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Moreno I. Coco; Frank Keller The interaction of visual and linguistic saliency during syntactic ambiguity resolution Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 46–74, 2015. @article{Coco2015, Psycholinguistic research using the visual world paradigm has shown that the processing ofsentences is constrained by the visual context in which they occur. Recently, there has been growing interest in the interactions observed when both language and vision provide relevant information during sentence pro- cessing. In three visual world experiments on syntactic ambiguity resolution, we investigate how visual and linguistic information influence the interpretation ofambiguous sentences. We hypothesize that (1) visual and linguistic information both constrain which interpretation is pursued by the sentence pro- cessor, and (2) the two types of information act upon the interpretation of the sentence at different points during processing. In Experiment 1, we show that visual saliency is utilized to anticipate the upcoming arguments ofa verb. In Experiment 2, we operationalize linguistic saliency using intonational breaks and demonstrate that these give prominence to linguistic referents. These results confirm pre- diction (1). In Experiment 3, we manipulate visual and linguistic saliency together and find that both types of information are used, but at different points in the sentence, to incrementally update its current interpretation. This finding is consistent with prediction (2). Overall, our results suggest an adaptive processing architecture in which different types of information are used when they become available, optimizing different aspects of situated language processing. |
Saveria Colonna; Sarah Schimke; Barbara Hemforth Different effects of focus in intra- and inter-sentential pronoun resolution in German Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 10, pp. 1306–1325, 2015. @article{Colonna2015, It is widely assumed that focused entities are more salient than non-focused ones and consequently, that an antecedent should be particularly available for a pronoun when it is foregrounded in a cleft construction. Contrary to this assumption, however, some studies observed that an antecedent focused by a cleft was less accessible than a non-focused one. We claim that the influence of clefting depends on the position of the ambiguous pronoun: clefted antecedents are only preferred as antecedents of a pronoun when the pronoun and its antecedent are in different discourse units. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a questionnaire and a visual world experiment in German in which we manipulated inter- vs. intra-sentential pronoun resolution. Results showed that clefting had different effects depending on the position of the pronoun. We will discuss why these results are consistent with the claim that pronouns preferentially co-refer with the sentence topic. |
Georgie Columbus; Naveed A. Sheikh; Marilena Cote-Lecaldare; Katja Hauser; Shari R. Baum; Debra Titone Individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing: An eye movement study of sentence reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 8, pp. 1057, 2015. @article{Columbus2015, Metaphors are common elements of language that allow us to creatively stretch the limits of word meaning. However, metaphors vary in their degree of novelty, which determines whether people must create new meanings on-line or retrieve previously known metaphorical meanings from memory. Such variations affect the degree to which general cognitive capacities such as executive control are required for successful comprehension. We investigated whether individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing using eye movement measures of reading. Thirty-nine participants read sentences including metaphors or idioms, another form of figurative language that is more likely to rely on meaning retrieval. They also completed the AX-CPT, a domain-general executive control task. In Experiment 1, we examined sentences containing metaphorical or literal uses of verbs, presented with or without prior context. In Experiment 2, we examined sentences containing idioms or literal phrases for the same participants to determine whether the link to executive control was qualitatively similar or different to Experiment 1. When metaphors were low familiar, all people read verbs used as metaphors more slowly than verbs used literally (this difference was smaller for high familiar metaphors). Executive control capacity modulated this pattern in that high executive control readers spent more time reading verbs when a prior context forced a particular interpretation (metaphorical or literal), and they had faster total metaphor reading times when there was a prior context. Interestingly, executive control did not relate to idiom processing for the same readers. Here, all readers had faster total reading times for high familiar idioms than literal phrases. Thus, executive control relates to metaphor but not idiom processing for these readers, and for the particular metaphor and idiom reading manipulations presented. |
Uschi Cop; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck Eye movement patterns in natural reading: A comparison of monolingual and bilingual reading of a novel Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. e0134008, 2015. @article{Cop2015, INTRODUCTION AND METHOD: This paper presents a corpus of sentence level eye movement parameters for unbalanced bilingual first language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading and monolingual reading of a complete novel (56 000 words). We present important sentence-level basic eye movement parameters of both bilingual and monolingual natural reading extracted from this large data corpus.$backslash$n$backslash$nRESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Bilingual L2 reading patterns show longer sentence reading times (20%), more fixations (21%), shorter saccades (12%) and less word skipping (4.6%), than L1 reading patterns. Regression rates are the same for L1 and L2 reading. These results could indicate, analogous to a previous simulation with the E-Z reader model in the literature, that it is primarily the speeding up of lexical access that drives both L1 and L2 reading development. Bilingual L1 reading does not differ in any major way from monolingual reading. This contrasts with predictions made by the weaker links account, which predicts a bilingual disadvantage in language processing caused by divided exposure between languages. |
Uschi Cop; Emmanuel Keuleers; Denis Drieghe; Wouter Duyck Frequency effects in monolingual and bilingual natural reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 1216–1234, 2015. @article{Cop2015a, This paper presents the first systematic examination of the monolingual and bilingual frequency effect (FE) during natural reading. We analyzed single fixation durations on content words for participants reading an entire novel. Unbalanced bilinguals and monolinguals show a similarly sized FE in their mother tongue (L1), but for bilinguals the FE is considerably larger in their second language (L2) than in their L1. The FE in both L1 and L2 reading decreased with increasing L1 proficiency, but it was not affected by L2 proficiency. Our results are consistent with an account of bilingual language processing that assumes an integrated mental lexicon with exposure as the main determiner for lexical entrenchment. This means that no qualitative difference in language processing between monolingual, bilingual L1, or bilingual L2 is necessary to explain reading behavior. We present this account and argue that not all groups of bilinguals necessarily have lower L1 exposure than monolinguals do and, in line with Kuperman and Van Dyke (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39 (3), 802-823, 2013), that individual vocabulary size and language exposure change the accuracy of the relative corpus word frequencies and thereby determine the size of the FEs in the same way for all participants. |
Marie-Josée Bisson; Walter J. B. Heuven; Kathy Conklin; Richard J. Tunney The role of verbal and pictorial information in multimodal incidental acquisition of foreign language vocabulary Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 7, pp. 1306–1326, 2015. @article{Bisson2015, This study used eye tracking to investigate the allocation of attention to multimodal stimuli during an incidental learning situation, as well as its impact on subsequent explicit learning. Participants were exposed to foreign language (FL) auditory words on their own, in conjunction with written native language (NL) translations, or with both written NL translations and pictures. Incidental acquisition of FL words was assessed the following day through an explicit learning task where participants learned to recognize translation equivalents, as well as one week later through recall and translation recognition tests. Results showed higher accuracy scores in the explicit learning task for FL words presented with meaning during incidental learning, whether written meaning or both written meaning and picture, than for FL words presented auditorily only. However, participants recalled significantly more FL words after a week delay if they had been presented with a picture during incidental learning. In addition, the time spent looking at the pictures during incidental learning significantly predicted recognition and recall scores one week later. Overall, results demonstrated the impact of exposure to multimodal stimuli on subsequent explicit learning, as well as the important role that pictorial information can play in incidental vocabulary acquisition. |
Hazel I. Blythe; Ascensión Pagán; Megan Dodd Beyond decoding: Phonological processing during silent reading in beginning readers Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 1244–1252, 2015. @article{Blythe2015, In this experiment, the extent to which beginning readers process phonology during lexical identification in silent sentence reading was investigated. The eye movements of children aged seven to nine years and adults were recorded as they read sentences containing either a correctly spelled target word (e.g., girl), a pseudohomophone (e.g., gerl), or a spelling control (e.g., garl). Both children and adults showed a benefit from the valid phonology of the pseudohomophone, compared to the spelling control during reading. This indicates that children as young as seven years old exhibit relatively skilled phonological processing during reading, despite having moved past the use of overt phonological decoding strategies. In addition, in comparison to adults, children's lexical processing was more disrupted by the presence of spelling errors, suggesting a developmental change in the relative dependence upon phonological and orthographic processing in lexical identification during silent sentence reading. |
Jens Bölte; Andrea Böhl; Christian Dobel; Pienie Zwitserlood In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1540, 2015. @article{Boelte2015, In three experiments, participants named target pictures by means of German compound words (e.g., Gartenstuhl-garden chair), each accompanied by two different distractor pictures (e.g., lawn mower and swimming pool). Targets and distractor pictures were semantically related either associatively (garden chair and lawn mower) or by a shared semantic category (garden chair and wardrobe). Within each type of semantic relation, target and distractor pictures either shared morpho-phonological (word-form) information (Gartenstuhl with Gartenzwerg, garden gnome, and Gartenschlauch, garden hose) or not. A condition with two completely unrelated pictures served as baseline. Target naming was facilitated when distractor and target pictures were morpho-phonologically related. This is clear evidence for the activation of word-form information of distractor pictures. Effects were larger for associatively than for categorically related distractors and targets, which constitute evidence for lexical competition. Mere categorical relatedness, in the absence of morpho-phonological overlap, resulted in null effects (Experiments 1 and 2), and only speeded target naming when effects reflect only conceptual, but not lexical processing (Experiment 3). Given that distractor pictures activate their word forms, the data cannot be easily reconciled with discrete serial models. The re sults fit well with models that allow information to cascade forward from conceptual to word-form levels. |
Tobias Bormann; Sascha A. Wolfer; Wibke Hachmann; Claudia Neubauer; Lars Konieczny Fast word reading in pure alexia: “Fast, yet serial” Journal Article In: Neurocase, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 251–267, 2015. @article{Bormann2015, Pure alexia is a severe impairment of word reading in which individuals process letters serially with a pronounced length effect. Yet, there is considerable variation in the performance of alexic readers with generally very slow, but also occasionally fast responses, an observation addressed rarely in previous reports. It has been suggested that "fast" responses in pure alexia reflect residual parallel letter processing or that they may even be subserved by an independent reading system. Four experiments assessed fast and slow reading in a participant (DN) with pure alexia. Two behavioral experiments investigated frequency, neighborhood, and length effects in forced fast reading. Two further experiments measured eye movements when DN was forced to read quickly, or could respond faster because words were easier to process. Taken together, there was little support for the proposal that "qualitatively different" mechanisms or reading strategies underlie both types of responses in DN. Instead, fast responses are argued to be generated by the same serial-reading strategy. |
Oliver Bott; Anja Gattnar The cross-linguistic processing of aspect – an eyetracking study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in Russian and German Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 877–898, 2015. @article{Bott2015a, This paper reports a cross-linguistic study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in an aspect language (Russian) and a non-aspect language (German). In Russian, mereological semantics led us to expect incremental mismatch detection independently of the presence or absence of the verbal arguments. In German, however, mismatch effects should be delayed until the processor has encountered the complete predication. These predictions were tested in two eyetracking during reading experiments. We investigated the processing of achievement verbs modified by aspectually mismatching adverbials in Russian (Exp. 1) and German (Exp. 2) and manipulated the word order in such a way that the mismatch occurred before or after the predication was complete. The data show that Russian readers immediately noticed the mismatch independently of whether the verb preceded or followed its arguments, whereas German readers showed mismatch effects only after a complete predication. We take this as evidence for cross-linguistically different increment sizes in event interpretation. |
Oliver Bott; Fabian Schlotterbeck The processing domain of scope interaction Journal Article In: Journal of Semantics, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 39–92, 2015. @article{Bott2015, The present study investigates whether quantifier scope is computed incrementally during online sentence processing. We exploited the free word order in German to manipulate whether the verbal predicate preceded or followed the second quantifier in doubly quantified sentences that required the computation of inverse scope. A pos- sessive pronoun in the first quantifier that had to be bound by the second quantifier was used to enforce scope inversion. We tested whether scope inversion causes diffi- culty and whether this difficulty emerges even at a point before comprehenders have encountered the main verb. We report three pretests and two reading time experi- ments. The first two pretests were offline tests that established (1) that the sentences exhibited the assumed scope preferences and (2) that variable binding forced scope inversion. The third pretest employed self-paced reading to show that interpreting a bound variable is not difficult per se and that difficulty in the critical construction must thus be due to inverting scope. Incremental processing of quantifier scope was inves- tigated in a self-paced reading experiment. We observed difficulty right after the second quantifier, but only if it appeared after the main verb, that is, after the predi- cation was complete. Further evidence for late scope inversion comes from an eye- tracking experiment. Again, a scope inversion effect could only be observed at the end ofthe sentence. Taken together, our study demonstrates that in German inverse scope is only computed at the sentence boundary. 1 |
Meredith Brown; Anne Pier Salverda; Laura C. Dilley; Michael K. Tanenhaus Metrical expectations from preceding prosody influence perception of lexical stress Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 306–323, 2015. @article{Brown2015, Two visual-world experiments tested the hypothesis that expectations based on preceding prosody influence the perception of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress. The results demonstrate that listeners' consideration of competing alternatives with different stress patterns (e.g., 'jury/gi'raffe) can be influ- enced by the fundamental frequency and syllable timing patterns across material preceding a target word. When preceding stressed syllables distal to the target word shared pitch and timing characteristics with the first syllable of the target word, pictures of alternatives with primary lexical stress on the first syllable (e.g., jury) initially attracted more looks than alternatives with unstressed initial syllables (e.g., giraffe). This effect was modulated when preceding unstressed syllables had pitch and timing characteristics similar to the initial syllable of the target word, with more looks to alternatives with unstressed initial syllables (e.g., giraffe) than to those with stressed initial syllables (e.g., jury). These findings suggest that expectations about the acoustic realization of upcoming speech include information about metrical organization and lexical stress and that these expectations constrain the initial interpretation of supraseg- mental stress cues. These distal prosody effects implicate online probabilistic inferences about the sources of acoustic–phonetic variation during spoken-word recognition. |
Meredith Brown; Anne Pier Salverda; Laura C. Dilley; Michael K. Tanenhaus Metrical expectations from preceding prosody influence spoken word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 306–323, 2015. @article{Brown2015a, Two visual world experiments tested the hypothesis that ex- pectations based on preceding prosody influence the percep- tion of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress. Experiment 1 showed that phonemically overlapping words with different initial stress patterns compete for recognition. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that fundamental frequency and sylla- ble timing patterns across material preceding the target word can influence the relative activation of competing alternatives with different initial stress patterns. The activation of alter- natives with initial stress was higher when preceding stressed syllables had suprasegmental acoustic characteristics similar to the initial syllable of the target word. These findings sug- gest that expectations about the acoustic realization of an ut- terance include information about metrical organization and lexical stress, and that these expectations constrain the initial interpretation of suprasegmental stress cues. These results are interpreted as support for expectation-based forward models in which acoustic information in the speech stream is interpreted based on expectations created by prosody. |
Meredith Brown; Anne Pier Salverda; Christine Gunlogson; Michael K. Tanenhaus Interpreting prosodic cues in discourse context Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 1-2, pp. 149–166, 2015. @article{Brown2015b, Two visual-world experiments investigated whether and how quickly discourse-based expectations about the prosodic realization of spoken words modulate interpretation of acoustic- prosodic cues. Experiment 1 replicated effects of segmental lengthening on activation of onset- embedded words (e.g. pumpkin) using resynthetic manipulation of duration and fundamental frequency (F0). In Experiment 2, the same materials were preceded by instructions establishing information-structural differences between competing lexical alternatives (i.e. repeated vs. newly- assigned thematic roles) in critical instructions. Eye-movements generated upon hearing the critical target word revealed a significant interaction between information structure and target- word realization: Segmental lengthening and pitch excursion elicited more fixations to the onset- embedded competitor when the target word remained in the same thematic role, but not when its thematic role changed. These results suggest that information structure modulates the interpretation of acoustic-prosodic cues by influencing expectations about fine-grained acoustic- phonetic properties of the unfolding utterance. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Scott H. Fraundorf Interpretation of informational questions modulated by joint knowledge and intonational contours Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 84, pp. 49–74, 2015. @article{BrownSchmidt2015, We examine processes by which dialogue partners form and use representations of joint knowledge, or common ground, during on-line language processing. Eye-tracked participants interpreted wh-questions that inquired about task-relevant objects during interactive conversation. Some objects were known to both speaker and listener, and thus in common ground, whereas others were only known to the listener, and thus in privileged ground. Questions were produced with a typical, falling intonation (Experiment 1) or with either falling or rising intonation (Experiments 2-3). Unlike the falling contour, the rising contour can indicate a request for clarification about previously mentioned information. Participants interpreted falling-contour questions as asking about privileged-ground objects. By contrast, rising questions elicited more consideration of common-ground objects. Directly comparing questions that were produced during live conversation vs. questions that were pre-recorded revealed that this sensitivity to common vs. privileged ground emerged only during live conversation. Finally, individual difference analyses in all three experiments did not support the claim that individuals fail to take perspective when executive function is limited. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for the on-line integration of perspective and intonation during conversational language processing. The lack of perspective effects in non-interactive settings speaks to the inherently interactive nature of conversational processes. |
Sarah Brown-Schmidt; Agnieszka E. Konopka Processes of incremental message planning during conversation Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 833–843, 2015. @article{BrownSchmidt2015a, Speaking begins with the formulation of an intended preverbal message and linguistic encoding of this information. The transition from thought to speech occurs incrementally, with cascading planning at subsequent levels of production. In this article, we aim to specify the mechanisms that support incremental message preparation. We contrast two hypotheses about the mechanisms responsible for incorporating message-level information into a linguistic plan. According to the Initial Preparation view, messages can be encoded as fluent utterances if all information is ready before speaking begins. By contrast, on the Continuous Incrementality view, messages can be continually prepared and updated throughout the production process, allowing for fluent production even if new information is added to the message while speaking is underway. Testing these hypotheses, eye-tracked speakers in two experiments produced unscripted, conjoined noun phrases with modifiers. Both experiments showed that new message elements can be incrementally incorporated into the utterance even after articulation begins, consistent with a Continuous Incrementality view of message planning, in which messages percolate to linguistic encoding immediately as that information becomes available in the mind of the speaker. We conclude by discussing the functional role of incremental message planning in conversational speech and the situations in which this continuous incremental planning would be most likely to be observed. |
Michele Burigo; Pia Knoeferle Visual attention during spatial language comprehension Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. e0115758, 2015. @article{Burigo2015, Spatial terms such as “above”, “in front of”, and “on the left of” are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday communication. Apprehending such spatial relations involves relating linguistic to object representations by means of attention. This requires at least one attentional shift, andmodels such as the Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) predict the direction of that attention shift, from the sausage to the box for spatial utterances such as “The box is above the sausage”. To the extent that this prediction generalizes to overt gaze shifts, a listener's visual attention should shift from the sausage to the box. However, listeners tend to rapidly look at referents in their order of mention and even anticipate them based on linguistic cues, a behavior that predicts a converse attention- al shift from the box to the sausage. Four eye-tracking experiments assessed the role of overt attention in spatial language comprehension by examining to which extent visual at- tention is guided by words in the utterance and to which extent it also shifts “against the grain” of the unfolding sentence. The outcome suggests that comprehenders' visual attention is predominantly guided by their interpretation of the spatial description. Visual shifts against the grain occurred only when comprehenders had some extra time, and their absence did not affect comprehension accuracy. However, the timing of this reverse gaze shift on a trial correlated with that trial's verification time. Thus, while the timing of these gaze shifts is subtly related to the verification time, their presence is not necessary for successful verification of spatial relations. |
Robyn Burton; Luke J. Saunders; David P. Crabb Areas of the visual field important during reading in patients with glaucoma Journal Article In: Japanese Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 94–102, 2015. @article{Burton2015, PURPOSE To determine the areas of the binocular visual field (VF) associated with reading speed in glaucomatous patients with preserved visual acuity (VA). MATERIALS AND METHODS Fifty-four patients with glaucoma (mean age ± standard deviation 70 ± 8 years) and 38 visually healthy controls (mean age 66 ± 9 years) had silent reading speeds measured using non-scrolling text on a computer setup. Participants completed three cognitive tests and tests of visual function, including the Humphrey 24-2 threshold VF test in each eye; the results were combined to produce binocular integrated VFs (IVFs). Regression analyses using the control group to correct for cognitive test scores, age and VA were conducted to obtain the IVF mean deviation (MD) and total deviation (TD) value from each IVF test location. Concordance between reading speed and TD, assessed using R (2) statistics, was ranked in order of importance to explore the parts of the IVF most likely to be linked with reading speed. RESULTS No significant association between IVF MD value and reading speed was observed (p = 0.38). Ranking individual thresholds indicated that the inferior left section of the IVF was most likely to be associated with reading speed. CONCLUSIONS Certain regions of the binocular VF impairment may be associated with reading performance even in patients with preserved VA. The inferior left region of patient IVFs may be important for changing lines during reading. |
Kathleen Carbary; Meredith Brown; Christine Gunlogson; Joyce M. McDonough; Aleksandra Fazlipour; Michael K. Tanenhaus Anticipatory deaccenting in language comprehension Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 1-2, pp. 197–211, 2015. @article{Carbary2015, We evaluated the hypothesis that listeners can generate expectations about upcoming input using anticipatory deaccenting, in which the absence of a nuclear pitch accent on an utterance-new noun is licensed by the subsequent repetition of that noun (e.g. Drag the SQUARE with the house to the TRIangle with the house). The phonemic restoration paradigm was modified to obscure word-initial segmental information uniquely identifying the final word in a spoken instruction, resulting in a stimulus compatible with two lexical alternatives (e.g. mouse/house). In Experiment 1, we measured participants' final interpretations and response times. In Experiment 2, we used the same materials in a crowd-sourced gating study. Sentence interpretations at gated intervals, final interpretations and response times provided converging evidence that the anticipatory deaccenting pattern contributed to listeners' referential expectations. The results illustrate the availability and importance of sentence-level accent patterns in spoken language comprehension.$backslash$nWe evaluated the hypothesis that listeners can generate expectations about upcoming input using anticipatory deaccenting, in which the absence of a nuclear pitch accent on an utterance-new noun is licensed by the subsequent repetition of that noun (e.g. Drag the SQUARE with the house to the TRIangle with the house). The phonemic restoration paradigm was modified to obscure word-initial segmental information uniquely identifying the final word in a spoken instruction, resulting in a stimulus compatible with two lexical alternatives (e.g. mouse/house). In Experiment 1, we measured participants' final interpretations and response times. In Experiment 2, we used the same materials in a crowd-sourced gating study. Sentence interpretations at gated intervals, final interpretations and response times provided converging evidence that the anticipatory deaccenting pattern contributed to listeners' referential expectations. The results illustrate the availability and importance of sentence-level accent patterns in spoken language comprehension. |
Paul Metzner; Titus Malsburg; Shravan Vasishth; Frank Rösler Brain responses to world knowledge violations: A comparison of stimulus- and fixation-triggered event-related potentials and neural oscillations Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 1017–1028, 2015. @article{Metzner2015, Recent research has shown that brain potentials time-locked to fixations in natural reading can be similar to brain potentials recorded during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). We attempted two replications of Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, and Petersson [Hagoort, P., Hald, L., Bastiaansen, M., & Petersson, K. M. Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension. Science, 304, 438-441, 2004] to determine whether this correspondence also holds for oscillatory brain responses. Hagoort et al. reported an N400 effect and synchronization in the theta and gamma range following world knowledge violations. Our first experiment (n = 32) used RSVP and replicated both the N400 effect in the ERPs and the power increase in the theta range in the time-frequency domain. In the second experiment (n = 49), participants read the same materials freely while their eye movements and their EEG were monitored. First fixation durations, gaze durations, and regression rates were increased, and the ERP showed an N400 effect. An analysis of time-frequency representations showed synchronization in the delta range (1-3 Hz) and desynchronization in the upper alpha range (11-13 Hz) but no theta or gamma effects. The results suggest that oscillatory EEG changes elicited by world knowledge violations are different in natural reading and RSVP. This may reflect differences in how representations are constructed and retrieved from memory in the two presentation modes. |
Holger Mitterer; Eva Reinisch Letters don't matter: No effect of orthography on the perception of conversational speech Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 85, pp. 116–134, 2015. @article{Mitterer2015, It has been claimed that learning to read changes the way we perceive speech, with detrimental effects for words with sound-spelling inconsistencies. Because conversational speech is peppered with segment deletions and alterations that lead to sound-spelling inconsistencies, such an influence would seriously hinder the perception of conversational speech. We hence tested whether the orthographic coding of a segment influences its deletion costs in perception. German glottal stop, a segment that is canonically present but not orthographically coded, allows such a test. The effects of glottal-stop deletion in German were compared to deletion of /h/ in German (grapheme: h) and deletion of glottal stop in Maltese (grapheme: q) in an implicit task with conversational speech and explicit task with careful speech. All segment deletions led to similar reduction costs in the implicit task, while an orthographic effect, with larger effects for orthographically coded segments, emerged in the explicit task. These results suggest that learning to read does not influence how we process speech but mainly how we think about it. |
Mariah Moore; Peter C. Gordon Reading ability and print exposure: item response theory analysis of the author recognition test Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 1095–1109, 2015. @article{Moore2015, In the author recognition test (ART), participants are presented with a series of names and foils and are asked to indicate which ones they recognize as authors. The test is a strong predictor of reading skill, and this predictive ability is generally explained as occurring because author knowledge is likely acquired through reading or other forms of print exposure. In this large-scale study (1,012 college student participants), we used item response theory (IRT) to analyze item (author) characteristics in order to facilitate identification of the determinants of item difficulty, provide a basis for further test development, and optimize scoring of the ART. Factor analysis suggested a potential two-factor structure of the ART, differentiating between literary and popular authors. Effective and ineffective author names were identified so as to facilitate future revisions of the ART. Analyses showed that the ART is a highly significant predictor of the time spent encoding words, as measured using eyetracking during reading. The relationship between the ART and time spent reading provided a basis for implementing a higher penalty for selecting foils, rather than the standard method of ART scoring (names selected minus foils selected). The findings provide novel support for the view that the ART is a valid indicator of reading volume. Furthermore, they show that frequency data can be used to select items of appropriate difficulty, and that frequency data from corpora based on particular time periods and types of texts may allow adaptations of the test for different populations. |
Bruno Nicenboim; Shravan Vasishth; Carolina A. Gattei; Mariano Sigman; Reinhold Kliegl Working memory differences in long-distance dependency resolution Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 312, 2015. @article{Nicenboim2015, There is a wealth of evidence showing that increasing the distance between an argument and its head leads to more processing effort, namely, locality effects; these are usually associated with constraints in working memory (DLT: Gibson, 2000; activation-based model: Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). In SOV languages, however, the opposite effect has been found: antilocality (see discussion in Levy et al., 2013). Antilocality effects can be explained by the expectation-based approach as proposed by Levy (2008) or by the activation-based model of sentence processing as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005). We report an eye-tracking and a self-paced reading study with sentences in Spanish together with measures of individual differences to examine the distinction between expectation- and memory-based accounts, and within memory-based accounts the further distinction between DLT and the activation-based model. The experiments show that (i) antilocality effects as predicted by the expectation account appear only for high-capacity readers; (ii) increasing dependency length by interposing material that modifies the head of the dependency (the verb) produces stronger facilitation than increasing dependency length with material that does not modify the head; this is in agreement with the activation-based model but not with the expectation account; and (iii) a possible outcome of memory load on low-capacity readers is the increase in regressive saccades (locality effects as predicted by memory-based accounts) or, surprisingly, a speedup in the self-paced reading task; the latter consistent with good-enough parsing (Ferreira et al., 2002). In sum, the study suggests that individual differences in working memory capacity play a role in dependency resolution, and that some of the aspects of dependency resolution can be best explained with the activation-based model together with a prediction component. |
Akira Omaki; Ellen Lau; Imogen Davidson White; Myles Louis Dakan; Aaron Apple; Colin Phillips Hyper-active gap filling Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 384, 2015. @article{Omaki2015, Much work has demonstrated that speakers of verb-final languages are able to construct rich syntactic representations in advance of verb information. This may reflect general architectural properties of the language processor, or it may only reflect a language-specific adaptation to the demands of verb-finality. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether speakers of a verb-medial language (English) wait to consult verb transitivity information before constructing filler-gap dependencies, where internal arguments are fronted and hence precede the verb. This configuration makes it possible to investigate whether the parser actively makes representational commitments on the gap position before verb transitivity information becomes available. A key prediction of the view that rich pre-verbal structure building is a general architectural property is that speakers of verb-medial languages should predictively construct dependencies in advance of verb transitivity information, and therefore that disruption should be observed when the verb has intransitive subcategorization frames that are incompatible with the predicted structure. In three reading experiments (self-paced and eye-tracking) that manipulated verb transitivity, we found evidence for reading disruption when the verb was intransitive, although no such reading difficulty was observed when the critical verb was embedded inside a syntactic island structure, which blocks filler-gap dependency completion. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that in English, as in verb-final languages, information from preverbal noun phrases is sufficient to trigger active dependency completion without having access to verb transitivity information. |
Kaitlin Falkauskas; Victor Kuperman When experience meets language statistics: Individual variability in processing english compound words Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1607–1627, 2015. @article{Falkauskas2015, Statistical patterns of language use demonstrably affect language comprehension and language production. This study set out to determine whether the variable amount of exposure to such patterns leads to individual differences in reading behavior as measured via eye-movements. Previous studies have demonstrated that more proficient readers are less influenced by distributional biases in language (e.g., frequency, predictability, transitional probability) than poor readers. We hypothesized that a probabilistic bias that is characteristic of written but not spoken language would preferentially affect readers with greater exposure to printed materials in general and to the specific pattern engendering the bias. Readers of varying reading experience were presented with sentences including English compound words that can occur in 2 spelling formats with differing probabilities: concatenated (windowsill, used 40% of the time) or spaced (window sill, 60%). Linear mixed effects multiple regression models fitted to the eye-movement measures showed that the probabilistic bias toward the presented spelling had a stronger facilitatory effect on compounds that occurred more frequently (in any spelling) or belonged to larger morphological families, and on readers with higher scores on a test of exposure-to-print. Thus, the amount of support toward the compound's spelling is effectively exploited when reading, but only when the spelling patterns are entrenched in an individual's mental lexicon via overall exposure to print and to compounds with alternating spelling. We argue that research on the interplay of language use and structure is incomplete without proper characterization of how particular individuals, with varying levels of experience and skill, learn these language structures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved) |
Thomas A. Farmer; Shaorong Yan; Klinton Bicknell; Michael K. Tanenhaus Form-to-expectation matching effects on first-pass eye movement measures during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 958–976, 2015. @article{Farmer2015, Recent Electroencephalography/Magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) studies suggest that when contextual information is highly predictive of some property of a linguistic signal, expectations generated from context can be translated into surprisingly low-level estimates of the physical form-based properties likely to occur in subsequent portions of the unfolding signal. Whether form-based expectations are generated and assessed during natural reading, however, remains unclear. We monitored eye movements while participants read phonologically typical and atypical nouns in noun-predictive contexts (Experiment 1), demonstrating that when a noun is strongly expected, fixation durations on furst-pass eye movement measures, including first fixation duration, gaze durations, and go-past times, are shorter for nouns with category typical form-based features. In Experiments 2 and 3, typical and atypical nouns were placed in sentential contexts normed to create expectations of variable strength for a noun. Context and typicality interacted significantly at gaze duration. These results suggest that during reading, form-based expectations that are translated from higher-level category-based expectancies can facilitate the processing of a word in context, and that their effect on lexical processing is graded based on the strength of category expectancy. |
Heather J. Ferguson; Ian Apperly; Jumana Ahmad; Markus Bindemann; James Cane Task constraints distinguish perspective inferences from perspective use during discourse interpretation in a false belief task Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 139, pp. 50–70, 2015. @article{Ferguson2015, Interpreting other peoples' actions relies on an understanding of their current mental states (e.g. beliefs, desires and intentions). In this paper, we distinguish between listeners' ability to infer others' perspectives and their explicit use of this knowledge to predict subsequent actions. In a visual-world study, two groups of participants (passive observers vs. active participants) watched short videos, depicting transfer events, where one character ('Jane') either held a true or false belief about an object's location. We tracked participants' eye-movements around the final visual scene, time-locked to related auditory descriptions (e.g. "Jane will look for the chocolates in the container on the left".). Results showed that active participants had already inferred the character's belief in the 1. s preview period prior to auditory onset, before it was possible to use this information to predict an outcome. Moreover, they used this inference to correctly anticipate reference to the object's initial location on false belief trials at the earliest possible point (i.e. from "Jane" onwards). In contrast, passive observers only showed evidence of a belief inference from the onset of "Jane", and did not show reliable use of this inference to predict Jane's behaviour on false belief trials until much later, when the location ("left/right") was auditorily available. These results show that active engagement in a task activates earlier inferences about others' perspectives, and drives immediate use of this information to anticipate others' actions, compared to passive observers, who are susceptible to influences from egocentric or reality biases. Finally, we review evidence that using other peoples' perspectives to predict their behaviour is more cognitively effortful than simply using one's own. |
Gerardo Fernández; Liliana R. Castro; Marcela Schumacher; Osvaldo E. Agamennoni Diagnosis of mild Alzheimer disease through the analysis of eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2015. @article{Fernandez2015, Reading requires the integration of several central cognitive subsystems, ranging from attention and oculomotor control to word identification and language comprehension. Reading saccades and fixations contain information that can be correlated with word properties. When reading a sentence, the brain must decide where to direct the next saccade according to what has been read up to the actual fixation. In this process, the retrieval memory brings information about the current word features and attributes into working memory. According to this information, the prefrontal cortex predicts and triggers the next saccade. The frequency and cloze predictability of the fixated word, the preceding words and the upcoming ones affect when and where the eyes will move next. In this paper we present a diagnostic technique for early stage cognitive impairment detection by analyzing eye movements during reading proverbs. We performed a case-control study involving 20 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease and 40 age-matched, healthy control patients. The measurements were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models, revealing that eye movement behavior while reading can provide valuable information about whether a person is cognitively impaired. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using word-based properties, proverbs and linear mixed-effect models for identifying cognitive abnormalities. |
Gerardo Fernández; Marcela Schumacher; Liliana Castro; David Orozco; Osvaldo Agamennoni Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease produced shorter outgoing saccades when reading sentences Journal Article In: Psychiatry Research, vol. 229, no. 1-2, pp. 470–478, 2015. @article{Fernandez2015a, In the present work we analyzed forward saccades of thirty five elderly subjects (Controls) and of thirty five mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) during reading regular and high-predictable sentences. While they read, their eye movements were recorded. The pattern of forward saccade amplitudes as a function of word predictability was clearly longer in Controls. Our results suggest that Controls might use stored information of words for enhancing their reading performance. Further, cloze predictability increased outgoing saccades amplitudes, as this increase stronger in high-predictable sentences. Quite the contrary, patients with mild AD evidenced reduced forward saccades even at early stages of the disease. This reduction might reveal impairments in brain areas such as those corresponding to working memory, memory retrieval, and semantic memory functions that are already present at early stages of AD. Our findings might be relevant for expanding the options for the early detection and monitoring of in the early stages of AD. Furthermore, eye movements during reading could provide a new tool for measuring a drug's impact on patient's behavior. |
Francesca Foppolo; Marco Marelli; Luisa Meroni; Andrea Gualmini Hey little sister, who's the only one? Modulating informativeness in the resolution of privative ambiguity Journal Article In: Cognitive science, vol. 39, no. 7, pp. 1646–1674, 2015. @article{Foppolo2015, We present two eye-tracking experiments on the interpretation of sentences like "The tall girl is (not) the only one that …," which are ambiguous between the anaphoric (the only girl that …) and the exophoric interpretation (the only individual that …). These interpretations differ in informativeness: in a positive context, the exophoric (strong) reading entails the anaphoric (weak), while in a negative context the entailment pattern is reversed and the anaphoric reading is the strongest one. We tested whether adults rely on considerations about informativeness in solving the ambiguity. The results show that participants interpreted one exophorically in both positive and negative contexts. Given these findings, we cast doubts on the idea that Informativeness plays a role in ambiguity resolution and proposes a Principle of Maximal Exploitation: When a context is provided, adults extend their domain of evaluation to include the whole scenario, independently from truth-conditional considerations about informativity and strength. |
Michael Frazier; Lauren Ackerman; Peter Baumann; David Potter; Masaya Yoshida Wh-filler-gap dependency formation guides reflexive antecedent search Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1504, 2015. @article{Frazier2015, Prior studies on online sentence processing have shown that the parser can resolve non-local dependencies rapidly and accurately. This study investigates the interaction between the processing of two such non-local dependencies: wh-filler-gap dependencies (WhFGD) and reflexive-antecedent dependencies. We show that reflexive-antecedent dependency resolution is sensitive to the presence of a WhFGD, and argue that the filler-gap dependency established by WhFGD resolution is selected online as the antecedent of a reflexive dependency. We investigate the processing of constructions like (1), where two NPs might be possible antecedents for the reflexive, namely which cowgirl and Mary. Even though Mary is linearly closer to the reflexive, the only grammatically licit antecedent for the reflexive is the more distant wh-NP, which cowgirl. (1). Which cowgirl did Mary expect to have injured herself due to negligence? Four eye-tracking text-reading experiments were conducted on examples like (1), differing in whether the embedded clause was non-finite (1 and 3) or finite (2 and 4), and in whether the tail of the wh-dependency intervened between the reflexive and its closest overt antecedent (1 and 2) or the wh-dependency was associated with a position earlier in the sentence (3 and 4). The results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate the parser accesses the result of WhFGD formation during reflexive antecedent search. The resolution of a wh-dependency alters the representation that reflexive antecedent search operates over, allowing the grammatical but linearly distant antecedent to be accessed rapidly. In the absence of a long-distance WhFGD (Experiments 3 and 4), wh-NPs were not found to impact reading times of the reflexive, indicating that the parser's ability to select distant wh-NPs as reflexive antecedents crucially involves syntactic structure. |
Steven Frisson About bound and scary books: The processing of book polysemies Journal Article In: Lingua, vol. 157, pp. 17–35, 2015. @article{Frisson2015, There are competing views on the on-line processing of polysemous words such as book, which have distinct but semantically related senses (as in bound book vs. scary book). According to a Sense-Enumeration Lexicon (SEL) view, different senses are represented separately, just as the different meanings of a homonym (e.g. bank). According to an underspecification view, initial processing does not distinguish between the different senses. According to a Relevance Theory (RT)-inspired view, the context will immediately guide interpretation to a specific sense. In Experiment 1, participants indicated whether an adjective-noun construction made sense or not. Switching from one sense to another was costly, but there was no effect of sense frequency (contra SEL). In Experiment 2, eye movements were recorded when participants read sentences in which a polyseme was disambiguated to a specific sense following a neutral context, a sense was repeated, or a sense was switched. The results showed no effect of sense dominance in the neutral condition, no advantage when a sense was repeated, and a cost when switched, especially when switching from a concrete to an abstract interpretation. These data cannot be fitted in an SEL or RT-inspired account, questioning the validity of both as a processing account. |
Benjamin Gagl; Stefan Hawelka; Heinz Wimmer On sources of the word length effect in uoung readers Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 289–306, 2015. @article{Gagl2015, We investigated how letter length, phoneme length, and consonant clusters contribute to the word length effect in 2nd- and 4th-grade children. They read words from three different conditions: In one condition, letter length increased but phoneme length did not due to multiletter graphemes (Haus-Bauch-Schach). In the remaining conditions, phoneme length increased in correspondence with letter length. One presented monosyllabic words with consonant clusters (Herbst); the other presented disyllabic words without consonant clusters (Kö.nig). Phoneme and letter length contributed to the length effect in naming latencies. Words with consonant clusters elicited the largest length effect. We interpreted this finding as reflecting difficulties of young readers with accessing the output phonology of the tightly coarticulated consonant clusters from the separate phonemes delivered from serial grapheme-to-phoneme conversions. Moreover, eye-movement data indicated that increased reading speed, accompanied with decreased word length effects, is due to more efficient grapheme-to-phoneme conversions rather than the emergence of whole-word recognition. |
Ian Cunnings; Clare Patterson; Claudia Felser Structural constraints on pronoun binding and coreference: Evidence from eye movements during reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 840, 2015. @article{Cunnings2015, A number of recent studies have investigated how syntactic and non-syntactic constraints combine to cue memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. In this paper we investigate how syntactic constraints and gender congruence interact to guide memory retrieval during the resolution of subject pronouns. Subject pronouns are always technically ambiguous, and the application of syntactic constraints on their interpretation depends on properties of the antecedent that is to be retrieved. While pronouns can freely corefer with non-quantified referential antecedents, linking a pronoun to a quantified antecedent is only possible in certain syntactic configurations via variable binding. We report the results from a judgment task and three online reading comprehension experiments investigating pronoun resolution with quantified and non-quantified antecedents. Results from both the judgment task and participants' eye movements during reading indicate that comprehenders freely allow pronouns to corefer with non-quantified antecedents, but that retrieval of quantified antecedents is restricted to specific syntactic environments. We interpret our findings as indicating that syntactic constraints constitute highly weighted cues to memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. |
Maya Dank; Avital Deutsch; Kathryn Bock Resolving conflicts in natural and grammatical gender agreement: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 435–467, 2015. @article{Dank2015, The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112–143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants' eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases. |
Isabelle Dautriche; Daniel Swingley; Anne Christophe Learning novel phonological neighbors: Syntactic category matters Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 143, pp. 77–86, 2015. @article{Dautriche2015, Novel words (like tog) that sound like well-known words (dog) are hard for toddlers to learn, even though children can hear the difference between them (Swingley & Aslin, 2002, 2007). One possibility is that phonological competition alone is the problem. Another is that a broader set of probabilistic considerations is responsible: toddlers may resist considering tog as a novel object label because its neighbor dog is also an object. In three experiments, French 18-month-olds were taught novel words whose word forms were phonologically similar to familiar nouns (noun-neighbors), to familiar verbs (verb-neighbors) or to nothing (no-neighbors). Toddlers successfully learned the no-neighbors and verb-neighbors but failed to learn the noun-neighbors, although both novel neighbors had a familiar phonological neighbor in the toddlers' lexicon. We conclude that when creating a novel lexical entry, toddlers' evaluation of similarity in the lexicon is multidimensional, incorporating both phonological and semantic or syntactic features. |
Jakub Dotlačil; Adrian Brasoveanu The manner and time course of updating quantifier scope representations in discourse Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 305–323, 2015. @article{Dotlacil2015, We present the results of two experiments, an eye-tracking study and a follow-up self-paced reading study, investigating the interpretation of quantifier scope in sentences with three quantifiers: two indefinites in subject and object positions and a universal distributive quantifier in ad-junct position. In addition to the fact that such three-way scope inter-actions have not been experimentally investigated before, they enable us to distinguish between different theories of quantifier scope interpretation in ways that are not possible when only simpler, two-way interactions are considered. The experiments show that contrary to underspecifica-tion theories of scope, a totally ordered scope-hierarchy representation is maintained and modified across sentences and this scope representation cannot be reduced to the truth-conditional/mental model representation of sentential meaning. The experiments also show that the processor uses scope-disambiguating information as early as possible to (re)analyze scope representation. |
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia; Albert Costa Lying in a native and foreign language Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 1124–1129, 2015. @article{Dunabeitia2015, This study explores the interaction between deceptive language and second language processing. One hundred participants were asked to produce veridical and false statements in either their first or second language. Pupil size, speech latencies, and utterance durations were analyzed. Results showed additive effects of statement veracity and the language in which these statements were produced. That is, false statements elicited larger pupil dilations and longer naming latencies compared with veridical statements, and statements in the foreign language elicited larger pupil dilations and longer speech durations and compared with first language. Importantly, these two effects did not interact, suggesting that the processing cost associated with deception is similar in a native and foreign language. The theoretical implications of these observations are discussed. |
Pierce Edmiston; Gary Lupyan What makes words special? Words as unmotivated cues Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 143, pp. 93–100, 2015. @article{Edmiston2015, Verbal labels, such as the words "dog" and "guitar," activate conceptual knowledge more effectively than corresponding environmental sounds, such as a dog bark or a guitar strum, even though both are unambiguous cues to the categories of dogs and guitars (Lupyan & Thompson-Schill, 2012). We hypothesize that this advantage of labels emerges because word-forms, unlike other cues, do not vary in a motivated way with their referent. The sound of a guitar cannot help but inform a listener to the type of guitar making it (electric, acoustic, etc.). The word "guitar" on the other hand, can leave the type of guitar unspecified. We argue that as a result, labels gain the ability to cue a more abstract mental representation, promoting efficient processing of category members. In contrast, environmental sounds activate representations that are more tightly linked to the specific cause of the sound. Our results show that upon hearing environmental sounds such as a dog bark or guitar strum, people cannot help but activate a particular instance of a category, in a particular state, at a particular time, as measured by patterns of response times on cue-picture matching tasks (Exps. 1-2) and eye-movements in a task where the cues are task-irrelevant (Exp. 3). In comparison, labels activate concepts in a more abstract, decontextualized way-a difference that we argue can be explained by labels acting as "unmotivated cues". |
Marcel R. Giezen; Henrike K. Blumenfeld; Anthony Shook; Viorica Marian; Karen Emmorey Parallel language activation and inhibitory control in bimodal bilinguals Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 141, pp. 9–25, 2015. @article{Giezen2015, Findings from recent studies suggest that spoken-language bilinguals engage nonlinguistic inhibitory control mechanisms to resolve cross-linguistic competition during auditory word recognition. Bilingual advantages in inhibitory control might stem from the need to resolve perceptual competition between similar-sounding words both within and between their two languages. If so, these advantages should be lessened or eliminated when there is no perceptual competition between two languages. The present study investigated the extent of inhibitory control recruitment during bilingual language comprehension by examining associations between language co-activation and nonlinguistic inhibitory control abilities in bimodal bilinguals, whose two languages do not perceptually compete. Cross-linguistic distractor activation was identified in the visual world paradigm, and correlated significantly with performance on a nonlinguistic spatial Stroop task within a group of 27 hearing ASL-English bilinguals. Smaller Stroop effects (indexing more efficient inhibition) were associated with reduced co-activation of ASL signs during the early stages of auditory word recognition. These results suggest that inhibitory control in auditory word recognition is not limited to resolving perceptual linguistic competition in phonological input, but is also used to moderate competition that originates at the lexico-semantic level. |
Aline Godfroid; Le Anne Spino Reconceptualizing reactivity of think-alouds and eye tracking: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence Journal Article In: Language Learning, vol. 65, no. 4, pp. 896–928, 2015. @article{Godfroid2015, This study extends previous reactivity research on the cognitive effects of think-alouds to include eye-tracking methodology. Unlike previous studies, we supplemented traditional superiority tests with equivalence tests, because only the latter are conceptually appropriate for demonstrating nonreactivity. Advanced learners of English read short English texts embedded with pseudowords in an eye-tracking (n = 28), think-aloud (n = 28), or silent control condition (n = 46). Results indicated that neither eye tracking nor thinking aloud affected text comprehension. In terms of vocabulary recognition, thinking aloud had a small, positive effect, and the results for eye tracking were mixed. We discuss challenges and opportunities of equivalence testing and explore ways to improve study quality more generally in second language acquisition research. |
Junjuan Gu; Xingshan Li The effects of character transposition within and across words in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 272–281, 2015. @article{Gu2015, Given the lack of spaces between words in Chinese text, Chinese readers must parse these characters into words using their word knowledge. In this situation, are the characters belonging to a single word or to different words understood via different character-order encoding processes? In this study, we explored the effects of word boundaries in Chinese text on character-order encoding. We used four-character words (the one-word condition) and two two-character words (the two-word condition) as our targets. We embedded the target words into sentences and then manipulated the previews of the words using the boundary paradigm. The preview was identical to the target word (identity condition), had the two middle characters of the target word transposed (TC condition), or had two middle characters that were different from those in the target word (SC condition). Fixation durations on the target word in the TC condition were much longer than those in the identity condition for the two-word condition, but they were not significantly different for the one-word condition. Furthermore, for the one-word condition, gaze durations were longer in the SC than in the TC condition, whereas for the two-word condition, the difference between the TC and SC conditions was not significant. Word boundaries were found to affect the character-order encoding in Chinese reading, further suggesting the early occurrence of word segmentation. |
Junjuan Gu; Xingshan Li; Simon P. Liversedge Character order processing in Chinese reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 127–137, 2015. @article{Gu2015a, We explored how character order information is encoded in isolated word processing or Chinese sentence reading in 2 experiments using a masked priming paradigm and a gaze-contingent display-change paradigm. The results showed that response latencies in the lexical decision task and reading times on the target word region were longer in the unrelated condition (the prime or the preview was unrelated with the target word) than the transposed-character condition (the prime or the preview was a transposition of the 2 characters of the target word), which were respectively longer than in the identity condition (the prime or preview was identical to the target word). These results show that character order is encoded at an early stage of processing in Chinese reading, but character position encoding was not strict. We also found that character order encoding was similar for single-morpheme and multiple-morpheme words, suggesting that morphemic status does not affect character order encoding. The current results represent an early contribution to our understanding of character order encoding during Chinese reading. |
Demet Gurler; Nathan Doyle; Edgar Walker; John Magnotti; Michael S. Beauchamp A link between individual differences in multisensory speech perception and eye movements Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 1333–1341, 2015. @article{Gurler2015, The McGurk effect is an illusion in which visual speech information dramatically alters the perception of auditory speech. However, there is a high degree of individual variability in how frequently the illusion is perceived: some individuals almost always perceive the McGurk effect, while others rarely do. Another axis of individual variability is the pattern of eye movements make while viewing a talking face: some individuals often fixate the mouth of the talker, while others rarely do. Since the talker's mouth carries the visual speech necessary information to induce the McGurk effect, we hypothesized that individuals who frequently perceive the McGurk effect should spend more time fixating the talker's mouth. We used infrared eye tracking to study eye movements as 40 participants viewed audiovisual speech. Frequent perceivers of the McGurk effect were more likely to fixate the mouth of the talker, and there was a significant correlation between McGurk frequency and mouth looking time. The noisy encoding of disparity model of McGurk perception showed that individuals who frequently fixated the mouth had lower sensory noise and higher disparity thresholds than those who rarely fixated the mouth. Differences in eye movements when viewing the talker's face may be an important contributor to interindividual differences in multisensory speech perception. |
Matthew Haigh; Jean François Bonnefon Conditional sentences create a blind spot in theory of mind during narrative comprehension Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 160, pp. 194–201, 2015. @article{Haigh2015a, We identify a blind spot in the early Theory of Mind processing of conditional sentences that describe a protagonist's potential action, and its predictable consequences. We propose that such sentences create expectations through two independent channels. A decision theoretic channel creates an expectation that the action will be taken (viz., not taken) if it has desirable (viz., undesirable) consequences, but a structural channel acts in parallel to create an expectation that the action will be taken, irrespective of desirability. Accordingly, reading should be disrupted when a protagonist avoids an action with desirable consequences, but reading should not be disrupted when a protagonist takes an action with undesirable consequences. This prediction was supported by the eye movements of participants reading systematically varied vignettes. Reading was always disrupted when the protagonist avoided an action with desirable consequences, but disruptions were either delayed (Experiment 1) or recovered from faster (Experiment 2) when the protagonist took an action with undesirable consequences. |
Matthew Haigh; Jean François Bonnefon Eye movements reveal how readers infer intentions from the beliefs and desires of others Journal Article In: Experimental Psychology, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 206–213, 2015. @article{Haigh2015, We examine how the beliefs and desires of a protagonist are used by readers to predict their intentions as a narrative vignette unfolds. Eye movement measures revealed that readers rapidly inferred an intention when the protagonist desired an outcome, even when this inference was not licensed by the protagonist's belief state. Reading was immediately disrupted when participants encountered a described action that contradicted this inference. During intermediate processing, desire inferences were moderated by the protagonist's belief state. Effects that emerged later in the text were again driven solely by the protagonist's desires. These data suggest that desire-based inferences are initially drawn irrespective of belief state, but are then quickly inhibited if not licensed by relevant beliefs. This inhibition of desire-based inferences may be an effortful process as it was not systematically sustained in later steps of processing. |
Jesse A. Harris Structure modulates similarity-based interference in sluicing: An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1839, 2015. @article{Harris2015, In cue-based content-addressable approaches to memory, a target and its competitors are retrieved in parallel from memory via a fast, associative cue-matching procedure under a severely limited focus of attention. Such a parallel matching procedure could in principle ignore the serial order or hierarchical structure characteristic of linguistic relations. I present an eye tracking while reading experiment that investigates whether the sentential position of a potential antecedent modulates the strength of similarity-based interference, a well-studied effect in which increased similarity in features between a target and its competitors results in slower and less accurate retrieval overall. The manipulation trades on an independently established Locality bias in sluiced structures to associate a wh-remnant (which ones) in clausal ellipsis with the most local correlate (some wines), as in "The tourists enjoyed some wines, but I don't know which ones." The findings generally support cue-based parsing models of sentence processing that are subject to similarity-based interference in retrieval, and provide additional support to the growing body of evidence that retrieval is sensitive to both the structural position of a target antecedent and its competitors, and the specificity of retrieval cues. |
Stefan Hawelka; Sarah Schuster; Benjamin Gagl; Florian Hutzler On forward inferences of fast and slow readers. An eye movement study Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 5, pp. 8432, 2015. @article{Hawelka2015, Unimpaired readers process words incredibly fast and hence it was assumed that top-down processing, such as predicting upcoming words, would be too slow to play an appreciable role in reading. This runs counter the major postulate of the predictive coding framework that our brain continually predicts probable upcoming sensory events. This means, it may generate predictions about the probable upcoming word during reading (dubbed forward inferences). Trying to asses these contradictory assumptions, we evaluated the effect of the predictability of words in sentences on eye movement control during silent reading. Participants were a group of fluent (i.e., fast) and a group of speed-impaired (i.e., slow) readers. The findings indicate that fast readers generate forward inferences, whereas speed-impaired readers do so to a reduced extent - indicating a significant role of predictive coding for fluent reading. |
Alison W. Heard; Michael E. J. Masson; Daniel N. Bub Time course of action representations evoked during sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 156, pp. 98–103, 2015. @article{Heard2015, The nature of hand-action representations evoked during language comprehension was investigated using a variant of the visual-world paradigm in which eye fixations were monitored while subjects viewed a screen displaying four hand postures and listened to sentences describing an actor using or lifting a manipulable object. Displayed postures were related to either a functional (using) or volumetric (lifting) interaction with an object that matched or did not match the object mentioned in the sentence. Subjects were instructed to select the hand posture that matched the action described in the sentence. Even before the manipulable object was mentioned in the sentence, some sentence contexts allowed subjects to infer the object's identity and the type of action performed with it and eye fixations immediately favored the corresponding hand posture. This effect was assumed to be the result of ongoing motor or perceptual imagery in which the action described in the sentence was mentally simulated. In addition, the hand posture related to the manipulable object mentioned in a sentence, but not related to the described action (e.g., a writing posture in the context of a sentence that describes lifting, but not using, a pencil), was favored over other hand postures not related to the object. This effect was attributed to motor resonance arising from conceptual processing of the manipulable object, without regard to the remainder of the sentence context. |
Daphna Heller; Jennifer E. Arnold; Natalie M. Klein; Michael K. Tanenhaus Inferring difficulty: Flexibility in the real-time processing of disfluency Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 190–203, 2015. @article{Heller2015, Upon hearing a disfluent referring expression, listeners expect the speaker to refer to an object that is previously unmentioned, an object that does not have a straightforward label, or an object that requires a longer description. Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments examined whether listeners directly associate disfluency with these properties of objects, or whether disfluency attribution is more flexible and involves situation-specific inferences. Since in natural situations reference to objects that do not have a straightforward label or that require a longer description is correlated with both production difficulty and with disfluency, we used a mini-artificial lexicon to dissociate difficulty from these properties, building on the fact that recently learned names take longer to produce than existing words in one's mental lexicon. The results demonstrate that disfluency attribution involves situation-specific inferences; we propose that in new situations listeners spontaneously infer what may cause production difficulty. However, the results show that these situation-specific inferences are limited in scope: listeners assessed difficulty relative to their own experience with the artificial names, and did not adapt to the assumed knowledge of the speaker. |
John M. Henderson; Wonil Choi; Steven G. Luke; Rutvik H. Desai Neural correlates of fixation duration in natural reading: Evidence from fixation-related fMRI Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 119, pp. 390–397, 2015. @article{Henderson2015a, A key assumption of current theories of natural reading is that fixation duration reflects underlying attentional, language, and cognitive processes associated with text comprehension. The neurocognitive correlates of this relationship are currently unknown. To investigate this relationship, we compared neural activation associated with fixation duration in passage reading and a pseudo-reading control condition. The results showed that fixation duration was associated with activation in oculomotor and language areas during text reading. Fixation duration during pseudo-reading, on the other hand, showed greater involvement of frontal control regions, suggesting flexibility and task dependency of the eye movement network. Consistent with current models, these results provide support for the hypothesis that fixation duration in reading reflects attentional engagement and language processing. The results also demonstrate that fixation-related fMRI provides a method for investigating the neurocognitive bases of natural reading. |
Ehab W. Hermena; Denis Drieghe; Sam Hellmuth; Simon P. Liversedge Processing of Arabic diacritical marks: Phonological-syntactic disambiguation of homographic verbs and visual crowding effects Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 494–507, 2015. @article{Hermena2015, Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed nondiacritized. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic homographic target verbs that have different pronunciations in active and passive were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences in which in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word. Our results show that readers benefitted from the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed their parsing preference for active verb analysis, and garden path effects were observed. When reading fully diacritized sentences, readers incurred only a small cost, likely due to increased visual crowding, but did not extensively process the (mostly superfluous) diacritics, thus resulting in a lack of benefit from the disambiguating diacritics on the passive verb. |
Florian Hintz; Antje S. Meyer Prediction and production of simple mathematical equations: Evidence from visual world eye-tracking Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 7, pp. e0130766, 2015. @article{Hintz2015, The relationship between the production and the comprehension systems has recently become a topic of interest for many psycholinguists. It has been argued that these systems are tightly linked and in particular that listeners use the production system to predict upcoming content. In this study, we tested how similar production and prediction processes are in a novel version of the visual world paradigm. Dutch speaking participants (native speakers in Experiment 1; German-Dutch bilinguals in Experiment 2) listened to mathematical equations while looking at a clock face featuring the numbers 1 to 12. On alternating trials, they either heard a complete equation ("three plus eight is eleven") or they heard the first part ("three plus eight is") and had to produce the result ("eleven") themselves. Participants were encouraged to look at the relevant numbers throughout the trial. Their eye movements were recorded and analyzed. We found that the participants' eye movements in the two tasks were overall very similar. They fixated the first and second number of the equations shortly after they were mentioned, and fixated the result number well before they named it on production trials and well before the recorded speaker named it on comprehension trials. However, all fixation latencies were shorter on production than on comprehension trials. These findings suggest that the processes involved in planning to say a word and anticipating hearing a word are quite similar, but that people are more aroused or engaged when they intend to respond than when they merely listen to another person. |
Ming Xiang; Sui Ping Wang; Yan Ling Cui Constructing covert dependencies-The case of Mandarin wh-in-situ dependency Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 84, pp. 139–166, 2015. @article{Xiang2015, Wh-in-situ constructions in Mandarin Chinese, as opposed to their English counterparts that front wh-phrases to the beginning of the sentence, have the same word order as regular non-wh declaratives. We argue that despite their surface word order, processing wh-in-situ constructions involves constructing a covert non-local syntactic dependency between the in-situ wh-phrase and a higher scope position at a clause boundary, leading to behavioral patterns similar to those associated with the processing of overt dependencies. In two comprehension experiments, we showed that the process of linking an in-situ wh-phrase and its scope position induces a similarity-based memory interference effect if another clause boundary position intervenes. In addition, a set of sentence completion studies also showed that the production of wh-in-situ constructions is heavily modulated by the increased working memory burden that results from planning and maintaining a non-local dependency. |
Ming Yan Visually complex foveal words increase the amount of parafoveal information acquired Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 111, no. Part A, pp. 91–96, 2015. @article{Yan2015, This study investigates the effect of foveal load (i.e., processing difficulty of currently fixated words) on parafoveal information processing. Contrary to the commonly accepted view that high foveal load leads to reduced parafoveal processing efficiency, results of the present study showed that increasing foveal visual (but not linguistic) processing load actually increased the amount of parafoveal information acquired, presumably due to the fact that longer fixation duration on the pretarget word provided more time for parafoveal processing of the target word. It is therefore proposed in the present study that foveal linguistic processing load is not the only factor that determines parafoveal processing; preview time (afforded by foveal word visual processing load) may jointly influence parafoveal processing. |
Ming Yan; Reinhold Kliegl Perceptual Span Depends on Font Size During the Reading of Chinese Sentences Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 209–219, 2015. @article{Yan2015a, The present study explored the perceptual span (i.e., the physical extent of an area from which useful visual information is extracted during a single fixation) during the reading of Chinese sentences in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested whether the rightward span can go beyond 3 characters when visually similar masks were used. Results showed that Chinese readers needed at least 4 characters to the right of fixation to maintain a normal reading behavior when visually similar masks were used and when characters were displayed in small fonts, indicating that the span is dynamically influenced by masking materials. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked whether the perceptual span varies as a function of font size in spaced (German) and unspaced (Chinese) scripts. Results clearly suggest perceptual span depends on font size in Chinese, but we failed to find such evidence for German. We propose that the perceptual span in Chinese is flexible; it is strongly constrained by its language-specific properties such as high information density and lack of word spacing. Implications for saccade-target selection during the reading of Chinese sentences are discussed. |
Ming Yan; Jinger Pan; Nathalie N. Bélanger; Hua Shu Chinese deaf readers have early access to parafoveal semantics Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 254–261, 2015. @article{Yan2015c, In the present study, we manipulated different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined how deaf readers make use of the parafoveal information. Results clearly indicate that although the reading-level matched hearing readers make greater use of orthographic information in the parafovea, parafoveal semantic information is obtained earlier among the deaf readers. In addition, a phonological preview benefit effect was found for the better deaf readers (relative to less-skilled deaf readers), although we also provide an alternative explanation for this effect. Providing evidence that Chinese deaf readers have higher efficiency when processing parafoveal semantics, the study indicates flexibility across individuals in the mechanisms underlying word recognition adapting to the inputs available in the linguistic environment. |
Ming Yan; Werner Sommer Parafoveal-on-foveal effects of emotional word semantics in reading chinese sentences: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 1237–1243, 2015. @article{Yan2015b, Despite the well-known influence of emotional meaning on cognition, relatively less is known about its effects on reading behavior. We investigated whether fixation behavior during the reading of Chinese sentences is influenced by emotional word meaning in the parafovea. Two-character target words embedded into the same sentence frames provided emotionally positive, negative, or neutral contents. Fixation durations on neutral pretarget words were prolonged for positive parafoveal words and for highly frequent negative parafoveal words. In addition, fixation durations on foveal emotional words were shorter than those on neutral words. We also found that the role of emotional words varied as a function of their valence during foveal and parafoveal processing. These findings suggest a processing advantage for emotional words relative to emotionally neutral stimuli in foveal and parafoveal vision. We discuss implications for the notion of attention attraction due to emotional content. |
Menahem Yeari; Paul W. Broek; Marja Oudega Processing and memory of central versus peripheral information as a function of reading goals: evidence from eye-movements Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1071–1097, 2015. @article{Yeari2015, The present study examined the effect of reading goals on the processing and memory of central and peripheral textual information. Using eye-tracking methodology, we compared the effect of four common reading goals—entertainment, presentation, studying for a close-ended (multiple-choice) questions test, and studying for an open-ended questions test—on the specific reading time of central and peripheral information and the overall reading time of expository texts. Text memory was tested using multiple-choice questions. Results showed that readers devoted more time to central information than peripheral information during initial reading, regardless of reading goal, but that they adjusted their rereading to the reading goal, with total reading time being longer for central information under some (entertainment and presentation) but not all (open-ended and close-ended questions tests) reading goals. Moreover, readers devoted more time to reading the texts for a study purpose (test or presentation) than for an entertainment purpose, and devoted more time in reading the texts to answer open-ended questions than close-ended questions. Finally, we found that readers remembered more central information than peripheral information under all reading goals. These findings suggest that centrality affects readers' early processing of text whereas reading goals only affect subsequent processing. Interestingly, processing time during reading predicted memory for peripheral information but not for central information. |
Keir X. X. Yong; Kishan Rajdev; Timothy J. Shakespeare; Alexander P. Leff; Sebastian J. Crutch Facilitating text reading in posterior cortical atrophy Journal Article In: Neurology, vol. 85, no. 4, pp. 339–348, 2015. @article{Yong2015, OBJECTIVE: We report (1) the quantitative investigation of text reading in posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), and (2) the effects of 2 novel software-based reading aids that result in dramatic improvements in the reading ability of patients with PCA. METHODS: Reading performance, eye movements, and fixations were assessed in patients with PCA and typical Alzheimer disease and in healthy controls (experiment 1). Two reading aids (single- and double-word) were evaluated based on the notion that reducing the spatial and oculomotor demands of text reading might support reading in PCA (experiment 2). RESULTS: Mean reading accuracy in patients with PCA was significantly worse (57%) compared with both patients with typical Alzheimer disease (98%) and healthy controls (99%); spatial aspects of passages were the primary determinants of text reading ability in PCA. Both aids led to considerable gains in reading accuracy (PCA mean reading accuracy: single-word reading aid = 96%; individual patient improvement range: 6%-270%) and self-rated measures of reading. Data suggest a greater efficiency of fixations and eye movements under the single-word reading aid in patients with PCA. CONCLUSIONS: These findings demonstrate how neurologic characterization of a neurodegenerative syndrome (PCA) and detailed cognitive analysis of an important everyday skill (reading) can combine to yield aids capable of supporting important everyday functional abilities. CLASSIFICATION OF EVIDENCE: This study provides Class III evidence that for patients with PCA, 2 software-based reading aids (single-word and double-word) improve reading accuracy. |
Andrea M. Zawoyski; Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder Using eye tracking to observe differential effects of repeated readings for second-grade students as a function of achievement level Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 171–184, 2015. @article{Zawoyski2015, Repeated readings (RR) is an evidence-based instructional technique in which students read the same text multiple times. Currently, little is known about how effects of RR may differ based on students' achievement levels. Eye tracking provides a means for closely examining instructional effects because it permits measurement of subtle changes that occur during RR. The current study measured changes in the reading behavior of second-grade students who were divided into two groups of 22 students each based on their reading achievement levels. Participants read a grade-level passage embedded with low-and high-frequency target words four times in a single session while their eye movements were recorded. Findings replicated those of previous research, suggesting that RR facilitated reading for students in both groups, particularly on low-frequency target words. Results indicated both similarities and differences in patterns of performance between lower and higher performing readers. Additionally, results implied that effects were greater for lower performing readers because they made greater improvements on high-frequency target words, whereas effects were diminished for higher performing readers. The findings have implications for improving future eye movement research investigating young students' reading and the efficiency of RR in the classroom. |
Likan Zhan; Stephen Crain; Peng Zhou The online processing of only if and even if conditional statements: Implications for mental models Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, pp. 367–379, 2015. @article{Zhan2015, A sentential connective like only if or even if merges two simple propositions into a complex statement. This study used a visual world paradigm experiment to explore how this merging process proceeds online. We first presented participants with a short animation, illustrating different simple propositions that are possible to be merged by the sentential connectives. We then auditorily played an only if or an even if statement and recorded participants' eye movements on the concurrent test image. We observed that hearing the sentential connective results in more fixations on the tokens of the appropriate propositions that are eligible to be merged by the sentential connective. Each sentential connective elicited anticipatory effect suggests that once they heard the sentential connective, participants knew which propositions could be merged. We then discussed the implications of our results to the mental model theory of conditionals and the experimental studies reported in literature. |
Mallory C. Stites; Kara D. Federmeier Subsequent to suppression: Downstream comprehension consequences of noun/verb ambiguity in natural reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 1497–1515, 2015. @article{Stites2015, We used eye tracking to investigate the downstream processing consequences of encountering noun/verb (NV) homographs (i.e., park) in semantically neutral but syntactically constraining contexts. Target words were followed by a prepositional phrase containing a noun that was plausible for only 1 meaning of the homograph. Replicating previous work, we found increased first fixation durations on NV homographs compared with unambiguous words, which persisted into the next sentence region. At the downstream noun, we found plausibility effects following ambiguous words that were correlated with the size of a reader's first fixation effect, suggesting that this effect reflects the recruitment of processing resources necessary to suppress the homograph's context-inappropriate meaning. Using these same stimuli, Lee and Federmeier (2012) found a sustained frontal negativity to the NV homographs, and, on the downstream noun, found a plausibility effect that was also positively correlated with the size of a reader's ambiguity effect. Together, these findings suggest that when only syntactic constraints are available, meaning selection recruits inhibitory mechanisms that can be measured in both first fixation slowdown and event-related potential ambiguity effects. |
Simon P. Tiffin-Richards; Sascha Schroeder Children's and adults' parafoveal processes in German: Phonological and orthographic effects Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 531–548, 2015. @article{TiffinRichards2015, Phonological and orthographic information has been shown to play an important role in parafoveal processing in skilled adult reading in English. In the present study, we investigated whether similar parafoveal effects can be found in children using the boundary eye tracking method. Children and adults read sentences in German with embedded target nouns which were presented in original, pseudohomophone (PsH), transposed-letter (TL), lower-case and control conditions to assess phonological and orthographic preview effects. We found evidence of PsH preview benefit effects for children. We also found TL preview benefit effects for adults, while children only showed these effects under specific conditions. Results are consistent with the developmental view that reading initially depends on phonological processes and that orthographic processes become increasingly important. |
Simon P. Tiffin-Richards; Sascha Schroeder Word length and frequency effects on children's eye movements during silent reading Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 113, pp. 33–43, 2015. @article{TiffinRichards2015a, In the present study we measured the eye movements of a large sample of 2nd grade German speaking children and a control group of adults during a silent reading task. To be able to directly investigate the interaction of word length and frequency effects we employed controlled sentence frames with embedded target words in an experimental design in which length and frequency were manipulated independently of one another. Unlike previous studies which have investigated the interaction of word length and frequency effects in children, we used age-appropriate word frequencies for children. We found significant effects of word length and frequency for both children and adults while effects were generally greater for children. The interaction of word length and frequency was significant for children in gaze duration and total viewing time eye movement measures but not for adults. Our results suggest that children rely on sublexical decoding of infrequent words, leading to greater length effects for infrequent than frequent words while adults do not show this effect when reading children's reading materials. |
Joseph C. Toscano; Bob McMurray The time-course of speaking rate compensation: Effects of sentential rate and vowel length on voicing judgments Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 529–543, 2015. @article{Toscano2015, Many sources of context information in speech (such as speaking rate) occur either before or after the phonetic cues they influence, yet there is little work examining the time-course of these effects. Here, we investigate how listeners compensate for preceding sentence rate and subsequent vowel length (VL; a secondary cue that has been used as a proxy for speaking rate) when categorising words varying in voice-onset time (VOT). Participants selected visual objects in a display while their eye-movements were recorded, allowing us to examine when each source of information had an effect on lexical processing. We found that the effect of VOT preceded that of VL, suggesting that each cue is used as it becomes available. In a second experiment, we found that, in contrast, the effect of preceding sentence rate occurred simultaneously with VOT, suggesting that listeners interpret VOT relative to preceding rate. |
Alba Tuninetti; Tessa Warren; Natasha Tokowicz Cue strength in second-language processing: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 568–584, 2015. @article{Tuninetti2015, This study used eye-tracking and grammaticality judgement measures to examine how second-language (L2) learners process syntactic violations in English. Participants were native Arabic and native Mandarin Chinese speakers studying English as an L2, and monolingual English-speaking controls. The violations involved incorrect word order and differed in two ways predicted to be important by the unified competition model [UCM; MacWhinney, B. (2005). A unified model of language acquisition. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 49-67). Oxford: Oxford University Press.]. First, one violation had more and stronger cues to ungrammaticality than the other. Second, the grammaticality of these word orders varied in Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. Sensitivity to violations was relatively quick overall, across all groups. Sensitivity also was related to the number and strength of cues to ungrammaticality regardless of native language, which is consistent with the general principles of the UCM. However, there was little evidence of cross-language transfer effects in either eye movements or grammaticality judgements. |
Wenjia Zhang; Nan Li; Xiaoyue Wang; Suiping Wang Integration of sentence-level semantic information in parafovea: Evidence from the RSVP-flanker paradigm Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 9, pp. e0139016, 2015. @article{Zhang2015b, During text reading, the parafoveal word was usually presented between 2° and 5° from the point of fixation. Whether semantic information of parafoveal words can be processed during sentence reading is a critical and long-standing issue. Recently, studies using the RSVP-flanker paradigm have shown that the incongruent parafoveal word, presented as right flanker, elicited a more negative N400 compared with the congruent parafoveal word. This suggests that the semantic information of parafoveal words can be extracted and integrated during sentence reading, because the N400 effect is a classical index of semantic integration. However, as most previous studies did not control the word-pair congruency of the parafoveal and the foveal words that were presented in the critical triad, it is still unclear whether such integration happened at the sentence level or just at the word-pair level. The present study addressed this question by manipulating verbs in Chinese sentences to yield either a semantically congruent or semantically incongruent context for the critical noun. In particular, the interval between the critical nouns and verbs was controlled to be 4 or 5 characters. Thus, to detect the incongruence of the parafoveal noun, participants had to integrate it with the global sentential context. The results revealed that the N400 time-locked to the critical triads was more negative in incongruent than in congruent sentences, suggesting that parafoveal semantic information can be integrated at the sentence level during Chinese reading. |
Sandrine Zufferey; Willem M. Mak; Liesbeth Degand; Ted J. M. Sanders Advanced learners' comprehension of discourse connectives: The role of L1 transfer across on-line and off-line tasks Journal Article In: Second Language Research, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 389–411, 2015. @article{Zufferey2015, Discourse connectives are important indicators of textual coherence, and mastering them is an essential part of acquiring a language. In this article, we compare advanced learners' sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by connectives in an off-line grammaticality judgment task and an on-line reading experiment using eye-tracking. We also assess the influence of first language (L1) transfer by comparing learners' comprehension of two non-native-like semantic uses of connectives in English, often produced by learners due to transfer from French and Dutch. Our results indicate that in an off-line task transfer is an important factor accounting for French-and Dutch-speaking learners' non-native-like comprehension of connectives. During on-line processing, however, learners are as sensitive as native speakers to the meaning conveyed by connectives. These results raise intriguing questions regarding explicit vs. implicit knowledge in language learners. |
Alma Veenstra; Antje S. Meyer; Daniel J. Acheson Effects of parallel planning on agreement production Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 162, pp. 29–39, 2015. @article{Veenstra2015, An important issue in current psycholinguistics is how the time course of utterance planning affects the generation of grammatical structures. The current study investigated the influence of parallel activation of the components of complex noun phrases on the generation of subject-verb agreement. Specifically, the lexical interference account (Gillespie & Pearlmutter, 2011b; Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004) predicts more agreement errors (i.e., attraction) for subject phrases in which the head and local noun mismatch in number (e.g., the apple next to the pears) when nouns are planned in parallel than when they are planned in sequence. We used a speeded picture description task that yielded sentences such as the apple next to the pears is red. The objects mentioned in the noun phrase were either semantically related or unrelated. To induce agreement errors, pictures sometimes mismatched in number. In order to manipulate the likelihood of parallel processing of the objects and to test the hypothesized relationship between parallel processing and the rate of agreement errors, the pictures were either placed close together or far apart. Analyses of the participants' eye movements and speech onset latencies indicated slower processing of the first object and stronger interference from the related (compared to the unrelated) second object in the close than in the far condition. Analyses of the agreement errors yielded an attraction effect, with more errors in mismatching than in matching conditions. However, the magnitude of the attraction effect did not differ across the close and far conditions. Thus, spatial proximity encouraged parallel processing of the pictures, which led to interference of the associated conceptual and/or lexical representation, but, contrary to the prediction, it did not lead to more attraction errors. |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Parafoveal lexical activation depends on skilled reading proficiency Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. March, pp. 586–595, 2015. @article{Veldre2015, The boundary paradigm was used to investigate individual differences in the extraction of lexical information from the parafovea in sentence reading. The preview of a target word was manipulated so that it was identical (e.g., sped), a higher frequency orthographic neighbor (seed), a nonword neighbor (sted), or an all-letter-different nonword (glat). Ninety-four skilled adult readers were assessed on measures of reading and spelling ability. The results showed that null effects of preview lexical status in the average data obscured systematic differences on the basis of proficiency and target neighborhood density. For targets from dense neighborhoods, inhibition from a higher frequency neighbor preview occurred among highly proficient readers, and particularly those with superior spelling ability, in early fixation measures. Poorer readers showed inhibition only in second-pass reading of the target. These data suggest that readers with precise lexical representations are more likely to extract lexical information from a word before it is fixated. The implications for computational models of eye movements in reading are discussed. |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Parafoveal preview benefit is modulated by the precision of skilled readers' lexical representations Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 219–232, 2015. @article{Veldre2015a, In skilled reading, the processing of an upcoming word often begins in the parafovea, that is, before the word is fixated. This study investigated whether the extraction and use of multiple sources of information about an upcoming word depends on reading skill. The eye movements of 107 skilled adult readers, assessed on measures of reading and spelling ability, were recorded. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to manipulate the preview of a target word's identity and length in sentences with low- or high-frequency pretarget words. Across all first-pass reading measures, superior reading ability was associated with a larger preview benefit, but only among readers with high spelling ability, suggesting that the orthographic precision of a reader's stored lexical representations influences the extraction of parafoveal information. There was also evidence that the highly skilled reader/spellers' parafoveal processing advantage derived partly from their efficient foveal processing. Finally, in first fixations on the target, increased preview benefit for highly skilled reader/spellers was restricted to accurate length previews, suggesting that readers with precise lexical representations use upcoming word length in combination with parafoveal orthographic information to narrow down potential lexical candidates. The implications of these results for computational models of eye movements are discussed. |
Malte C. Viebahn; Mirjam Ernestus; James M. McQueen Syntactic predictability can facilitate the recognition of casually produced words in connected speech Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1684–1702, 2015. @article{Viebahn2015, The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past participles and auxiliary verbs in Dutch subordinate clauses. Acoustic-phonetic reliability was manipulated by presenting sentences either in a careful or a casual speaking style. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants recognized past participles more quickly when they occurred after their associated auxiliary verbs than when they preceded them. Response measures tapping into later stages of processing suggested that this effect was stronger for casually than for carefully produced sentences. These findings provide further evidence that syntactic predictability can influence word recognition and that this type of information is particularly useful for coping with acoustic-phonetic reductions in conversational speech. We conclude that listeners dynamically adapt to the different sources of linguistic information available to them. |
Tessa Warren; Evelyn Milburn; Nikole D. Patson; Michael Walsh Dickey Comprehending the impossible: what role do selectional restriction violations play? Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 8, pp. 932–939, 2015. @article{Warren2015, To elucidate how different kinds of knowledge are used during comprehension, readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences that were: plausible, impossible because of a selectional restriction violation (SRV) or impossible because of a violation of general world knowledge. Eye movements on the pre-critical, critical, and post-critical words evidenced disruption in the SRV condition compared to the other two conditions. These findings suggest that disruption associated with reading about impossible events is not directly determined by how impossible the event seems. Rather, the relationship between the verb and arguments in the sentence seems to matter. These findings are the strongest evidence to date that processing effects associated with selectional restrictions can dissociate from those associated with general world knowledge about events. |
Jeffrey Weiler; Cameron D. Hassall; Olave E. Krigolson; Matthew Heath The unidirectional prosaccade switch-cost: Electroencephalographic evidence of task-set inertia in oculomotor control Journal Article In: Behavioural Brain Research, vol. 278, pp. 323–329, 2015. @article{Weiler2015, The execution of an antisaccade selectively increases the reaction time (RT) of a subsequent prosaccade (the unidirectional prosaccade switch-cost). To explain this finding, the task-set inertia hypothesis asserts that an antisaccade requires a cognitively mediated non-standard task-set that persists inertially and delays the planning of a subsequent prosaccade. The present study sought to directly test the theoretical tenets of the task-set inertia hypothesis by examining the concurrent behavioural and the event-related brain potential (ERP) data associated with the unidirectional prosaccade switch-cost. Participants pseudo-randomly alternated between pro- and antisaccades while electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded. As expected, the completion of an antisaccade selectively increased the RT of a subsequent prosaccade, whereas the converse switch did not influence RTs. Thus, the behavioural results demonstrated the unidirectional prosaccade switch-cost. In terms of the ERP findings, we observed a reliable change in the amplitude of the P3 - time-locked to task-instructions - when trials were switched from a prosaccade to an antisaccade; however, no reliable change was observed when switching from an antisaccade to a prosaccade. This is a salient finding because extensive work has shown that the P3 provides a neural index of the task-set required to execute a to-be-completed response. As such, results showing that prosaccades completed after antisaccades exhibited increased RTs in combination with a P3 amplitude comparable to antisaccades provides convergent evidence that the unidirectional prosaccade switch-cost is attributed to the persistent activation of a non-standard antisaccade task-set. |
Dorothea Wendt; Birger Kollmeier; Thomas Brand How hearing impairment affects sentence comprehension: Using eye fixations to investigate the duration of speech processing Journal Article In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 19, 2015. @article{Wendt2015, The main objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which hearing impairment influences the duration of sentence processing. An eye-tracking paradigm is introduced that provides an online measure of how hearing impairment prolongs processing of linguistically complex sentences; this measure uses eye fixations recorded while the participant listens to a sentence. Eye fixations toward a target picture (which matches the aurally presented sentence) were measured in the presence of a competitor picture. Based on the recorded eye fixations, the single target detection amplitude, which reflects the tendency of the participant to fixate the target picture, was used as a metric to estimate the duration of sentence processing. The single target detection amplitude was calculated for sentence structures with different levels of linguistic complexity and for different listening conditions: in quiet and in two different noise conditions. Participants with hearing impairment spent more time processing sentences, even at high levels of speech intelligibility. In addition, the relationship between the proposed online measure and listener-specific factors, such as hearing aid use and cognitive abilities, was investigated. Longer processing durations were measured for participants with hearing impairment who were not accustomed to using a hearing aid. Moreover, significant correlations were found between sentence processing duration and individual cognitive abilities (such as working memory capacity or susceptibility to interference). These findings are discussed with respect to audiological applications. |
Sarah J. White; Kayleigh L. Warrington; Victoria A. McGowan; Kevin B. Paterson Eye movements during reading and topic scanning: Effects of word frequency Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 233–248, 2015. @article{White2015a, The study examined the nature of eye movement control and word recognition during scanning for a specific topic, compared with reading for comprehension. Experimental trials included a manipulation of word frequency: the critical word was frequent (and orthographically familiar) or infrequent (2 conditions: orthographically familiar and orthographically unfamiliar). First-pass reading times showed effects of word frequency for both reading and scanning, with no interactions between word characteristics and task. Therefore, in contrast to the task of searching for a single specific word (Rayner & Fischer, 1996), there were immediate and localized influences of lexical processing when scanning for a specific topic, indicating that early word recognition processes are similar during reading and topic scanning. In contrast, there were interactions for later measures, with larger effects of word frequency during reading than scanning, indicating that reading goals can modulate later processes such as the integration of words into sentence context. Additional analyses of the distribution of first-pass single fixation durations indicated that first-pass fixations of all durations were shortened during scanning compared with reading, and reading for comprehension produced a larger subset of longer first-pass fixations compared with scanning. The implications for the nature of word recognition and eye movement control are discussed. |
Veronica Whitford; Debra Titone In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 1118–1129, 2015. @article{Whitford2015, Eye movement measures demonstrate differences in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph-level reading as a function of individual differences in current L2 exposure among bilinguals (Whitford & Titone, 2012). Specifically, as current L2 exposure increases, the ease of L2 word processing increases, but the ease of L1 word processing decreases. Here, we investigate whether current L2 exposure also relates to more general aspects of reading performance, including global eye movement measures and how bilinguals use parafoveal information to the right of fixation during L1 and L2 sentence-level reading, through use of a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). We found that bilinguals with high versus low current L2 exposure exhibited increased L2 reading fluency (faster reading rates, shorter forward fixation durations), but decreased L1 reading fluency (slower reading rates, longer forward fixation durations). We also found that bilinguals with high versus low current L2 exposure were more affected by reductions in window size during L2 reading (indicative of a larger L2 perceptual span), but were less affected by reductions in window size during L1 reading (indicative of a smaller L1 perceptual span). Taken together, these findings suggest that individual differences in current L2 exposure among bilinguals also modulate more general aspects of reading behavior, including global measures of reading difficulty and the allocation of visual attention into the parafovea during both L1 and L2 sentence-level reading. |
2014 |
Aaron Veldre; Sally Andrews Lexical quality and eye movements: Individual differences in the perceptual span of skilled adult readers Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 4, pp. 703–727, 2014. @article{Veldre2014, Two experiments used the gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm to investigate whether reading comprehension and spelling ability modulate the perceptual span of skilled adult readers during sentence reading. Highly proficient reading and spelling were both associated with increased use information to the right of fixation, but did not systematically modulate the extraction of information to the left of fixation. Individuals who were high in both reading and spelling ability showed the greatest benefit from window sizes larger than 11 characters, primarily because of increases in forward saccade length. They were also significantly more disrupted by being denied close parafoveal information than those poor in reading and/or spelling. These results suggest that, in addition to supporting rapid lexical retrieval of fixated words, the high quality lexical representations indexed by the combination of high reading and spelling ability support efficient processing of parafoveal information and effective saccadic targeting. |
Aiping Wang; Wei Zhou; Hua Shu; Ming Yan Reading proficiency modulates parafoveal processing efficiency: Evidence from reading Chinese as a second language Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 152, pp. 29–33, 2014. @article{Wang2014g, In the present study, we manipulated different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined how native Korean readers who learned Chinese as a second language make use of the parafoveal information. Results clearly indicate that, only identical and orthographically similar previews facilitated processing of the target words when they were subsequently fixated. More critically, more parafoveal information was obtained by subjects with higher reading proficiency. These results suggest that, mainly low-level features of the parafoveal words are obtained by the non-native Chinese readers and less attentional resources are available for the readers with lower reading proficiency, thereby causing a reduction of the perceptual span. |
Jingxin Wang; Jing Tian; Weijin Han; Simon P. Liversedge; Kevin B. Paterson Inhibitory stroke neighbour priming in character recognition and reading in Chinese Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 11, pp. 2149–2171, 2014. @article{Wang2014d, In alphabetic languages, prior exposure to a target word's orthographic neighbour influences word recognition in masked priming experiments and the process of word identification that occurs during normal reading. We investigated whether similar neighbour priming effects are observed in Chinese in 4 masked priming experiments (employing a forward mask and 33-ms, 50-ms, and 67-ms prime durations) and in an experiment that measured eye movements while reading. In these experiments, the stroke neighbour of a Chinese character was defined as any character that differed by the addition, deletion, or substitution of one or two strokes. Prime characters were either stroke neighbours or stroke non-neighbours of the target character, and each prime character had either a higher or a lower frequency of occurrence in the language than its corresponding target character. Frequency effects were observed in all experiments, demonstrating that the manipulation of character frequency was successful. In addition, a robust inhibitory priming effect was observed in response times for target characters in the masked priming experiments and in eye fixation durations for target characters in the reading experiment. This stroke neighbour priming was not modulated by the relative frequency of the prime and target characters. The present findings therefore provide a novel demonstration that inhibitory neighbour priming shown previously for alphabetic languages is also observed for nonalphabetic languages, and that neighbour priming (based on stroke overlap) occurs at the level of the character in Chinese. |
Dorothea Wendt; Thomas Brand; Birger Kollmeier An eye-tracking paradigm for analyzing the processing time of sentences with different linguistic complexities Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. e100186, 2014. @article{Wendt2014a, An eye-tracking paradigm was developed for use in audiology in order to enable online analysis of the speech comprehension process. This paradigm should be useful in assessing impediments in speech processing. In this paradigm, two scenes, a target picture and a competitor picture, were presented simultaneously with an aurally presented sentence that corresponded to the target picture. At the same time, eye fixations were recorded using an eye-tracking device. The effect of linguistic complexity on language processing time was assessed from eye fixation information by systematically varying linguistic complexity. This was achieved with a sentence corpus containing seven German sentence structures. A novel data analysis method computed the average tendency to fixate the target picture as a function of time during sentence processing. This allowed identification of the point in time at which the participant understood the sentence, referred to as the decision moment. Systematic differences in processing time were observed as a function of linguistic complexity. These differences in processing time may be used to assess the efficiency of cognitive processes involved in resolving linguistic complexity. Thus, the proposed method enables a temporal analysis of the speech comprehension process and has potential applications in speech audiology and psychoacoustics. |
Veronica Whitford; Debra Titone The effects of reading comprehension and launch site on frequency-predictability interactions during paragraph reading Journal Article In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 67, no. 6, pp. 1151–1165, 2014. @article{Whitford2014, We used eye movement measures of paragraph reading to examine whether word frequency and predictability interact during the earliest stages of lexical processing, with a specific focus on whether these effects are modulated by individual differences in reading comprehension or launch site (i.e., saccade length between the prior and currently fixated word–a proxy for the amount of parafoveal word processing). The joint impact of frequency and predictability on reading will elucidate whether these variables additively or multiplicatively affect the earliest stages of lexical access, which, in turn, has implications for computational models of eye movements during reading. Linear mixed effects models revealed additive effects during both early- and late-stage reading, where predictability effects were comparable for low- and high-frequency words. Moreover, less cautious readers (e.g., readers who engaged in skimming, scanning, mindless reading) demonstrated smaller frequency effects than more cautious readers. Taken together, our findings suggest that during extended reading, frequency and predictability exert additive influences on lexical and postlexical processing, and that individual differences in reading comprehension modulate sensitivity to the effects of word frequency. |
Maria Staudte; Matthew W. Crocker; Alexis Heloir; Michael Kipp The influence of speaker gaze on listener comprehension: Contrasting visual versus intentional accounts Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 133, no. 1, pp. 317–328, 2014. @article{Staudte2014, Previous research has shown that listeners follow speaker gaze to mentioned objects in a shared environment to ground referring expressions, both for human and robot speakers. What is less clear is whether the benefit of speaker gaze is due to the inference of referen- tial intentions (Staudte and Crocker, 2011) or simply the (reflexive) shifts in visual atten- tion. That is, is gaze special in how it affects simultaneous utterance comprehension? In four eye-tracking studies we directly contrast speech-aligned speaker gaze of a virtual agent with a non-gaze visual cue (arrow). Our findings show that both cues similarly direct listeners' attention and that listeners can benefit in utterance comprehension from both cues. Only when they are similarly precise, however, does this equality extend to incongru- ent cueing sequences: that is, even when the cue sequence does not match the concurrent sequence of spoken referents can listeners benefit from gaze as well as arrows. The results suggest that listeners are able to learn a counter-predictive mapping of both cues to the sequence of referents. Thus, gaze and arrows can in principle be applied with equal flexi- bility and efficiency during language comprehension. |
Benjamin Swets; Matthew E. Jacovina; Richard J. Gerrig Individual differences in the scope of speech planning: Evidence from eye-movements Journal Article In: Language and Cognition, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 12–44, 2014. @article{Swets2014, Previous research has demonstrated that the scope of speakers' planning in language production varies in response to external forces such as time pressure. This susceptibility to external pressures indicates a flexibly incremental production system: speakers plan utterances piece by piece, but external pressures affect the size of the pieces speakers buffer. In the current study, we explore internal constraints on speech planning. Specifi cally, we examine whether individual differences in working memory predict the scope and efficiency of advance planning. In our task, speakers described picture arrays to partners in a matching game. The arrays sometimes required speakers to note a contrast between a sentence-initial object (e.g., a four-legged cat) and a sentence-final object (e.g., a three-legged cat). Based on prior screening, we selected participants who differed on verbal working memory span. Eye-movement measures revealed that high-span speakers were more likely to gaze at the contrasting pictures prior to articulation than were low-span speakers. As a result, high-span speakers were also more likely to reference the contrast early in speech. We conclude that working memory plays a substantial role in the fl exibility of incremental speech planning. |
Annie Tremblay; Elsa Spinelli English listeners' use of distributional and acoustic-phonetic cues to liaison in French: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Language and Speech, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 310–337, 2014. @article{Tremblay2014, This study investigates English listeners' use of distributional and acoustic-phonetic cues to liaison in French. Liaison creates a misalignment of the syllable and word boundaries, but is signaled by distributional cues (/z/ is a frequent liaison but not a frequent word onset; /t/ is a frequent word onset but a less frequent liaison) and acoustic-phonetic cues (liaison consonants are 15 per cent shorter than word-initial consonants). English-speaking French learners completed a visual- world eye-tracking experiment in which they heard adjective-noun sequences where the pivotal consonant was /t/ (expected advantage for consonant-initial words) or /z/ (expected advantage for liaison-initial words). Their results were compared to those of native French speakers. Both groups showed an advantage for consonant-initial targets with /t/ but no advantage for consonant- or liaison-initial targets with /z/. Both groups' competitor fixations were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant, but only the learners' fixations to liaison-initial targets were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant. This suggests that English listeners use both top-down (distributional) and bottom-up (acoustic-phonetic) cues to liaison in French. Their greater reliance on acoustic-phonetic cues is hypothesized to stem in part from English, where such cues play an important role for locating word boundaries. |
Danijela Trenkic; Jelena Mirkovic; Gerry T. M. Altmann Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 237–257, 2014. @article{Trenkic2014, We investigated second language (L2) comprehension of grammatical structures that are unique to the L2, and which are known to cause persistent difficulties in production. A visual-world eye-tracking experiment focused on online comprehension of English articles by speakers of the article-lacking Mandarin, and a control group of English native speakers. The results show that non-native speakers from article-lacking backgrounds can incrementally utilise the information signalled by L2 articles in real time to constrain referential domains and resolve reference more efficiently. The findings support the hypothesis that L2 processing does not always over-rely on pragmatic affordances, and that some morphosyntactic structures unique to the target language can be processed in a targetlike manner in comprehension-despite persistent difficulties with their production. A novel proposal, based on multiple meaning-to-form, but consistent form-to-meaning mappings, is developed to account for such comprehension-production asymmetries. © 2013 Cambridge University Press. |
Maartje Velde; Antje S. Meyer; Agnieszka E. Konopka Message formulation and structural assembly: Describing "easy" and "hard" events with preferred and dispreferred syntactic structures Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 124–144, 2014. @article{Velde2014, When formulating simple sentences to describe pictured events, speakers look at the referents they are describing in the order of mention. Accounts of incrementality in sentence production rely heavily on analyses of this gaze-speech link. To identify systematic sources of variability in message and sentence formulation, two experiments evaluated differences in formulation for sentences describing "easy" and "hard" events (more codable and less codable events) with preferred and dispreferred structures (actives and passives). Experiment 1 employed a subliminal cuing manipulation and a cumulative priming manipulation to increase production of passive sentences. Experiment 2 examined the influence of event codability on formulation without a cuing manipulation. In both experiments, speakers showed an early preference for looking at the agent of the event when constructing active sentences. This preference was attenuated by event codability, suggesting that speakers were less likely to prioritize encoding of a single character at the outset of formulation in "easy" events than in "harder" events. Accessibility of the agent influenced formulation primarily when an event was "harder" to describe. Formulation of passive sentences in Experiment 1 also began with early fixations to the agent but changed with exposure to passive syntax: speakers were more likely to consider the patient as a suitable sentential starting point after cumulative priming. The results show that the message-to-language mapping in production can vary with the ease of encoding an event structure and of generating a suitable linguistic structure. |
Heather Winskel; Manuel Perea Can parafoveal-on-foveal effects be obtained when reading an unspaced alphasyllabic script (Thai)? Journal Article In: Writing Systems Research, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 94–104, 2014. @article{Winskel2014, One controversial question in the field of eye movements and reading is whether there is evidence of parafoveal-on-foveal effects. This is an important issue because some models of eye movements in reading make quite different predictions in this respect (e.g., E-Z Reader vs. SWIFT models). The aim of the current study was to investigate if parafoveal-on-foveal effects occur when reading Thai, an unspaced, alphasyllabic orthography. Word frequency (high and low) of the word to the right of the currently fixated word was manipulated to examine if it would influence processing of the fixated word. Thirty-six participants read single sentences while having their eye movements monitored. There was no evidence of the effect of word frequency of the parafoveal word on fixation duration measures of the foveal word, as assessed by p(H0|D) values - except for a marginal effect in the skipping rates. Thus, the present data are in line with previous studies using spaced Indo-European languages which have found small/null results for parafoveal effects of word frequency during one-line sentence reading. © 2013 Taylor & Francis. |
