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2023 |
Loïc Daumail; Brock M. Carlson; Blake A. Mitchell; Michele A. Cox; Jacob A. Westerberg; Cortez Johnson; Paul R. Martin; Frank Tong; Alexander Maier; Kacie Dougherty Rapid adaptation of primate LGN neurons to drifting grating stimulation Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 129, no. 6, pp. 1447–1467, 2023. @article{Daumail2023, The visual system needs to dynamically adapt to changing environments. Much is known about the adaptive effects of constant stimulation over prolonged periods. However, there are open questions regarding adaptation to stimuli that are changing over time, interrupted, or repeated. Feature-specific adaptation to repeating stimuli has been shown to occur as early as primary visual cortex (V1), but there is also evidence for more generalized, fatigue-like adaptation that might occur at an earlier stage of processing. Here, we show adaptation in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of awake, fixating monkeys following brief (1 s) exposure to repeated cycles of a 4-Hz drifting grating. We examined the relative change of each neuron's response across successive (repeated) grating cycles. We found that neurons from all cell classes (parvocellular, magnocellular, and koniocellular) showed significant adaptation. However, only magnocellular neurons showed adaptation when responses were averaged to a population response. In contrast to firing rates, response variability was largely unaffected. Finally, adaptation was comparable between monocular and binocular stimulation, suggesting that rapid LGN adaptation is monocular in nature. |
Alexandriya M. X. Emonds; Ramanujan Srinath; Kristina J. Nielsen; Charles E. Connor Object representation in a gravitational reference frame Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 12, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Emonds2023, When your head tilts laterally, as in sports, reaching, and resting, your eyes counterrotate less than 20%, and thus eye images rotate, over a total range of about 180°. Yet, the world appears stable and vision remains normal. We discovered a neural strategy for rotational stability in anterior inferotemporal cortex (IT), the final stage of object vision in primates. We measured object orientation tuning of IT neurons in macaque monkeys tilted +25 and –25° laterally, producing ~40° difference in retinal image orientation. Among IT neurons with consistent object orientation tuning, 63% remained stable with respect to gravity across tilts. Gravitational tuning depended on vestibular/somatosensory but also visual cues, consistent with previous evidence that IT processes scene cues for gravity's orientation. In addition to stability across image rotations, an internal gravitational reference frame is important for physical understanding of a world where object position, posture, structure, shape, movement, and behavior interact critically with gravity. |
Martin R. Vasilev; Michael Lowman; Katherine Bills; Fabrice B. R. Parmentier; Julie A. Kirkby Unexpected sounds inhibit the movement of the eyes during reading and letter scanning Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 60, no. 12, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Vasilev2023, Novel sounds that unexpectedly deviate from a repetitive sound sequence are well known to cause distraction. Such unexpected sounds have also been shown to cause global motor inhibition, suggesting that they trigger a neurophysiological response aimed at stopping ongoing actions. Recently, evidence from eye movements has suggested that unexpected sounds also temporarily pause the movements of the eyes during reading, though it is unclear if this effect is due to inhibition of oculomotor planning or inhibition of language processes. Here, we sought to distinguish between these two possibilities by comparing a natural reading task to a letter scanning task that involves similar oculomotor demands to reading, but no higher level lexical processing. Participants either read sentences for comprehension or scanned letter strings of these sentences for the letter ‘o' in three auditory conditions: silence, standard, and novel sounds. The results showed that novel sounds were equally distracting in both tasks, suggesting that they generally inhibit ongoing oculomotor processes independent of lexical processing. These results suggest that novel sounds may have a global suppressive effect on eye-movement control. |
Aaron Veldre; Erik D. Reichle; Lili Yu; Sally Andrews Understanding the visual constraints on lexical processing: New empirical and simulation results Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 152, no. 3, pp. 693–722, 2023. @article{Veldre2023, Word identification is slower and less accurate outside central vision, but the precise relationship between retinal eccentricity and lexical processing is not well specified by models of either word identification or reading. In a seminal eye-movement study, Rayner and Morrison (1981) found that participants made remarkably accurate naming and lexical-decision responses to words displayed more than 3 degrees from the center of vision—even under conditions requiring fixed gaze. However, the validity of these findings is challenged by a range of methodological limitations. We report a series of gaze-contingent lexical-decision and naming experiments that replicate and extend Rayner and Morrison's study to provide a more accurate estimate of how visual constraints delimit lexical processing. Simulations were conducted using the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2012) to assess the implications for understanding eye-movement control during reading. Augmenting the model's assumptions about the impact of both eccentricity and visual crowding on the rate of lexical processing provided good fits to the observed data without impairing the model's ability to simulate benchmark eye-movement effects. The findings are discussed with a view toward the development of a complete model of reading |
Marie Vernet; Stéphanie Bellocchi; Jérémy Danna; Delphine Massendari; Marianne Jover; Yves Chaix; Stéphanie Ducrot The determinants of saccade targeting strategy in neurodevelopmental disorders: The influence of suboptimal reading experience Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 204, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Vernet2023, Whether eye-movements deficits are causal in reading disorders (RD) or rather a consequence of linguistic processing difficulty experienced by disabled readers has been extensively debated. Since RD are frequently comorbid with the Neurofibromatosis type1 (NF1), children with NF1 were used as a comparison group for children with dyslexia in this study. Eye movements were recorded while 21 dyslexic, 20 NF1, and 20 typically developing children performed an oculomotor lateralized bisection task. In this experiment, we manipulated the type of stimulus - discrete (words and strings of hashes) versus continuous (solid lines) - and the visual field where the stimulus was displayed (left vs right). The results showed that (1) only proficient readers (TD and NF1 without RD) showed fully developed oculomotor mechanisms for efficient reading, with a clear preferred viewing location located to the left of the word's centre in both visual fields, and fine-tuned saccade targeting guided by the between-character space information and (2) NF1 poor readers mirrored the dyslexic eye movement behaviour, with less accuracy and more variability in saccadic programming, no sensitivity to the discreteness of the stimuli, particularly in the left visual field. We concluded that disruption to oculomotor behaviour reflects the fact that many of the processes involved in reading are not yet automatized for children with RD, independently of NF1. This suggests that the differences in saccade targeting strategy between children with and without RD would be secondary consequences of their reduced reading experience. |
Margreet Vogelzang; Nanna Fuhrhop; Tobias Mundhenk; Esther Ruigendijk Influence of capitalisation and presence of an article in noun phrase recognition in German: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 294–311, 2023. @article{Vogelzang2023, Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus be context-dependent, that is, dependent on other cues. Precisely this context dependency is investigated in the current study: Is there an effect of capitalisation on reading and is this affected by the presence of other cues such as a determiner (specifically, an article)?. Methods: We ran an eye-tracking study with 30 German-speaking adults, measuring fixations during sentence reading. Critical NPs either contained correctly capitalised nouns or not and were presented either with or without a determiner. Results: The results show that both the presence of capitalisation on the noun and the presence of a determiner led to faster reading. When no determiner was present to signal the NP, the presence of noun capitalisation aided reading most. Conclusions: From these results, we conclude that the influence of capitalisation is indeed context dependent: Capitalisation aids processing most when no other cue is present. Thus, different cues play a role in NP recognition. Based on these findings, we argue that noun capitalisation should not be studied in isolation. We argue that a better understanding of capitalisation as a reading aid is relevant for teaching reading strategies. |
Katie Von Holzen; Sandrien Ommen; Katherine S. White; Thierry Nazzi The impact of phonological biases on mispronunciation sensitivity and novel accent adaptation Journal Article In: Language Learning and Development, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 303–322, 2023. @article{VonHolzen2023, Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers' lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers are exposed to a novel accent in which these changes occur systematically. The flexibility to deal with different types of variation may not be the same for toddlers learning different first languages, however, as language structure shapes early phonological biases. We examined French-learning 19-month-olds' sensitivity and adaptation to a novel accent that shifted either the standard pronunciation of /a/ from [a] to [ɛ] (Experiment 1) or the standard pronunciation of /p/ from [p] to [t] (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, French-learning toddlers recognized words with /a/ produced as [ɛ], regardless of whether they were previously exposed to an accent that contained this vowel shift or not. In Experiment 2, toddlers did not recognize words with /p/ pronounced as [t] at test unless they were first familiarized with an accent that contained this consonant shift. These findings are consistent with evidence that French-learning toddlers privilege consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Together with previous work, these results demonstrate both differences and similarities in how French- and English-learning children treat variation, in line with their language-specific phonological biases. |
Andi Wang; Ana Pellicer-Sánchez Examining the effectiveness of bilingual subtitles for comprehension: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 882–905, 2023. @article{Wang2023b, The present study examined the relative effectiveness of bilingual subtitles for L2 viewing comprehension, compared to other subtitling types. Learners' allocation of attention to the image and subtitles/captions in different viewing conditions, as well as the relationship between attention and comprehension, were also investigated. A total of 112 Chinese learners of English watched an English documentary clip in one of four conditions (bilingual subtitles, captions, L1 subtitles, no subtitles) while their eye movements were recorded. The results revealed that bilingual subtitles were as beneficial as L1 subtitles for comprehension, which both outscored captions and no subtitles. Participants using bilingual subtitles spent significantly more time processing L1 than L2 lines. L1 lines in bilingual subtitles were processed significantly longer than in L1 subtitles, but L2 lines were processed significantly shorter than in captions. No significant relationship was found between the processing time and comprehension for either the L1 or L2 lines of bilingual subtitles. |
Danhui Wang; Man Zeng; Han Zhao; Lei Gao; Shan Li; Zibei Niu; Xuejun Bai; Xiaolei Gao Effects of syllable boundaries in Tibetan reading Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 314, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Wang2023, Interword spaces exist in the texts of many languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In most cases, interword spaces, as a kind of word boundary information, play an important role in the reading process of readers. Tibetan also uses alphabetic writing, its text has no spaces between words as word boundary markers. Instead, there are intersyllable tshegs (“."), which are superscript dots. Interword spaces play an important role in reading as word boundary information. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate the role of tshegs and what effect replacing tshegs with spaces will have on Tibetan reading. To answer these questions, Experiment 1 was conducted in which 72 Tibetan undergraduates read three-syllable-boundary conditions (normal, spaced, and untsheged). However, in Experiment 1, because we performed the experimental operations of deleting tshegs and replacing tshegs, the spatial information distribution of Tibetan sentences under different operating conditions was different, which may have a certain potential impact on the experimental results. To rule out the underlying confounding factor, in Experiment 2, 58 undergraduates read sentences for both untsheged and alternating-color conditions. Overall, the global and local analyses revealed that tshegs, spaces, and alternating-color markers as syllable boundaries can help readers segment syllables in Tibetan reading. In Tibetan reading, both spaces and tshegs are effective visual syllable segmentation cues, and spaces are more effective visual syllable segmentation cues than tshegs. |
Jingwen Wang; Jinmian Yang; Chris Biemann; Xingshan Li Mechanism of semantic processing of lexicalized and novel compound words: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 49, no. 11, pp. 1812–1822, 2023. @article{Wang2023f, The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information ofcompound words with contexts in the present study. By manipulating the temporary plausibility of the first constituent through varying the preceding verb, we aimed to investigate how readers process semantic information of compound words during normal reading. A significant plausibility effect pattern in the first constituent region was observed for the four-character novel words, but not for the lexicalized compound words and two-character novel compound words. However, for both two-character and four-character novel compound words, a reverse plausibility effect was found in the second constituent region. This was not the case for lexicalized compound words. These results indicate that novel compound words are integrated with the context in a decompositional manner, while lexicalized compound words are integrated holistically. |
Tao Wang; Mingyao Geng; Yue Wang; Min Zhao; Tongquan Zhou; Yiming Yang Chinese EFL learners different from English natives in cataphora resolution: Evidence from eye-tracking studies Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Wang2023i, Previous studies on English natives have shown that encountering an English cataphoric pronoun triggers an active search for its antecedent and this searching process is modulated by syntactic constraints. It remains unknown whether the conclusion is universal to EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, particularly those with distinct L1 like Chinese in linguistic typology. Therefore, this study used two eye-tracking experiments to investigate how Chinese EFL learners resolve English cataphora. The experiments adopted the gender-mismatch paradigm. Experiment 1 investigated whether Chinese EFL learners with different proficiency would adopt the similar processing pattern to English natives and found that gender congruency elicited longer reading times than gender incongruency between the first potential antecedent and the cataphoric pronoun, the effect early observed in high-proficiency relative to low-proficiency learners. Experiment 2 explored whether the cataphora resolution process was modulated by Binding Principle B and revealed that longer first fixation durations and first pass reading times were observed in gender-mismatch than in gender-match conditions no matter the antecedents are binding-accessible or not while longer regression path durations occurred in gender-mismatch than in gender-match conditions only as the antecedents are binding-accessible. Taken together, these results indicate that Chinese EFL learners also adopt an active search mechanism to resolve cataphoric pronouns, yet along a processing path distinct from English natives'. Specifically, Chinese EFL learners predictively link a cataphoric pronoun to the first potential antecedent in the sentence but only a gender-matching antecedent can prompt them to engage in deep processing of the antecedent. Moreover, the processing time varies with the learners' English proficiency. Furthermore, unlike native English speakers' early application of syntactic constraints in their cataphora resolution, Chinese EFL learners try to establish co-reference relations between cataphoric pronouns and antecedents regardless of following or flouting Binding Principle B in early processing stages whereas they exclusively link the cataphoric pronouns to the binding-accessible antecedents in late processing stages. This study adds evidence to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis whereby L2 learners resort to lexical prior to syntactic cues to process sentences in general, which is just opposite to the fashion adopted by the natives. |
Youxi Wang; Suke Duan; Guojie Ma; Wei Shen Segmentation of spoken overlapping ambiguity strings in chinese: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 66, no. 12, pp. 4913–4933, 2023. @article{Wang2023l, PURPOSE: Using the printed-word paradigm with eye tracking, this study conducted three experiments to examine (a) how multiple words in spoken overlapping ambiguity strings (OASs) are activated, (b) how word frequency influences the word segmentation of spoken OASs, and (c) whether the multiple words in spoken OASs are activated competitively or independently. METHOD: In this study, participants listened to a four-character spoken OAS (ABCD) and were presented with a visual display composed of a semantic associate of the "middle word" (BC; Experiments 1 and 2) or the "left word" (AB; Experiment 3) and two distractors. In Experiment 1, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be higher than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 2, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be either higher or lower than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 3, participants listened to either spoken OASs (ABCD) or spoken unambiguous strings (ABEF). RESULTS: In Experiment 1, we observed a significant semantic competition effect; that is, more fixations fell on the semantic competitors than on distractors, suggesting that the semantic information of the middle words in the spoken OASs was activated. In Experiment 2, the semantic competition effect was only observed in the high-frequency condition and was absent in the low-frequency condition. In Experiment 3, the results showed significant semantic competition effects for the left words under both conditions, and the observed effect was similar between the ambiguity condition and the control condition. CONCLUSIONS: These findings show that multiple words in spoken OASs are all activated and the activation level is modulated by word frequency. In addition, multiple words in the spoken OASs may be processed independently during spoken comprehension. |
Zhiyun Wang; Qingfang Zhang Ageing of grammatical advance planning in spoken sentence production: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Psychological Research, no. 2001, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Wang2023m, This study used an image-description paradigm with concurrent eye movement recordings to investigate differences of grammatical advance planning between young and older speakers in spoken sentence production. Participants were asked to produce sentences with simple or complex initial phrase structures (IPS) in Experiment 1 while producing individual words in Experiment 2. Young and older speakers showed comparable speaking latencies in sentence production task, whereas older speakers showed longer latencies than young speakers in word production task. Eye movement data showed that compared with young speakers, older speakers had higher fixation percentage on object 1, lower percentage of gaze shift from object 1 to 2, and lower fixation percentage on object 2 in simple IPS sentences, while they showed similar fixation percentage on object 1, similar percentage of gaze shift from object 1 to 2, and lower fixation percentage on object 2 in complex IPS sentences, indicating a decline of grammatical encoding scope presenting on eye movement patterns. Meanwhile, speech analysis showed that older speakers presented longer utterance duration, slower speech rate, and longer and more frequently occurred pauses in articulation, indicating a decline of speech articulation in older speakers. Thus, our study suggests that older speakers experience an ageing effect in the sentences with complex initial phrases due to limited cognitive resources. |
Yanjun Wei; Yingjuan Tang; Adam John Privitera Functional priority of syntax over semantics in Chinese 'ba' construction: Evidence from eye-tracking during natural reading Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, pp. 1–21, 2023. @article{Wei2023, Studies on sentence processing in inflectional languages support that syntactic structure building functionally precedes semantic processing. Conversely, most EEG studies of Chinese sentence processing do not support the priority of syntax. One possible explanation is that the Chinese language lacks morphological inflections. Another explanation may be that the presentation of separate sentence components on individual screens in EEG studies disrupts syntactic framework construction during sentence reading. The present study investigated this explanation using a self-paced reading experiment mimicking rapid serial visual presentation in EEG studies and an eye-tracking experiment reflecting natural reading. In both experiments, Chinese 'ba' sentences were presented to Chinese young adults in four conditions that differed across the dimensions of syntactic and semantic congruency. Evidence supporting the functional priority of syntax over semantics was limited to only the natural reading context, in which syntactic violations blocked the processing of semantics. Additionally, we observed a later stage of integrating plausible semantics with a failed syntax. Together, our findings extend the functional priority of syntax to the Chinese language and highlight the importance of adopting more ecologically valid methods when investigating sentence reading. |
Kim Lara Weiss; Stefan Hawelka; Florian Hutzler; Sarah Schuster Stronger functional connectivity during reading contextually predictable words in slow readers Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Weiss2023, The effect of word predictability is well-documented in terms of local brain activation, but less is known about the functional connectivity among those regions associated with processing predictable words. Evidence from eye movement studies showed that the effect is much more pronounced in slow than in fast readers, suggesting that speed-impaired readers rely more on sentence context to compensate for their difficulties with visual word recognition. The present study aimed to investigate differences in functional connectivity of fast and slow readers within core regions associated with processing predictable words. We hypothesize a stronger synchronization between higher-order language areas, such as the left middle temporal (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and the left occipito-temporal cortex (OTC) in slow readers. Our results show that slow readers exhibit more functional correlations among these connections; especially between the left IFG and OTC. We interpret our results in terms of the lexical quality hypothesis which postulates a stronger involvement of semantics on orthographic processing in (speed-)impaired readers. |
Ana Werkmann Horvat; Marianna Bolognesi; Nadja Althaus Attention to the source domain of conventional metaphorical expressions: Evidence from an eye tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 215, pp. 131–144, 2023. @article{WerkmannHorvat2023, This study investigates whether the metaphorical status of conventional expressions can be reactivated when elements of the source domain are present in the context. In indirect metaphors the source domain (or literal meaning) is not expressed (e.g., The father cut the budget). The literal meaning of cutting remains latently encoded in the predicate and readers' attention is not required to move from the finance domain to the domain of physical cuts. Such conventional metaphoric expressions are likely to be processed via lexical disambiguation of a polysemous (metaphorical) verb. Using an eye tracking combined with a forced-choice semantic relatedness task we investigated whether by adding linguistic material referring to the source domain (e.g., father cut the budget like grass), we can direct readers' attention to the source domain of the metaphorical predicate and stimulate them to interpret conventional metaphorical expressions by means of cross-domain mapping. The results indicate that in the reactivated condition participants dwell on the object (budget) significantly longer in their second run and when they regress to it after the final region than where there is no source domain activation. These findings may offer new insight into the limited experimental evidence related to the deliberate metaphor theory. |
Alex L. White; Kendrick N. Kay; Kenny A. Tang; Jason D. Yeatman Engaging in word recognition elicits highly specific modulations in visual cortex Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 33, no. 7, pp. 1308–1320, 2023. @article{White2023, A person's cognitive state determines how their brain responds to visual stimuli. The most common such effect is a response enhancement when stimuli are task relevant and attended rather than ignored. In this fMRI study, we report a surprising twist on such attention effects in the visual word form area (VWFA), a region that plays a key role in reading. We presented participants with strings of letters and visually similar shapes, which were either relevant for a specific task (lexical decision or gap localization) or ignored (during a fixation dot color task). In the VWFA, the enhancement of responses to attended stimuli occurred only for letter strings, whereas non-letter shapes evoked smaller responses when attended than when ignored. The enhancement of VWFA activity was accompanied by strengthened functional connectivity with higher-level language regions. These task-dependent modulations of response magnitude and functional connectivity were specific to the VWFA and absent in the rest of visual cortex. We suggest that language regions send targeted excitatory feedback into the VWFA only when the observer is trying to read. This feedback enables the discrimination of familiar and nonsense words and is distinct from generic effects of visual attention. |
Veronica Whitford; Narissa Byers; Gillian A. O'Driscoll; Debra Titone Eye movements and the perceptual span in disordered reading: A comparison of schizophrenia and dyslexia Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Research: Cognition, vol. 34, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Whitford2023, Increasing evidence of a common neurodevelopmental etiology between schizophrenia and developmental dyslexia suggests that neurocognitive functions, such as reading, may be similarly disrupted. However, direct comparisons of reading performance in these disorders have yet to be conducted. To address this gap in the literature, we employed a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to examine sentence-level reading fluency and perceptual span (breadth of parafoveal processing) in adults with schizophrenia (dataset from Whitford et al., 2013) and psychiatrically healthy adults with dyslexia (newly collected dataset). We found that the schizophrenia and dyslexia groups exhibited similar reductions in sentence-level reading fluency (e.g., slower reading rates, more regressions) compared to matched controls. Similar reductions were also found for standardized language/reading and executive functioning measures. However, despite these reductions, the dyslexia group exhibited a larger perceptual span (greater parafoveal processing) than the schizophrenia group, potentially reflecting a disruption in normal foveal-parafoveal processing dynamics. Taken together, our findings suggest that reading and reading-related functions are largely similarly disrupted in schizophrenia and dyslexia, providing additional support for a common neurodevelopmental etiology. |
Bogusława Whyatt; Olga Witczak; Ewa Tomczak-Łukaszewska; Olha Lehka-Paul The proof of the translation process is in the reading of the target text: An eyetracking reception study Journal Article In: Ampersand, vol. 11, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Whyatt2023, This article is an attempt to bridge the divide between translation process research (TPR) which has investigated how translators as specialised bilingual professionals use their expertise to translate texts and translation reception which explores how the texts are read and received by the target language readers. Over the last thirty years, TPR has provided empirically grounded findings to demonstrate the complexity of the cognitive processes in the translator's mind but much less empirical interest has been paid to how translated texts are read and processed by the readers. To redress this imbalance, we hypothesise that the cognitive effort invested in reading a translated text can be taken as proof of how successful the translation process has been. We report on an exploratory study in which two groups of participants read a high-quality and a low-quality translation of the same text while their eye movements were recorded by an eyetracker. We compare the readers' cognitive effort indexed by character-adjusted dwell time, number of runs and re-reading in the second and third run with the translators' character-adjusted cognitive effort invested in producing the target texts. The results show that the relationship between the translation process and the reading experience is not straightforward and depends on the quality of the target text. |
Lijuan Zhang; Zhiwei Liu; Sainan Zhao; Jingxin Wang Semantic plausibility preferentially affects the semantic preview benefit in Chinese reading: Evidence from an eye-movement study Journal Article In: PeerJ, vol. 11, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Zhang2023a, Background: Numerous studies have confirmed that skilled readers can benefit from a semantically related preview word (i.e., semantic preview benefit, SPB), suggesting that readers can extract semantic information from the parafovea to achieve efficient reading. It is still under debate whether the occurrence of this benefit is because of the semantic association between the preview and target words or because of the contextual fit of the preview word in the sentence context. Methods: Two independent factors, preview plausibility (preview plausible/ implausible) and semantic relatedness (semantically related/unrelated), were manipulated, and we further strictly controlled for syntactic plausibility in the present study. Results: The results showed that the first-pass reading times of the target words were significantly shorter in the plausible preview condition than in the implausible preview condition. However, the main effect of semantic relatedness was found only in the gaze duration measure. Discussion: The pattern of results revealed that semantic plausibility affects the semantic preview benefit preferentially in Chinese reading, supporting the contextual fit account. Our findings have implications for a better understanding of parafoveal processing and provide empirical support for the eye-movement control model. |
Songzhu Zhang In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 2919–2935, 2023. @article{Zhang2023d, This study is based on an experimental method of eye-tracking to investigate how translators perceive and understand translated literary texts and how different stylistic features influence their perception. This methodology allowed us to observe which parts of the text translators focused on the most, providing valuable data on their reading patterns and cognitive processes. Among English-Chinese translators, 95 out of 120 participants (79%) showed a tendency to prioritize faithfully conveying the source text's meaning over crafting a target text that aligns with Chinese stylistically. In the specific context of Chinese-English translation out of the 120 instances examined, the translators exhibited a reduced fixation duration on words in the source language, accounting for 34 instances (28%). This suggests a greater concern for preserving the source text's meaning rather than adapting it to the target culture. This research can assist translators and linguists in translating the stylistic features of English and Chinese literary texts more effectively. Future studies can explore other language stylistic features that may impact translation and compare translation styles across various literary genres and language pairs. |
Bin Zhao; Gaoyan Zhang; Longbiao Wang; Jianwu Dang Multimodal evidence for predictive coding in sentence oral reading Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 33, no. 13, pp. 8620–8632, 2023. @article{Zhao2023, Sentence oral reading requires not only a coordinated effort in the visual, articulatory, and cognitive processes but also supposes a top-down influence from linguistic knowledge onto the visual-motor behavior. Despite a gradual recognition of a predictive coding effect in this process, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive demonstration regarding the time-varying brain dynamics that underlines the oral reading strategy. To address this, our study used a multimodal approach, combining real-time recording of electroencephalography, eye movements, and speech, with a comprehensive examination of regional, inter-regional, sub-network, and whole-brain responses. Our study identified the top-down predictive effect with a phrase-grouping phenomenon in the fixation interval and eye-voice span. This effect was associated with the delta and theta band synchronization in the prefrontal, anterior temporal, and inferior frontal lobes. We also observed early activation of the cognitive control network and its recurrent interactions with the visual-motor networks structurally at the phrase rate. Finally, our study emphasizes the importance of cross-frequency coupling as a promising neural realization of hierarchical sentence structuring and calls for further investigation. |
Zitong Zhao; Jinfeng Ding; Jiayu Wang; Yiya Chen; Xiaoqing Li The flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in listening comprehension: Evidence from the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, pp. 1–24, 2023. @article{Zhao2023a, Using the visual world paradigm with printed words, this study investigated the flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in real-time speech processing. Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese listened to spoken sentences containing highly predictable target words and viewed a visual array with a critical word and a distractor word on the screen. The critical word was manipulated in four ways: a highly predictable target word, a homophone competitor, a tonal competitor, or an unrelated word. Participants showed a preference for fixating on the homophone competitors before hearing the highly predictable target word. The predicted phonological information waned shortly but was re-activated later around the acoustic onset of the target word. Importantly, this homophone bias was observed only when participants were completing a 'pronunciation judgement' task, but not when they were completing a 'word judgement' task. No effect was found for the tonal competitors. The task modulation effect, combined with the temporal pattern of phonological pre-activation, indicates that phonological prediction can be flexibly generated by top-down mechanisms. The lack of tonal competitor effect suggests that phonological features such as lexical tone are not independently predicted for anticipatory speech processing. |
Wei Zhou; Yi Fan; Yulin Chang; Wenjuan Liu; Jiuju Wang; Yufeng Wang Pathogenesis of comorbid adhd and chinese developmental dyslexia: Evidence from eye-movement tracking and rapid automatized naming Journal Article In: Journal of Attention Disorders, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 294–306, 2023. @article{Zhou2023f, Background: ADHD and Chinese developmental dyslexia (DD) have a very high comorbidity rate; however, which cognitive deficits characterize the comorbidity and when they occur during cognitive processing are still under debate. Methods: Rapid automatic naming (RAN) tasks with eye-movement tracking were conducted with 75 children who were typically developing, had comorbid ADHD and DD, had only ADHD, and had only DD. Results: The clinical groups had longer first fixation durations than the control for RAN digits. Temporal eye-movement measures, such as gaze duration and total reading time, were found to vary between the comorbidity and ADHD groups. Spatial eye-movement measures, such as regression probability and incoming saccade amplitude, differed between the comorbidity and DD groups. Conclusions: These results indicate that investigation with eye-movement measures combined with RAN tasks can strengthen the understanding of the pathogenesis of comorbid ADHD and DD. |
Wei Zhou; Sile Wang; Ming Yan Fixation-related fMRI analysis reveals the neural basis of natural reading of unspaced and spaced Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 33, no. 19, pp. 10401–10410, 2023. @article{Zhou2023b, Although there are many eye-movement studies focusing on natural sentence reading and functional magnetic resonance imaging research on reading with serial visual presentation paradigms, there is a scarcity of investigations into the neural mechanism of natural sentence reading. The present study recruited 33 adults to read unspaced and spaced Chinese sentences with the eye tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging data recorded simultaneously. By using fixation-related functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis, this study showed that natural reading of Chinese sentences produced activations in ventral visual, dorsal attention, and semantic brain regions, which were modulated by the properties of words such as word length and word frequency. The multivoxel pattern analysis showed that the activity pattern in the left middle temporal gyrus could significantly predict the visual layout categories (i.e. unspaced vs. spaced conditions). Dynamic causal modeling analysis showed that there were bidirectional brain connections between the left middle temporal gyrus and the left inferior occipital cortex in the unspaced Chinese sentence reading but not in the spaced reading. These results provide a neural mechanism for the natural reading of Chinese sentences from the perspective of word segmentation. |
Anastasia A. Ziubanova; Anna K. Laurinavichyute; Olga Parshina Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers? Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Ziubanova2023, Introduction: Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors – early access to sign and/or spoken language – on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers. Methods: In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested. Results: Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found. Discussion: Our results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children. |
Blake A. Mitchell; Brock M. Carlson; Jacob A. Westerberg; Michele A. Cox; Alexander Maier A role for ocular dominance in binocular integration Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 33, no. 18, pp. 3884–3895, 2023. @article{Mitchell2023, Neurons in the primate primary visual cortex (V1) combine left- and right-eye information to form a binocular output. Controversy surrounds whether ocular dominance, the preference of these neurons for one eye over the other, is functionally relevant. Here, we demonstrate that ocular dominance impacts gain control during binocular combination. We recorded V1 spiking activity while monkeys passively viewed grating stimuli. Gratings were either presented to one eye (monocular), both eyes with the same contrasts (binocular balanced), or both eyes with different contrasts (binocular imbalanced). We found that contrast placed in a neuron's dominant eye was weighted more strongly than contrast placed in a neuron's non-dominant eye. This asymmetry covaried with neurons' ocular dominance. We then tested whether accounting for ocular dominance within divisive normalization improves the fit to neural data. We found that ocular dominance significantly improved model performance, with interocular normalization providing the best fits. These findings suggest that V1 ocular dominance is relevant for response normalization during binocular stimulation. |
Naomi N. Odean; Mehdi Sanayei; Michael N. Shadlen Transient oscillations of neural firing rate associated with routing of evidence in a perceptual decision Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 37, pp. 6369–6383, 2023. @article{Odean2023, To form a perceptual decision, the brain must acquire samples of evidence from the environment and incorporate them in computations that mediate choice behavior. While much is known about the neural circuits that process sensory information and those that form decisions, less is known about the mechanisms that establish the functional linkage between them. We trained monkeys of both sexes to make difficult decisions about the net direction of visual motion under conditions that required trial-by-trial control of functional connectivity. In one condition, the motion appeared at different locations on different trials. In the other, two motion patches appeared, only one of which was informative. Neurons in the parietal cortex produced brief oscillations in their firing rate at the time routing was established: upon onset of the motion display when its location was unpredictable across trials, and upon onset of an attention cue that indicated in which of two locations an informative patch of dots would appear. The oscillation was absent when the stimulus location was fixed across trials. We interpret the oscillation as a manifestation of the mechanism that establishes the source and destination of flexibly routed information, but not the transmission of the information per se. |
Emily E. Oor; Terrence R. Stanford; Emilio Salinas Stimulus salience conflicts and colludes with endogenous goals during urgent choices Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Oor2023, Selecting where to look next depends on both the salience of objects and current goals (what we are looking for), but discerning their relative contributions over the time frame of typical visuomotor decisions (200–250 ms) has been difficult. Here we investigate this problem using an urgent choice task with which the two contributions can be dissociated and tracked moment by moment. Behavioral data from three monkeys corresponded with model-based predictions: when salience favored the target, perceptual performance evolved rapidly and steadily toward an asymptotic level; when salience favored the distracter, many rapid errors were produced and the rise in performance took more time—effects analogous to oculomotor and attentional capture. The results show that salience has a brief (∼50 ms) but inexorable impact that leads to exogenous, involuntary capture, and this can either help or hinder performance, depending on the alignment between salience and ongoing internal goals. |
John J. Orczyk; Annamaria Barczak; Monica N. O'Connell; Yoshinao Kajikawa Saccadic inhibition during free viewing in macaque monkeys Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 129, no. 2, pp. 356–367, 2023. @article{Orczyk2023, We investigated the time courses of saccade rate following visual stimuli during three conditions of free viewing in macaque monkeys. Under all conditions, saccade rate decreased transiently after the onset of visual stimuli. These results suggest that saccadic inhibition occurs during free viewing.Through the process of saccadic inhibition, visual events briefly suppress eye movements including microsaccades. In humans, saccadic inhibition has been shown to occur in response to the presentation of parafoveal or peripheral visual distractors during fixation and target-directed saccades and to physical changes of behaviorally relevant visual objects. In monkeys performing tasks that controlled eye movements, saccadic inhibition of microsaccades and target-directed saccades has been shown. Using eye data from three previously published studies, we investigated how saccade rate changed while monkeys were presented with visual stimuli under conditions with loose or no viewing demands. In two conditions, animals passively sat while an LED lamp flashed or screen-wide images appeared in front of them. In the third condition, images were repeated semiperiodically while animals had to maintain their gaze within a wide rectangular area and detect oddballs. Despite animals not being required to maintain fixation or make saccades to particular targets, the onset of visual events led to a temporary reduction of saccade rate across all conditions. Interestingly, saccadic inhibition was found at image offsets as well. These results show that saccadic inhibition occurs in monkeys during free viewing.NEW & NOTEWORTHY We investigated the time courses of saccade rate following visual stimuli during three conditions of free viewing in macaque monkeys. Under all conditions, saccade rate decreased transiently after the onset of visual stimuli. These results suggest that saccadic inhibition occurs during free viewing. |
Nicolas Orlando Dessaints; Laurent Goffart Tracking a moving visual target in the rhesus monkey: Influence of the occurrence frequency of the target path Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 130, no. 6, pp. 1425–1443, 2023. @article{OrlandoDessaints2023, Following previous studies documenting the ability to generate anticipatory responses, we tested whether the repeated motion of a visual target along the same path affected its oculomotor tracking. In six rhesus monkeys, we evaluated how the frequency of a target path influenced the onset, accuracy, and velocity of eye movements. Three hundred milliseconds after its extinction, a central target reappeared and immediately moved toward the periphery in four possible (oblique) directions and at a constant speed (20°/s or 40°/s). During each daily session, the frequency of one motion direction was either uncertain (25% of trials) or certain (100% of trials). Our results show no reduction of saccade latency between the two sessions. No express saccades were observed in either session. A slow eye movement started after target onset (presaccadic glissade) and its velocity was larger during the "certain" sessions only with the 40°/s target. No anticipatory eye movement was observed. Longer intersaccadic intervals were found during the "certain" sessions but the postsaccadic pursuit velocity exhibited no change. No correlation was found between the accuracy and precision of saccades (interceptive or catch-up) and the postsaccadic pursuit velocity. Repeatedly tracking a target that moves always along the same path does not favor the generation of anticipatory eye movements, saccadic or slow. Their occurrence is not spontaneous but seems to require preliminary training. Finally, for both sessions, the lack of correlation between the saccade-related and pursuit-related kinematic parameters is consistent with separate control of saccadic and slow eye movements.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Following previous studies documenting anticipatory movements, we investigated how the frequency of occurrence of a target path influenced the generation of tracking eye movements. When present, the effects were small. The limited performance that we found suggests that anticipatory responses require preliminary training, in which case, they should not be considered as a behavioral marker of the primates' ability to extrapolate but the outcome of learning and remembering past experience. |
Michael Ortiz-Rios; Beshoy Agayby; Fabien Balezeau; Marcus Haag; Samy Rima; Jaime Cadena-Valencia; Michael C. Schmid Optogenetic stimulation of the primary visual cortex drives activity in the visual association cortex Journal Article In: Current Research in Neurobiology, vol. 4, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{OrtizRios2023, Developing optogenetic methods for research in non-human primates (NHP) is important for translational neuroscience and for delineating brain function with unprecedented specificity. Here we assess, in macaque monkeys, the selectivity by which optogenetic stimulation of the primary visual cortex (V1) drives the local laminar and widespread cortical connectivity related to visual perception. Towards this end, we transfected neurons with light-sensitive channelrhodopsin in dorsal V1. fMRI revealed that optogenetic stimulation of V1 using blue light at 40 Hz increased functional activity in the visual association cortex, including areas V2/V3, V4, motion-sensitive area MT and frontal eye fields, although nonspecific heating and eye movement contributions to this effect could not be ruled out. Neurophysiology and immunohistochemistry analyses confirmed optogenetic modulation of spiking activity and opsin expression with the strongest expression in layer 4-B in V1. Stimulating this pathway during a perceptual decision task effectively elicited a phosphene percept in the receptive field of the stimulated neurons in one monkey. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the great potential of optogenetic methods to drive the large-scale cortical circuits of the primate brain with high functional and spatial specificity. |
Mojtaba Abbaszadeh; Armin Panjehpour; Seyyed Mohammad Amin Alemohammad; Ali Ghavampour; Ali Ghazizadeh Prefrontal cortex encodes value pop-out in visual search Journal Article In: iScience, vol. 26, no. 9, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Abbaszadeh2023, Recent evidence demonstrates that long-term object value association can enhance visual search efficiency, a phenomenon known as value pop-out. However, the neural mechanism underlying this effect is not fully understood. Given the known role of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) in visual search and value memory, we recorded its single-unit activity (n = 526) in two macaque monkeys while they engaged in the value-driven search. Monkeys had to determine whether a high-value target was present within a variable number of low-value objects. Differential neural firing, as well as gamma-band power, indicated the presence of a target within ∼150ms of display onset. Notably, this differential activity was negatively correlated with search time and had reduced set-size dependence during efficient search. On the other hand, neural firing and its variability were higher in inefficient search. These findings implicate vlPFC in rapid detection of valuable targets which would be a crucial skill in competitive environments. |
Ariana R. Andrei; Alan E. Akil; Natasha Kharas; Robert Rosenbaum; Krešimir Josić; Valentin Dragoi Rapid compensatory plasticity revealed by dynamic correlated activity in monkeys in vivo Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 26, no. 11, pp. 1960–1969, 2023. @article{Andrei2023, To produce adaptive behavior, neural networks must balance between plasticity and stability. Computational work has demonstrated that network stability requires plasticity mechanisms to be counterbalanced by rapid compensatory processes. However, such processes have yet to be experimentally observed. Here we demonstrate that repeated optogenetic activation of excitatory neurons in monkey visual cortex (area V1) induces a population-wide dynamic reduction in the strength of neuronal interactions over the timescale of minutes during the awake state, but not during rest. This new form of rapid plasticity was observed only in the correlation structure, with firing rates remaining stable across trials. A computational network model operating in the balanced regime confirmed experimental findings and revealed that inhibitory plasticity is responsible for the decrease in correlated activity in response to repeated light stimulation. These results provide the first experimental evidence for rapid homeostatic plasticity that primarily operates during wakefulness, which stabilizes neuronal interactions during strong network co-activation. |
Rosa Lafer-Sousa; Karen Wang; Reza Azadi; Emily Lopez; Simon Bohn; Arash Afraz Behavioral detectability of optogenetic stimulation of inferior temporal cortex varies with the size of concurrently viewed objects Journal Article In: Current Research in Neurobiology, vol. 4, pp. 1–7, 2023. @article{LaferSousa2023, We have previously demonstrated that macaque monkeys can behaviorally detect a subtle optogenetic impulse delivered to their inferior temporal (IT) cortex. We have also shown that the ability to detect the cortical stimulation impulse varies depending on some characteristics of the visual images viewed at the time of brain stimulation, revealing the visual nature of the perceptual events induced by stimulation of the IT cortex. Here we systematically studied the effect of the size of viewed objects on behavioral detectability of optogenetic stimulation of the central IT cortex. Surprisingly, we found that behavioral detection of the same optogenetic impulse highly varies with the size of the viewed object images. Reduction of the object size in four steps from 8 to 1 degree of visual angle significantly decreased detection performance. These results show that identical stimulation impulses delivered to the same neural population induce variable perceptual events depending on the mere size of the objects viewed at the time of brain stimulation. |
Aaron J. Levi; Yuan Zhao; Il Memming Park; Alexander C. Huk Sensory and choice responses in MT distinct from motion encoding Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 12, pp. 2090–2103, 2023. @article{Levi2023, The macaque middle temporal (MT) area is well known for its visual motion selectivity and relevance to motion perception, but the possibility of it also reflecting higher-level cognitive functions has largely been ignored. We tested for effects of task performance distinct from sensory encoding by manipulating subjects' temporal evidence-weighting strategy during a direction discrimination task while performing electrophysiological recordings from groups of MT neurons in rhesus macaques (one male, one female). This revealed multiple components of MT responses that were, surprisingly, not interpretable as behaviorally relevant modulations of motion encoding, or as bottom-up consequences of the readout of motion direction from MT. The time-varying motion-driven responses of MT were strongly affected by our strategic manipulation—but with time courses opposite the subjects' temporal weighting strategies. Furthermore, large choice-correlated signals were represented in population activity distinct from its motion responses, with multiple phases that lagged psychophysical readout and even continued after the stimulus (but which preceded motor responses). In summary, a novel experimental manipulation of strategy allowed us to control the time course of readout to challenge the correlation between sensory responses and choices, and population-level analyses of simultaneously recorded ensembles allowed us to identify strong signals that were so distinct from direction encoding that conventional, single-neuron-centric analyses could not have revealed or properly characterized them. Together, these approaches revealed multiple cognitive contributions to MT responses that are task related but not functionally relevant to encoding or decoding of motion for psychophysical direction discrimination, providing a new perspective on the assumed status of MT as a simple sensory area. |
John P. Liska; Declan P. Rowley; Trevor T. K. Nguyen; Jens-Oliver Muthmann; Daniel A. Butts; Jacob L. Yates; Alexander C. Huk Running modulates primate and rodent visual cortex differently Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 12, no. 415, pp. 1–30, 2023. @article{Liska2023, When mice run, activity in their primary visual cortex (V1) is strongly modulated. This observation has altered conception of a brain region assumed to be a passive image processor. Extensive work has followed to dissect the circuits and functions of running-correlated modulation. However, it remains unclear whether visual processing in primates might similarly change during locomotion. We measured V1 activity in marmosets while they viewed stimuli on a treadmill. In contrast to mouse V1, marmoset V1 was slightly but reliably suppressed during running. Population-level analyses revealed trial-to-trial fluctuations of shared gain across V1 in both species, but these gain modulations were smaller and more often negatively correlated with running in marmosets. Thus, population-scale gain fluctuations of V1 reflect a common feature of mammalian visual cortical function, but important quantitative differences yield distinct consequences for the relation between vision and action in primates versus rodents. |
Xin He Liu; Lu Gan; Zhi Ting Zhang; Pan Ke Yu; Ji Dai Probing the processing of facial expressions in monkeys via time perception and eye tracking Journal Article In: Zoological Research, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 882–893, 2023. @article{Liu2023g, Accurately recognizing facial expressions is essential for effective social interactions. Non-human primates (NHPs) are widely used in the study of the neural mechanisms underpinning facial expression processing, yet it remains unclear how well monkeys can recognize the facial expressions of other species such as humans. In this study, we systematically investigated how monkeys process the facial expressions of conspecifics and humans using eye-tracking technology and sophisticated behavioral tasks, namely the temporal discrimination task (TDT) and face scan task (FST). We found that monkeys showed prolonged subjective time perception in response to Negative facial expressions in monkeys while showing longer reaction time to Negative facial expressions in humans. Monkey faces also reliably induced divergent pupil contraction in response to different expressions, while human faces and scrambled monkey faces did not. Furthermore, viewing patterns in the FST indicated that monkeys only showed bias toward emotional expressions upon observing monkey faces. Finally, masking the eye region marginally decreased the viewing duration for monkey faces but not for human faces. By probing facial expression processing in monkeys, our study demonstrates that monkeys are more sensitive to the facial expressions of conspecifics than those of humans, thus shedding new light on inter-species communication through facial expressions between NHPs and humans. |
Shira M. Lupkin; Vincent B. McGinty Monkeys exhibit human-like gaze biases in economic decisions Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 12, pp. 1–27, 2023. @article{Lupkin2023, In economic decision-making individuals choose between items based on their perceived value. For both humans and nonhuman primates, these decisions are often carried out while shifting gaze between the available options. Recent studies in humans suggest that these shifts in gaze actively influence choice, manifesting as a bias in favor of the items that are viewed first, viewed last, or viewed for the overall longest duration in a given trial. This suggests a mechanism that links gaze behavior to the neural computations underlying value-based choices. In order to identify this mechanism, it is first necessary to develop and validate a suitable animal model of this behavior. To this end, we have created a novel value-based choice task for macaque monkeys that captures the essential features of the human paradigms in which gaze biases have been observed. Using this task, we identified gaze biases in the monkeys that were both qualitatively and quantita-tively similar to those in humans. In addition, the monkeys' gaze biases were well-explained using a sequential sampling model framework previously used to describe gaze biases in humans—the first time this framework has been used to assess value-based decision mechanisms in nonhuman primates. Together, these findings suggest a common mechanism that can explain gaze-related choice biases across species, and open the way for mechanistic studies to identify the neural origins of this behavior. |
Samuel Madariaga; Cecilia Babul; José Ignacio Egaña; Iván Rubio-Venegas; Gamze Güney; Miguel Concha-Miranda; Pedro E. Maldonado; Christ Devia In: MethodsX, vol. 10, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Madariaga2023, In this work we present SaFiDe, a deterministic method to detect eye movements (saccades and fixations) from eye-trace data. We developed this method for human and nonhuman primate data from video- and coil-recorded eye traces and further applied the algorithm to eye traces computed from electrooculograms. All the data analyzed were from free-exploration paradigms, where the main challenge was to detect periods of saccades and fixations that were uncued by the task. The method uses velocity and acceleration thresholds, calculated from the eye trace, to detect saccade and fixation periods. We show that our fully deterministic method detects saccades and fixations from eye traces during free visual exploration. The algorithm was implemented in MATLAB, and the code is publicly available on a GitHub repository. • The algorithm presented is entirely deterministic, simplifying the comparison between subjects and tasks. • Thus far, the algorithm presented can operate over video-based eye tracker data, human electrooculogram records, or monkey scleral eye coil data. |
Kazutaka Maeda; Ken Inoue; Masahiko Takada; Okihide Hikosaka Environmental context-dependent activation of dopamine neurons via putative amygdala-nigra pathway in macaques Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Maeda2023, Seeking out good and avoiding bad objects is critical for survival. In practice, objects are rarely good every time or everywhere, but only at the right time or place. Whereas the basal ganglia (BG) are known to mediate goal-directed behavior, for example, saccades to rewarding objects, it remains unclear how such simple behaviors are rendered contingent on higher-order factors, including environmental context. Here we show that amygdala neurons are sensitive to environments and may regulate putative dopamine (DA) neurons via an inhibitory projection to the substantia nigra (SN). In male macaques, we combined optogenetics with multi-channel recording to demonstrate that rewarding environments induce tonic firing changes in DA neurons as well as phasic responses to rewarding events. These responses may be mediated by disinhibition via a GABAergic projection onto DA neurons, which in turn is suppressed by an inhibitory projection from the amygdala. Thus, the amygdala may provide an additional source of learning to BG circuits, namely contingencies imposed by the environment. |
Vincent B. McGinty; Shira M. Lupkin Behavioral read-out from population value signals in primate orbitofrontal cortex Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 26, no. 12, pp. 2203–2212, 2023. @article{McGinty2023, The primate orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has long been recognized for its role in value-based decisions; however, the exact mechanism linking value representations in the OFC to decision outcomes has remained elusive. Here, to address this question, we show, in non-human primates, that trial-wise variability in choices can be explained by variability in value signals decoded from many simultaneously recorded OFC neurons. Mechanistically, this relationship is consistent with the projection of activity within a low-dimensional value-encoding subspace onto a potentially higher-dimensional, behaviorally potent output subspace. Identifying this neural–behavioral link answers longstanding questions about the role of the OFC in economic decision-making and suggests population-level read-out mechanisms for the OFC similar to those recently identified in sensory and motor cortex. |
JeongJun Park; Seolmin Kim; Hyung Goo R. Kim; Joonyeol Lee Prior expectation enhances sensorimotor behavior by modulating population tuning and subspace activity in sensory cortex Journal Article In: Science Advances, vol. 9, no. 27, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Park2023, Prior knowledge facilitates our perception and goal-directed behaviors, particularly when sensory input is lacking or noisy. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the improvement in sensorimotor behavior by prior expectations remain unknown. In this study, we examine the neural activity in the middle temporal (MT) area of visual cortex while monkeys perform a smooth pursuit eye movement task with prior expectation of the visual target's motion direction. Prior expectations discriminately reduce the MT neural responses depending on their preferred directions, when the sensory evidence is weak. This response reduction effectively sharpens neural population direction tuning. Simulations with a realistic MT population demonstrate that sharpening the tuning can explain the biases and variabilities in smooth pursuit, suggesting that neural computations in the sensory area alone can underpin the integration of prior knowledge and sensory evidence. State-space analysis further supports this by revealing neural signals of prior expectations in the MT population activity that correlate with behavioral changes. |
Aashay M. Patel; Katsuhisa Kawaguchi; Lenka Seillier; Hendrikje Nienborg In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 57, no. 8, pp. 1368–1382, 2023. @article{Patel2023, Sensory processing is influenced by neuromodulators such as serotonin, thought to relay behavioural state. Recent work has shown that the modulatory effect of serotonin itself differs with the animal's behavioural state. In primates, including humans, the serotonin system is anatomically important in the primary visual cortex (V1). We previously reported that in awake fixating macaques, serotonin reduces the spiking activity by decreasing response gain in V1. But the effect of serotonin on the local network is unknown. Here, we simultaneously recorded single-unit activity and local field potentials (LFPs) while iontophoretically applying serotonin in V1 of alert monkeys fixating on a video screen for juice rewards. The reduction in spiking response we observed previously is the opposite of the known increase of spiking activity with spatial attention. Conversely, in the local network (LFP), the application of serotonin resulted in changes mirroring the local network effects of previous reports in macaques directing spatial attention to the receptive field. It reduced the LFP power and the spike–field coherence, and the LFP became less predictive of spiking activity, consistent with reduced functional connectivity. We speculate that together, these effects may reflect the sensory side of a serotonergic contribution to quiet vigilance: The lower gain reduces the salience of stimuli to suppress an orienting reflex to novel stimuli, whereas at the network level, visual processing is in a state comparable to that of spatial attention. |
Jagruti J. Pattadkal; Carrie Barr; Nicholas J. Priebe Ocular following eye movements in marmosets follow complex motion trajectories Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Pattadkal2023, Ocular following eye movements help stabilize images on the retina and offer a window to study motion inter-pretation by visual circuits. We use these ocular following eye movements to study motion integration behavior in the marmosets. We characterize ocular following responses in the marmosets using different moving stimuli such as dot patterns, gratings, and plaids. Marmosets track motion along different directions and exhibit spatial frequency and speed sensitivity, which closely matches the sensitivity reported in neurons from their mo-tion-selective area MT. Marmosets are also able to track the integrated motion of plaids, with tracking direction consistent with an intersection of constraints model of motion integration. Marmoset ocular following responses are similar to responses in macaques and humans with certain species-specific differences in peak sensitivities. Such motion-sensitive eye movement behavior in combination with direct access to cortical circuitry makes the marmoset model well suited to study the neural basis of motion integration. |
Philip T. Putnam; Cheng Chi J. Chu; Nicholas A. Fagan; Olga Dal Monte; Steve W. C. Chang Dissociation of vicarious and experienced rewards by coupling frequency within the same neural pathway Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 111, no. 16, pp. 2513–2522, 2023. @article{Putnam2023, Vicarious reward, essential to social learning and decision making, is theorized to engage select brain regions similarly to experienced reward to generate a shared experience. However, it is just as important for neural systems to also differentiate vicarious from experienced rewards for social interaction. Here, we investigated the neuronal interaction between the primate anterior cingulate cortex gyrus (ACCg) and the basolateral amygdala (BLA) when social choices made by monkeys led to either vicarious or experienced reward. Coherence between ACCg spikes and BLA local field potential (LFP) selectively increased in gamma frequencies for vicarious reward, whereas it selectively increased in alpha/beta frequencies for experienced reward. These respectively enhanced couplings for vicarious and experienced rewards were uniquely observed following voluntary choices. Moreover, reward outcomes had consistently strong directional influences from ACCg to BLA. Our findings support a mechanism of vicarious reward where social agency is tagged by interareal coordination frequency within the same shared pathway. |
Rajani Raman; Anna Bognár; Ghazaleh Ghamkhari Nejad; Nick Taubert; Martin Giese; Rufin Vogels Bodies in motion: Unraveling the distinct roles of motion and shape in dynamic body responses in the temporal cortex Journal Article In: Cell Reports, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Raman2023, The temporal cortex represents social stimuli, including bodies. We examine and compare the contributions of dynamic and static features to the single-unit responses to moving monkey bodies in and between a patch in the anterior dorsal bank of the superior temporal sulcus (dorsal patch [DP]) and patches in the anterior inferotemporal cortex (ventral patch [VP]), using fMRI guidance in macaques. The response to dynamics varies within both regions, being higher in DP. The dynamic body selectivity of VP neurons correlates with static features derived from convolutional neural networks and motion. DP neurons' dynamic body selectivity is not predicted by static features but is dominated by motion. Whereas these data support the dominance of motion in the newly proposed “dynamic social perception” stream, they challenge the traditional view that distinguishes DP and VP processing in terms of motion versus static features, underscoring the role of inferotemporal neurons in representing body dynamics. |
Thomas R. Reppert; Richard P. Heitz; Jeffrey D. Schall Neural mechanisms for executive control of speed-accuracy trade-off Journal Article In: Cell Reports, vol. 42, no. 11, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Reppert2023, The medial frontal cortex (MFC) plays an important but disputed role in speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT). In samples of neural spiking in the supplementary eye field (SEF) in the MFC simultaneous with the visuomotor frontal eye field and superior colliculus in macaques performing a visual search with instructed SAT, during accuracy emphasis, most SEF neurons discharge less from before stimulus presentation until response generation. Discharge rates adjust immediately and simultaneously across structures upon SAT cue changes. SEF neurons signal choice errors with stronger and earlier activity during accuracy emphasis. Other neurons signal timing errors, covarying with adjusting response time. Spike correlations between neurons in the SEF and visuomotor areas did not appear, disappear, or change sign across SAT conditions or trial outcomes. These results clarify findings with noninvasive measures, complement previous neurophysiological findings, and endorse the role of the MFC as a critic for the actor instantiated in visuomotor structures. |
Chia-Yu Liu; Chao-Jung Wu Effects of working memory and relevant knowledge on reading texts and infographics Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 36, no. 162, pp. 2319–2343, 2023. @article{Liu2023i, Infographics are a new type of reading material comprising textual and visual information that has been used worldwide. Nonetheless, there has been limited research investigating people's infographic-reading performance and the characteristics of superior readers. This study adopted Chinese texts and infographics as materials and employed eye-tracking technology to assess how working memory and relevant knowledge affected 137 college students' reading comprehension, as indicated by reading accuracy (ACC), and reading efficiency, which in turn was indicated by reading time (RT) and total fixation duration (TFD). For texts, verbal working memory (VWM) exhibited no effects on individuals' reading performance; visuospatial working memory (VSWM) exerted positive effects on both ACC and TFD, and participants with higher knowledge demonstrated better ACC. For infographics, higher-VWM participants showed greater ACC, and higher-VSWM participants displayed a longer RT and TFD, though the effect of knowledge was limited. Moreover, a significant interaction effect of VWM and relevant knowledge on the TFD of infographics was observed, indicating that individuals' prior knowledge or experience might structure schemas in an infographic and then act with VWM to accelerate reading speed. This study improves our understanding of how working memory and relevant knowledge impact the processing of materials with different synthesized levels, and its implications for instruction and research are discussed. |
Priscila López-Beltrán Heritage speakers' processing of the Spanish subjunctive: A pupillometric study Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, pp. 1–47, 2023. @article{LopezBeltran2023, We investigated linguistic knowledge of subjunctive mood in heritage speakers of Spanish who live in a long-standing English-Spanish bilingual community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Three experiments examine the constraints on subjunctive selection. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 employed pupillometry to investigate heritage speakers' online sensitivity to the presence of the subjunctive with non-variable governors (Lexical conditioning) and with negated governors (Structural conditioning). Experiment 3 employed an elicited production task to examine production of subjunctive in the same contexts. The findings of the heritage group were compared to those of a group ofSpanish-dominant Mexican bilinguals. Results showed that in comprehension and production, heritage speakers were as sensitive as the Spanish-dominant bilinguals to the lexical and structural factors that condition mood selection. In comprehension, the two groups experienced an increased pupillary dilation in conditions where the indicative was used but the subjunctive was expected. In addition, high- frequency governors and irregular subordinate verbs boosted participants' sensitivity to the presence of the subjunctive. In production, there were no significant differences between heritage speakers and Spanish-dominant bilinguals when producing the subjunctive with non-variable and negated governors. |
