pp. 157–171, 2007. @article{Drieghe2007,The probability of skipping a word is influenced by its processing ease. For instance, a word that is predictable from the preceding context is skipped more often than an unpredictable word. A meta-analysis of studies examining this predictability effect reported effect sizes ranging from 0 to 13%, with an average of 8%. One study does not fit within this picture and reported 23% more skipping of Dutch pronouns in sentences in which the pronoun had no disambiguating value (e.g. 'Mary was envious of Helen because she never looked so good') than in sentences where it did have a disambiguating value (e.g. 'Mary was envious of Albert because she never looked so good'). We re-examined this ambiguity in Dutch using a task that more closely resembles normal reading and observed only a 9% difference in skipping of the pronoun, bringing this linguistic effect in line with the other findings. |
Paola E. Dussias; Nuria Sagarra The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish - English bilinguals Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 101–116, 2007. @article{Dussias2007,An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish - English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish - English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The ambiguity concerned whether a relative clause (RC) that appeared after a complex noun phrase (NP) was interpreted as modifying the first or the second noun in the complex NP (El policía arrestó a la hermana del criado que estaba enferma desde hacía tiempo). The results showed that whereas the Spanish monolingual speakers and the Spanish - English bilinguals with limited exposure reliably attached the relative clause to the first noun, the Spanish - English bilingual with extensive exposure attached the relative to the second noun. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence parsing most consistent with the findings. © 2007 Cambridge University Press. |
Wouter Duyck; Eva Van Assche; Denis Drieghe; Robert J. Hartsuiker Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 663–679, 2007. @article{Duyck2007,Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. In the present study, the authors investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a 2nd language (L2) lexical decision task were faster to recognize identical and nonidentical cognate words (e.g., banaan-banana) presented in isolation than control words. A second experiment replicated this effect when the same set of cognates was presented as the final words of low-constraint sentences. In a third experiment that used eyetracking, the authors showed that early target reading time measures also yield cognate facilitation but only for identical cognates. These results suggest that a sentence context may influence, but does not nullify, cross-lingual lexical interactions during early visual word recognition by bilinguals. |
Géry D'Ydewalle; Wim De Bruycker Eye movements of children and adults while reading television subtitles Journal Article In: European Psychologist, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 196–205, 2007. @article{DYdewalle2007,Eye movements of children (Grade 5–6) and adults were monitored while they were watching a foreign language movie with either standard (foreign language soundtrack and native language subtitling) or reversed (foreign language subtitles and native language soundtrack) subtitling. With standard subtitling, reading behavior in the subtitle was observed, but there was a difference between one- and two-line subtitles. As two lines of text contain verbal information that cannot easily be inferred from the pictures on the screen, more regular reading occurred; a single text line is often redundant to the information in the picture, and accordingly less reading of one-line text was apparent. Reversed subtitling showed even more irregular reading patterns (e.g., more subtitles skipped, fewer fixations, longer latencies). No substantial age differences emerged, except that children took longer to shift attention to the subtitle at its onset, and showed longer fixations and shorter saccades in the text. On the whole, the results demonstrated the flexibility of the attentional system and its tuning to the several information sources available (image, soundtrack, and subtitles). |
Julie A. Van Dyke Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents during sentence processing Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 407–430, 2007. @article{Dyke2007,Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsis- tent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic interference occur in the earliest online measures in the region where the retrieval of a long-distance dependent occurs. Semantic interference effects occur in later online measures at the end of the sentence. Both effects endure in offline comprehension measures, suggesting that interfering items participate in incorrect interpretations that resist reanalysis. The data are discussed in terms of a cue-based retrieval account of parsing, which reconciles the fact that the parser must violate the grammar in order for these interference effects to occur. Broader implications of this research indicate a need for a precise specification of the interface between the parsing mechanism and the memory system that supports language comprehension. |
Stephani Foraker; Brian McElree The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Active versus passive representations Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 357–383, 2007. @article{Foraker2007,A prominent antecedent facilitates anaphor resolution. Speed-accuracy tradeoff modeling in Experiments 1 and 3 indicated that clefting did not affect the speed of accessing an antecedent representation, which is inconsistent with claims that discourse-focused information is actively maintained in focal attention [e.g., Gundel, J. K. (1999). On different kinds of focus. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt, (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]. Rather, clefting simply increased the likelihood of retrieving the antecedent representation, suggesting that clefting only increases the strength of a representation in memory. Eye fixation measures in Experiment 2 showed that clefting did not affect early bonding of the pronoun and antecedent, but did ease later integration. Collectively, the results indicate that clefting made antecedent representations more distinctive in working memory, hence more available for subsequent discourse operations. Pronoun type also affected resolution processes. Gendered pronouns (he or she) were interpreted more accurately than an ungendered pronoun (it), and in one case, earlier in time-course. We argue that both effects are due to the greater ambiguity of it, as a cue to retrieve the correct antecedent representation. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |