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EyeLink Reading and Language Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink reading and language research publications up until 2021 (with some early 2022s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Visual World, Comprehension, Speech Production, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink reading or language articles, please email us!
Floor van den Berg; Jelle Brouwer; Thomas B. Tienkamp; Josje Verhagen; Merel Keijzer
Language entropy relates to behavioral and pupil indices of executive control in young adult bilinguals Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, pp. 1-17, 2022.
Introduction: It has been proposed that bilinguals' language use patterns are differentially associated with executive control. To further examine this, the present study relates the social diversity of bilingual language use to performance on a color- shape switching task (CSST) in a group of bilingual university students with diverse linguistic backgrounds. Crucially, this study used language entropy as a measure of bilinguals' language use patterns. This continuous measure reflects a spectrum of language use in a variety of social contexts, ranging from compartmentalized use to fully integrated use. Methods: Language entropy for university and non-university contexts was calculated from questionnaire data on language use. Reaction times (RTs) were measured to calculate global RT and switching and mixing costs on the CSST, representing conflict monitoring, mental set shifting, and goal maintenance, respectively. In addition, this study innovatively recorded a potentially more sensitive measure of set shifting abilities, namely, pupil size during task performance. Results: Higher university entropy was related to slower global RT. Neither university entropy nor non-university entropy were associated with switching costs as manifested in RTs. However, bilinguals with more compartmentalized language use in non-university contexts showed a larger difference in pupil dilation for switch trials in comparison with non-switch trials. Mixing costs in RTs were reduced for bilinguals with higher diversity of language use in non-university contexts. No such effects were found for university entropy. Discussion: These results point to the social diversity of bilinguals' language use as being associated with executive control, but the direction of the effects may depend on social context (university vs. non-university). Importantly, the results also suggest that some of these effects may only be detected by using more sensitive measures, such as pupil dilation. The paper discusses theoretical and practical implications regarding the language entropy measure and the cognitive effects of bilingual experiences more generally, as well as as how methodological choices can advance our understanding of these effects.
Yueyuan Zheng; Xinchen Ye; Janet H. Hsiao
Does adding video and subtitles to an audio lesson facilitate its comprehension? Journal Article
In: Learning and Instruction, vol. 77, pp. 101542, 2022.
We examined whether adding video and subtitles to an audio lesson facilitates its comprehension and whether the comprehension depends on participants' cognitive abilities, including working memory and executive functions, and where they looked during video viewing. Participants received lessons consisting of statements of facts under four conditions: audio-only, audio with verbatim subtitles, audio with relevant video, and audio with both subtitles and video. Comprehension was assessed as the accuracy in answering multiple-choice questions for content memory. We found that subtitles facilitated comprehension whereas video did not. In addition, comprehension of audio lessons with video depended on participants' cognitive abilities and eye movement pattern: a more centralized (looking mainly at the screen center) eye movement pattern predicted better comprehension as opposed to a distributed pattern (with distributed regions of interest). Thus, whether video facilitates comprehension of audio lessons depends on both learners' cognitive abilities and where they look during video viewing.
Pablo Oyarzo; David Preiss; Diego Cosmelli
Attentional and meta‐cognitive processes underlying mind wandering episodes during continuous naturalistic reading are associated with specific changes in eye behavior Journal Article
In: Psychophysiology, pp. e13994, 2022.
Although eye movements during reading have been studied extensively, their variation due to attentional fluctuations such as spontaneous distractions is not well understood. Here we used a naturalistic reading task combined with an at- tentional sampling method to examine the effects of mind wandering— and the subsequent metacognitive awareness of its occurrence— on eye movements and pupillary dynamics. Our goal was to better understand the attentional and meta- cognitive processes involved in the initiation and termination of mind wander- ing episodes. Our results show that changes in eye behavior are consistent with underlying independent cognitive mechanisms working in tandem to sustain the attentional resources required for focused reading. In addition to changes in blink frequency, blink duration, and the number of saccades, variations in eye movements during unaware distractions point to a loss of the perceptual asym- metry that is usually observed in attentive, left- to- right reading. Also, before self- detected distractions, we observed a specific increase in pupillary diameter, indicating the likely presence of an anticipatory autonomic process that could contribute to becoming aware of the current attentional state. These findings stress the need for further research tackling the temporal structure of attentional dynamics during tasks that have a significant real- world impact.
Rhona M. Amos; Kilian G. Seeber; Martin J. Pickering
Prediction during simultaneous interpreting: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm Journal Article
In: Cognition, vol. 220, pp. 104987, 2022.
We report the results of an eye-tracking study which used the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to investigate the time-course of prediction during a simultaneous interpreting task. Twenty-four L1 French professional conference interpreters and twenty-four L1 French professional translators untrained in simultaneous interpretation listened to sentences in English and interpreted them simultaneously into French while looking at a visual scene. Sentences contained a highly predictable word (e.g., The dentist asked the man to open his mouth a little wider). The visual scene comprised four objects, one of which depicted either the target object (mouth; bouche), an English phonological competitor (mouse; souris), a French phonological competitor (cork; bouchon), or an unrelated word (bone; os). We considered 1) whether interpreters and translators predict upcoming nouns during a simultaneous interpreting task, 2) whether interpreters and translators predict the form of these nouns in English and in French and 3) whether interpreters and translators manifest different predictive behaviour. Our results suggest that both interpreters and translators predict upcoming nouns, but neither group predicts the word-form of these nouns. In addition, we did not find significant differences between patterns of prediction in interpreters and translators. Thus, evidence from the visual-world paradigm shows that prediction takes place in simultaneous interpreting, regardless of training and experience. However, we were unable to establish whether word-form was predicted.
Sixin Liao; Lili Yu; Jan-Louis Kruger; Erik D. Reichle
The impact of audio on the reading of intralingual versus interlingual subtitles: Evidence from eye movements Book
This study investigated how semantically relevant auditory information might affect the reading of subtitles, and if such effects might be modulated by the concurrent video content. Thirty-four native Chinese speakers with English as their second language watched video with English subtitles in six conditions defined by manipulating the nature of the audio (Chinese/L1 audio vs. English/L2 audio vs. no audio) and the presence versus absence of video content. Global eye-movement analyses showed that participants tended to rely less on subtitles with Chinese or English audio than without audio, and the effects of audio were more pronounced in the presence of video presentation. Lexical processing of subtitles was not modulated by the audio. However, Chinese audio, which presumably obviated the need to read the subtitles, resulted in more superficial post-lexical processing of the subtitles relative to either the English or no audio. On the contrary, English audio accentuated post-lexical processing of the subtitles compared with Chinese audio or no audio, indicating that participants might use English audio to support subtitle reading (or vice versa) and thus engaged in deeper processing of the subtitles. These findings suggest that, in multimodal reading situations, eye movements are not only controlled by processing difficulties associated with properties of words (e.g., their frequency and length) but also guided by metacognitive strategies involved in monitoring comprehension and its online modulation by different information sources.
Ana Marcet; Manuel Perea
Does omitting the accent mark in a word affect sentence reading? Evidence from Spanish Journal Article
In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 75, no. 1, pp. 148–155, 2022.
Lexical stress in multisyllabic words is consistent in some languages (e.g., first syllable in Finnish), but it is variable in others (e.g., Spanish, English). To help lexical processing in a transparent language like Spanish, scholars have proposed a set of rules specifying which words require an accent mark indicating lexical stress in writing. However, recent word recognition using that lexical decision showed that word identification times were not affected by the omission of a word's accent mark in Spanish. To examine this question in a paradigm with greater ecological validity, we tested whether omitting the accent mark in a Spanish word had a deleterious effect during silent sentence reading. A target word was embedded in a sentence with its accent mark or not. Results showed no reading cost of omitting the word's accent mark in first-pass eye fixation durations, but we found a cost in the total reading time spent on the target word (i.e., including re-reading). Thus, the omission of an accent mark delays late, but not early, lexical processing in Spanish. These findings help constrain the locus of accent mark information in models of visual word recognition and reading. Furthermore, these findings offer some clues on how to simplify the Spanish rules of accentuation.
Jan-Louis Kruger; Natalia Wisniewska; Sixin Liao
Why subtitle speed matters: Evidence from word skipping and rereading Journal Article
In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 211–236, 2022.
High subtitle speed undoubtedly impacts the viewer experience. However, little is known about how fast subtitles might impact the reading of individual words. This article presents new findings on the effect of subtitle speed on viewers' reading behavior using word-based eye-tracking measures with specific attention to word skipping and rereading. In multimodal reading situations such as reading subtitles in video, rereading allows people to correct for oculomotor error or comprehension failure during linguistic processing or integrate words with elements of the image to build a situation model of the video. However, the opportunity to reread words, to read the majority of the words in the subtitle and to read subtitles to completion, is likely to be compromised when subtitles are too fast. Participants watched videos with subtitles at 12, 20, and 28 characters per second (cps) while their eye movements were recorded. It was found that comprehension declined as speed increased. Eye movement records also showed that faster subtitles resulted in more incomplete reading of subtitles. Furthermore, increased speed also caused fewer words to be reread following both horizontal eye movements (likely resulting in reduced lexical processing) and vertical eye movements (which would likely reduce higher-level comprehension and integration).
Johannes Rennig; Michael S Beauchamp
Intelligibility of audiovisual sentences drives nultivoxel response patterns in human superior temporal cortex Journal Article
In: NeuroImage, vol. 247, pp. 118796, 2022.
Regions of the human posterior superior temporal gyrus and sulcus (pSTG/S) respond to the visual mouth movements that constitute visual speech and the auditory vocalizations that constitute auditory speech, and neural responses in pSTG/S may underlie the perceptual benefit of visual speech for the comprehension of noisy auditory speech. We examined this possibility through the lens of multivoxel pattern responses in pSTG/S. BOLD fMRI data was collected from 22 participants presented with speech consisting of English sentences presented in five different formats: visual-only; auditory with and without added auditory noise; and audiovisual with and without auditory noise. Participants reported the intelligibility of each sentence with a button press and trials were sorted post-hoc into those that were more or less intelligible. Response patterns were measured in regions of the pSTG/S identified with an independent localizer. Noisy audiovisual sentences with very similar physical properties evoked very different response patterns depending on their intelligibility. When a noisy audiovisual sentence was reported as intelligible, the pattern was nearly identical to that elicited by clear audiovisual sentences. In contrast, an unintelligible noisy audiovisual sentence evoked a pattern like that of visual-only sentences. This effect was less pronounced for noisy auditory-only sentences, which evoked similar response patterns regardless of intelligibility. The successful integration of visual and auditory speech produces a characteristic neural signature in pSTG/S, highlighting the importance of this region in generating the perceptual benefit of visual speech.
Nuria Sagarra; Nicole Rodriguez
Subject-verb number agreement in bilingual processing: (Lack of) age of acquisition and proficiency effects Journal Article
In: Languages, vol. 7, pp. 15, 2022.
Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition.
Ruth E. Corps; Charlotte Brooke; Martin J. Pickering
Prediction involves two stages: Evidence from visual-world eye-tracking Journal Article
In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 122, pp. 104298, 2022.
Comprehenders often predict what they are going to hear. But do they make the best predictions possible? We addressed this question in three visual-world eye-tracking experiments by asking when comprehenders consider perspective. Male and female participants listened to male and female speakers producing sentences (e.g., I would like to wear the nicełdots) about stereotypically masculine (target: tie; distractor: drill) and feminine (target: dress, distractor: hairdryer) objects. In all three experiments, participants rapidly predicted semantic associates of the verb. But participants also predicted consistently-that is, consistent with their beliefs about what the speaker would ultimately say. They predicted consistently from the speaker's perspective in Experiment 1, their own perspective in Experiment 2, and the character's perspective in Experiment 3. This consistent effect occurred later than the associative effect. We conclude that comprehenders consider perspective when predicting, but not from the earliest moments of prediction, consistent with a two-stage account.
Lei Cui; Chuanli Zang; Xiaochen Xu; Wenxin Zhang; Yuhan Su; Simon P. Liversedge
Predictability effects and parafoveal processing of compound words in natural Chinese reading Journal Article
In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 75, no. 1, pp. 18–29, 2022.
We report a boundary paradigm eye movement experiment to investigate whether the predictability of the second character of a two-character compound word affects how it is processed prior to direct fixation during reading. The boundary was positioned immediately prior to the second character of the target word, which itself was either predictable or unpredictable. The preview was either a pseudocharacter (nonsense preview) or an identity preview. We obtained clear preview effects in all conditions, but more importantly, skipping probability for the second character of the target word and the whole target word from pretarget was greater when it was predictable than when it was not predictable from the preceding context. Interactive effects for later measures on the whole target word (gaze duration and go-past time) were also obtained. These results demonstrate that predictability information from preceding sentential context and information regarding the likely identity of upcoming characters are used concurrently to constrain the nature of lexical processing during natural Chinese reading.
Yi-Ting Chen; Ming-Chou Ho
Eye movement patterns differ while watching captioned videos of second language vs. mathematics lessons Journal Article
In: Learning and Individual Differences, vol. 93, pp. 102106, 2022.
Background: Extant eye-tracking studies suggest that foreign-language learners tend to read the native language captions while watching foreign-language videos. However, it remains unclear how the captions affect the learners' eye movements when watching Math videos. Purpose: While watching teaching videos, we seek to determine how the lesson type (English or Math), cognitive load (high or low), and caption type (meaningful, no captions, or meaningless) affect the dwell times and fixation counts on the captions. Methods: One hundred and eighty undergraduate students were randomly and equally assigned to six (2 lesson type × 3 caption type) conditions. Each participant watched two short teaching videos (one low load and one high load). After watching each video, a comprehension test and three self-reported items (fatigue, effort, and difficulty) regarding this particular video were given. Results: We reported more dwell times and fixation counts on the meaningful captions, compared to the meaningless captions and no captions. In the high-load condition, viewers watching an English lesson relied more on the meaningful captions than they did when watching a Math lesson. In the low-load condition, the dwell times and fixation counts on the captions were similar between the English and Math lessons. Finally, the captions did not affect the comprehension test performances after ruling out individual differences in the prior performances of English and Math. Conclusions: English language learning may rely more on the captions than is the case in learning Math. This study provides the direction for designing multimedia teaching materials in the current trend of multimedia teaching. In
Aaron Veldre; Roslyn Wong; Sally Andrews
Reading proficiency predicts the extent of the right, but not left, perceptual span in older readers Journal Article
In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 18–26, 2021.
The gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm was used to assess the size and symmetry of the perceptual span in older readers. The eye movements of 49 cognitively intact older adults (60–88 years of age) were recorded as they read sentences varying in difficulty, and the availability of letter information to the right and left of fixation was manipulated. To reconcile discrepancies in previous estimates of the perceptual span in older readers, individual differences in written language proficiency were assessed with tests of vocabulary, reading comprehension, reading speed, spelling ability, and print exposure. The results revealed that higher proficiency older adults extracted information up to 15 letter spaces to the right of fixation, while lower proficiency readers showed no additional benefit beyond 9 letters to the right. However, all readers showed improvements to reading with the availability of up to 9 letters to the left—confirming previous evidence of reduced perceptual span asymmetry in older readers. The findings raise questions about whether the source of age-related changes in parafoveal processing lies in the adoption of a risky reading strategy involving an increased propensity to both guess upcoming words and make corrective regressions.
Kathryn A. Tremblay; Katherine S. Binder; Scott P. Ardoin; Amani Talwar; Elizabeth L. Tighe
Third graders' strategy use and accuracy on an expository text: an exploratory study using eye movements Journal Article
In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 737–756, 2021.
Background: Of the myriad of reading comprehension (RC) assessments used in schools, multiple-choice (MC) questions continue to be one of the most prevalent formats used by educators and researchers. Outcomes from RC assessments dictate many critical factors encountered during a student's academic career, and it is crucial that we gain a deeper understanding of the nuances of these assessments and the types of skills needed for their successful completion. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine how different component skills (i.e., decoding, word recognition, reading fluency, RC and working memory) were related to students' response accuracy as they read a text and responded to MC questions. Methods: We monitored the eye movements of 73 third graders as they read an expository text and answered MC questions. We investigated whether the component skills differentially predicted accuracy across different question types and difficulty levels. Results: Results indicated that readers who answered MC questions correctly were able to identify when they needed to reread the text to find the answer and were better able to find the relevant area in the text compared with incorrect responders. Incorrect responders were less likely to reread the text to find the answer and generally had poorer precision when attempting to locate the answer in the text. Finally, the component skills relied upon by readers to answer RC questions were related to the type and difficulty of the questions. Conclusions: Results of the present study suggest that comprehension difficulties can arise from a myriad of sources and that reading abilities together with test-taking strategies impact RC test outcomes.
Marianne L. Marloes L. Moort; Arnout Koornneef; Paul W. Broek
Differentiating text-based and knowledge-Bbsed validation processes during reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article
In: Discourse Processes, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 22–41, 2021.
To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but when and how they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive architecture of text-based and knowledge-based validation processes, we used eye-tracking methodology. Participants read versions of texts that varied systematically in (in)coherence with prior text or background knowledge. Contradictions with respect to prior text and background knowledge both were found to disrupt reading but in different ways: The two types of contradiction led to distinct patterns of processes, and, importantly, these differences were evident already in early processing stages. Moreover, knowledge-based incoherence triggered more pervasive and longer (repair) processes than did text-based incoherence. Finally, processing of text-based and knowledge-based incoherence was not influenced by readers' working memory capacity.
Sietske Viersen; Athanassios Protopapas; George K. Georgiou; Rauno Parrila; Laoura Ziaka; Peter F. Jong
Lexicality effects on orthographic learning in beginning and advanced readers of Dutch: An eye-tracking study Journal Article
In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–20, 2021.
Orthographic learning is the topic of many recent studies about reading, but much is still unknown about conditions that affect orthographic learning and their influence on reading fluency development over time. This study investigated lexicality effects on orthographic learning in beginning and relatively advanced readers of Dutch. Eye movements of 131 children in Grades 2 and 5 were monitored during an orthographic learning task. Children read sentences containing pseudowords or low-frequency real words that varied in number of exposures. We examined both offline learning outcomes (i.e., orthographic choice and spelling dictation) of target items and online gaze durations on target words. The results showed general effects of exposure, lexicality, and reading-skill level. Also, a two-way interaction was found between the number of exposures and lexicality when detailed orthographic representations were required, consistent with a larger overall effect of exposure on learning the spellings of pseudowords. Moreover, lexicality and reading-skill level were found to affect the learning rate across exposures based on a decrease in gaze durations, indicating a larger learning effect for pseudowords in Grade 5 children. Yet, further interactions between exposure and reading-skill level were not present, indicating largely similar learning curves for beginning and advanced readers. We concluded that the reading system of more advanced readers may cope somewhat better with words varying in lexicality, but is not more efficient than that of beginning readers in building up orthographic knowledge of specific words across repeated exposures.
Bram Vanroy; Moritz Schaeffer; Lieve Macken
Comparing the effect of product-based metrics on the translation process Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 681945, 2021.
Characteristics of the translation product are often used in translation process research as predictors for cognitive load, and by extension translation difficulty. In the last decade, user-activity information such as eye-tracking data has been increasingly employed as an experimental tool for that purpose. In this paper, we take a similar approach. We look for significant effects that different predictors may have on three different eye-tracking measures: First Fixation Duration (duration of first fixation on a token), Eye-Key Span (duration between first fixation on a token and the first keystroke contributing to its translation), and Total Reading Time on source tokens (sum of fixations on a token). As predictors we make use of a set of established metrics involving (lexico)semantics and word order, while also investigating the effect of more recent ones concerning syntax, semantics or both. Our results show a, particularly late, positive effect of many of the proposed predictors, suggesting that both fine-grained metrics of syntactic phenomena (such as word reordering) as well as coarse-grained ones (encapsulating both syntactic and semantic information) contribute to translation difficulties. The effect on especially late measures may indicate that the linguistic phenomena that our metrics capture (e.g., word reordering) are resolved in later stages during cognitive processing such as problem-solving and revision.
Martin R. Vasilev; Victoria I. Adedeji; Calvin Laursen; Marcin Budka; Timothy J. Slattery
Do readers use character information when programming return-sweep saccades? Journal Article
In: Vision Research, vol. 183, pp. 30–40, 2021.
Reading saccades that occur within a single line of text are guided by the size of letters. However, readers occasionally need to make longer saccades (known as return-sweeps) that take their eyes from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next. In this study, we tested whether return-sweep saccades are also guided by font size information and whether this guidance depends on visual acuity of the return-sweep target area. To do this, we manipulated the font size of letters (0.29 vs 0.39° per character) and the length of the first line of text (16 vs 26°). The larger font resulted in return-sweeps that landed further to the right of the line start and in a reduction of under-sweeps compared to the smaller font. This suggests that font size information is used when programming return-sweeps. Return-sweeps in the longer line condition landed further to the right of the line start and the proportion of under-sweeps increased compared to the short line condition. This likely reflects an increase in saccadic undershoot error with the increase in intended saccade size. Critically, there was no interaction between font size and line length. This suggests that when programming return-sweeps, the use of font size information does not depend on visual acuity at the saccade target. Instead, it appears that readers rely on global typographic properties of the text in order to maintain an optimal number of characters to the left of their first fixation on a new line.
Martin R. Vasilev; Fabrice B. R. Parmentier; Julie A. Kirkby
Distraction by auditory novelty during reading: Evidence for disruption in saccade planning, but not saccade execution Journal Article
In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 5, pp. 826–842, 2021.
Novel or unexpected sounds that deviate from an otherwise repetitive sequence of the same sound cause behavioural distraction. Recent work has suggested that distraction also occurs during reading as fixation durations increased when a deviant sound was presented at the fixation onset of words. The present study tested the hypothesis that this increase in fixation durations occurs due to saccadic inhibition. This was done by manipulating the temporal onset of sounds relative to the fixation onset of words in the text. If novel sounds cause saccadic inhibition, they should be more distracting when presented during the second half of fixations when saccade programming usually takes place. Participants read single sentences and heard a 120 ms sound when they fixated five target words in the sentence. On most occasions (p =.9), the same sine wave tone was presented ("standard"), while on the remaining occasions (p =.1) a new sound was presented ("novel"). Critically, sounds were played, on average, either during the first half of the fixation (0 ms delay) or during the second half of the fixation (120 ms delay). Consistent with the saccadic inhibition hypothesis (SIH), novel sounds led to longer fixation durations in the 120 ms compared to the 0 ms delay condition. However, novel sounds did not generally influence the execution of the subsequent saccade. These results suggest that unexpected sounds have a rapid influence on saccade planning, but not saccade execution.
Martin R. Vasilev; Mark Yates; Ethan Prueitt; Timothy J. Slattery
Parafoveal degradation during reading reduces preview costs only when it is not perceptually distinct Journal Article
In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 2, pp. 254–276, 2021.
There is a growing understanding that the parafoveal preview effect during reading may represent a combination of preview benefits and preview costs due to interference from parafoveal masks. It has been suggested that visually degrading the parafoveal masks may reduce their costs, but adult readers were later shown to be highly sensitive to degraded display changes. Four experiments examined how preview benefits and preview costs are influenced by the perception of distinct parafoveal degradation at the target word location. Participants read sentences with four preview types (identity, orthographic, phonological, and letter-mask preview) and two levels of visual degradation (0% vs. 20%). The distinctiveness of the target word degradation was either eliminated by degrading all words in the sentence (Experiments 1a–2a) or remained present, as in previous research (Experiments 1b–2b). Degrading the letter masks resulted in a reduction in preview costs, but only when all words in the sentence were degraded. When degradation at the target word location was perceptually distinct, it induced costs of its own, even for orthographically and phonologically related previews. These results confirm previous reports that traditional parafoveal masks introduce preview costs that overestimate the size of the true benefit. However, they also show that parafoveal degradation has the unintended consequence of introducing additional costs when participants are aware of distinct degradation on the target word. Parafoveal degradation appears to be easily perceived and may temporarily orient attention away from the reading task, thus delaying word processing.
Aaron Veldre; Roslyn Wong; Sally Andrews
Predictability effects and parafoveal processing in older readers. Journal Article
In: Psychology and Aging, pp. 1–17, 2021.
Normative aging is accompanied by visual and cognitive changes that impact the systems that are critical for fluent reading. The patterns of eye movements during reading displayed by older adults have been characterized as demonstrating a trade-off between longer forward saccades and more word skipping versus higher rates of regressions back to previously read text. This pattern is assumed to reflect older readers' reliance on top-down contextual information to compensate for reduced uptake of parafoveal information from yet-to-be fixated words. However, the empirical evidence for these assumptions is equivocal. This study investigated the depth of older readers' parafoveal processing as indexed by sensitivity to the contextual plausibility of parafoveal words in both neutral and highly constraining sentence contexts. The eye movements of 65 cognitively intact older adults (61–87 years) were compared with data previously collected from young adults in two sentence reading experiments in which critical target words were replaced by valid, plausible, related, or implausible previews until the reader fixated on the target word location. Older and younger adults showed equivalent plausibility preview benefits on first-pass reading measures of both predictable and unpredictable words. However, older readers did not show the benefit of preview orthographic relatedness that was observed in young adults and showed significantly attenuated preview validity effects. Taken together, the data suggest that older readers are specifically impaired in the integration of parafoveal and foveal information but do not show deficits in the depth of parafoveal processing. The implications for understanding the effects of aging on reading are discussed.
Aiping Wang; Ming Yan; Bei Wang; Gaoding Jia; Albrecht W. Inhoff
The perceptual span in Tibetan reading Journal Article
In: Psychological Research, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 1307–1316, 2021.
Tibetan script differs from other alphabetic writing systems in that word forms can be composed of horizontally and vertically arrayed characters. To examine information extraction during the reading of this script, eye movements of native readers were recorded and used to control the size of a window of legible text that moved in synchrony with the eyes. Letters outside the window were masked, and no viewing constraints were imposed in a control condition. Comparisons of window conditions with the control condition showed that reading speed and oculomotor activity matched the control condition, when windows revealed three letters to the left and seven to eight letters to the right of a fixated letter location. Cross-script comparisons indicate that this perceptual span is smaller than for English and larger than for Chinese script. We suggest that the information density of a writing system influences the perceptual span during reading.
Jingwen Wang; Bernhard Angele; Guojie Ma; Xingshan Li
Repetition causes confusion: Insights to word segmentation during Chinese reading Journal Article
In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 147–156, 2021.
Since there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries in Chinese, it is common to see 2 identical neighboring characters in natural text. Usually, this occurs when there are 2 adjacent words containing the same character (we will call such a coincidental sequence of 2 identical characters repeated characters). In the present study, we examined how Chinese readers process words when there are repeated characters. In 3 experiments, we compared how Chinese readers process 4-character strings including 2 repeated characters (e.g. 行动动机, pinyin: xíngdòng dòngjī, meaning behavioral motivation) with a control condition where none of the characters repeat (e.g. 行动欲望, pinyin: xíngdòng yùwàng, meaning behavioral desire). In Experiment 1, the 4-character strings were presented for 40 ms and participants were asked to report as many characters as possible. Participants reported the second and third characters less accurately in the repeated condition than the control condition. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we embedded 2 different types of 4-character strings, compound Chinese characters and simple Chinese characters, into the same sentence frames, and asked participants to read these sentences normally. Gaze duration and total time on the second word were significantly longer in the repeated condition. These results suggest that the repeated characters increased the difficulty of word processing. Moreover, the results are consistent with the predictions of serial models, which assumes that words are processed serially in reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Mengsi Wang; Hazel I. Blythe; Simon P. Liversedge
Eye-movement control during learning and scanning of English pseudoword stimuli: Exposure frequency effects and spacing effects in a visual search task Journal Article
In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 83, no. 8, pp. 3146–3161, 2021.
Wang et al. (Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, in press, 2021) reported a Landolt-C learning and scanning experiment. In a learning session, they simulated exposure frequency effects successfully by training participants to learn target Landolt-C clusters with different exposures. The rate of learning high-frequency (HF) targets were greater than that of learning low-frequency (LF) targets. In a subsequent scanning session, participants were required to scan text-like Landolt-C strings to detect whether any pre-learnt target was embedded in the strings. The Landolt-C strings were displayed under different spacing formats (i.e., spaced format, unspaced format, and unspaced shaded format). However, the simulated exposure frequency effect did not occur in the scanning session. Wang et al. argued one straightforward reason for this might be because participants failed to maintain the memory of pre-learnt target to the scanning session. In the current study, we employed the same learning and scanning paradigm to investigate whether exposure frequency would occur in a target search task by using easier learning materials – pseudoword stimuli. The learning of pseudoword stimuli was much more successful than Landolt-C stimuli. Interestingly, however, we found a very different rate of learning effect such that the rate of learning LF targets was greater than HF targets. To our surprise, we did not find any influence of exposure frequency on eye movements during scanning even when participants were able to identify pre-learnt pseudowords in strings. Learning rate effect, exposure frequency effects, and saccadic targeting during the scanning of strings under different spacing formats are discussed in this paper.
Youxi Wang; Xuelian Zang; Hua Zhang; Wei Shen
The processing of the second syllable in recognizing Chinese disyllabic spoken words: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 681337, 2021.
In the current study, two experiments were conducted to investigate the processing of the second syllable (which was considered as the rhyme at the word level) during Chinese disyllabic spoken word recognition using a printed-word paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants heard a spoken target word and were simultaneously presented with a visual display of four printed words: a target word, a phonological competitor, and two unrelated distractors. The phonological competitors were manipulated to share either full phonemic overlap of the second syllable with targets (the syllabic overlap condition; e.g., 小篆, xiao3zhuan4, "calligraphy" vs. 公转, gong1zhuan4, "revolution") or the initial phonemic overlap of the second syllable (the sub-syllabic overlap condition; e.g., 圆柱, yuan2zhu4, "cylinder" vs. 公转, gong1zhuan4, "revolution") with targets. Participants were asked to select the target words and their eye movements were simultaneously recorded. The results did not show any phonological competition effect in either the syllabic overlap condition or the sub-syllabic overlap condition. In Experiment 2, to maximize the likelihood of observing the phonological competition effect, a target-absent version of the printed-word paradigm was adopted, in which target words were removed from the visual display. The results of Experiment 2 showed significant phonological competition effects in both conditions, i.e., more fixations were made to the phonological competitors than to the distractors. Moreover, the phonological competition effect was found to be larger in the syllabic overlap condition than in the sub-syllabic overlap condition. These findings shed light on the effect of the second syllable competition at the word level during spoken word recognition and, more importantly, showed that the initial phonemes of the second syllable at the syllabic level are also accessed during Chinese disyllabic spoken word recognition.
Leila Wehbe; Idan Asher Blank; Cory Shain; Richard Futrell; Roger Levy; Titus Von Der Malsburg; Nathaniel Smith; Edward Gibson; Evelina Fedorenko
Incremental language comprehension difficulty predicts activity in the language network but not the multiple demand network Journal Article
In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 31, no. 9, pp. 4006–4023, 2021.
What role do domain-general executive functions play in human language comprehension? To address this question, we examine the relationship between behavioral measures of comprehension and neural activity in the domain-general "multiple demand"(MD) network, which has been linked to constructs like attention, working memory, inhibitory control, and selection, and implicated in diverse goal-directed behaviors. Specifically, functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected during naturalistic story listening are compared with theory-neutral measures of online comprehension difficulty and incremental processing load (reading times and eye-fixation durations). Critically, to ensure that variance in these measures is driven by features of the linguistic stimulus rather than reflecting participant- or trial-level variability, the neuroimaging and behavioral datasets were collected in nonoverlapping samples. We find no behavioral-neural link in functionally localized MD regions; instead, this link is found in the domain-specific, fronto-temporal "core language network,"in both left-hemispheric areas and their right hemispheric homotopic areas. These results argue against strong involvement of domain-general executive circuits in language comprehension.
Yipu Wei; Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul; Ted M. Sanders; Willem M. Mak
The role of connectives and stance Mmrkers in the processing of subjective causal relations Journal Article
In: Discourse Processes, vol. 58, no. 8, pp. 766–786, 2021.
Interpreting subjectivity in causal relations takes effort: Subjective, claim-argument relations are read slower than objective, cause-consequence relations. In an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment, we investigated whether connectives and stance markers can play a facilitative role. Sixty-five Chinese participants read sentences expressing a subjective causal relation, systematically varied in the use of stance markers (no, attitudinal, epistemic) in the first clause and connectives (neutral suoyi "so", subjective kejian "so") in the second clause. Results showed that processing subjectivity proceeds highly incrementally: The interplay of the subjectivity markers is visible as the sentence unfolds. Subjective connectives increased reading times, irrespective of the type of stance marker being used. Stance markers did, however, facilitate the processing of modal verbs in subjective relations. We conclude that processing subjectivity involves evaluating how the argument supports the claim and that connectives, modal verbs, and stance markers function as processing instructions that help readers achieve this evaluation.
Veronica Whitford; Marc F. Joanisse
Eye movement measures of within-language and cross-language activation during reading in monolingual and bilingual children and adults: A focus on neighborhood density effects Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 674007, 2021.
We used eye movement measures of first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph reading to investigate how the activation of multiple lexical candidates, both within and across languages, influences visual word recognition in four different age and language groups: (1) monolingual children; (2) monolingual young adults; (3) bilingual children; and (4) bilingual young adults. More specifically, we focused on within-language and cross-language orthographic neighborhood density effects, while controlling for the potentially confounding effects of orthographic neighborhood frequency. We found facilitatory within-language orthographic neighborhood density effects (i.e., words were easier to process when they had many vs. few orthographic neighbors, evidenced by shorter fixation durations) across the L1 and L2, with larger effects in children vs. adults (especially the bilingual ones) during L1 reading. Similarly, we found facilitatory cross-language neighborhood density effects across the L1 and L2, with no modulatory influence of age or language group. Taken together, our findings suggest that word recognition benefits from the simultaneous activation of visually similar word forms during naturalistic reading, with some evidence of larger effects in children and particularly those whose words may have differentially lower baseline activation levels and/or weaker links between word-related information due to divided language exposure: bilinguals.
Sibylla Leon Guerrero; Veronica Whitford; Laura Mesite; Gigi Luk
Text complexity modulates cross-linguistic sentence integration in L2 reading Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Communication, vol. 6, pp. 651769, 2021.
Cross-linguistic influences (CLI) in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading have been widely demonstrated in experimental paradigms with adults at the word and sentence levels. However, less is known about CLI in adolescents during naturalistic text reading. Through eye-tracking and behavioral measures, this study investigated expository reading in functionally English monolingual and Spanish (L1) - English (L2) bilingual adolescents. In particular, we examined the role of L1 (Spanish) sentence integration skills among the bilingual adolescents when L2 school texts contained challenging syntactic structures, such as complex clauses, elaborated noun phrases, and anaphoric references. Results of generalized multilevel linear regression modeling demonstrated CLI in both offline comprehension and online eye-tracking measures that were modulated by school text characteristics. We found a positive relationship (i.e.,facilitation) between L1 sentence integration skills and L2 English text comprehension, especially for passages with greater clause complexity. Similar main, but not modulatory, effects of sentence integration skill were found in online eye-tracking measures. Overall, both language groups appeared to draw upon similar reading component skills to support reading fluency and comprehension when component skills were measured only in English. However, differential patterns of association across languages became evident when those skills were measured in both L1 and L2. Taken together, our findings suggest that bilingual adolescents' engagement of cross-linguistic resources in expository reading varies dynamically according to both language-specific semantic knowledge and language-general sentence integration skills, and is modulated by text features, such as syntactic complexity.
Li Jie
Pattern-prototype effects of processing familiar metonymy in sentential context Journal Article
In: Journal of Literature and Art Studies, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 404–411, 2021.
This study conducted an eye-tracking experiment on processing different patterns of Chinese familiar metonymy in sentential contexts. It analyzes five eye-tracking measures concerning the processing of metonymy. The results indicate that different patterns of metonymy experience different processing processes under a sentential-context condition, and results in prototype effects. The main finding is that Spatial Part & Whole metonymy is more prototypical than other three patterns of metonymy, i.e., Container and Contained, Location and Located, Entity and Adjacent Entity, and that the effect of metonymy pattern on the processing is stable and observable. It concludes that contextual information facilitates the processing of non-prototypical metonymy, but restrain the processing of prototypical metonymy.
Fang Li; Xin Li; Manman Zhang; Xuejun Bai
Effects of sentence structure and type of control verb on thematic role assignment: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article
In: Acta Psychologica Sinica, vol. 53, no. 10, pp. 1071–1081, 2021.
Thematic role assignment refers to the on-line processing of assigning semantic roles, such as assigning agents or patients, to arguments (i.e., nouns) related to the verb. Linguistic information provided by arguments (e.g., word order, or case marking), as well as lexical argument representation of the verb is used for assigning thematic roles. The Extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM) suggests that argument cues utilized to assign semantic roles vary across languages. For rigid word-ordering languages (e.g., English) with case marking, readers adopt a position-based assignment, according to which the initial argument is usually analyzed as an agent. By contrast, thematic role assignment in unrestricted word-ordering languages (e.g., German, Italian, Japanese, and Turkish) with case marking exhibits a morphology-based strategy. The eADM model also predicts a reversal of thematic role assignment when the verb's argument representation contradicts with the argument cues, which is based on verb information and induces additional processing costs. Considerable evidence has demonstrated the language-specific weight on argument cues. However, it is unknown whether word order strongly affects thematic role assignment in Chinese (a rigid-ordering language with case marking) reading. In addition, the reanalysis of thematic roles proposed by the eADM model has only been tentatively explored in Spanish. Whether such reanalysis processing exists in other languages, especially in non-alphabetic languages like Chinese, is still lack of evidence. The present study examined the reliance on word order information in the existence of case marking information and the reanalysis of thematic roles when argument representation of the verb was in contradiction with cues of arguments in Chinese. The sentence structure (centered or preposed) and the type of control verb (subject-control or object-control) were manipulated. Sentences in the centered structure provided information of word order and case marking, while sentences in the preposed structure only provided case marking information. Argument representation of object-control verbs incompatible with the information of arguments would lead to a re-assignment of semantic roles. The argument representation of subject-control verbs compatible with the argument cues would cause no reanalysis. Fifty-four pairs of control verbs were selected, each of which was embedded into a centered-structure sentence and a preposed-structure sentence. Eye movements of 24 native Chinese speakers were recorded by the Eyelink Ⅱ eye tracker. Each participant read 54 experimental sentences, followed by a comprehension question. The results showed that the preposed structure sentences caused longer second-pass reading time and more total incoming regressions in the first noun, longer first-pass reading time in the second noun, and longer regression path duration in the verb region than the centered-structure sentences, which suggested the strategy of position-based assignment for Chinese readers. There were robust main effects of the types of control verb, in that longer first pass reading time, regression path duration, and total incoming regressions were observed in the verb region, and longer second-pass reading time and total incoming (outgoing) regressions were found in the post-verb region in the object control verb condition than in the subject control verb condition. These results indicated that the mismatch of verb argument representation and argument cues contributed to an extra processing load. In addition, interactions between sentence structure and types of control verb were also observed, with longer second-pass reading time and total incoming regression in the second noun and longer second-pass reading time in the verb region in the centered-structure sentences containing object control verbs than those containing subject control verbs. There were longer first-pass reading time and regression path duration in the post-verb region in the preposed-structure sentences in the object-control verb condition than in the subject-control verb condition. In conclusion, these findings indicate that Chinese readers depend on word order information heavily to assign thematic roles even when there is case marking; also, the mismatch between cues of arguments and the argument representation of control verbs in Chinese reading causes reanalysis of thematic roles. Such findings are in line with the claim of the eADM model.
Hui Li; Kayleigh L. Warrington; Ascensión Pagán; Kevin B. Paterson; Xialou Wang
Independent effects of collocation strength and contextual predictability on eye movements in reading Journal Article
In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 8, pp. 1001–1009, 2021.
Collocations are commonly co-occurring word pairs, such as "black coffee". Previous research has demonstrated a processing advantage for collocations compared to novel phrases, suggesting that readers are sensitive to the frequency that words co-occur in phrases. However, a further question concerns whether this processing advantage for collocations occurs independently from effects of contextual predictability. We examined this issue in an eye movement experiment using adjective–noun pairs that are strong collocations (e.g. "black coffee") or weak collocations (e.g. "bitter coffee"), based on co-occurrence statistics. These were presented in sentences where the shared concept they expressed (e.g. coffee) was predictable or unpredictable from the prior sentence context. We observed clear effects of collocation strength, with shorter reading times for strong compared to weak collocations. Moreover, these effects occurred independently of effects of contextual predictability. The findings therefore provide novel evidence that a processing advantage for collocations is not driven by contextual expectations.
Sainan Li; Yongsheng Wang; Zebo Lan; Xiaoyuan Yuan; Li Zhang; Guoli Yan
Effects of word spacing on children's reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article
In: Reading and Writing, pp. 1–15, 2021.
Word is important in Chinese reading. However, when inter-word spaces are inserted into Chinese text, there is no facilitation or disruption to adults' reading. Researchers argued that there was a trade-off between word segmentation facilitation and disruption due to format unfamiliarity. To assess the trade-off hypothesis, in Experiment 1, we tested Grade 1, 2 and 3 children who have less reading experience than adults and manipulated four spacing conditions: normal unspaced, word spaced, character spaced, and nonword spaced text. In Experiment 2, we collected data from Grade 1 and 3 with the word spaced condition and normal unspaced condition. Overall, global analyses from both Experiments consistently showed that word spacing facilitated Grade 1 reading, with much reduced facilitation for higher grade readers; local measures (total reading time and second-pass reading time) replicated the same pattern in which word spacing effects were more pronounced among younger readers. In summary, we obtained greater facilitatory effects of word spacing for younger compared with elder readers, which provides strong evidence for the trade-off hypothesis.
Wei Li; Hannah Rohde; Martin Corley
Veritable untruths: Autistic traits and the processing of deception Journal Article
In: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, pp. 1–10, 2021.
How do we decide whether a statement is literally true? Here, we contrast participants' eventual evaluations of a speaker's meaning with the real-time processes of comprehension. We record participants' eye movements as they respond to potentially misleading instructions to click on one of two objects which might be concealing treasure (the treasure is behind thee, uh, hat). Participants are less likely to click on the named object when the instructions are disfluent. However, when hearing disfluent utterances, a tendency to fixate the named object early increases with participants' autism quotient scores. This suggests that, even where utterances are equivalently understood, the processes by which interpretations are achieved vary across individuals.
Xiuhong Li; Weidong Li; Buyun Liu; Jinxin Zhang; Jingwen Ma; Chuanbo Xie; Jing Wu; Jin Jing
The influence of articulatory suppression on reading among chinese children with developmental dyslexia: An eye-movement study Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Pediatrics, vol. 9, pp. 758615, 2021.
Objective: The study aimed to examine how the phonological loop influences reading ability and processing in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD). Methods: This study included 30 children with DD and 37 children without DD. Two types of articles (i.e., scenery prose and narrative story) and two conditions (under the conditions of articulatory-suppression and silent reading) were applied. An eye-link II High-Speed Eye Tracker was used to track a series of eye-movement parameters. The data were analyzed by the linear Mixed-Effects model. Results: Compared with children without DD, Children with DD had lower reading achievement (RA), frequency of saccades (FS) and frequency of fixations (FF), longer reading time (RT) and average fixation duration (AFD), slower reading speed (RS), shorter average saccade amplitude (ASA) and fixation distance (FD), more number of fixations (NF), and number of saccades (NS). There were significant interactions between participant group and articulatory suppression on RT and FD. We also observed interaction effects between article types and articulatory suppression on RA, AFD, ASA, and FS. Conclusion: Children DD exhibit abnormal phonological loop and eye movements while reading. The role of articulatory suppression on reading varies with the presentation of DD and the article type.
Kunyu Lian; Jie Ma; Feifei Liang; Ling Wei; Shuwei Zhang; Yingying Wu; Xuejun Bai; Rong Lian
The role of character positional frequency in oral reading: A developmental study Journal Article
In: Social Behavior and Personality, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2021.
How frequently a character appears in a word (positional character frequency) is used as a cue in word segmentation when reading aloud in the Chinese language. In this study we created 176 sentences with a target word in the center of each. Participants were 76 college students (mature readers) and 76 third-grade students (beginner readers). Results show an interaction effect of age and positional frequency of the initial character in the word on gaze duration. Further analysis shows that the third-grade students gaze duration was significantly longer in high, relative to low, positional character frequency of the target words. This trend was consistent with refixation duration, and there was a marginally significant interaction between age and total fixation time. Overall, positional character frequency was an important cue for word segmentation in oral reading in the Chinese language, and third-grade students relied more heavily on this cue than did college students.
Feifei Liang; Jie Ma; Xuejun Bai; Simon P. Liversedge
Initial landing position effects on Chinese word learning in children and adults Journal Article
In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 116, pp. 104183, 2021.
We adopted a word learning paradigm to examine whether children and adults differ in their saccade targeting strategies when learning novel words in Chinese reading. Adopting a developmental perspective, we extrapolated hypotheses pertaining to saccadic targeting and its development from the Chinese Reading Model (Li & Pollatsek, 2020). In our experiment, we embedded novel words into eight sentences, each of which provided a context for readers to form a new lexical representation. A group of children and a group of adults were required to read these sentences as their eye movements were recorded. At a basic level, we showed that decisions of initial saccadic targeting, and mechanisms responsible for computation of initial landing sites relative to launch sites are in place early in children, however, such targeting was less optimal in children than adults. Furthermore, for adults as lexical familiarity increased saccadic targeting behavior became more optimized, however, no such effects occurred in children. Mechanisms controlling initial saccadic targeting in relation to launch sites and in respect of lexical familiarity appear to operate with functional efficacy that is developmentally delayed. At a broad theoretical level, we consider our results in relation to issues associated with visually and linguistically, mediated saccadic control. More specifically, our novel findings fit neatly with our theoretical extrapolations from the CRM and suggest that its framework may be valuable for future investigations of the development of eye movement control in Chinese reading.
Sixin Liao; Lili Yu; Erik D. Reichle; Jan Louis Kruger
Using eye movements to study the reading of subtitles in video Journal Article
In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 417–435, 2021.
This article reports the first eye-movement experiment to examine how the presence versus absence of concurrent video content and presentation speed affect the reading of subtitles. Results indicated that participants adapted their visual routines to examine video content while simultaneously prioritizing the reading of subtitles, especially when the latter was displayed only briefly. Although decisions about when and where to move the eyes largely remained under local (cognitive) control, this control was also modulated by global task demands, suggesting an integration of local and global eye-movement control. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed, and we also briefly describe a new theoretical framework for understanding all forms of multimodal reading, including the reading of subtitles in video.
Di Liu; Marnie Reed
Exploring the complexity of the L2 intonation system: An acoustic and eye-tracking study Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Communication, vol. 6, pp. 627316, 2021.
Phonological research has demonstrated that English intonation, variably referred to as prosody, is a multidimensional and multilayered system situated at the interface of information structure, morphosyntactic structure, phonological phenomena, and pragmatic functions. The structural and functional complexity of the intonational system, however, is largely under-addressed in L2 pronunciation teaching, leading to a lack of spontaneous use of intonation despite successful imitation in classrooms. Focusing on contrastive and implicational sentence stress, this study explored the complexity of the English intonation system by investigating how L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers use multiple acoustic features (i.e., pitch range, pitch level, duration, and intensity) in signaling contrastive and implicational information and how one acoustic feature (maximum pitch level) is affected by information structure (contrast), morphosyntactic structure (phrasal boundary), and a phonological phenomenon (declination) in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' speech. Using eye-tracking technology, we also investigated (1) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' real-time processing of lexical items that carry information structure (i.e., contrast) and typically receive stress in L1 speakers' speech; (2) the influence of visual enhancement (italics and bold) on L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive information; and (3) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of pictures with contrastive information. Statistical analysis using linear mixed-effects models showed that L1 English speakers and Mandarin-English L2 speakers differed in their use of acoustic cues in signaling contrastive and implicational information. They also differed in the use of maximum pitch level in signaling sentence stress influenced by contrast, phrasal boundary, and declination. We did not find differences in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive and implicational information at the sentence level, but the two groups of participants differ in their processing of contrastive information in passages and pictures. These results suggest that processing limitations may be the reason why L2 speakers did not use English intonation spontaneously. The findings of this study also suggest that Complexity Theory (CT), which emphasizes the complex and dynamic nature of intonation, is a theoretical framework that has the potential of bridging the gap between L2 phonology and L2 pronunciation teaching.
Nina Liu; Xia Wang; Guoli Yan; Kevin B. Paterson; Ascensión Pagán
Eye movements of developing chinese readers: Effects of word frequency and predictability Journal Article
In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 234–250, 2021.
The frequency and contextual predictability of words have a fundamental role in determining where and when the eyes move during reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. However, surprising little is known about the how the influence of these variables develops, although this is important for understanding how children learn to read. Accordingly, to gain insight into their use during reading development, we examined the effects of orthogonally manipulating the frequency and contextual predictability of a specific target word in sentences on the eye movements of developing Chinese readers. The findings show that both factors influence eye movement behavior associated with the early processing of words during reading, but that effects of contextual predictability are mediated by the lexical frequency of words. We consider these effects in the context of visual and linguistic demands associated with reading Chinese and in relation to current models of eye movement control during reading.
Pan Liu; Simon Rigoulot; Xiaoming Jiang; Shuyi Zhang; Marc D. Pell
Unattended emotional prosody affects visual processing of facial expressions in Mandarin-speaking Chinese: A comparison With English-speaking Canadians Journal Article
In: Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 275–294, 2021.
Emotional cues from different modalities have to be integrated during communication, a process that can be shaped by an individual's cultural background. We explored this issue in 25 Chinese participants by examining how listening to emotional prosody in Mandarin influenced participants' gazes at emotional faces in a modified visual search task. We also conducted a cross-cultural comparison between data of this study and that of our previous work in English-speaking Canadians using analogous methodology. In both studies, eye movements were recorded as participants scanned an array of four faces portraying fear, anger, happy, and neutral expressions, while passively listening to a pseudo-utterance expressing one of the four emotions (Mandarin utterance in this study; English utterance in our previous study). The frequency and duration of fixations to each face were analyzed during 5 seconds after the onset of faces, both during the presence of the speech (early time window) and after the utterance ended (late time window). During the late window, Chinese participants looked more frequently and longer at faces conveying congruent emotions as the speech, consistent with findings from English-speaking Canadians. Cross-cultural comparison further showed that Chinese, but not Canadians, looked more frequently and longer at angry faces, which may signal potential conflicts and social threats. We hypothesize that the socio-cultural norms related to harmony maintenance in the Eastern culture promoted Chinese participants' heightened sensitivity to, and deeper processing of, angry cues, highlighting culture-specific patterns in how individuals scan their social environment during emotion processing.
Xiaomei Liu; Joseph A. Mikels; Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow
The psycholinguistic and affective processing of framed health messages among younger and older adults Journal Article
In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 201–212, 2021.
How health-related messages are framed can impact their effectiveness in promoting behaviors, and messages framed in terms of gains have been shown to be more effective among older adults. Recent findings have suggested that the affective response to framed messages can contribute to these effects. However, the impact of demands associated with psycholinguistic processing for different frames is not well understood. In this study, exercise-related messages were gain or loss framed and with a focus on either desirable or undesirable outcomes. Participants read these messages while their eye movements were monitored and then provided affective ratings. Older adults reacted less negatively than younger adults to loss-framed messages and messages focusing on undesirable outcomes. Eye-movement measures indicated both younger and older adults had difficulty processing the most complex messages (loss-framed messages focused on avoiding desirable outcomes). When gain-framed messages were easily processed, they engendered more positive affect, which in turn, was related to better recall. These results suggest that affective and cognitive mechanisms are interdependent in comprehension of framed messages for younger and older adults. An implication for translation to effective health communication is that simpler message framing engenders a positive reaction, which in turn supports memory for that information, regardless of age.
Zhi Fang Liu; Chao Yang Chen; Wen Tong; Yong Qiang Su
Deafness enhances perceptual span size in Chinese reading: Evidence from a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm Journal Article
In: PsyCh Journal, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 508–520, 2021.
Using a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm, we investigated whether/how deafness affects perceptual processing in Chinese reading. Besides the manipulation of window size, word length of sentences used in the experiment was also manipulated to check whether deafness enhanced the word length effect on perceptual span. Significant interactions of window constraints and deafness and a three-way interaction were observed on reading rate. Smaller effects of window constraints for deaf Chinese readers and nonreliable three-way interactions were observed on forward saccade length. This suggests that deaf Chinese readers exhibit a larger perceptual span, and word length affected the span from which information was acquired for comprehension whereas both deafness and word length might have little impact on the span from which information is acquired for oculomotor targeting during natural reading of Chinese.
Priscila López-Beltrán; Michael A. Johns; Paola E. Dussias; Cristóbal Lozano; Alfonso Palma
The effects of information structure in the processing of word order variation in the second language Journal Article
In: Second Language Research, pp. 1–32, 2021.
Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical counterparts when presented with discourse contexts that license their information structure constraints. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the effect of information structure on the online processing of active and passive constructions and whether this effect differed in monolinguals and L1-Spanish–L2-English speakers. In line with previous corpus studies, our results indicated that there was an interaction between word order and information structure according to which passive sentences were much more costly to process with new–given information structure patterns. Crucially, we failed to find evidence that the effect of information structure on word order constraints in comprehension differed between monolingual and L2 speakers.
Matthew W. Lowder; Peter C. Gordon
Relative clause effects at the matrix verb depend on type of intervening material Journal Article
In: Cognitive Science, vol. 45, no. 9, pp. e13039, 2021.
Although a large literature demonstrates that object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well as how best to explain these effects. An eye-tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017) demonstrated that readers experience more processing difficulty at the matrix verb for ORCs than for SRCs when the matrix verb immediately follows the relative clause (RC), but the difficulty is eliminated if a prepositional phrase (PP) intervenes. A careful examination of Staub et al.'s materials reveals that the types of PPs used in the experiment were a mixture of locative and temporal PPs. This is important in that locative PPs can modify either a noun phrase or a verb phrase (VP), whereas temporal PPs typically modify VPs, resulting in systematic differences in PP attachment across ORCs versus SRCs. In the current eye-tracking experiment, we systematically manipulated RC type and PP type in the same sentences used by Staub et al. The manipulation of PP type resulted in a crossover pattern at the matrix verb such that there was a trend for reading times to be longer for ORCs than SRCs when the PP was locative, but reading times were longer for SRCs than ORCs when the PP was temporal. These results provide important information regarding the locus of RC-processing effects and highlight the importance of carefully considering how intervening material might unintentionally alter the structure or the meaning of a sentence.
Cristina Lozano-Argüelles; Nuria Sagarra
Interpreting experience enhances the use of lexical stress and syllabic structure to predict L2 word endings Journal Article
In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 1135–1157, 2021.
Prediction underlies many life's situations including language. Monolinguals and advanced L2 learners use prosodic cues such as stress and tone in a word's first syllable to predict the word's suffix. To determine whether the same findings extend to words with non-morphological endings, we investigate whether Spanish monolinguals and advanced learners of Spanish with and without interpreting experience use stress (stressed, unstressed) and syllabic structure (CV, CVC) in a word's initial syllable to predict its ending. This is crucial to understand whether associations underlying prediction are morphophonolexical associations or purely phonolexical. Interpreters were included due to their extensive experience predicting incoming speech. Participants completed an eye-tracking study where they listened to a sentence while seeing two words and selected the word they heard. Results revealed that monolinguals and interpreters predicted word endings under all conditions, but non-interpreters only predicted in the CVC oxytone condition. These findings are relevant for (1) prediction accounts, showing that phonolexical associations trigger prediction; (2) phonological models, revealing that stress and syllable information in the initial syllable are key for accessing and predicting meaning; and (3) L2 processing models, indicating that L2 learners with interpreting experience use suprasegmental information to access and predict lexical items similar to monolinguals.
Xingcheng Ma
Coping with syntactic complexity in English–Chinese sight translation by translation and interpreting students Journal Article
In: Across Languages and Cultures, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 192–213, 2021.
This study approaches syntactic complexity from a relative point of view and examines how translation and interpreting students cope with relative clauses and passive constructions, two exemplifications of syntactic complexity in English–Chinese sight translation. A group of students ( N = 23) took part in the study. The study consisted of three parts: an English reading span test, a sight translation task, and a baseline reading task. During the sight translation task, the participants sight translated English sentences with different degrees of structural asymmetry into Chinese in the single sentence context and the discourse context. During the baseline reading task, they silently read the English sentences and answered the comprehension questions. The participants' eye movements in the sight translation and baseline reading tasks were recorded as indicators of cognitive load. Three major findings were generated: (1) Syntactic complexity resulted in a significant increase in cognitive load during the sight translation task. The syntactic aspects of the target language were activated during the initial stage of comprehension, which favoured the parallel view of translation. (2) Although sight translation became more time efficient due to wider contexts, a larger amount of contextual information did not make word-based processing less effortful, as indicated by more fixations and the longer regression path duration in the discourse context. (3) No correlations were found between reading span and cognitive load in addressing syntactical complexity.
Xingcheng Ma; Dechao Li
A cognitive investigation of 'chunking' and 'reordering' for coping with word-order asymmetry in English-to-Chinese sight translation Journal Article
In: Interpreting, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 192–221, 2021.
Word-order asymmetry between source language and target language has been recognized as a major obstacle in interpreting. Regarding whether the original word order is changed in target production, two strategies for asymmetrical structures are identified: chunking and reordering. This study primarily examined the cognitive mechanism involved in applying these two strategies during English to Chinese sight translation. The cognitive load associated with chunking and reordering was measured by eye movement and the resulting data were analysed. A group of interpreting trainees sight-translated asymmetrical sentences in two contexts: sentence and text. Their eye-movement measures, including total dwell time, fixation count and rereading rate, were recorded. The results demonstrate that chunking was the primary strategy used to render word-order asymmetry in both task conditions. A greater cognitive load was found in the reordered sentences. More contextual information did not contribute to an execution of the strategies that required less effort. This research is one of the first attempts to explore the cognitive process associated with interpreting strategies for word-order asymmetry. It provides a new perspective with which to deepen our understanding of the cognitive mechanism underlying the use of a strategy.
Xingcheng Ma; Dechao Li; Yu-Yin Hsu
Exploring the impact of word order asymmetry on cognitive load during Chinese–English sight translation Journal Article
In: Target, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 103–131, 2021.
This paper explores the impact of word order asymmetry between source language and target language on cognitive load during Chinese–English sight translation. Twenty-five MA students of translation from a Hong Kong university were asked to sight translate sentences with different degrees of between-language structural asymmetry from Chinese into English, in both single-sentence and discourse context conditions. Their eye movements were recorded to examine cognitive load during sight translation. The results show: (1) There was a significant effect of word order asymmetry on overall cognitive load as indicated by the considerably longer dwell times and more frequent fixations for the asymmetric sentences, but it was only during the later-processing stage that structural asymmetry exerted a strong influence on local processing in terms of first fixation duration and regression path duration; (2) the role of context in offsetting the asymmetry effect was very limited; and (3) although reordering may place a greater burden on working memory, most participants preferred reordering over segmentation to cope with the asymmetric structures. The empirical data point to the need to consider word order asymmetry as a variable in theoretical accounts of the interpreting process, especially for interpreting between languages that are structurally very different.
Jennifer E. Mack; Colleen Ward; Sofia Stratford
Impact of the fMRI environment on eye-tracking measures in a linguistic prediction task Journal Article
In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 675–693, 2021.
The present study investigated the impact of the MRI environment on eye-movement measures in the visual-world paradigm. 24 neurotypical young adults performed a linguistic prediction task in a typical lab setting (Lab) and 22 did so during MRI scanning (Scanner). Data analyses focused on eye-tracking data quality and the time course and magnitude of prediction effects. Data quality was reduced in the Scanner as compared to the Lab, as indicated by a higher rate of track loss and saccades/fixations of atypical duration. Predictive eye movement patterns were generally similar in timing and magnitude between the Lab and Scanner, although there was modest evidence for increased prediction effects in the Scanner. In the Scanner environment only, predictive eye movements were linked to better task performance. Evidently, the MRI environment can enhance prediction effects and their relationship to task performance, possibly due to increased deployment of cognitive control mechanisms.
Ryo Maie; Aline Godfroid
Controlled and automatic processing in the acceptability judgment task: An eye tracking study Journal Article
In: Language Learning, pp. 1–40, 2021.
We conducted an eye-tracking study of the acceptability judgment task (AJT) by drawing on the dual process theory of controlled and automatic processing. We conceptually replicated the work of Godfroid et al. (2015) and then extended it in two respects: (a) we analyzed both late and early measures of eye movement to differentiate between the effect of time pressure on controlled and on automatic processes, and (b) we examined how the automaticity of participants' lexical processing moderated the effect of time pressure. Under timed and untimed conditions, 31 L1 and 40 L2 English speakers performed the AJT while their eye movements were recorded. Through statistical modeling of the eye-tracking data, we demonstrated that (a) time pressure inhibits not only controlled processing but also automatic processing and (b) the time pressure effect is most pronounced for the late eye-movement measures of L2 speakers with slow lexical decoding skills. We explain that time pressure may not work as theoretically predicted by L2 researchers (i.e., to suppress only controlled processes associated with explicit knowledge) and that its effect is not uniform across different L2 speakers.
Marloes Mak; Roel M. Willems
Eyelit: Eye movement and reader response data during literary reading Journal Article
In: Journal of Open Humanities Data, vol. 7, no. 25, pp. 1–6, 2021.
An eye-tracking data set is described of 102 participants reading three Dutch literary short stories each (7790 words in total per participant). The pre-processed data set includes (1) Fixation report, (2) Saccade report, (3) Interest Area report, (4) Trial report (aggregated data for each page), (5) Sample report (sampling rate = 500 Hz), (6) Questionnaire data on reading experiences and participant characteristics, and (7) word characteristics for all words (with the potential of calculating additional word characteristics). It is stored on DANS, and can be used to study word characteristics or literary reading and all facets of eye movements.
Katja Maquate; Pia Knoeferle
Integration of social context vs. linguistic reference during situated language processing Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 547360, 2021.
Research findings on language comprehension suggest that many kinds of non-linguistic cues can rapidly affect language processing. Extant processing accounts of situated language comprehension model these rapid effects and are only beginning to accommodate the role of non-linguistic emotional, cues. To begin with a detailed characterization of distinct cues and their relative effects, three visual-world eye-tracking experiments assessed the relative importance of two cue types (action depictions vs. emotional facial expressions) as well as the effects of the degree of naturalness of social (facial) cues (smileys vs. natural faces). We predicted to replicate previously reported rapid effects of referentially mediated actions. In addition, we assessed distinct world-language relations. If how a cue is conveyed matters for its effect, then a verb referencing an action depiction should elicit a stronger immediate effect on visual attention and language comprehension than a speaker's emotional facial expression. The latter is mediated non-referentially via the emotional connotations of an adverb. The results replicated a pronounced facilitatory effect of action depiction (relative to no action depiction). By contrast, the facilitatory effect of a preceding speaker's emotional face was less pronounced. How the facial emotion was rendered mattered in that the emotional face effect was present with natural faces (Experiment 2) but not with smileys (Experiment 1). Experiment 3 suggests that contrast, i.e., strongly opposing emotional valence information vs. non-opposing valence information, might matter for the directionality of this effect. These results are the first step toward a more principled account of how distinct visual (social) cues modulate language processing, whereby the visual cues that are referenced by language (the depicted action), copresent (the depicted action), and more natural (the natural emotional prime face) tend to exert more pronounced effects.
Katja Maquate; Pia Knoeferle
Referential vs. non-referential world-language relations: How do they modulate language comprehension in 4 to 5-year-olds, younger, and older adults? Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, pp. 542091, 2021.
Age has been shown to influence language comprehension, with delays, for instance, in older adults' expectations about upcoming information. We examined to what extent expectations about upcoming event information (who-does-what-to-whom) change across the lifespan (in 4- to 5-year-old children, younger, and older adults) and as a function of different world-language relations. In a visual-world paradigm, participants in all three age groups inspected a speaker whose facial expression was either smiling or sad. Next they inspected two clipart agents (e.g., a smiling cat and a grumpy rat) depicted as acting upon a patient (e.g., a ladybug tickled by the cat and arrested by the rat). Control scenes featured the same three characters without the action depictions. While inspecting the depictions, comprehenders listened to a German sentence [e.g., Den Marienkäfer kitzelt vergnügt der Kater; literally: "The ladybug (object/patient) tickles happily the cat (subject/agent)"]. Referential verb-action relations (i.e., when the actions were present) could, in principle, cue the cat-agent and so could non-referential relations via links from the speaker's smile to "happily" and the cat's smile. We examined variation in participants' visual anticipation of the agent (the cat) before it was mentioned depending on (a) participant age and (b) whether the referentially mediated action depiction or the non-referentially associated speaker smile cued the agent. The action depictions rapidly boosted participants' visual anticipation of the agent, facilitating thematic role assignment in all age groups. By contrast, effects of the non-referentially cued speaker smile emerged in the younger adults only. We outline implications of these findings for processing accounts of the temporally coordinated interplay between listeners' age-dependent language comprehension, their interrogation of the visual context, and visual context influences.
Viorica Marian; James Bartolotti; Natalia L. Daniel; Sayuri Hayakawa
Spoken words activate native and non-native letter-to-sound mappings: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article
In: Brain and Language, vol. 223, pp. 105045, 2021.
Many languages use the same letters to represent different sounds (e.g., the letter P represents /p/ in English but /r/ in Russian). We report two experiments that examine how native language experience impacts the acquisition and processing of words with conflicting letter-to-sound mappings. Experiment 1 revealed that individual differences in nonverbal intelligence predicted word learning and that novel words with conflicting orthography-to-phonology mappings were harder to learn when their spelling was more typical of the native language than less typical (due to increased competition from the native language). Notably, Experiment 2 used eye tracking to reveal, for the first time, that hearing non-native spoken words activates native language orthography and both native and non-native letter-to-sound mappings. These findings evince high interactivity in the language system, illustrate the role of orthography in phonological learning and processing, and demonstrate that experience with written form changes the linguistic mind.
Sainan Zhao; Lin Li; Min Chang; Jingxin Wang; Kevin B Paterson
A further look at ageing and word predictability effects in Chinese reading: Evidence from one-character words Journal Article
In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 68–78, 2021.
Older adults are thought to compensate for slower lexical processing by making greater use of contextual knowledge, relative to young adults, to predict words in sentences. Accordingly, compared to young adults, older adults should produce larger contextual predictability effects in reading times and skipping rates for words. Empirical support for this account is nevertheless scarce. Perhaps the clearest evidence to date comes from a recent Chinese study showing larger word predictability effects for older adults in reading times but not skipping rates for two-character words. However, one possibility is that the absence of a word-skipping effect in this experiment was due to the older readers skipping words infrequently because of difficulty processing two-character words parafoveally. We therefore took a further look at this issue, using one-character target words to boost word-skipping. Young (18–30 years) and older (65+ years) adults read sentences containing a target word that was either highly predictable or less predictable from the prior sentence context. Our results replicate the finding that older adults produce larger word predictability effects in reading times but not word-skipping, despite high skipping rates. We discuss these findings in relation to ageing effects on reading in different writing systems.
Mengyan Zhu; Xiangling Zhuang; Guojie Ma
Readers extract semantic information from parafoveal two-character synonyms in Chinese reading Journal Article
In: Reading and Writing, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 773–790, 2021.
In Chinese reading, the possibility and mechanism of semantic parafoveal processing has been debated for a long time. To advance the topic, "semantic preview benefit" in Chinese reading was reexamined, with a specific focus on how it is affected by the semantic relatedness between preview and target words at the two-character word level. Eighty critical two-character words were selected as target words. Reading tasks with gaze-contingent boundary paradigms were used to study whether different semantic-relatedness preview conditions influenced parafoveal processing. The data showed that synonyms (the most closely related preview) produced significant preview benefit compared with the semantic-related (non-synonyms) condition, even when plausibility was controlled. This result indicates that the larger extent of semantic preview benefit is mainly caused by the larger semantic relatedness between preview and target words. Moreover, plausibility is not the only cause of semantic preview benefit in Chinese reading. These findings improve the current understanding of the mechanism of parafoveal processing in Chinese reading and the implications on modeling eye movement control are discussed.
Amber Dudley; Roumyana Slabakova
L2 knowledge of the obligatory French subjunctive: Offline measures and eye tracking compared Journal Article
In: Languages, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1–30, 2021.
Extensive research has shown that second language (L2) learners find it difficult to apply grammatical knowledge during real-time processing, especially when differences exist between the first (L1) and L2. The current study examines the extent to which British English-speaking learners of French can apply their grammatical knowledge of the French subjunctive during real-time processing, and whether this ability is modulated by the properties of the L1 grammar, and/or proficiency. Data from an acceptability judgment task and an eye-tracking during reading experiment revealed that L2 learners had knowledge of the subjunctive, but were unable to apply this knowledge when reading for comprehension. Such findings therefore suggest that L2 knowledge of the subjunctive, at least at the proficiency levels tested in this study, is largely metalinguistic (explicit) in nature and that reduced lexical access and/or limited computational resources (e.g., working memory) prevented learners from fully utilising their grammatical representations during real-time processing.
Lynn S. Eekhof; Moniek M. Kuijpers; Myrthe Faber; Xin Gao; Marloes Mak; Emiel Van den Hoven; Roel M. Willems
Lost in a story, detached from the words Journal Article
In: Discourse Processes, vol. 58, no. 7, pp. 595–616, 2021.
This article explores the relationship between low- and high-level aspects of reading by studying the interplay between word processing, as measured with eye tracking, and narrative absorption and liking, as measured with questionnaires. Specifically, we focused on how individual differences in sensitivity to lexical word characteristics—measured as the effect of these characteristics on gaze duration—were related to narrative absorption and liking. By reanalyzing a large data set consisting of three previous eye-tracking experiments in which subjects (N = 171) read literary short stories, we replicated the well-established finding that word length, lemma frequency, position in sentence, age of acquisition, and orthographic neighborhood size of words influenced gaze duration. More importantly, we found that individual differences in the degree of sensitivity to three of these word characteristics, i.e., word length, lemma frequency, and age of acquisition, were negatively related to print exposure and to a lesser degree to narrative absorption and liking. Even though the underlying mechanisms of this relationship are still unclear, we believe the current findings underline the need to map out the interplay between, on the one hand, the technical and, on the other hand, the subjective processes of reading by studying reading behavior in more natural settings.
Lynn S. Eekhof; Kobie Krieken; José Sanders; Roel M. Willems
Reading minds, reading stories: Social-cognitive abilities affect the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 698986, 2021.
Although various studies have shown that narrative reading draws on social-cognitive abilities, not much is known about the precise aspects of narrative processing that engage these abilities. We hypothesized that the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint—expressed by elements that provide access to the inner world of characters—might play an important role in engaging social-cognitive abilities. Using eye tracking, we studied the effect of lexical markers of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional viewpoint on eye movements during reading of a 5,000-word narrative. Next, we investigated how this relationship was modulated by individual differences in social-cognitive abilities. Our results show diverging patterns of eye movements for perceptual viewpoint markers on the one hand, and cognitive and emotional viewpoint markers on the other. Whereas the former are processed relatively fast compared to non-viewpoint markers, the latter are processed relatively slow. Moreover, we found that social-cognitive abilities impacted the processing of words in general, and of perceptual and cognitive viewpoint markers in particular, such that both perspective-taking abilities and self-reported perspective-taking traits facilitated the processing of these markers. All in all, our study extends earlier findings that social cognition is of importance for story reading, showing that individual differences in social-cognitive abilities are related to the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint.
Erica M. Ellis; Arielle Borovsky; Jeffrey L. Elman; Julia L. Evans
Toddlers' ability to leverage statistical information to support word learning Journal Article
In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, pp. 600694, 2021.
Purpose: This study investigated whether the ability to utilize statistical regularities from fluent speech and map potential words to meaning at 18-months predicts vocabulary at 18- and again at 24-months. Method: Eighteen-month-olds (N = 47) were exposed to an artificial language with statistical regularities within the speech stream, then participated in an object-label learning task. Learning was measured using a modified looking-while-listening eye-tracking design. Parents completed vocabulary questionnaires when their child was 18-and 24-months old. Results: Ability to learn the object-label pairing for words after exposure to the artificial language predicted productive vocabulary at 24-months and amount of vocabulary change from 18- to 24 months, independent of non-verbal cognitive ability, socio-economic status (SES) and/or object-label association performance. Conclusion: Eighteen-month-olds' ability to use statistical information derived from fluent speech to identify words within the stream of speech and then to map the "words" to meaning directly predicts vocabulary size at 24-months and vocabulary change from 18 to 24 months. The findings support the hypothesis that statistical word segmentation is one of the important aspects of word learning and vocabulary acquisition in toddlers.
Michael A. Eskenazi; Paige Kemp; Jocelyn R. Folk
Word skipping during the lexical acquisition process Journal Article
In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, no. 3, pp. 548–558, 2021.
During reading, most words are identified in the fovea through a direct fixation; however, readers also identify some words in the parafovea without directly fixating them. This word skipping process is influenced by many lexical and visual factors including word length, launch position, frequency, and predictability. Although these factors are well understood, there is some disagreement about the process that leads to word skipping and the degree to which skipped words are processed. The purpose of this study was to investigate the word skipping process when readers are exposed to novel words in an incidental lexical acquisition paradigm. Participants read 18 three-letter novel words (i.e., pru, cho) in three different informative contexts each while their eye movements were monitored. They then completed a surprise test of their orthographic and semantic acquisition and a spelling skill assessment. Mixed-effects models indicated that participants learned spellings and meanings of words at the same rate regardless of the number of times that they were skipped. However, word skipping rates increased across the three exposures and reading times decreased. Results indicate that readers appear to process skipped words to the same degree as fixated words. However, this may be due to a more cautious skipping process used during lexical acquisition of unfamiliar words compared to processing of already known words.
Michael A. Eskenazi; Bailey Nix
Individual differences in the desirable difficulty effect during lexical acquisition Journal Article
In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 45–52, 2021.
Reading in difficult or novel fonts results in slower and less efficient reading (Slattery & Rayner, 2010); however, these fonts may also lead to better learning and memory (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011). This effect is consistent with a desirable difficulty effect such that more effort during encoding results in better long term retention (Bjork, 1994). The effect is robust and found in many contexts; however, it has not yet been applied to the process of lexical acquisition. The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether readers would learn words better when presented in Sans Forgetica, a font designed to induce desirable difficulty. One hundred sixty participants were randomly assigned to one font type and read sentences with 15 very low-frequency English words presented in two different informative contexts while their eye movements were monitored. They completed a spelling skill assessment and tests of their orthographic and semantic acquisition of the words. Linear mixed effects analyses were conducted and indicate that high-skill spellers learned the spelling and meaning of words better in the desirable difficulty font, but low-skill spellers did not show the same benefit. This pattern highlights the importance of individual differences in learning such that a desirable difficulty for one reader may be an undesirable difficulty for another. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
George D. Farmer; Paula Smith; Simon Baron-Cohen; William J. Skylark
The effect of autism on information sampling during decision-making: An eye-tracking study Journal Article
In: Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 614–637, 2021.
Recent research has highlighted a tendency for more rational and deliberative decision-making in individuals with autism. We tested this hypothesis by using eye-tracking to investigate the information processing strategies that underpin multiattribute choice in a sample of adults diagnosed with autism spectrum condition. We found that, as the number of attributes defining each option increased, autistic decision-makers were speedier, examined less of the available information, and spent a greater proportion of their time examining the option they eventually chose. Rather than indicating a more deliberative style, our results are consistent with a tendency for individuals with autism to narrow down the decision-space more quickly than does the neurotypical population.
Saoradh Favier; Antje S. Meyer; Falk Huettig
Literacy can enhance syntactic prediction in spoken language processing Journal Article
In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 150, no. 10, pp. 2167–2174, 2021.
Language comprehenders can use syntactic cues to generate predictions online about upcoming language. Previous research with reading-impaired adults and healthy, low-proficiency adult and child learners suggests that reading skills are related to prediction in spoken language comprehension. Here, we investigated whether differences in literacy are also related to predictive spoken language processing in non-reading-impaired proficient adult readers with varying levels of literacy experience. Using the visual world paradigm enabled us to measure prediction based on syntactic cues in the spoken sentence, prior to the (predicted) target word. Literacy experience was found to be the strongest predictor of target anticipation, independent of general cognitive abilities. These findings suggest that (a) experience with written language can enhance syntactic prediction of spoken language in normal adult language users and (b) processing skills can be transferred to related tasks (from reading to listening) if the domains involve similar processes (e.g., predictive dependencies) and representations (e.g., syntactic). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Leigh B. Fernandez; Ricarda Bothe; Shanley E. M. Allen
The role of L1 reading direction on L2 perceptual span: An eye-tracking study investigating Hindi and Urdu speakers Journal Article
In: Second Language Research, pp. 1–23, 2021.
In the current study we used the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to directly compare the second language (L2) English perceptual span of two groups that speak languages with essentially the same lexicon and grammar but crucially with different writing directions (and scripts): Hindi (read left to right) and Urdu (read right to left). This is the first study to directly compare first language (L1) speakers of languages that differ primarily in reading direction in a common L2, English. While Urdu speakers had a slightly faster reading rate, we found no additional differences between Hindi and Urdu speakers when reading L2 English; both groups showed a perceptual span between 9 and 11 characters to the right of the fixation based on saccade length. This suggests little to no influence of L1 reading direction on L2 perceptual span, but rather that L2 perceptual span is influenced by allocation of attention during reading. Our data are in line with research by Leung et al. (2014) finding that L2 speakers have a smaller perceptual span than native speakers (L1 perceptual span is approximately 15 characters to the right of the fixation). This most likely stems from the increased demands associated with reading in a second language, which led to a reduction in the amount of attention that can be allocated outside of the current fixation.
Leigh B. Fernandez; Christoph Scheepers; Shanley E. M. Allen
Cross-linguistic differences in parafoveal semantic and orthographic processing Journal Article
In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 83, no. 8, pp. 3183–3200, 2021.
In this study we investigated parafoveal processing by L1 and late L2 speakers of English (L1 German) while reading in English. We hypothesized that L2ers would make use of semantic and orthographic information parafoveally. Using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated six parafoveal masks in a sentence (Mark found th*e wood for the fire; * indicates the invisible boundary): identical word mask (wood), English orthographic mask (wook), English string mask (zwwl), German mask (holz), German orthographic mask (holn), and German string mask (kxfs). We found an orthographic benefit for L1ers and L2ers when the mask was orthographically related to the target word (wood vs. wook) in line with previous L1 research. English L2ers did not derive a benefit (rather an interference) when a non-cognate translation mask from their L1 was used (wood vs. holz), but did derive a benefit from a German orthographic mask (wood vs. holn). While unexpected, it may be that L2ers incur a switching cost when the complete German word is presented parafoveally, and derive a benefit by keeping both lexicons active when a partial German word is presented parafoveally (narrowing down lexical candidates). To the authors' knowledge there is no mention of parafoveal processing in any model of L2 processing/reading, and the current study provides the first evidence for a parafoveal non-cognate orthographic benefit (but only with partial orthographic overlap) in sentence reading for L2ers. We discuss how these findings fit into the framework of bilingual word recognition theories.
María Fernández-López; Jonathan Mirault; Jonathan Grainger; Manuel Perea
How resilient is reading to letter rotations? A parafoveal preview investigation. Journal Article
In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–14, 2021.
Skilled readers have developed a certain amount of tolerance to variations in the visual form of words (e.g., CAPTCHAs, handwritten text, etc.). To examine how visual distortion affects the mapping from the visual input onto abstract word representations during normal reading, we focused on a single type of distortion: letter rotation. Importantly, two leading neurally inspired models of word recognition (SERIOL model, Whitney, 2001; LCD model, Dehaene et al., 2005) make distinct predictions: Whereas the SERIOL model postulates that the cost of letter rotation increases gradually, the LCD model assumes an all-or-none boundary at around 40° to 45° rotation angle. To examine these predictions in a normal reading scenario, we conducted a parafoveal preview experiment using the gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm. The parafoveal previews were identical or unrelated to the target word. Critically, each preview's individual letters were rotated 15°, 30°, 45°, or 60°. Apart from the parafoveal previews, all text, including target words, was presented with letters in their canonical upright orientation. Results showed that the advantage of the identity preview condition in eye fixation times on the target word decreased progressively by rotation angle. This pattern of results favors the view that the cost of letter rotation during normal reading increases gradually as a function of the angle of rotation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Francesca Foppolo; Jasmijn E. Bosch; Ciro Greco; Maria N. Carminati; Francesca Panzeri
Draw a star and make it perfect: Incremental processing of telicity Journal Article
In: Cognitive Science, vol. 45, no. 10, pp. e13052, 2021.
Predicates like "coloring-the-star" denote events that have a temporal duration and a culmination point (telos). When combined with perfective aspect (e.g., "Valeria has colored the star"), a culmination inference arises implying that the action has stopped, and the star is fully colored. While the perfective aspect is known to constrain the conceptualization of the event as telic, many reading studies have demonstrated that readers do not make early commitments as to whether the event is bounded or unbounded. A few visual-world studies tested the processing of telic predicates during online sentence processing, demonstrating an early integration of aspectual and temporal cues. By employing the visual-world paradigm, we tested the incremental processing of the perfective aspect in Italian in two eye-tracking studies in which listeners heard durative predicates in the perfective form in a scenario showing a completed and a non-completed event. Differently from previous studies, we compared telic durative predicates such as "coloring-the-star" to punctual predicates such as "lighting-the-candle." While for punctual predicates, the inferences of telicity (the event has a telos) and of culmination (the telos is reached) are lexically encoded in the perfective verb, for durative predicates, the degree of event completion (visually encoded) needs to be integrated with perfective aspect (linguistically encoded) for the culmination inference derivation. By modulating the interaction of visual and linguistic stimuli across the two experiments, we show that the verb's perfective aspect triggers the culmination inference incrementally during sentence processing, offering novel evidence for the continuous integration of linguistic processing with real-world visual information.
Stefan L. Frank; Patty Ernst; Robin L. Thompson; Rein Cozijn
The missing-VP effect in readers of English as a second language Journal Article
In: Memory and Cognition, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 1204–1219, 2021.
English sentences with double center-embedded clauses are read faster when they are made ungrammatical by removing one of the required verb phrases. This phenomenon is known as the missing-VP effect. German and Dutch speakers do not experience the missing-VP effect when reading their native language, but they do when reading English as a second language (L2). We investigate whether the missing-VP effect when reading L2 English occurs in native Dutch speakers because their knowledge of English is similar to that of native English speakers (the high exposure account), or because of the difficulty of L2 reading (the low proficiency account). In an eye-tracking study, we compare the size of the missing-VP effect between native Dutch and native English participants, and across native Dutch participants with varying L2 English proficiency and exposure. Results provide evidence for both accounts, suggesting that both native-like knowledge of English and L2 reading difficulty play a role.
Léon Franzen; Zoey Stark; Aaron P. Johnson
Individuals with dyslexia use a different visual sampling strategy to read text Journal Article
In: Scientific Reports, vol. 11, pp. 6449, 2021.
Individuals with dyslexia present with reading-related deficits including inaccurate and/or less fluent word recognition and poor decoding abilities. Slow reading speed and worse text comprehension can occur as secondary consequences of these deficits. Reports of visual symptoms such as atypical eye movements during reading gave rise to a search for these deficits' underlying mechanisms. This study sought to replicate established behavioral deficits in reading and cognitive processing speed while investigating their underlying mechanisms in more detail by developing a comprehensive profile of eye movements specific to reading in adult dyslexia. Using a validated standardized reading assessment, our findings confirm a reading speed deficit among adults with dyslexia. We observed different eye movements in readers with dyslexia across numerous eye movement metrics including the duration of a stop (i.e., fixation), the length of jumps (i.e., saccades), and the number of times a reader's eyes expressed a jump atypical for reading. We conclude that individuals with dyslexia visually sample written information in a laborious and more effortful manner that is fundamentally different from those without dyslexia. Our findings suggest a mix of aberrant cognitive linguistic and oculomotor processes being present in adults with dyslexia.
Max R. Freeman; Viorica Marian
Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Eye-tracking evidence that L2 proficiency impacts access of L1 phonotactics Journal Article
In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, pp. 1–29, 2021.
A bilingual's language system is highly interactive. When hearing a second language (L2), bilinguals access native-language (L1) words that share sounds across languages. In the present study, we examine whether input modality and L2 proficiency moderate the extent to which bilinguals activate L1 phonotactic constraints (i.e., rules for combining speech sounds) during L2 processing. Eye movements of English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals were tracked as they searched for a target English word in a visual display. On critical trials, displays included a target that conflicted with the Spanish vowel-onset rule (e.g., spa), as well as a competitor containing the potentially activated "e"onset (e.g., egg). The rule violation was processed either in the visual modality (Experiment 1) or audio-visually (Experiment 2). In both experiments, bilinguals with lower L2 proficiency made more eye movements to competitors than fillers. Findings suggest that bilinguals who have lower L2 proficiency access L1 phonotactic constraints during L2 visual word processing with and without auditory input of the constraint-conflicting structure (e.g., spa). We conclude that the interactivity between a bilingual's two languages is not limited to words that share form across languages, but also extends to sublexical, rule-based structures.
Zuzanna Fuchs
Facilitative use of grammatical gender in Heritage Spanish Journal Article
In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, pp. 1–27, 2021.
This paper presents an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm that tests whether participants are able to access gender information on definite articles and deploy it to facilitate lexical retrieval of subsequent nouns. A comparison of heritage speakers of Spanish with control monolingual speakers of Spanish suggests that the heritage speakers' performance on this task is qualitatively similar to that of the baseline. This suggests that, despite non-target-like performance in offline tasks targeting gender production and comprehension, heritage speakers of Spanish can use gender in a target-like manner in online tasks. In line with proposals put forth by Grüter et al. (2012) and Montrul et al. (2014) , a preliminary comparison with previous work on L2 learners ( Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010 ; Grüter et al., 2012 ; Dussias et al., 2013 ) provides tentative support for the idea that the nature of early language learning is crucial in developing the ability to use grammatical gender to facilitate lexical retrieval ( Grüter et al., 2012 ; Montrul et al., 2014 ).
Hiroki Fujita; Ian Cunnings
Lingering misinterpretation in native and nonnative sentence processing: Evidence from structural priming Journal Article
In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 475–504, 2021.
Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers sometimes misinterpret temporarily ambiguous sentences like When Mary dressed the baby laughed happily. Recent studies suggest that the initially assigned misinterpretation (Mary dressed the baby) may persist even after disambiguation, and that L2 speakers may have particular difficulty discarding initial misinterpretations. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers are more persistent with misinterpretation compared with L1 speakers during sentence processing, using the structural priming and eye tracking while reading tasks. In the experiment, participants read prime followed by target sentences. Reading times revealed that unambiguous but not ambiguous prime sentences facilitated processing of the globally correct interpretation of ambiguous target sentences. However, this priming effect was only observed when the prime and target sentence shared the same verb. Comprehension accuracy rates were not significantly influenced by priming effects but did provide evidence of lingering misinterpretation. We did not find significant L1/L2 differences in either priming effects or persistence of misinterpretation. Together, these results suggest that initially assigned misinterpretations linger in both L1 and L2 readers during sentence processing and that L1 and L2 comprehension priming is strongly lexically mediated.
Hiroki Fujita; Ian Cunnings
Reanalysis processes in non-native sentence comprehension Journal Article
In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 628–641, 2021.
We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (laughed), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (the baby) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (dressed). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis.
Kumiko Fukumura; Maria Nella Carminati
Overspecification and incremental referential processing: An eye-tracking study Journal Article
In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–22, 2021.
Using eye-tracking, we examined whether overspecification hinders or facilitates referent selection and the extent to which this depends on the properties of the attribute mentioned in the referring expressions and the underpinning processing mode. Following spoken instructions, participants selected the referent in a visual dis- play while their eye movements were monitored. The referring expressions were presented either simultaneously with the displays, so the attributes could be incrementally processed in sequence,or before the display presentation, so the attributes could be processed in parallel from the outset of search. Experiment 1 showed that when the attributes were processed incrementally, how quickly an earlier-mentioned attribute discriminated determined whether a late-mentioned, overspecified attribute contributed to discrimination: When color was mentioned first and was fully discriminating, the referent was selected fast regardless of the second-mentioned pattern, whereas when pattern was mentioned first and fully discriminating, the second-mentioned color facilitated discrimination. Experiment 2 found that under incremental processing, color mention after a fully discriminating pattern increased fixations but delayed referent selection relative to a pattern-only description; under parallel processing, however, color mention immediately eliminated alternatives and sped up referent selection. Experiment 3 showed that pattern mention after a fully discriminating color delayed referent selec- tion and tended to reduce fixations relative to a color-only description in both processing modes. Hence, additional attributes can speed up referent selection but only when they can discriminate much faster than alternative attributes mentioned in a more concise description and,critically,when they can be used early for referent search.
Kumiko Fukumura; Maria Nella Carminati
Overspecification and incremental referential processing: An eye-tracking study Journal Article
In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–22, 2021.
Using eye-tracking, we examined whether overspecification hinders or facilitates referent selection and the extent to which this depends on the properties of the attribute mentioned in the referring expressions and the underpinning processing mode. Following spoken instructions, participants selected the referent in a visual dis- play while their eye movements were monitored. The referring expressions were presented either simultaneously with the displays, so the attributes could be incrementally processed in sequence,or before the display presentation, so the attributes could be processed in parallel from the outset of search. Experiment 1 showed that when the attributes were processed incrementally, how quickly an earlier-mentioned attribute discriminated determined whether a late-mentioned, overspecified attribute contributed to discrimination: When color was mentioned first and was fully discriminating, the referent was selected fast regardless of the second-mentioned pattern, whereas when pattern was mentioned first and fully discriminating, the second-mentioned color facilitated discrimination. Experiment 2 found that under incremental processing, color mention after a fully discriminating pattern increased fixations but delayed referent selection relative to a pattern-only description; under parallel processing, however, color mention immediately eliminated alternatives and sped up referent selection. Experiment 3 showed that pattern mention after a fully discriminating color delayed referent selec- tion and tended to reduce fixations relative to a color-only description in both processing modes. Hence, additional attributes can speed up referent selection but only when they can discriminate much faster than alternative attributes mentioned in a more concise description and,critically,when they can be used early for referent search.
Benjamin Gagl; Klara Gregorova; Julius Golch; Stefan Hawelka; Jona Sassenhagen; Alessandro Tavano; David Poeppel; Christian J. Fiebach
Eye movements during text reading align with the rate of speech production Journal Article
In: Nature Human Behaviour, 2021.
Across languages, the speech signal is characterized by a predominant modulation of the amplitude spectrum between about 4.3 and 5.5 Hz, reflecting the production and processing of linguistic information chunks (syllables and words) every $sim$200 ms. Interestingly, $sim$200 ms is also the typical duration of eye fixations during reading. Prompted by this observation, we demonstrate that German readers sample written text at $sim$5 Hz. A subsequent meta-analysis of 142 studies from 14 languages replicates this result and shows that sampling frequencies vary across languages between 3.9 Hz and 5.2 Hz. This variation systematically depends on the complexity of the writing systems (character-based versus alphabetic systems and orthographic transparency). Finally, we empirically demonstrate a positive correlation between speech spectrum and eye movement sampling in low-skilled non-native readers, with tentative evidence from post hoc analysis suggesting the same relationship in low-skilled native readers. On the basis of this convergent evidence, we propose that during reading, our brain's linguistic processing systems imprint a preferred processing rate—that is, the rate of spoken language production and perception—onto the oculomotor system.
Beatriz Martín-Luengo; Andriy Myachykov; Yury Shtyrov
Deliberative process in sharing information with different audiences: Eye-tracking correlates Journal Article
In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, pp. 1–12, 2021.
Research on conversational pragmatics demonstrates how interlocutors tailor the information they share depending on the audience. Previous research showed that, in informal contexts, speakers often provide several alternative answers, whereas in formal contexts, they tend to give only a single answer; however, the psychological underpinnings of these effects remain obscure. To investigate this answer selection process, we measured participants' eye movements in different experimentally modelled social contexts. Participants answered general knowledge questions by providing responses with either single (one) or plural (three) alternatives. Then, a formal (job interview) or informal (conversation with friends) context was presented and participants decided either to report or withdraw their responses after considering the given social context. Growth curve analysis on the eye movements indicates that the selected response option attracted more eye movements. There was a discrepancy between the answer selection likelihood and the proportion of fixations to the corresponding option—but only in the formal context. These findings support a more elaborate decision-making processes in formal contexts. They also suggest that eye movements do not necessarily accompany the options considered in the decision-making processes.
Ronan McGarrigle; Sarah Knight; Lyndon Rakusen; Jason Geller; Sven Mattys
Older adults show a more sustained pattern of effortful listening than young adults Journal Article
In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 504–519, 2021.
Listening to speech in adverse conditions can be challenging and effortful, especially for older adults. This study examined age-related differences in effortful listening by recording changes in the task-evoked pupil response (TEPR; a physiological marker of listening effort) both at the level of sentence processing and over the entire course of a listening task. A total of 65 (32 young adults, 33 older adults) participants performed a speech recognition task in the presence of a competing talker, while moment-to-moment changes in pupil size were continuously monitored. Participants were also administered the Vanderbilt Fatigue Scale, a questionnaire assessing daily life listening-related fatigue within four domains (social, cognitive, emotional, physical). Normalized TEPRs were overall larger and more steeply rising and falling around the peak in the older versus the young adult group during sentence processing. Additionally, mean TEPRs over the course of the listening task were more stable in the older versus the young adult group, consistent with a more sustained recruitment of compensatory attentional resources to maintain task performance. No age-related differences were found in terms of total daily life listening-related fatigue; however, older adults reported higher scores than young adults within the social domain. Overall, this study provides evidence for qualitatively distinct patterns of physiological arousal between young and older adults consistent with age-related upregulation in resource allocation during listening. A more detailed understanding of age-related changes in the subjective and physiological mechanisms that underlie effortful listening will ultimately help to address complex communication needs in aging listeners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
Ronan McGarrigle; Lyndon Rakusen; Sven Mattys
Effortful listening under the microscope: Examining relations between pupillometric and subjective markers of effort and tiredness from listening Journal Article
In: Psychophysiology, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. e13703, 2021.
Effort during listening is commonly measured using the task-evoked pupil response (TEPR); a pupillometric marker of physiological arousal. However, studies to date report no association between TEPR and perceived effort. One possible reason for this is the way in which self-report effort measures are typically administered, namely as a single data point collected at the end of a testing session. Another possible reason is that TEPR might relate more closely to the experience of tiredness from listening than to effort per se. To examine these possibilities, we conducted two preregistered experiments that recorded subjective ratings of effort and tiredness from listening at multiple time points and examined their covariance with TEPR over the course of listening tasks varying in levels of acoustic and attentional demand. In both experiments, we showed a within-subject association between TEPR and tiredness from listening, but no association between TEPR and effort. The data also suggest that the effect of task difficulty on the experience of tiredness from listening may go undetected using the traditional approach of collecting a single data point at the end of a listening block. Finally, this study demonstrates the utility of a novel correlation analysis technique ("rmcorr"), which can be used to overcome statistical power constraints commonly found in the literature. Teasing apart the subjective and physiological mechanisms that underpin effortful listening is a crucial step toward addressing these difficulties in older and/or hearing-impaired individuals.
Drew J. McLaughlin; Maggie E. Zink; Lauren Gaunt; Brent Spehar; Kristin J. Van Engen; Mitchell S. Sommers; Jonathan E. Peelle
Pupillometry reveals cognitive demands of lexical competition during spoken word recognition in young and older adults Journal Article
In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, pp. 1–13, 2021.
In most contemporary activation-competition frameworks for spoken word recognition, candidate words compete against phonological "neighbors" with similar acoustic properties (e.g., "cap" vs. "cat"). Thus, recognizing words with more competitors should come at a greater cognitive cost relative to recognizing words with fewer competitors, due to increased demands for selecting the correct item and inhibiting incorrect candidates. Importantly, these processes should operate even in the absence of differences in accuracy. In the present study, we tested this proposal by examining differences in processing costs associated with neighborhood density for highly intelligible items presented in quiet. A second goal was to examine whether the cognitive demands associated with increased neighborhood density were greater for older adults compared with young adults. Using pupillometry as an index of cognitive processing load, we compared the cognitive demands associated with spoken word recognition for words with many or fewer neighbors, presented in quiet, for young (n = 67) and older (n = 69) adult listeners. Growth curve analysis of the pupil data indicated that older adults showed a greater evoked pupil response for spoken words than did young adults, consistent with increased cognitive load during spoken word recognition. Words from dense neighborhoods were marginally more demanding to process than words from sparse neighborhoods. There was also an interaction between age and neighborhood density, indicating larger effects of density in young adult listeners. These results highlight the importance of assessing both cognitive demands and accuracy when investigating the mechanisms underlying spoken word recognition.
Johannes M Meixner; Jessie S Nixon; Jochen Laubrock; Johannes M Meixner; Jessie S Nixon; Jochen Laubrock
The perceptual span Is dynamically adjusted in response to foveal load by beginning readers Journal Article
In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, pp. 1–14, 2021.
The perceptual span describes the size of the visual field from which information is obtained during a fixation in reading. Its size depends on characteristics of writing system and reader, but—according to the foveal load hypothesis—it is also adjusted dynamically as a function of lexical processing difficulty. Using the moving window paradigm to manipulate the amount of preview, here we directly test whether the perceptual span shrinks as foveal word difficulty increases. We computed the momentary size of the span from word-based eye-movement measures as a function of foveal word frequency, allowing us to separately describe the perceptual span for information affecting spatial saccade targeting and temporal saccade execution. First fixation duration and gaze duration on the upcoming (parafoveal) word N þ 1 were significantly shorter when the current (foveal) word N was more frequent. We show that the word frequency effect is modulated by window size. Fixation durations on word N þ 1 decreased with high-frequency words N, but only for large windows, that is, when sufficient parafoveal preview was available. This provides strong support for the foveal load hypothesis. To investigate the development of the foveal load effect, we analyzed data from three waves of a longitudinal study on the perceptual span with German children in Grades 1 to 6. Perceptual span adjustment emerged early in development at around second grade and remained stable in later grades. We conclude that the local modulation of the perceptual span indicates a general cognitive process, perhaps an attentional gradient with rapid readjustment.wubble: eye movements, attention, perceptual span, foveal load, reading development
Rita Mendonça; Margarida V. Garrido; Gün R. Semin
The effect of simultaneously presented words and auditory tones on visuomotor performance Journal Article
In: Multisensory Research, vol. 34, no. 7, pp. 715–742, 2021.
The experiment reported here used a variation of the spatial cueing task to examine the effects of unimodal and bimodal attention-orienting primes on target identification latencies and eye gaze movements. The primes were a nonspatial auditory tone and words known to drive attention consistent with the dominant writing and reading direction, as well as introducing a semantic, temporal bias (past-future) on the horizontal dimension. As expected, past-related (visual) word primes gave rise to shorter response latencies on the left hemifield and future-related words on the right. This congruency effect was differentiated by an asymmetric performance on the right space following future words and driven by the left-to-right trajectory of scanning habits that facilitated search times and eye gaze movements to lateralized targets. Auditory tone prime alone acted as an alarm signal, boosting visual search and reducing response latencies. Bimodal priming, i.e., temporal visual words paired with the auditory tone, impaired performance by delaying visual attention and response times relative to the unimodal visual word condition. We conclude that bimodal primes were no more effective in capturing participants' spatial attention than the unimodal auditory and visual primes. Their contribution to the literature on multisensory integration is discussed.
Winfried Menninghaus; Sebastian Wallot
What the eyes reveal about (reading) poetry Journal Article
In: Poetics, vol. 85, pp. 101526, 2021.
This study investigated how rhyme and meter affect eye movements and subjective aesthetic evaluations while reading poems. Earlier findings suggest that the effects might include prosodic predictability-driven cognitive and affective rewards from increased processing fluency (Blohm, Wagner, Schlesewsky and Menninghaus, 2018, McGlone and Tofighbakhsh, 2000), but also semantic and syntactic disfluency, as rhyme and meter are often implemented at the expense of unusual word forms and word order (Menninghaus et al., 2015, Wallot and Menninghaus, 2018). This study set out to investigate the extent to which eye movements might reveal not only distinct effects of fluency and disfluency at the same time, but potentially also hedonic responses that are associated with longer rather than shorter self-motivated exposure, in line with the hypothesis of "savoring" (Frijda and Sundararajan, 2007). The results reveal several fluency-enhancing effects of rhyme and meter on reading times for more global features of the poems, but also increased disfluency effects on gaze durations for some more local features of the poems. Moreover, some of the latter effects are readily interpretable in terms of the savoring hypothesis. Eye movement characteristics that were predictive of higher aesthetic evaluation—irrespective of the presence or absence of rhyme and meter—similarly resulted in increased fluency, disfluency, and savoring effects. Our study thus reveals, for the first time, a complex picture of effects that co-occur while reading poetic prosody, based on analyzing different dimensions of a single psychophysiological variable, namely, eye movements.
Emmelien Merchie; Leen Catrysse; Hilde Van Keer
Mind maps as primers when reading-for-learning in elementary grades? An eye tracking study Journal Article
In: Instructional Science, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 23–65, 2021.
Mind maps are often used to help readers process texts, but their effectiveness is empirically under-investigated. This study explores whether the use of mind maps presented either before or after the text can prime successful selective processing strategies related to the text topic structure. Differences in performance outcomes (i.e., memory and comprehension) are also investigated. Sixty-four late elementary education students were randomly assigned to a text-only-condition (T), mind map-text-condition (MMT) or text-mind map-condition (TMM). All groups studied an informative text while their eye movements were registered. Multilayered posttests and interviews were administered. Linear mixed effect models and one-way analysis of variances show that presenting a mind map beforehand primes more successful selective processing strategies than when the mind map is presented afterwards or not presented. In contrast, the TMM-condition outperformed the others in their amount of free recall and coherence. This study suggests that both receiving a mind map before or after text processing can be beneficial during targeted instruction in view of successful reading-for-learning.
Martina Micai; Mila Vulchanova; David Saldaña
Reading goals and executive function in autism: An eye-tracking study Journal Article
In: Autism Research, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 1007–1024, 2021.
The sources of reading comprehension difficulties in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are still open to discussion. We explored their ability to adapt reading strategies to different reading goals using eye-tracking technology. A group of participants with ASD, and intelligence-, receptive oral language- and reading skills-matched control peers, read three stories under three different reading goals conditions: read for entertainment; read for study; and read fast and search information for a previously presented question. Each text required participants to answer comprehension questions. The ASD group was less accurate in question answering. The control group was faster in reading questions, displayed more fixations on the text, and reported to be more confident in question answering during reading for study compared to reading for entertainment. These differences between reading goals were not observed in the ASD group. The control group adopted and was aware of using different reading strategies according to different reading goals. In contrast, the ASD group did not change their reading behavior and strategies between entertainment and study reading goal condition, showing less of a tendency to adopt deep-level processing strategies when necessary. Planning, as measured by Tower of Hanoi, was the only executive task that predicted individual differences in text reading time across conditions. Participants with better planning ability were also able to adapt their reading behavior to different reading instructions. Difficulties in adjusting the reading behavior according to the task, evaluating own performance and planning may be partly involved in reading comprehension problems in ASD. Lay abstract: The control group read questions faster, reported to be more confident in question answering during reading for study compared to reading for entertainment, and were aware of using different reading strategies according to different reading goals. In contrast, the autistic group did not change their reading behavior and strategies according to the reading goal. Difficulties in adjusting the reading behavior according to the task, in evaluating own performance and in planning may be partly involved in reading comprehension problems in autism.
Evelyn Milburn; Michael Walsh Dickey; Tessa Warren; Rebecca Hayes
Increased reliance on world knowledge during language comprehension in healthy aging: Evidence from verb-argument prediction Journal Article
In: Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, pp. 1–33, 2021.
Cognitive aging negatively impacts language comprehension performance. However, there is evidence that older adults skillfully use linguistic context and their crystallized world knowledge to offset age-related changes that negatively impact comprehension. Two visual-world paradigm experiments examined how aging changes verb-argument prediction, a comprehension process that relies on world knowledge but has rarely been examined in the cognitive-aging literature. Older adults did not differ from younger adults in their activation of an upcoming likely verb argument, particularly when cued by a semantically-rich agent+verb combination (Experiment 1). However, older adults showed elevated activation of previously-mentioned agents (Experiment 1) and of unlikely but verb-congruent referents (Experiment 2). This is novel evidence that older adults exploit semantic context and world knowledge during comprehension to successfully activate upcoming referents. However, older adults also show elevated activation of irrelevant information, consistent with previous findings demonstrating that older adults may experience greater proactive interference and competition from task-irrelevant information.
Evelyn Milburn; Mila Vulchanova; Valentin Vulchanov
Collocational frequency and context effects on idiom processing in advanced L2 speakers Journal Article
In: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 169–174, 2021.
Multiword expressions have attracted attention recently following suggestions that they are acquired chunk-wise by children in the first language, while adults learning a second language may focus more on individual words within an expression. This is of particular interest for the acquisition of idioms, which are multiword expressions in which the literal meanings of the component words do not (always) directly contribute to overall phrasal meaning, resulting in a figurative interpretation. Figurative meaning access is speeded both by idiom-internal characteristics, like higher collocational frequency, and idiom-external characteristics, like supportive contexts. We examined the relationship between the collocational frequency of idioms' component words and the context in which an idiom is embedded. In a visual world eye-tracking study, advanced nonnative English speakers heard incomplete English phrases embedded within contexts that biased either literal or idiomatic continuations and saw images representing literal or figurative completions, or distractor images. Participants showed higher looks to figurative completions that were at odds with contextual bias, suggesting that integrating frequency information in context in adult L2 users may be overridden when a phrase is figurative. However, higher-proficiency participants showed more successful suppression of inappropriate figurative con- tinuations. These results suggest that idiom conventionality when compared to literal phrases may be a stronger driver of predictive looks than collocational frequency or contextual bias alone, and that sensitivity to contextual fit when processing idioms may still be developing even among very advanced L2 users.
Sara V. Milledge; Hazel I. Blythe; Simon P. Liversedge
Parafoveal pre-processing in children reading English: The importance of external letters Journal Article
In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 197–208, 2021.
Although previous research has demonstrated that for adults external letters of words are more important than internal letters for lexical processing during reading, no comparable research has been conducted with children. This experiment explored, using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, whether parafoveal pre-processing in English is more affected by the manipulation of external letters or internal letters, and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Six previews were generated: identity (e.g., monkey); external letter manipulations where either the beginning three letters of the word were substituted (e.g., rackey) or the last three letters of the word were substituted (e.g., monhig); internal letter manipulations; e.g., machey, mochiy); and an unrelated control condition (e.g., rachig). Results indicate that both adults and children undertook pre-processing of words in their entirety in the parafovea, and that the manipulation of external letters in preview was more harmful to participants' parafoveal pre-processing than internal letters. The data also suggest developmental change in the time course of pre-processing, with children's pre-processing delayed compared to that of adults. These results not only provide further evidence for the importance of external letters to parafoveal processing and lexical identification for adults, but also demonstrate that such findings can be extended to children.
Sanako Mitsugi
Polarity adverbs facilitate predictive processing in L2 Japanese Journal Article
In: Second Language Research, pp. 1–24, 2021.
This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs – zenzen 'at all' and amari '(not) very' – as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by these adverbs, generate predictions of the polarity of the sentence-final verb. The visual-world paradigm experiment revealed that both native-speaker and L2-learner groups looked progressively more at the target picture before the negated verb when the information from adverbs was available than when it was not. The pattern of results underscores the usefulness of adverbial polarity items as predictive cues and indicates that they expedite the processing of negation in Japanese. Learners successfully exploited this information to generate nativelike predictions on sentence meaning.
Holger Mitterer; Sahyang Kim; Taehong Cho
Glottal stops do not constrain lexical access as do oral stops Journal Article
In: PLoS ONE, vol. 16, no. 11, pp. e0259573, 2021.
This study explores processing characteristics of a glottal stop in Maltese which occurs both as a phoneme and as an epenthetic stop for vowel-initial words. Experiment 1 shows that its hyperarticulation is not necessarily mapped onto an underlying form, although listeners may interpret it as underlying at a later processing stage. Experiment 2 shows that listeners' experience with a particular speaker's use of a glottal stop exclusively as a phoneme does not modulate competition patterns accordingly. Not only are vowel-initial words activated by [?]-initial forms, but /?/-initial words are also activated by vowel-initial forms, suggesting that lexical access is not constrained by an initial acoustic mismatch that involves a glottal stop. Experiment 3 reveals that the observed pattern is not generalizable to an oral stop /t/. We propose that glottal stops have a special status in lexical processing: it is prosodic in nature to be licensed by the prosodic structure.
Serena K. Mon; Mira Nencheva; Francesca M. M. Citron; Casey Lew-Williams; Adele E. Goldberg
Conventional metaphors elicit greater real-time engagement than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences Journal Article
In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 121, pp. 104285, 2021.
Conventional metaphors (e.g., a firm grasp on an idea) are extremely common. A possible explanation for their ubiquity is that they are more engaging, evoking more focused attention, than their literal paraphrases (e.g., a good understanding of an idea). To evaluate whether, when, and why this may be true, we created a new database of 180 English sentences consisting of conventional metaphors, literal paraphrases, and concrete descriptions (e.g., a firm grip on a doorknob). Extensive norming matched differences across sentence types in complexity, plausibility, emotional valence, intensity, and familiarity of the key phrases. Then, using pupillometry to study the time course of metaphor processing, we predicted that metaphors would elicit greater event-evoked pupil dilation compared to other sentence types. Results confirmed the predicted increase beginning at the onset of the key phrase and lasting seconds beyond the end of the sentence. When metaphorical and literal sentences were compared directly in survey data, participants judged metaphorical sentences to convey "richer meaning," but not more information. We conclude that conventional metaphors are more engaging than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences in a way that is irreducible to difficulty or ease, amount of information, short-term lexical access, or downstream inferences.
Petroula Mousikou; Lorena Nüesch; Jana Hasenäcker; Sascha Schroeder
Reading morphologically complex words in German: The case of particle and prefixed verbs Journal Article
In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 255–268, 2021.
German verb stems may be combined with a particle or a prefix, forming particle and prefixed verbs, respectively. Both types of verbs are morphologically complex, yet particles are free morphemes, which are routinely separated from their stem and can stand alone in a sentence, whereas prefixes are bound morphemes, which are attached to their stem and cannot stand alone in a sentence. Morphologically complex words are thought to be segmented into their constituent morphemes during reading. On this assumption, we took advantage of the separability feature of the constituent morphemes of particle verbs to investigate how the segmentation process occurs in skilled reading. Thirty German adults participated in a sentence-reading task that employed the eye-contingent boundary paradigm in eye-tracking. We observed no differences in the processing of particle and prefixed verbs, which suggests that idiosyncratic linguistic characteristics do not modulate the way morphologically complex words are segmented in skilled reading.
Iris Mulders
Are Dutch posture verbs lexical or functional elements? Journal Article
In: Linguistics in the Netherlands, vol. 38, pp. 40–64, 2021.
In Dutch, posture verbs like liggen 'lie' and staan 'stand' are obligatorily used in locative constructions with inanimate subjects, classifying the spatial Figure-Ground relation. Prima facie, in this use, posture verbs seem more like functional elements than like lexical verbs. This paper investigates processing of Dutch posture verbs in a reference resolution task in the visual world paradigm, to get more clarity on the nature of these verbs. We know that lexical verbs like rinkelen 'ring' cause anticipatory looks towards a matching target referent like telefoon 'telephone'; and that they suppress looks to a phonological competitor like telescoop 'telescope'. The functional property of grammatical gender on determiners ( de vs. het ) is less robust in directing looks. When it comes to anticipating the target referent, and suppressing looks to a phonological competitor, do posture verbs pattern with lexical verbs, or with functional elements like grammatical gender?
Gábor Müller; Emese Bodnár; Stavros Skopeteas; Julia Marina Kröger
On the impact of case and prosody on thematic role disambiguation: An eye-tracking study on Hungarian Journal Article
In: Language and Speech, vol. 64, no. 4, pp. 930–961, 2021.
Thematic-role assignment is influenced by several classes of cues during sentence comprehension, ranging from morphological exponents of syntactic relation such as case and agreement to probabilistic cues such as prosody. The effect of these cues cross-linguistically varies, presumably reflecting their language-specific robustness in signaling thematic roles. However, language-specific frequencies are not mapped onto the cue strength in a one-to-one fashion. The present article reports two eye-tracking studies on Hungarian examining the interaction of case and prosody during the processing of case-unambiguous (Experiment 1) and case-ambiguous (Experiment 2) clauses. Eye fixations reveal that case is a strong cue for thematic role assignment, but stress only enhances the effect of case in case-unambiguous clauses. This result differs from findings reported for Italian and German in which case initial stress reduces the expectation for subject-first clauses. Furthermore, the sentence comprehension facts are not explained by corpus frequencies in Hungarian. After considering an array of hypotheses about the roots of cross-linguistic variation, we conclude that the crucial difference lies in the high reliability/availability of case cues in Hungarian in contrast to the further languages examined within this experimental paradigm.
Shingo Nahatame
Text readability and processing effort in second language reading: A computational and eye-tracking investigation Journal Article
In: Language Learning, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 1004–1043, 2021.
Although text readability has traditionally been measured based on simple linguistic features, recent studies have employed natural language processing techniques to develop new readability formulas that better represent theoretical accounts of reading processes. This study evaluated the construct validity of different readability formulas, including both traditional and newer formulas, by examining their ability to predict the processing effort involved during L2 reading as evidenced by eye movements. Two studies (an experimental study and a corpus-based study) were conducted in which the readability of target texts was calculated using different formulas and then utilized to develop models that predict particular eye movement patterns during reading. These studies revealed that although traditional formulas showed reliable performance in predicting particular eye movement patterns, in many cases, the newer formulas outperformed them. These findings support the newer readability formulas as more theoretically valid and accurate measures of the processing effort involved in L2 reading.
Chie Nakamura; Jesse A. Harris; Sun-Ah Jun
Integrating prosody in anticipatory language processing: How listeners adapt to unconventional prosodic cues Journal Article
In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, pp. 1–24, 2021.
A growing body of research suggests that language users integrate diverse sources of information in processing and adapt to the variability of language at multiple levels. In two visual-world paradigm studies, we explored whether listeners use prosody to predict a resolution to structures with a PP that is structurally ambiguous between a modifier and an instrument interpretation. The first study revealed that listeners predict a referent that is most compatible with the location of a prosodic boundary, casting anticipatory looks to the appropriate object even before the onset of a disambiguating word. The second study indicated that listeners failed to anticipate instrument resolutions when the prosody of non-experimental filler items was unconventional, even though experimental items remained identical to the first study. The results suggest that listeners adjust their predictive processing to the utility of prosodic information according to whether a speaker reliably conforms to the conventional use of prosody. ARTICLE
Mira L. Nencheva; Elise A. Piazza; Casey Lew-Williams
The moment-to-moment pitch dynamics of child-directed speech shape toddlers' attention and learning Journal Article
In: Developmental Science, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. e12997, 2021.
Young children have an overall preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and its structural features are thought to facilitate language learning. Many studies have supported these findings, but less is known about processing of CDS at short, sub-second timescales. How do the moment-to-moment dynamics of CDS influence young children's attention and learning? In Study 1, we used hierarchical clustering to characterize patterns of pitch variability in a natural CDS corpus, which uncovered four main word-level contour shapes: 'fall', 'rise', 'hill', and 'valley'. In Study 2, we adapted a measure from adult attention research—pupil size synchrony—to quantify real-time attention to speech across participants, and found that toddlers showed higher synchrony to the dynamics of CDS than to ADS. Importantly, there were consistent differences in toddlers' attention when listening to the four word-level contour types. In Study 3, we found that pupil size synchrony during exposure to novel words predicted toddlers' learning at test. This suggests that the dynamics of pitch in CDS not only shape toddlers' attention but guide their learning of new words. By revealing a physiological response to the real-time dynamics of CDS, this investigation yields a new sub-second framework for understanding young children's engagement with one of the most important signals in their environment.
Kelly Nisbet; Raymond Bertram; Charlotte Erlinghagen; Aleks Pieczykolan; Victor Kuperman
Quantifying the difference in reading fluency between L1 and L2 readers of English Journal Article
In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, pp. 1–28, 2021.
This study is a comparative examination of reading behavior of first-language (L1) Canadian and second-language (L2) Finnish and German readers of English. We measured eye-movement patterns during reading the same set of English sentences and administered tests of English vocabulary, spelling, and exposure to print. The core of our study is a novel method of statistical prediction used to generate hypothetical Finnish and German participants with maximum observed L1 scores in all component skills. We found that with L1-like component skills, hypothetical German readers can show the same reading speed as the L1 group. We hypothesize this advantage comes from the small linguistic distance to English. Conversely, hypothetical Finnish readers remain disadvantaged even with maximum component skills, likely due to a larger linguistic distance. We discuss theoretical and applied implications of our method for L2 acquisition research.