Stephanie N. Lovich; Cynthia D. King; David L. K. Murphy; Hossein Abbasi; Patrick Bruns; Christopher A. Shera; Jennifer M. Groh Conserved features of eye movement related eardrum oscillations (EMREOs) across humans and monkeys Journal Article In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 378, no. 1886, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Lovich2023, Auditory and visual information involve different coordinate systems, with auditory spatial cues anchored to the head and visual spatial cues anchored to the eyes. Information about eye movements is therefore critical for reconciling visual and auditory spatial signals. The recent discovery of eye movement-related eardrum oscillations (EMREOs) suggests that this process could begin as early as the auditory periphery. How this reconciliation might happen remains poorly understood. Because humans and monkeys both have mobile eyes and therefore both must perform this shift of reference frames, comparison of the EMREO across species can provide insights to shared and therefore important parameters of the signal. Here we show that rhesus monkeys, like humans, have a consistent, significant EMREO signal that carries parametric information about eye displacement as well as onset times of eye movements. The dependence of the EMREO on the horizontal displacement of the eye is its most consistent feature, and is shared across behavioural tasks, subjects and species. Differences chiefly involve the waveform frequency (higher in monkeys than in humans) and patterns of individual variation (more prominent in monkeys than in humans), and the waveform of the EMREO when factors due to horizontal and vertical eye displacements were controlled for. This article is part of the theme issue 'Decision and control processes in multisensory perception'. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Antonio Cardoso; Michael Pittman; Adrian Zhou Effects of syntactic structure on the processing of lexical repetition during sentence reading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 51, no. 5, pp. 1249–1263, 2023. @article{Lowder2023a, Previous research has demonstrated that the ease or difficulty of processing complex semantic expressions depends on sentence structure: Processing difficulty emerges when the constituents that create the complex meaning appear in the same clause, whereas difficulty is reduced when the constituents appear in separate clauses. The goal of the current eye-tracking-while-reading experiments was to determine how changes to sentence structure affect the processing of lexical repetition, as this manipulation enabled us to isolate processes involved in word recognition (repetition priming) from those involved in sentence interpretation (felicity of the repetition). When repetition of the target word was felicitous (Experiment 1), we observed robust effects of repetition priming with some evidence that these effects were weaker when repetition occurred within a clause versus across a clause boundary. In contrast, when repetition of the target word was infelicitous (Experiment 2), readers experienced an immediate repetition cost when repetition occurred within a clause, but this cost was eliminated entirely when repetition occurred across clause boundaries. The results have implications for word recognition during reading, processes of semantic integration, and the role of sentence structure in guiding these linguistic representations. |
Matthew W. Lowder; Adrian Zhou; Peter C. Gordon The lab discovered: Place-for-institution metonyms appearing in subject position are processed as agents Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Lowder2023, “Hospital” can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for- institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syn- tactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.g., “The hospital [that was] requested by the doctor…”). If com- prehenders have a bias to interpret metonyms in subject position as agents (Fishbein & Harris, 2014), they should initially access the figurative (institutional) sense of the metonym. This interpretation is rendered incorrect at the disambiguating by-phrase, which should lead to reanalysis (i.e., garden-path effects). In Experiment 1, larger garden-path effects were observed for metonyms compared to inanimate control nouns that did not have a figurative sense. In Experiment 2, garden-path effects were equivalent for metonyms and animate sentence subjects. In addition, there was some evidence that readers exhibited initial difficulty at the verb (e.g., “requested”) when it immediately followed the metonym compared to the inanimate control nouns in Experiment 1. Overall, the results suggest that the subject-as-agent heuristic is a powerful cue during sentence processing, which can prompt the comprehender to access a figurative interpretation of a metonym. |
Cristina Lozano-Argüelles; Nuria Sagarra; Joseph V. Casillas Interpreting experience and working memory effects on L1 and L2 morphological prediction Journal Article In: Frontiers in Language Sciences, vol. 1, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{LozanoArgueelles2023, The human brain tries to process information as efficiently as possible through mechanisms like prediction. Native speakers predict linguistic information extensively, but L2 learners show variability. Interpreters use prediction while working and research shows that interpreting experience mediates L2 prediction. However, it is unclear whether advantages related to interpreting are due to higher working memory (WM) capacity, a typical characteristic of professional interpreters. To better understand the role of WM during L1 and L2 prediction, English L2 learners of Spanish with and without interpreting experience and Spanish monolinguals completed a visual-world paradigm eye-tracking task and a number-letter sequencing working memory task. The eye-tracking task measured prediction of verbal morphology (present, past) based on suprasegmental information (lexical stress: paroxytone, oxytone) and segmental information (syllabic structure: CV, CVC). Results revealed that WM mediates L1 prediction, such that higher WM facilitates prediction of morphology in monolinguals. However, higher WM hinders prediction in L2 processing for non-interpreters. Interestingly, interpreters behaved similarly to monolinguals, with higher WM facilitating L2 prediction. This study provides further understanding of the variability in L2 prediction. |
Steven G. Luke; Tanner Jensen The effect of sudden-onset distractors on reading efficiency and comprehension Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 76, no. 5, pp. 1195 –1206, 2023. @article{Luke2023, Reading is an essential skill that requires focused attention. However, much reading is done in non-optimal environments. These days, reading is often done on digital devices or with a digital device nearby. These devices often introduce momentary distractions during reading, interrupting with alerts, notifications, and pop-ups. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how such momentary distractions affect reading. Participants read paragraphs while their eye movements were monitored. During half of the paragraphs, distractions appeared periodically on the screen that required a response from the participants. In Experiment 1, the distractions were arrows that the participant had to respond to and then could immediately forget. In Experiment 2, the participants performed a 1-back task that required them to remember the identity of the last distractor. Compared with the no-distraction condition, the respond-and-forget distractors of Experiment 1 had minimal impact on reading behaviour and comprehension, but the working-memory-load distractors of Experiment 2 led to increased rereading and decreased reading comprehension. It seems a simple pop-up does not disrupt reading, but a message you must remember will. |
Steven G. Luke; Rachel Yu Liu; Kyle Nelson; Jared Denton; Michael W. Child An ex-Gaussian analysis of eye movements in L2 reading Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 330–344, 2023. @article{Luke2023a, Second language learners' reading is less efficient and more effortful than native reading. However, the source of their difficulty is unclear; L2 readers might struggle with reading in a different orthography, or they might have difficulty with later stages of linguistic interpretation of the input, or both. The present study explored the source of L2 reading difficulty by analyzing the distribution of fixation durations in reading. In three studies, we observed that L2 readers experience an increase in Mu, which we interpret as indicating early orthographic processing difficulty, when the L2 has a significantly different writing system than the L1 (e.g., Chinese and English) but not when the writing systems were similar (e.g., Portuguese and English). L2 readers also experienced an increase in Tau, indicating later-arising processing difficulty which likely reflects later-stage linguistic processes, when they read for comprehension. L2 readers of Chinese also experienced an additional increase in Tau. |
Changlin Luo; Mengyan Zhu; Xiangling Zhuang; Guojie Ma Food word processing in Chinese reading: A study of restrained eaters Journal Article In: British Journal of Psychology, vol. 114, no. 2, pp. 476–494, 2023. @article{Luo2023a, Food-related attentional bias refers that individuals typically prioritize rewarding food-related cues (e.g. food words and food images) compared with non-food stimuli; however, the findings are inconsistent for restrained eaters. Traditional paradigms used to test food-related attentional bias, such as visual probe tasks and visual search tasks, may not directly and accurately enough to reflect individuals' food-word processing at different cognitive stages. In this study, we introduced the boundary paradigm to investigate food-word attentional bias for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. Eye movements were recorded when they performed a naturalistic sentence-reading task. The results of later-stage analyses showed that food words were fixated on for less time than non-food words, which indicated a superiority of foveal food-word processing for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. The results of early-stage analyses showed that restrained eaters spent more time on pre-target regions in the food-word valid preview conditions, which indicated a parafoveal food-word processing superiority for restrained eaters (i.e. the parafoveal-on-foveal effect). The superiority of foveal food-word processing provides new insights into explaining food-related attentional bias in general groups. Additionally, the enhanced food-word attentional bias in parafoveal processing for restrained eaters illustrates the importance of individual characteristics in studying word recognition. |
Yingyi Luo; Dixiao Tan; Ming Yan Morphological structure influences saccade generation in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Luo2023d, Recent studies have demonstrated that saccadic programming in reading is not only determined by low-level visual factors. High-level morphological effects on saccade have been shown in two morphologically rich languages. In the present study, we examined the underlying mechanism of such morphological influences by comparing the processes of reading three-character Chinese compound words that differ in their structures in terms of morphological decomposition. Consistent with earlier reports, our results showed an effect of morphological structure on saccade. The readers' first-fixation location shifted further away from the beginning of the word, when the last two characters were more morphologically bounded and thus formed a [1 + 2] structure, than when the first two characters were more bounded (i.e., a [2 + 1] structure). The results are not accountable by a processing difficulty hypothesis, which proposes that saccade amplitude is determined by morphological complexity; rather, they suggest that Chinese readers parafoveally decompose a word and spontaneously target its longer stem, thus reflecting parafoveal access to words' stems. |
Yingyue Lv; Lei Zhang; Wanying Chen; Fang Xie; Kayleigh L. Warrington The influence of foveal load on parafoveal processing of N + 2 during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 97–106, 2023. @article{Lv2023, According to the foveal load hypothesis, parafoveal processing is influenced by the difficulty of current foveal processing. It remains unclear whether foveal load may affect the extent of parafoveal processing. This is an important consideration given the evidence that Chinese readers may frequently pre-process word N + 2 when N + 1 is one character. Accordingly, the current study manipulated word frequency to explore the influence of foveal load on parafoveal processing of N + 2 using a 2 (foveal load: high-frequency, low-frequency) × 2 (preview condition: identical preview, pseudo-character preview) within-subject design. Main effects of foveal load were found for the foveal word N, with longer fixations for low- than for high-frequency words and a main effect of preview was also found for N + 2, with longer fixations for pseudo-character preview compared to identical preview. Crucially, there was no interaction between foveal load and preview condition, indicating that parafoveal processing of word N + 2 is not influenced by foveal load during natural Chinese reading. |
Anqi Lyu; Larry Abel; Allen M. Y. Cheong Effect of habitual reading direction on saccadic eye movements: A pilot study Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Lyu2023, Cognitive processes can influence the characteristics of saccadic eye movements. Reading habits, including habitual reading direction, also affect cognitive and visuospatial processes, favouring attention to the side where reading begins. Few studies have investigated the effect of habitual reading direction on saccade directionality of low-cognitive-demand stimuli (such as dots). The current study examined horizontal prosaccade, antisaccade, and self-paced saccade in subjects with two primary habitual reading directions. We hypothesised that saccades responding to the stimuli in subject's habitual reading direction would show a longer prosaccade latency and lower antisaccade error rate (errors being a reflexive glance to a suddenappearing target, rather than a saccade away from it). Sixteen young Chinese participants with primary habitual reading direction from left to right and sixteen young Arabic and Persian participants with primary habitual reading direction from right to left were recruited. All subjects spoke/read English as their second language. Subjects needed to look towards a 5°/10° target in the prosaccade task or look towards the mirror image location of the target in the antisaccade task and look between two 10° targets in the self-paced saccade task. Only Arabic and Persian participants showed a shorter and directional prosaccade latency towards 5° stimuli against their habitual reading direction. No significant effect of reading direction on antisaccade latency towards the correct directions was found. Chinese readers were found to generate significantly shorter prosaccade latencies and higher antisaccade directional errors compared with Arabic and Persian readers for stimuli appearing at their habitual reading side. The present pilot study provides insights into the effect of reading habits on saccadic eye movements of low-cognitive-demand stimuli and offers a platform for future studies to investigate the relationship between reading habits and eye movement behaviours. |
Xiaochuan Ma; Yikang Liu; Roy Clariana; Chanyuan Gu; Ping Li From eye movements to scanpath networks: A method for studying individual differences in expository text reading Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 730–750, 2023. @article{Ma2023b, Eye movements have been examined as an index of attention and comprehension during reading in the literature for over 30 years. Although eye-movement measurements are acknowledged as reliable indicators of readers' comprehension skill, few studies have analyzed eye-movement patterns using network science. In this study, we offer a new approach to analyze eye-movement data. Specifically, we recorded visual scanpaths when participants were reading expository science text, and used these to construct scanpath networks that reflect readers' processing of the text. Results showed that low ability and high ability readers' scanpath networks exhibited distinctive properties, which are reflected in different network metrics including density, centrality, small-worldness, transitivity, and global efficiency. Such patterns provide a new way to show how skilled readers, as compared with less skilled readers, process information more efficiently. Implications of our analyses are discussed in light of current theories of reading comprehension. |
Ye Ma; Brian Buccola; Zinan Wang; Shannon Cousins; Aline Godfroid; Alan Beretta Expressions with aspectual verbs elicit slower reading times than those with psychological verbs: An eye-tracking study in Mandarin Chinese Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 179–215, 2023. @article{Ma2023c, Research over the last 20 years has investigated the processing costs for sentences such as John began the book. Much of this work has conflated sentences with aspectual verbs, like start or finish, with psychological verbs, like enjoy or tolerate. However, recent studies have reported greater costs for aspectual verbs compared to psychological verbs (e.g., Katsika et al. in Ment Lex 7:58–76, 2012; Lai et al. in Compositionality and concepts in linguistics and psychology, 2017). The present paper reports an eye-tracking study that examined the costs of processing both verb types in Mandarin Chinese. The results revealed greater costs both for aspectual verbs compared to controls (John read the book) and for aspectual verbs compared to psychological verbs, reinforcing the claims of the Structured Individual Hypothesis (Piñango and Deo in J Semant 33:359–408, 2016). Strikingly, there was an early effect at the verb for aspectual verbs but not for psychological verbs. We argue that this result, together with previous findings and other conceptual issues, necessitates a conservative modification of the SIH: aspectual verbs are semantically more complex than psychological verbs. This modification retains the core analysis underlying the SIH, but reconciles the SIH with experimental findings by bringing it in line with the view that lexical semantic complexity has immediate consequences in processing (e.g., Brennan and Pylkkänen in Lang Cogn Process 25:777–807, 2010). |
Federica Magnabosco; Olaf Hauk An eye on semantics: A study on the influence of concreteness and predictability on early fixation durations Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Magnabosco2023, We used eye-tracking during natural reading to study how semantic control and representation mechanisms interact for the successful comprehension of sentences, by manipulating sentence context and single-word meaning. Specifically, we examined whether a word's semantic characteristic (concreteness) affects first fixation and gaze durations (FFDs and GDs) and whether it interacts with the predictability of a word. We used a linear mixed effects model including several possible psycholinguistic covariates. We found a small but reliable main effect of concreteness and replicated a predictability effect on FFDs, but we found no interaction between the two. The results parallel previous findings of additive effects of predictability (context) and frequency (lexical level) in fixation times. Our findings suggest that the semantics of a word and the context created by the preceding words additively influence early stages of word processing in natural sentence reading. |
Marloes Mak; Myrthe Faber; Roel M. Willems Different kinds of simulation during literary reading: Insights from a combined fMRI and eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 162, pp. 115–135, 2023. @article{Mak2023, Mental simulation is an important aspect of narrative reading. In a previous study, we found that gaze durations are differentially impacted by different kinds of mental simulation. Motor simulation, perceptual simulation, and mentalizing as elicited by literary short stories influenced eye movements in distinguishable ways (Mak & Willems, 2019). In the current study, we investigated the existence of a common neural locus for these different kinds of simulation. We additionally investigated whether individual differences during reading, as indexed by the eye movements, are reflected in domain-specific activations in the brain. We found a variety of brain areas activated by simulation-eliciting content, both modality-specific brain areas and a general simulation area. Individual variation in percent signal change in activated areas was related to measures of story appreciation as well as personal characteristics (i.e., transportability, perspective taking). Taken together, these findings suggest that mental simulation is supported by both domain-specific processes grounded in previous experiences, and by the neural mechanisms that underlie higher-order language processing (e.g., situation model building, event indexing, integration). |