Heather Winskel; Khazriyati Salehudding Morphological parafoveal preview benefit effects when reading derived words in Malay Journal Article In: Kajian Malaysia, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 23–40, 2014. @article{Winskel2014a, Eye-movement tracking is a method that is used to study reading across different languages and is increasingly being employed. Eye movements provide a window into the underlying cognitive processes and mechanisms while a person is reading (Rayner, 1998). The majority of research investigating eye movements during reading has been conducted on European languages such as English and German; relatively little work has been conducted on other writing systems such as Malay. Malay offers an interesting opportunity to investigate early morphological processing because Malay has a rich derivational morphology that is more structurally and semantically transparent than English. The current study investigates whether the morphological constituents of affixed words (prefixed and suffixed) in Malay influence early word processing during reading using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). The boundary paradigm involves the positioning of a preview word stimulus in place of the target word so that when the eyes move towards the preview word, they cross an invisible boundary that triggers a change from the preview word to the target word. Two commonly used affixes were used: a prefix pe- and a suffix -an, which both convert a verb into a nominal (e.g. lakon, "to act", with the prefix pe- becomes pelakon, "actor"; and makan, "to eat", with the suffix -an becomes makanan, "food"). Thirty participants read 72 single sentences that were identical in length (having the same number of letters) and contained affixed and pseudo-affixed words. Parafoveal previews consisted of identical affixed and control conditions. The dependent measures were first fixation duration and gaze duration. The results revealed a significant preview benefit for the identical condition compared with the affixed and control conditions and for the affixed condition compared with the control condition. This effect was not influenced by word type; hence, there was no evidence of morphological pre-processing. In conclusion, the results from the current study indicate that although Malay is a morphologically rich language with a relatively transparent orthography, readers do not necessarily utilise early morphological processes. The results are discussed in terms of language and orthography-specific differences in early morphological processing. |
Fuyun Wu; Yingyi Luo; Xiaolin Zhou Building Chinese relative clause structures with lexical and syntactic cues: Evidence from visual world eye-tracking and reading times Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 10, pp. 1205–1226, 2014. @article{Wu2014c, Relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese are prenominal. In object-modifying, object-extracted RCs (e.g. Click on [RC the ball broke] window, meaning 'Click on the window [RC that the ball broke]), the ambiguous status of the local noun ball and the long-distance attachment of the head noun window into the main verb appear to make online parsing of Chinese RCs particularly difficult. By interposing mismatching classifiers and the passive marker BEI into the RC sentences, we investigated whether the presence of incomplete heads would add storage costs, as predicted by the Dependency Locality Theory (DLT), or would serve as retrieval cues to help pre-build the RC structure, as predicted by the cue-based retrieval theory. Results from a visual world eye-tracking experiment and a self-paced reading showed that Chinese comprehenders are able to use BEI cues and the mismatching classifier (albeit to a less extent) to pre-build RC structure, providing support for the cue-based retrieval theory. |
Ming Yan; Yingyi Luo; Albrecht W. Inhoff Syllable articulation influences foveal and parafoveal processing of words during the silent reading of Chinese sentences Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 75, pp. 93–103, 2014. @article{Yan2014, The current study examined effects of syllable articulation on eye movements during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, which contained two types of two-character target words whose second characters were subject to dialect-specific variation. In one condition the second syllable was articulated with a neutral tone for northern-dialect Chinese speakers and with a full tone for southern-dialect Chinese speakers (neutral-tone target words) and in the other condition the second syllable was articulated with a full tone irrespective of readers' dialect type (full-tone target words). Native speakers of northern and southern Chinese dialects were recruited in Experiment 1 to examine the effect of dialect-specific articulation on silent reading. Recordings of their eye movements revealed shorter viewing durations for neutral- than for full-tone target words only for speakers of northern but not for southern dialects, indicating that dialect-specific articulation of syllabic tone influenced visual word recognition. Experiment 2 replicated the syllabic tone effect for speakers of northern dialects, and the use of gaze-contingent display changes further revealed that these readers processed an upcoming parafoveal word less effectively when a neutral- than when a full-tone target was fixated. Shorter viewing duration for neutral-tone words thus cannot be attributed to their easier lexical processing; instead, tonal effects appear to reflect Chinese readers' simulated articulation of to-be-recognized words during silent reading. |
Ming Yan; Wei Zhou; Hua Shu; Rizwangul Yusupu; Dongxia Miao; André Krügel; Reinhold Kliegl Eye movements guided by morphological structure: Evidence from the Uighur language Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 132, no. 2, pp. 181–215, 2014. @article{Yan2014a, It is generally accepted that low-level features (e.g., inter-word spaces) are responsible for saccade-target selection in eye-movement control during reading. In two experiments using Uighur script known for its rich suffixes, we demonstrate that, in addition to word length and launch site, the number of suffixes influences initial landing positions. We also demonstrate an influence of word frequency. These results are difficult to explain purely by low-level guidance of eye movements and indicate that due to properties specific to Uighur script low-level visual information and high-level information such as morphological structure of parafoveal words jointly influence saccade programming. |
Jinmian Yang; Nan Li; Suiping Wang; Timothy J. Slattery; Keith Rayner Encoding the target or the plausible preview word? The nature of the plausibility preview benefit in reading Chinese Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 193–213, 2014. @article{Yang2014a, Previous studies have shown that a plausible preview word can facilitate the processing of a target word as compared to an implausible preview word (a plausibility preview benefit effect) when reading Chinese (Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012; Yang, 2013). Regarding the nature of this effect, it is possible that readers processed the meaning of the plausible preview word and did not actually encode the target word (given that the parafoveal preview word lies close to the fovea). The current experiment examined this possibility with three conditions wherein readers received a preview of a target word that was either (1) identical to the target word (identical preview), (2) a plausible continuation of the pre-target text, but the post-target text in the sentence was incompatible with it (initially plausible preview), or (3) not a plausible continuation of the pre-target text, nor compatible with the post-target text (implausible preview). Gaze durations on target words were longer in the initially plausible condition than the identical condition. Overall, the results showed a typical preview benefit, but also implied that readers did not encode the initially plausible preview. Also, a plausibility preview benefit was replicated: gaze durations were longer with implausible previews than the initially plausible ones. Furthermore, late eye movement measures did not reveal differences between the initially plausible and the implausible preview conditions, which argues against the possibility of misreading the plausible preview word as the target word. In sum, these results suggest that a plausible preview word provides benefit in processing the target word as compared to an implausible preview word, and this benefit is only present in early but not late eye movement measures. |
Xiaohong Yang; Lijing Chen; Yufang Yang The effect of discourse structure on depth of semantic integration in reading Journal Article In: Memory & Cognition, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 325–339, 2014. @article{Yang2014b, A coherent discourse exhibits certain structures in that subunits of discourses are related to one another in various ways and in that subunits that contribute to the same discourse purpose are joined to create a larger unit so as to produce an effect on the reader. To date, this crucial aspect of discourse has been largely neglected in the psycholinguistic literature. In two experiments, we examined whether semantic integration in discourse context was influenced by the difference of discourse structure. Readers read discourses in which the last sentence was locally congruent but either semantically congruent or incongruent when interpreted with the preceding sentence. Furthermore, the last sentence was either in the same discourse unit or not in the same discourse unit as the preceding sentence, depending on whether they shared the same discourse purpose. Results from self-paced reading (Experiment 1) and eye tracking (Experiment 2) showed that discourse-incongruous words were read longer than discourse-congruous words only when the critical sentence and the preceding sentence were in the same discourse unit, but not when they belonged to different discourse units. These results establish discourse structure as a new factor in semantic integration and suggest that discourse effects depend both on the content of what is being said and on the way that the contents are organized. |
Si On Yoon; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Adjusting conceptual pacts in three-party conversation Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 919–937, 2014. @article{Yoon2014, During conversation, partners develop representations of jointly known information-the common ground-and use this knowledge to guide subsequent linguistic exchanges. Extensive research on 2-party conversation has offered key insights into this process, in particular, its partner-specificity: Common ground that is shared with 1 partner is not always assumed to be shared with other partners. Conversation often involves multiple pairs of individuals who differ in common ground. Yet, little is known about common ground processes in multi-party conversation. Here, we take a 1st step toward understanding this problem by examining situations in which simple dyadic representations of common ground might cause difficulty-situations in which dialogue partners develop shared labels (entrained terms), and then a 3rd (naïve) party joins the conversation. Experiment 1 examined unscripted, task-based conversation in which 2 partners entrained on terms. At test, speakers referenced game-pieces in a dialogue with their partner, or in a 3-party conversation including a new, naïve listener. Speakers were sensitive to the 3rd party, using longer, disfluent expressions when additionally addressing the new partner. By contrast, analysis of listener eye-fixations did not suggest sensitivity. Experiment 2 provided a stronger test of sensitivity and revealed that listeners do cancel expectations for terms that had been entrained before when a 3rd, naïve party joins the conversation. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying common ground, showing that rather than a unitary construct, common ground is flexibly adapted to the needs of a naïve 3rd party. |
Peng Zhou; Stephen Crain; Likan Zhan Grammatical aspect and event recognition in children's online sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 133, no. 1, pp. 262–276, 2014. @article{Zhou2014, This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme -le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme -zhe. The perfective morpheme -le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme -zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing. We were interested to see whether young children are able to use the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes (i.e., completed versus ongoing) as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we tested 34 Mandarin-speaking adults and 99 Mandarin-speaking children (35 three-year-olds, 32 four-year-olds and 32 five-year-olds). On each trial, participants were presented with spoken sentences containing either of the two aspectual morphemes while viewing a visual image containing two pictures, one representing a completed event and one representing an ongoing event. Participants' eye movements were recorded from the onset of the spoken sentences. The results show that both the adults and the three age groups of children exhibited a facilitatory effect trigged by the aspectual morpheme: hearing the perfective morpheme -le triggered more eye movements to the completed event area, whereas hearing the durative morpheme -zhe triggered more eye movements to the ongoing event area. This effect occurred immediately after the onset of the aspectual morpheme, both for the adults and the three groups of children. This is evidence that young children are able to use the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition. Children's eye movement patterns reflect a rapid mapping of grammatical aspect onto the temporal structures of events depicted in the visual scene. |
Renske S. Hoedemaker; Peter C. Gordon Embodied language comprehension: Encoding-based and goal-driven processes Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 143, no. 2, pp. 914–929, 2014. @article{Hoedemaker2014, Theories of embodied language comprehension have proposed that language is understood through perceptual simulation of the sensorimotor characteristics of its meaning. Strong support for this claim requires demonstration of encoding-based activation of sensorimotor representations that is distinct from task-related or goal-driven processes. Participants in 3 eye-tracking experiments were presented with triplets of either numbers or object and animal names. In Experiment 1, participants indicated whether the size of the referent of the middle object or animal name was in between the size of the 2 outer items. In Experiment 2, the object and animal names were encoded for an immediate recognition memory task. In Experiment 3, participants completed the same comparison task of Experiment 1 for both words and numbers. During the comparison tasks, word and number decision times showed a symbolic distance effect, such that response time was inversely related to the size difference between the items. A symbolic distance effect was also observed for animal and object encoding times in cases where encoding time likely reflected some goal-driven processes as well. When semantic size was irrelevant to the task (Experiment 2), it had no effect on word encoding times. Number encoding times showed a numerical distance priming effect: Encoding time increased with numerical difference between items. Together these results suggest that while activation of numerical magnitude representations is encoding-based as well as goal-driven, activation of size information associated with words is goal-driven and does not occur automatically during encoding. This conclusion challenges strong theories of embodied cognition which claim that language comprehension consists of activation of analog sensorimotor representations irrespective of higher level processes related to context or task-specific goals. |
Sven Hohenstein; Reinhold Klieg Semantic preview benefit during reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 166–190, 2014. @article{Hohenstein2014, Word features in parafoveal vision influence eye movements during reading. The question of whether readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words was studied in 3 experiments by using a gaze-contingent display change technique. Subjects read German sentences containing 1 of several preview words that were replaced by a target word during the saccade to the preview (boundary paradigm). In the 1st experiment the preview word was semantically related or unrelated to the target. Fixation durations on the target were shorter for semantically related than unrelated previews, consistent with a semantic preview benefit. In the 2nd experiment, half the sentences were presented following the rules of German spelling (i.e., previews and targets were printed with an initial capital letter), and the other half were presented completely in lowercase. A semantic preview benefit was obtained under both conditions. In the 3rd experiment, we introduced 2 further preview conditions, an identical word and a pronounceable nonword, while also manipulating the text contrast. Whereas the contrast had negligible effects, fixation durations on the target were reliably different for all 4 types of preview. Semantic preview benefits were greater for pretarget fixations closer to the boundary (large preview space) and, although not as consistently, for long pretarget fixation durations (long preview time). The results constrain theoretical proposals about eye movement control in reading. |
Stephanie Huette; Bodo Winter; Teenie Matlock; David H. Ardell; Michael J. Spivey Eye movements during listening reveal spontaneous grammatical processing Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5, pp. 410, 2014. @article{Huette2014, Recent research using eye-tracking typically relies on constrained visual contexts in particular goal-oriented contexts, viewing a small array of objects on a computer screen and performing some overt decision or identification. Eyetracking paradigms that use pictures as a measure of word or sentence comprehension are sometimes touted as ecologically invalid because pictures and explicit tasks are not always present during language comprehension. This study compared the comprehension of sentences with two different grammatical forms: the past progressive (e.g., was walking), which emphasizes the ongoing nature of actions, and the simple past (e.g., walked), which emphasizes the end-state of an action. The results showed that the distribution and timing of eye movements mirrors the underlying conceptual structure of this linguistic difference in the absence of any visual stimuli or task constraint: Fixations were shorter and saccades were more dispersed across the screen, as if thinking about more dynamic events when listening to the past progressive stories. Thus, eye movement data suggest that visual inputs or an explicit task are unnecessary to solicit analog representations of features such as movement, that could be a key perceptual component to grammatical comprehension. |