Marcello Maniglia; Kristina M. Visscher; Aaron R. Seitz Consistency of preferred retinal locus across tasks and participants trained with a simulated scotoma Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 203, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Maniglia2023, After loss of central vision following retinal pathologies such as macular degeneration (MD), patients often adopt compensatory strategies including developing a “preferred retinal locus” (PRL) to replace the fovea in tasks involving fixation. A key question is whether patients develop multi-purpose PRLs or whether their oculomotor strategies adapt to the demands of the task. While most MD patients develop a PRL, clinical evidence suggests that patients may develop multiple PRLs and switch between them according to the task at hand. To understand this, we examined a model of central vision loss in normally seeing individuals and tested whether they used the same or different PRLs across tasks after training. Nineteen participants trained for 10 sessions on contrast detection while in conditions of gaze-contingent, simulated central vision loss. Before and after training, peripheral looking strategies were evaluated during tasks measuring visual acuity, reading abilities and visual search. To quantify strategies in these disparate, naturalistic tasks, we measured and compared the amount of task-relevant information at each of 8 equally spaced, peripheral locations, while participants performed the tasks. Results showed that some participants used consistent viewing strategies across tasks whereas other participants' strategies differed depending on task. This novel method allows quantification of peripheral vision use even in relatively ecological tasks. These results represent one of the first examinations of peripheral viewing strategies across tasks in simulated vision loss. Results suggest that individual differences in peripheral looking strategies following simulated central vision loss may model those developed in pathological vision loss. |
Hannah S. Sarvasy; Adam Milton Morgan; Jenny Yu; Victor S. Ferreira; Shota Momma Cross-clause planning in Nungon (Papua New Guinea): Eye-tracking evidence Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 666–680, 2023. @article{Sarvasy2023, Hundreds of languages worldwide use a sentence structure known as the “clause chain,” in which 20 or more clauses can be stacked to form a sentence. The Papuan language Nungon is among a subset of clause chaining languages that require “switch-reference” suffixes on nonfinal verbs in chains. These suffixes announce whether the subject of each upcoming clause will differ from the subject of the previous clause. We examine two major issues in psycholinguistics: predictive processing in comprehension, and advance planning in production. Whereas previous work on other languages has demonstrated that sentence planning can be incremental, switch-reference marking would seem to prohibit strictly incremental planning, as it requires speakers to plan the next clause before they can finish producing the current one. This suggests an intriguing possibility: planning strategies may be fundamentally different in Nungon. We used a mobile eye-tracker and solar-powered laptops in a remote village in Papua, New Guinea, to track Nungon speakers' gaze in two experiments: comprehension and production. Curiously, during comprehension, fixation data failed to find evidence that switch-reference marking is used for predictive processing. However, during production, we found evidence for advance planning of switch-reference markers, and, by extension, the subjects they presage. We propose that this degree of advance syntactic planning pushes the boundaries of what is known about sentence planning, drawing on data from a novel morpheme type in an understudied language. |
Daniel Schmidtke; Sadaf Rahmanian; Anna L. Moro Tracking reading development in an English language university-level bridging program: evidence from eye-movements during passage reading Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 26, pp. 356–370, 2023. @article{Schmidtke2023, Increasing numbers of international students enter university education via English language bridging programs. Much research has overlooked the nature of second language reading development during a bridging program, focusing instead on the development of literacy skills of international students who already meet the language requirement for undergraduate admission. We report a longitudinal eye-movement study assessing English passage reading efficiency and comprehension in 405 Chinese-speaking bridging program students. Incoming IELTS reading scores were used as an index of baseline reading ability. Linear mixed-effects regression models fitted to global eye-movement measures and reading comprehension indicated that despite initial between-subjects differences, within-subject change at each ability level progressed at the same rate, following parallel growth trajectories. Therefore, there was significant overall reading progress during the bridging program, but no evidence that the gap between low and high ability readers either closed or widened over time. |
Elizabeth R. Schotter; Sara Milligan; Victoria M. Estevez Event-related potentials show that parafoveal vision is insufficient for semantic integration Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 60, no. 7, pp. 1–25, 2023. @article{Schotter2023, Readers extract information from a word from parafoveal vision prior to looking at it. It has been argued that parafoveal perception allows readers to initiate linguistic processes, but it is unclear which stages of word processing are engaged: the process of extracting letter information to recognize words, or the process of extracting meaning to comprehend them. This study used the event-related brain potential (ERP) technique to investigate how word recognition (indexed by the N400 effect for unexpected or anomalous compared to expected words) and semantic integration (indexed by the Late-positive component; LPC effect for anomalous compared to expected words) are or are not elicited when the word is perceived only in parafoveal vision. Participants read a target word following a sentence that made it expected, unexpected, or anomalous, and read the sentences presented three words at a time in the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) with flankers paradigm so that words were perceived in parafoveal and foveal vision. We orthogonally manipulated whether the target word was masked in parafoveal and/or foveal vision to dissociate the processing associated with perception of the target word from either location. We found that the N400 effect was generated from parafoveally perceived words, and was reduced for foveally perceived words if they were previously perceived parafoveally. In contrast, the LPC effect was only elicited if the word was perceived foveally, suggesting that readers must attend to a word directly in foveal vision in order to attempt to integrate its meaning into the sentence context. |
Laura Schwalm; Ralph Radach Parafoveal syntactic processing from word N + 2 during reading: The case of gender-specific German articles Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 87, no. 8, pp. 2511–2532, 2023. @article{Schwalm2023, Previous research has suggested that some syntactic information such as word class can be processed parafoveally during reading. However, it is still unclear to what extent early syntactic cueing within noun phrases can facilitate word processing during dynamic reading. Two experiments (total N = 72) were designed to address this question using a gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm to manipulate the syntactic fit within a nominal phrase. Either the article (Experiment 1) or the noun (Experiment 2) was manipulated in the parafovea, resulting in a syntactic mismatch, depending on the condition. Results indicated a substantial elevation of viewing times on both parts of the noun phrase when conflicting syntactic information had been present in the parafovea. In Experiment 1, the article was also fixated more often in the syntactic mismatch condition. These results provide direct evidence of parafoveal syntactic processing. Based on the early time-course of this effect, it can be concluded that grammatical gender is used to generate constraints for the processing of upcoming nouns. To our knowledge, these results also provide the first evidence that syntactic information can be extracted from a parafoveal word N + 2. |
Soroosh Shalileh; Dmitry Ignatov; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Olga Dragoy Identifying dyslexia in school pupils from eye movement and demographic data using artificial intelligence Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–26, 2023. @article{Shalileh2023, This paper represents our research results in the pursuit of the following objectives: (i) to introduce a novel multi-sources data set to tackle the shortcomings of the previous data sets, (ii) to propose a robust artificial intelligence-based solution to identify dyslexia in primary school pupils, (iii) to investigate our psycholinguistic knowledge by studying the importance of the features in identifying dyslexia by our best AI model. In order to achieve the first objective, we collected and annotated a new set of eye-movement-during-reading data. Furthermore, we collected demographic data, including the measure of non-verbal intelligence, to form our three data sources. Our data set is the largest eye-movement data set globally. Unlike the previously introduced binary-class data sets, it contains (A) three class labels and (B) reading speed. Concerning the second objective, we formulated the task of dyslexia prediction as regression and classification problems and scrutinized the performance of 12 classifications and eight regressions approaches. We exploited the Bayesian optimization method to fine-tune the hyperparameters of the models: and reported the average and the standard deviation of our evaluation metrics in a stratified ten-fold cross-validation. Our studies showed that multi-layer perceptron, random forest, gradient boosting, and k-nearest neighbor form the group having the most acceptable results. Moreover, we showed that although separately using each data source did not lead to accurate results, their combination led to a reliable solution. We also determined the importance of the features of our best classifier: our findings showed that the IQ, gender, and age are the top three important features; we also showed that fixation along the y-axis is more important than other fixation data. Dyslexia detection, eye fixation, eye movement, demographic, classification, regression, artificial intelligence. |
Jing Shen; Elizabeth Heller Murray; Erin R. Kulick The effect of breathy vocal quality on speech intelligibility and listening effort in background noise Journal Article In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 27, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Shen2023, Speech perception is challenging under adverse conditions. However, there is limited evidence regarding how multiple adverse conditions affect speech perception. The present study investigated two conditions that are frequently encountered in real-life communication: background noise and breathy vocal quality. The study first examined the effects of background noise and breathiness on speech perception as measured by intelligibility. Secondly, the study tested the hypothesis that both noise and breathiness affect listening effort, as indicated by linear and nonlinear changes in pupil dilation. Low-context sentences were resynthesized to create three levels of breathiness (original, mild-moderate, and severe). The sentences were presented in a fluctuating nonspeech noise with two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of −5 dB (favorable) and −9 dB (adverse) SNR. Speech intelligibility and pupil dilation data were collected from young listeners with normal hearing thresholds. The results demonstrated that a breathy vocal quality presented in noise negatively affected speech intelligibility, with the degree of breathiness playing a critical role. Listening effort, as measured by the magnitude of pupil dilation, showed significant effects with both severe and mild-moderate breathy voices that were independent of noise level. The findings contributed to the literature by demonstrating the impact of vocal quality on the perception of speech in noise. They also highlighted the complex dynamics between overall task demand and processing resources in understanding the combined impact of multiple adverse conditions. |
Meng Shen; Zibei Niu; Lei Gao; Tianzhi Li; Danhui Wang; Shan Li; Man Zeng; Xuejun Bai; Xiaolei Gao Examining the extraction of parafoveal semantic information in Tibetan Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Shen2023a, This study conducted two experiments to investigate the extraction of semantic preview information from the parafovea in Tibetan reading. In Experiment 1, a single-factor (preview type: identical vs. semantically related vs. unrelated) within-subject experimental design was used to investigate whether there is a parafoveal semantic preview effect (SPE) in Tibetan reading. Experiment 2 used a 2 (contextual constraint: high vs. low) × 3 (preview type: identical vs. semantically related vs. unrelated) within-subject experimental design to investigate the influence of contextual constraint on the parafoveal semantic preview effect in Tibetan reading. Supporting the E-Z reader model, the experimental results showed that in Tibetan reading, readers could not obtain semantic preview information from the parafovea, and contextual constraint did not influence this process. However, comparing high- and low-constrained contexts, the latter might be more conducive to extracting semantic preview information from the parafovea. |
Olympia Simantiraki; Anita E. Wagner; Martin Cooke The impact of speech type on listening effort and intelligibility for native and non-native listeners Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Simantiraki2023, Listeners are routinely exposed to many different types of speech, including artificially-enhanced and synthetic speech, styles which deviate to a greater or lesser extent from naturally-spoken exemplars. While the impact of differing speech types on intelligibility is well-studied, it is less clear how such types affect cognitive processing demands, and in particular whether those speech forms with the greatest intelligibility in noise have a commensurately lower listening effort. The current study measured intelligibility, self-reported listening effort, and a pupillometry-based measure of cognitive load for four distinct types of speech: (i) plain i.e. natural unmodified speech; (ii) Lombard speech, a naturally-enhanced form which occurs when speaking in the presence of noise; (iii) artificially-enhanced speech which involves spectral shaping and dynamic range compression; and (iv) speech synthesized from text. In the first experiment a cohort of 26 native listeners responded to the four speech types in three levels of speech-shaped noise. In a second experiment, 31 non-native listeners underwent the same procedure at more favorable signal-to-noise ratios, chosen since second language listening in noise has a more detrimental effect on intelligibility than listening in a first language. For both native and non-native listeners, artificially-enhanced speech was the most intelligible and led to the lowest subjective effort ratings, while the reverse was true for synthetic speech. However, pupil data suggested that Lombard speech elicited the lowest processing demands overall. These outcomes indicate that the relationship between intelligibility and cognitive processing demands is not a simple inverse, but is mediated by speech type. The findings of the current study motivate the search for speech modification algorithms that are optimized for both intelligibility and listening effort. |
Tiana V. Simovic; Craig G. Chambers How do antecedent semantics influence pronoun interpretation? Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Simovic2023, Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of retrieval, whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic form. The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation by examining whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Participants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases, the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., “Move the house on the left to area 12,” where the result was that a different house is now the leftmost one). In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun (“Now, move it…”) should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation. |
Joshua Snell; Jeremy Yeaton; Jonathan Mirault; Jonathan Grainger Parallel word reading revealed by fixation-related brain potentials Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 162, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Snell2023, During reading, the brain is confronted with many relevant objects at once. But does lexical processing occur for multiple words simultaneously? Cognitive science has yet to answer this prominent question. Recently it has been argued that the issue warrants supplementing the field's traditional toolbox (response times, eye-tracking) with neuroscientific techniques (EEG, fMRI). Indeed, according to the OB1-reader model, upcoming words need not impact oculomotor behavior per se, but parallel processing of these words must nonetheless be reflected in neural activity. Here we combined eye-tracking with EEG, time-locking the neural window of interest to the fixation on target words in sentence reading. During these fixations, we manipulated the identity of the subsequent word so that it posed either a syntactically legal or illegal continuation of the sentence. In line with previous research, oculomotor measures were unaffected. Yet, syntax impacted brain potentials as early as 100 ms after the target fixation onset. Given the EEG literature on syntax processing, the presently observed timings suggest parallel word reading. We reckon that parallel word processing typifies reading, and that OB1-reader offers a good platform for theorizing about the reading brain. |
Katrine Falcon Soby; Evelyn Arko Milburn; Line Burholt Kristensen; Valentin Vulchanov; Mila Vulchanova In the native speaker's eye: Online processing of anomalous learner syntax Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 1–28, 2023. @article{Soby2023, How do native speakers process texts with anomalous learner syntax? Second-language learners of Norwegian, and other verb-second (V2) languages, frequently place the verb in third position (e.g.,*Adverbial-Subject-Verb), although it is mandatory for the verb in these languages to appear in second position (Adverbial-Verb-Subject). In an eye-Tracking study, native Norwegian speakers read sentences with either grammatical V2 or ungrammatical verb-Third (V3) word order. Unlike previous eye-Tracking studies of ungrammaticality, which have primarily addressed morphosyntactic anomalies, we exclusively manipulate word order with no morphological or semantic changes. We found that native speakers reacted immediately to ungrammatical V3 word order, indicated by increased fixation durations and more regressions out on the subject, and subsequently on the verb. Participants also recovered quickly, already on the following word. The effects of grammaticality were unaffected by the length of the initial adverbial. The study contributes to future models of sentence processing which should be able to accommodate various types of noisy input, that is, non-standard variation. Together with new studies of processing of other L2 anomalies in Norwegian, the current findings can help language instructors and students prioritize which aspects of grammar to focus on. |
Linda Sommerfeld; Maria Staudte; Nivedita Mani; Jutta Kray Even young children make multiple predictions in the complex visual world Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 235, pp. 1–29, 2023. @article{Sommerfeld2023, Children can anticipate upcoming input in sentences with semantically constraining verbs. In the visual world, the sentence context is used to anticipatorily fixate the only object matching potential sentence continuations. Adults can process even multiple visual objects in parallel when predicting language. This study examined whether young children can also maintain multiple prediction options in parallel during language processing. In addition, we aimed at replicating the finding that children's receptive vocabulary size modulates their prediction. German children (5–6 years |
Sybren Spit; Andreea Geambașu; Daan Renswoude; Elma Blom; Paula Fikkert; Sabine Hunnius; Caroline Junge; Josje Verhagen; Ingmar Visser; Frank Wijnen; Clara C. Levelt Robustness of the cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants: A close multi-center replication of Kovács and Mehler (2009) Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Spit2023, We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the screen for nine trials and then switched to the other side. In the original experiment, both mono- and bilingual infants anticipated where the visual stimulus would appear during pre-switch trials. However, during post-switch trials, only bilingual children anticipated that the stimulus would appear on the other side of the screen. The authors took this as evidence of a cognitive advantage. Using the exact same materials in combination with novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses), we assessed the robustness of these findings in four babylabs (N = 98). Our results did not replicate the original findings: although anticipatory looks increased slightly during post-switch trials for both groups, bilingual infants were not better switchers than monolingual infants. After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence either. The results highlight the importance of multicenter replications and more fine-grained statistical analyses to better understand child development. Highlights: We carried out an exact replication across four baby labs of the high-impact study by Kovács and Mehler (2009). We did not replicate the findings of the original study, calling into question the robustness of the claim that bilingual infants have enhanced cognitive abilities. After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants correctly associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence. The use of novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses) allowed us to draw better-informed conclusions. |
Vladislava Staroverova; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Nina Zdorova; Nina Ladinskaya; Olga Vedenina; Sofya Goldina; Anastasiia Kaprielova; Ksenia Bartseva; Olga Dragoy Phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian children and adults Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 226, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Staroverova2023, Studies on German and English have shown that children and adults can rely on phonological and orthographic information from the parafovea during reading, but this reliance differs between ages and languages. In the current study, we investigated the development of phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian-speaking 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The participants read sentences with embedded nouns that were presented in original, pseudohomophone, control for pseudohomophone, transposed-letter, and control for transposed-letter conditions in the parafoveal area to assess phonological and orthographic preview benefit effects. The results revealed that all groups of participants relied only on orthographic but not phonological parafoveal information. These findings indicate that 8-year-old children already preprocess parafoveal information similarly to adults. |
Adrian Staub The function/content word distinction and eye movements in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Staub2023, A substantial quantity of research has explored whether readers' eye movements are sensitive to the distinc- tion between function and content words. No clear answer has emerged, in part due to the difficulty of accounting for differences in length, frequency, and predictability between the words in the two classes. Based on evidence that readers differentially overlook function word errors, we hypothesized that function words may be more frequently skipped or may receive shorter fixations. We present two very large-scale eyetracking experiments using selected sentences from a corpus of natural text, with each sentence containing a target function or content word. The target words in the two classes were carefully matched on length, frequency, and predictability, with the latter variable operationalized in terms of next-word probability obtained from the large language model GPT-2. While the experiments replicated a range of expected effects, word class did not have any clear influence on target word skipping probability, and there was some evidence for a content word advantage in fixation duration measures. These results indicate that readers' tendency to overlook function word errors is not due to reduced time spent encoding these words. The results also broadly support the implicit assumption in prominent models ofeye movement control in reading that a word's syntactic category does not play an important role in decisions about when and where to move the eyes. |
Jia Jin; Chenchen Lin; Fenghua Wang; Ting Xu; Wuke Zhang A study of cognitive effort involved in the framing effect of summary descriptions of online product reviews for search vs. experience products Journal Article In: Electronic Commerce Research, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 785–806, 2023. @article{Jin2023b, Few studies have focused on summary descriptions of online product reviews regarding purchase decisions, and there is a gap between individual product reviews and summary descriptions of online product reviews. The current study applied eye-tracking to explore how the product type moderates the framing effect of summary descriptions of product reviews on e-consumers' purchase decisions. The results showed that product type moderated the framing effect of summary reviews on e-consumers' purchase intention. Specifically, for search products, compared with a negative frame, a positive frame increased e-consumers' attention to function attributes and led to higher purchase intention. However, with experience products, e-consumers' attention and purchase intention did not vary across framing messages. Referring to information asymmetry theory and signal theory, we posit that the cognitive effort involved in summary review information is high for search products and low for experience products since summary reviews are a more useful signal in reducing information asymmetry for search products than for experience products. The theoretical and practical implications are also discussed. |
Jia Jin; Ailian Wang; Cuicui Wang; Qingguo Ma How do consumers perceive and process online overall vs. individual text-based reviews? Behavioral and eye-tracking evidence Journal Article In: Information and Management, vol. 60, no. 5, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Jin2023a, Building on the Heuristic-Systematic model, we use a survey and two eye-tracking experiments to investigate consumers' perceived usefulness of overall and individual text-based reviews (OTRs vs. ITRs) for search vs. experience products, and the information processing features. Results indicate that OTRs show higher usefulness than ITRs, regardless of product type. ITRs are perceived to be more useful for experience products than for search products. Furthermore, two eye-tracking studies confirm these results from a physiological standpoint and reveal the attentional allocation during information processing. OTRs affect subjects' processing of ITRs information differently in purchase search and experience products. |
Miranda Johnson; John Palmer; Cathleen M. Moore; Geoffrey M. Boynton Evidence from partially valid cueing that words are processed serially Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Johnson2023c, There has been a long-standing debate about whether lexical and semantic processing of words is serial or parallel. We addressed this debate using partially valid cueing, where one of two words is cued. The cue was valid on 80% and invalid on the other 20% of the trials. The task was semantic categorization, and performance was measured by accuracy. The new feature was to use a postmask to limit attentional switching. We found a large effect of cueing while performance for the uncued word was at chance. This chance performance was consistent with serial processing and not with typical parallel processing. This result adds to the evidence from other recent studies that the lexical and semantic processing of words is serial. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Cara Koch; Megan Wootten Keep clam and carry on: Misperceptions of transposed-letter neighbours Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Johnson2023a, Previous research has provided evidence that readers experience processing difficulty when reading words that have a transposed-letter (TL) neighbour (e.g., TRAIL has the TL neighbour TRIAL). Here, we provide direct evidence that this interference is driven by explicit misidentifications of the word for its TL neighbour. Experiment 1 utilised an eye-tracking task in which participants read sentences aloud and reading errors were coded. Sentences had a target word that either (1) had a TL neighbour or (2) was a matched control word with no TL neighbour. In Experiment 2, participants identified words within sentences that they consciously misread and reported the interloper. In both experiments, readers explicitly misidentified many more of the TL words than control words, and most often for their TL neighbour. These findings support the idea that TL interference effects are due primarily to initial misperceptions and post-lexical checking rather than co-activation at the lexical level. |
Rebecca L. Johnson; Megan Wootten; Abigail I. Spear; Ashley Smolensky The relationship between personality traits and the processing of emotion words: Evidence from eye-movements in sentence reading Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 52, no. 5, pp. 1497–1523, 2023. @article{Johnson2023b, Previous research shows that processing times on emotion words (both negative and positive) are faster than on non-emotional neutral words. In the current study, we explored how personality traits (the Big Five and the trait emotional intelligence factors) may further influence the processing of emotion versus non-emotion words by conducting two experiments where participants silently read sentences while their eye movements were recorded. The results replicated the facilitative emotion effect and showed that those with higher agreeableness scores had stronger emotion effects on positive words and those with higher extraversion scores, higher openness scores, higher agreeableness scores, lower sociability scores, and higher emotionality scores had stronger emotion effects on negative words. Furthermore, some personality traits also led to different ways that readers approach text, for example, through more risky reading strategies. |
Olessia Jouravlev; Mark McPhedran; Vegas Hodgins; Debra Jared Cross-language semantic parafoveal preview benefits in bilinguals Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 49, no. 10, pp. 1683–1697, 2023. @article{Jouravlev2023, The aim of this project was to identify factors contributing to cross-language semantic preview benefits. In Experiment 1, Russian–English bilinguals read English sentences with Russian words presented as parafoveal previews. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to present sentences. Critical previews were cognate translations of the target word (CTAPT—START), noncognate translations (CPOK— TERM), or interlingual homograph translations (MOPE—SEA).A semantic preview benefit (i.e., shorter fixation durations for related than unrelated previews) was observed for cognate and interlingual homograph translations, but not for noncognate translations. In Experiment 2, English–French bilinguals read English sentences with French words used as parafoveal previews. Critical previews were interlingual homograph translations of the target word (PAIN—BREAD) or interlingual homograph translations with a diacritic added (PÁIN—BREAD). A robust semantic preview benefit was found only for interlingual homographs without diacritics, although both preview types produced a semantic preview benefit in the total fixation duration. Our findings suggest that semantically related previews need to have substantial orthographic overlap with words in the target language to produce cross-language semantic preview benefits in early eye fixation measures. In terms of the Bilingual Interactive Activation+ model, the preview word may need to activate the language node for the target language before its meaning is integrated with that of the target word. |
Marju Kaps Information structural effects in processing contrastive ellipsis: Eye-tracking evidence from a flexible word order language Journal Article In: Journal of Linguistics, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 427–457, 2023. @article{Kaps2023, Previous experimental work on the processing of clausal ellipsis with contrastive remnants shows a Locality preference - DP remnants are preferentially paired with the most recently encountered DP correlate in the antecedent clause, even in the presence of contrastive prosody or semantic bias favouring a non-local correlate. The Locality effect has been argued to arise from the language processor consulting (default) information-structural representations when pairing remnants and correlates, yet direct evidence for the information structure hypothesis for Locality has been difficult to obtain. Estonian is a flexible word order language that optionally marks Contrastive Topics (CTs) syntactically, while allowing for the linear distance between a CT subject correlate and remnant to be held constant, in order to rule out a Recency explanation for the Locality effect. In an eye-tracking during reading experiment with case-disambiguated subject and object remnants in Estonian, we see asymmetries in the Locality preference (i.e. object advantage) following canonical Verb-second antecedent clauses and subject CT-marking Verb-third clauses. This provides novel evidence for fine-grained information-structural representations guiding the processing of contrastive ellipsis. |
Natalia Kartushina; Julien Mayor Coping with dialects from birth: Role of variability on infants' early language development. Insights from Norwegian dialects Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Kartushina2023, Previous research suggests that exposure to accent variability can affect toddlers' familiar word recognition and word comprehension. The current preregistered study addressed the gap in knowledge on early language development in infants exposed to two dialects from birth and assessed the role of dialect similarity in infants' word recognition and comprehension. A 12-month-old Norwegian-learning infants, exposed to native Norwegian parents speaking the same or two Norwegian dialects, took part in two eye-tracking tasks, assessing familiar word form recognition and word comprehension. Their parents' speech was assessed for similarity by native Norwegian speakers. First, in contrast to previous research, our results revealed no listening preference for words over nonwords in both monodialectal and bidialectal infants, suggesting potential language-specific differences in the onset of word recognition. Second, the results showed evidence for word comprehension in monodialectal infants, but not in bidialectal infants, suggesting that exposure to dialectal variability impacts early word acquisition. Third, perceptual similarity between parental dialects tendentially facilitated bidialectal infants' word recognition and comprehension. Forth, the results revealed a strong correlation between the raters and parents' assessment of similarity between dialects, indicating that parental estimations can be reliably used to assess infants' speech variability at home. Finally, our results revealed a strong relationship between word recognition and comprehension in monodialectal infants and the absence of such a relationship in bidialectal infants, suggesting that either these two skills do not necessarily align in infants exposed to more variable input, or that the alignment might occur at a later stage. |
I. M. Dushyanthi Karunathilake; Jason L. Dunlap; Janani Perera; Alessandro Presacco; Lien Decruy; Samira Anderson; Stefanie E. Kuchinsky; Jonathan Z. Simon Effects of aging on cortical representations of continuous speech Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 129, no. 6, pp. 1359–1377, 2023. @article{Karunathilake2023, Understanding speech in a noisy environment is crucial in day-to-day interactions and yet becomes more challenging with age, even for healthy aging. Age-related changes in the neural mechanisms that enable speech-in-noise listening have been investigated previously; however, the extent to which age affects the timing and fidelity of encoding of target and interfering speech streams is not well understood. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated how continuous speech is represented in auditory cortex in the presence of interfering speech in younger and older adults. Cortical representations were obtained from neural responses that time-locked to the speech envelopes with speech envelope reconstruction and temporal response functions (TRFs). TRFs showed three prominent peaks corresponding to auditory cortical processing stages: early (∼50 ms), middle (∼100 ms), and late (∼200 ms). Older adults showed exaggerated speech envelope representations compared with younger adults. Temporal analysis revealed both that the age-related exaggeration starts as early as ∼50 ms and that older adults needed a substantially longer integration time window to achieve their better reconstruction of the speech envelope. As expected, with increased speech masking envelope reconstruction for the attended talker decreased and all three TRF peaks were delayed, with aging contributing additionally to the reduction. Interestingly, for older adults the late peak was delayed, suggesting that this late peak may receive contributions from multiple sources. Together these results suggest that there are several mechanisms at play compensating for age-related temporal processing deficits at several stages but which are not able to fully reestablish unimpaired speech perception. |
Laura Keller; Malte C. Viebahn; Alexis Hervais-Adelman; Kilian G. Seeber Unpacking the multilingualism continuum: An investigation of language variety co-activation in simultaneous interpreters Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–27, 2023. @article{Keller2023, This study examines the phonological co-activation of a task-irrelevant language variety in mono- and bivarietal speakers of German with and without simultaneous interpreting (SI) experience during German comprehension and production. Assuming that language varieties in bivarietal speakers are co-activated analogously to the co-activation observed in bilinguals, the hypothesis was tested in the Visual World paradigm. Bivarietalism and SI experience were expected to affect co-activation, as bivarietalism requires communication-context based language-variety selection, while SI hinges on concurrent comprehension and production in two languages; task type was not expected to affect co-activation as previous evidence suggests the phenomenon occurs during comprehension and production. Sixty-four native speakers of German participated in an eye-tracking study and completed a comprehension and a production task. Half of the participants were trained interpreters and half of each sub-group were also speakers of Swiss German (i.e., bivarietal speakers). For comprehension, a growth-curve analysis of fixation proportions on phonological competitors revealed cross-variety co-activation, corroborating the hypothesis that co-activation in bivar-ietals' minds bears similar traits to language co-activation in multilingual minds. Conversely, co-activation differences were not attributable to SI experience, but rather to differences in language-variety use. Contrary to expectations, no evidence for phonological competition was found for either same- nor cross-variety competitors in either production task (interpreting- and word-naming variety). While phonological co-activation during production cannot be excluded based on our data, exploring the effects of additional demands involved in a production task hinging on a language-transfer component (oral translation from English to Standard German) merit further exploration in the light of a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of the SI task. |
Clare Kirtley; Christopher Murray; Phillip B. Vaughan; Benjamin W. Tatler Navigating the narrative: An eye-tracking study of readers' strategies when reading comic page layouts Journal Article In: Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 52–70, 2023. @article{Kirtley2023, In multimedia stimuli (e.g., comics), the reader must follow a narrative in which text and image both contribute information, and artists may use more irregular layouts which must still be followed correctly. While previous work has found that the external structure (outlines) of panels is a major contributor to navigation decisions in comics, other studies have shown that panel content can affect reading order. The present studies use eye-tracking to investigate these contributions further. In Experiment 1, the reading behaviors on six layout variations were compared. The influence of the external structure was replicated, but an effect of text location was also found for one layout type. Experiment 2 focused on variations of this particular layout, manipulating the location of text within critical panels. Panel content was a consistent effect for all variations. While most navigation decisions are made using the external structure, content becomes key when resolving ambiguous layouts. |
Kelsey E. Klein; Elizabeth A. Walker; Bob McMurray In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 338–357, 2023. @article{Klein2023a, Objective: The objective of this study was to characterize the dynamics of real-time lexical access, including lexical competition among phonologically similar words, and spreading semantic activation in school-age children with hearing aids (HAs) and children with cochlear implants (CIs). We hypothesized that developing spoken language via degraded auditory input would lead children with HAs or CIs to adapt their approach to spoken word recognition, especially by slowing down lexical access. Design: Participants were children ages 9- to 12-years old with normal hearing (NH), HAs, or CIs. Participants completed a Visual World Paradigm task in which they heard a spoken word and selected the matching picture from four options. Competitor items were either phonologically similar, semantically similar, or unrelated to the target word. As the target word unfolded, children's fixations to the target word, cohort competitor, rhyme competitor, semantically related item, and unrelated item were recorded as indices of ongoing lexical access and spreading semantic activation. Results: Children with HAs and children with CIs showed slower fixations to the target, reduced fixations to the cohort competitor, and increased fixations to the rhyme competitor, relative to children with NH. This wait-and-see profile was more pronounced in the children with CIs than the children with HAs. Children with HAs and children with CIs also showed delayed fixations to the semantically related item, although this delay was attributable to their delay in activating words in general, not to a distinct semantic source. Conclusions: Children with HAs and children with CIs showed qualitatively similar patterns of real-time spoken word recognition. Findings suggest that developing spoken language via degraded auditory input causes long-term cognitive adaptations to how listeners recognize spoken words, regardless of the type of hearing device used. Delayed lexical access directly led to delays in spreading semantic activation in children with HAs and CIs. This delay in semantic processing may impact these children's ability to understand connected speech in everyday life. |
Marina Klimovich; Simon P. Tiffin-Richards; Tobias Richter In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 123–142, 2023. @article{Klimovich2023, Background: Commercial speed-reading training programs are typically marketed with the promise to dramatically increase reading speed without impairing comprehension. From the perspective of reading psychology, it seems quite unlikely that speed-reading training can indeed have such effects. However, research on the effectiveness of modern speed-reading training programs on reading performance in typical readers is sparse. The present study had two goals. First, we sought to extend prior research on speed-reading by assessing the effects of a speed-reading application on reading performance in a pre-training and post-training design with a control group. Second, we aimed to identify the mechanism underlying speed-reading training programs. Methods: We assessed reading speed, comprehension and eye movements of 30 German-speaking undergraduates (Mage = 22.77 years |
Eva Marie Koch; Bram Bulté; Alex Housen; Aline Godfroid The predictive processing of number information in subregular verb morphology in a first and second language Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 750–783, 2023. @article{Koch2023, We investigated the predictive processing of grammatical number information through stem-vowel alternations in German strong verbs by adult first language (L1) speakers and Dutch-speaking advanced second language (L2) learners of German, and the influence of working memory and awareness (i.e., whether participants consciously registered the predictive cue) thereon. While changed stem vowels indicate a singular referent (e.g., /ϵ/ in fällt3SG, falls), unchanged vowels indicate plural (e.g., /a/ in fallt2PL, fall). This target structure presents a challenge for L2 learners of German due to its subregularity and low salience. With their eye movements being tracked, participants matched German auditory sentences (VSO order) with one of two pictures, displaying identical action scenes but varying in agent number. The number cue provided by the strong verbs allowed participants to predict whether the upcoming subject would be singular or plural. The analyses revealed significant prediction, measured as predictive eye movements toward the target picture and faster button-press responses. Prediction in the L2 group was weaker than in the L1 group and present in the eye movement data only. Higher working memory scores were linked to faster predictive presses. Approximately half of the participants had become aware of the predictive cue, and being aware facilitated prediction to a limited extent. |
Deran Kong; Yu-Yin Hsu Processing covert dependency: An eye-tracking study of scope interpretations of embedded Wh-questions in Mandarin Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Kong2023, Non-local dependency in Mandarin wh-questions has been extensively researched in theoretical linguistics, but it remains an under-studied topic in the field of language processing. Unlike languages that require wh-movement to form wh-questions, Mandarin is a wh-in-situ language, and hence is generally assumed to require a covert dependency between a whphrase and its scope-bearing position. Mandarin therefore provides an ideal linguistic environment in which to study not only cognitive-processing mechanisms, but also how different types of non-local dependency, especially covert dependency, can be handled by readers. This paper investigates the processing of such covert non-local dependency in multiple embedded clauses, that is, multiple complementizer phrases (CPs). In wh-in-situ sentences with multiple CPs, the wh-phrases' scope varies according to the types of verbs and their embedded clauses. Based on the subcategorization of clausal verbs, we designed four experimental conditions: double-embedded low scope, double-embedded high scope, double-embedded ambiguous scope, and long distance in pivotal construction. According to memory-based and distance-based language processing theories, the low-scope condition should be easier to process than the high-scope one, because the former has a shorter linear distance than the latter when forming dependencies; and pivotal construction should be easier to process than high-scope embedded clauses, because the former has a shorter structural distance. In cases where both low- and high-scope interpretations are possible, we aim to determine whether readers exhaust every potential interpretation during comprehension, or adopt a ‘good-enough' approach to obtaining an interpretation via an easier and less costly process. To this end, we will adopt the eye-tracking technique that allows us to obtain fine-grained reading-time data, which can be used to compare processing across conditions. The results will contribute to understanding human readers' mechanisms for processing covert dependency and resolving scope ambiguity in wh-in-situ languages. |
Anastasiia Konovalova Pun processing in advertising posters: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Konovalova2023, This study examines the process of reading polycode advertising posters, focusing in particular on the effect of a pun in the headline. The pun, or a sequence of lexical items that can be perceived as ambiguous, is contained in the headline and different meanings of this sequence are supported by the picture and text. The results of the preliminary experiment showed that advertisements with puns are rated as more attractive, original, effective and positive compared to advertisements without puns. We hypothesized that puns in the headlines increase cognitive effort in processing posters, leading to higher evaluations. The main experiment tested this and examined differences in eye movement when reading posters with and without puns. Fifty-five Russian participants viewed advertisements while their eye movements were recorded. Our results showed no fundamental differences in the general pattern of viewing advertisement posters with and without puns. We found that readers start to perceive polycode advertisements from the text and spend more time reading the text than looking at an image. These findings shed light on how attention is distributed between verbal and non-verbal components of polycode texts, and which type of poster is more effective for information retrieval at different processing levels. |
Arnout Koornneef On the readability of texts presented in sentence-by-sentence segments to beginner readers: Evidence from self-paced reading and eye tracking Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 69–87, 2023. @article{Koornneef2023, Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence presentation mode of texts improves reading comprehension of beginning readers because this presentation mode encourages them to engage in more effortful sentence wrap-up processing. In a series of self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments with primary school pupils as participants (6–9 years old; n = 134), reading speed and text comprehension were assessed in a full-page control condition—i.e., texts were presented in their entirety—and in an experimental condition in which texts were presented in sentence-by-sentence segments. The results showed that text comprehension scores were higher for segmented texts than for full-page texts. Furthermore, in the final word-regions of the sentences in the texts, the segmented layout induced longer reading times than the full-page layout did. However, mediation analyses revealed that these inflated reading times had no, or even a disruptive influence on text comprehension. This indicates that the observed comprehension advantage for segmented texts cannot be attributed to more effortful sentence wrap-up. A more general implication of these findings is that the segmentation features of reading applications should be used with caution (e.g., in educational or professional settings) because it is unclear how they affect the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that underlie reading. |
Drew J. McLaughlin; Jackson S. Colvett; Julie M. Bugg; Kristin J. Van Engen Sequence effects and speech processing: Cognitive load for speaker-switching within and across accents Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{McLaughlin2023, Prior work in speech processing indicates that listening tasks with multiple speakers (as opposed to a single speaker) result in slower and less accurate processing. Notably, the trial-to-trial cognitive demands of switching between speakers or switching between accents have yet to be examined. We used pupillometry, a physiological index of cognitive load, to examine the demands of processing first (L1) and second (L2) language-accented speech when listening to sentences produced by the same speaker consecutively (no switch), a novel speaker of the same accent (within-accent switch), and a novel speaker with a different accent (across-accent switch). Inspired by research on sequential adjustments in cognitive control, we aimed to identify the cognitive demands of accommodating a novel speaker and accent by examining the trial-to-trial changes in pupil dilation during speech processing. Our results indicate that switching between speakers was more cognitively demanding than listening to the same speaker consecutively. Additionally, switching to a novel speaker with a different accent was more cognitively demanding than switching between speakers of the same accent. However, there was an asymmetry for across-accent switches, such that switching from an L1 to an L2 accent was more demanding than vice versa. Findings from the present study align with work examining multi-talker processing costs, and provide novel evidence that listeners dynamically adjust cognitive processing to accommodate speaker and accent variability. We discuss these novel findings in the context of an active control model and auditory streaming framework of speech processing. |
Hannah Mechtenberg; Cristal Giorio; Emily B. Myers Pupil dilation reflects perceptual priorities during a receptive speech task Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Mechtenberg2023, Objectives: The listening demand incurred by speech perception fluctu- ates in normal conversation. At the acoustic-phonetic level, natural varia- tion in pronunciation acts as speedbumps to accurate lexical selection. Any given utterance may be more or less phonetically ambiguous—a problem that must be resolved by the listener to choose the correct word. This becomes especially apparent when considering two common speech registers—clear and casual—that have characteristically differ- ent levels of phonetic ambiguity. Clear speech prioritizes intelligibility through hyperarticulation which results in less ambiguity at the pho- netic level, while casual speech tends to have a more collapsed acoustic space. We hypothesized that listeners would invest greater cognitive resources while listening to casual speech to resolve the increased amount of phonetic ambiguity, as compared with clear speech. To this end, we used pupillometry as an online measure of listening effort dur- ing perception of clear and casual continuous speech in two background conditions: quiet and noise. Design: Forty-eight participants performed a probe detection task while listening to spoken, nonsensical sentences (masked and unmasked) while recording pupil size. Pupil size was modeled using growth curve analysis to capture the dynamics of the pupil response as the sentence unfolded. Results: Pupil size during listening was sensitive to the presence of noise and speech register (clear/casual). Unsurprisingly, listeners had over- all larger pupil dilations during speech perception in noise, replicating earlier work. The pupil dilation pattern for clear and casual sentences was considerably more complex. Pupil dilation during clear speech tri- als was slightly larger than for casual speech, across quiet and noisy backgrounds. Conclusions: We suggest that listener motivation could explain the larger pupil dilations to clearly spoken speech. We propose that, bounded by the context of this task, listeners devoted more resources to perceiving the speech signal with the greatest acoustic/phonetic fidelity. Further, we unexpectedly found systematic differences in pupil dilation preceding the onset of the spoken sentences. Together, these data demonstrate that the pupillary system is not merely reactive but also adaptive—sensitive to both task structure and listener motivation to maximize accurate per- ception in a limited resource system. |
Jinger Pan; Aiping Wang; Catherine McBride; Jeung Ryeul Cho; Ming Yan Online assessment of parafoveal morphological processing/Awareness during reading among Chinese and Korean adults Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 232–252, 2023. @article{Pan2023c, Purpose: The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity. Method: Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated the relation between the homographic parafoveal preview morphemes and the target words in Chinese and Korean, respectively, in two experiments. We tested 57 Chinese and 45 Korean university students. Together with baseline conditions in which the previews were either identical or unrelated to the target, we had two critical conditions in which the homographs shared/did not share the same morphemic meaning (i.e., same morpheme/different morpheme) with the target morpheme. Results: Across the two experiments, the differences between the same and different morpheme conditions in a number of eye movement indices were significant, consistently showing that appropriate morpho-semantic information facilitates lexical processing. The different-morpheme previews facilitated the target word processing in Chinese but not in Korean reading. Conclusion: These findings suggest that morphemic meanings are activated early on during word recognition in Chinese, a logographic orthography, and Korean Hangul, a phonologically transparent writing system, before the word is fixated upon. |