The effect of word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty on the eye movements of young and older readers.

Young adult and older readers' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing target words that varied in frequency or predictability. In addition, half of the sentences were printed in a font that was easy to read (Times New Roman) and the other half were printed in a font that was more difficult to read (Old English). Word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty effects were apparent in the eye movement data of both groups of readers. In the fixation time data, the pattern of results was the same, but the older readers had larger frequency and predictability effects than the younger readers. The older readers skipped words more often than the younger readers (as indicated by their skipping rate on selected target words), but they made more regressions back to the target words and more regressions overall. The E-Z Reader model was used as a platform to evaluate the results, and simulations using the model suggest that lexical processing is slowed in older readers and that, possibly as a result of this, they adopt a more risky reading strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Effects of Frequency and Predictability on Eye Fixations in Reading: Implications for the E-Z Reader Model.

Readers read sentences containing target words varying in frequency and predictability. The observed pattern of data for fixation durations only mildly departed from additivity, with predictability effects that were slightly larger for low-frequency than for high-frequency words. The pattern of data for skipping was different as predictability affected only the probability of skipping for high-frequency target words. Simulations of these data using the E-Z Reader model indicated that a single-process model was unlikely to provide a good fit for both measures. A version of the model that assumes that (a) word-encoding time is additively affected by frequency and predictability and (b) difficulty with postlexical processing of the target word causes a double take accounted for the data while indicating that the relationship between the duration of hypothesized word-encoding stages and observed fixation durations is not likely to be transparent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye Movements and Word Skipping During Reading Revisited.

The authors examined word skipping in reading in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, skipping rates were higher for a preview of a predictable word than for a visually similar nonword, indicating there is full recognition in parafoveal vision. In Experiment 2, foveal load was manipulated by varying the frequency of the word preceding either a 3-letter target word or a misspelled preview. There was again a higher skipping rate for a correct preview and a lower skipping rate when there was a high foveal load, but there was no interaction, and the pattern of effects in fixation times was the same as in the skipping data. Experiment 2 also showed significant skipping of nonwords similar to the target word, indicating skipping based on partial information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of alphabet-letter instruction on young children's word recognition.

This study examined the influence of letter-name instruction on beginning word recognition. Thirty-three preschool children from low-socioeconomic-status families participated in 16 weeks of letter-name or comprehension-focused instruction. After instruction, children's ability to learn 3 types of word spellings was examined: words phonetically spelled with letters children had been taught (e.g., BL for ball), words phonetically spelled with letters children had not been taught, and words with visually distinct letter spellings that were nonphonetic. Children who received letter-name instruction learned words phonetically spelled with letters included in instruction significantly better than other words. Children receiving comprehension instruction performed significantly better on visually distinct word spellings. Results demonstrate the beneficial effects of alphabet-letter instruction on beginning phonetic word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movement control during reading: Effects of word frequency and orthographic familiarity.

Word frequency and orthographic familiarity were independently manipulated as readers' eye movements were recorded. Word frequency influenced fixation durations and the probability of word skipping when orthographic familiarity was controlled. These results indicate that lexical processing of words can influence saccade programming (as shown by fixation durations and which words are fixated). Orthographic familiarity, but not word frequency, influenced the duration of prior fixations. These results provide evidence for orthographic, but not lexical, parafoveal-on-foveal effects. Overall, the findings have a crucial implication for models of eye movement control in reading: There must be sufficient time for lexical factors to influence saccade programming before saccade metrics and timing are finalized. The conclusions are critical for the fundamental architecture of models of eye movement control in reading- namely, how to reconcile long saccade programming times and complex linguistic influences on saccades during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When does length cause the word length effect?

The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, has been termed one of the benchmark findings that any theory of immediate memory must account for. Indeed, the effect led directly to the development of working memory and the phonological loop, and it is viewed as the best remaining evidence for time-based decay. However, previous studies investigating this effect have confounded length with orthographic neighborhood size. In the present study, Experiments 1A and 1B revealed typical effects of length when short and long words were equated on all relevant dimensions previously identified in the literature except for neighborhood size. In Experiment 2, consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) words with a large orthographic neighborhood were better recalled than were CVC words with a small orthographic neighborhood. In Experiments 3 and 4, using two different sets of stimuli, we showed that when short (1-syllable) and long (3-syllable) items were equated for neighborhood size, the word length effect disappeared. Experiment 5 replicated this with spoken recall. We suggest that the word length effect may be better explained by the differences in linguistic and lexical properties of short and long words rather than by length per se. These results add to the growing literature showing problems for theories of memory that include decay offset by rehearsal as a central feature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The word grouping hypothesis and eye movements during reading.

The distribution of landing positions and durations of first fixations in a region containing a noun preceded by either an article (e.g., the soldiers) or a high-frequency 3-letter word (e.g., all soldiers) were compared. Although there were fewer first fixations on the blank space between the high-frequency 3-letter word and the noun than on the surrounding letters (and the fixations on the blank space were shorter), this pattern did not occur when the noun was preceded by an article. R. Radach (1996) inferred from a similar experiment that did not manipulate the type of short word that 2 words could be processed as a perceptual unit during reading when the first word is a short word. As this different pattern of fixations is restricted to article-noun pairs, it indicates that word grouping does not occur purely on the basis of word length during reading; moreover, as the authors demonstrate, one can explain the observed patterns in both conditions more parsimoniously without adopting a word-grouping mechanism in eye movement control during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Investigating the Effects of a Set of Intercorrelated Variables on Eye Fixation Durations in Reading.

The present experiment investigated the influence of 5 intercorrelated variables on word recognition using a multiple regression analysis. The 5 variables were word frequency, subjective familiarity, word length, concreteness, and age of acquisition (AoA). Target words were embedded in sentences and eye tracking methodology was used to investigate the predictive power of these variables. All 5 variables were found to influence reading time. However, the time course of these variables differed. Both word frequency and familiarity showed an early but lasting influence on eye fixation durations. Word length only significantly predicted fixation durations after refixations on the target words were taken into account. This is the 1st experiment to demonstrate concreteness and AoA effects on eye fixations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In search of perceptual influences of sentence context on word recognition.

A major issue in the study of word perception concerns the nature (perceptual or nonperceptual) of sentence context effects. The authors compared effects of legal, word replacement, nonword replacement, and transposed contexts on target word performance using the Reicher-Wheeler task to suppress nonperceptual influences of contextual and lexical constraint. Experiment 1 showed superior target word performance for legal (e.g., "it began to flap/flop") over all other contexts and for transposed over word replacement and nonword replacement contexts. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with higher constraint contexts (e.g., "the cellar is dark/dank") and Experiment 3 showed that strong constraint contexts improved performance for congruent (e.g., "born to be wild") but not incongruent (e.g., mild) target words. These findings support the view that the very perception of words can be enhanced when words are presented in legal sentence contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of word frequency and case alternation effects on fixation times in reading: Evidence for lexical control of eye movements.

Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences in which high-frequency and low-frequency target words were presented either in normal font (e.g., account) or case alternated (e.g., aCcOuNt). The influence of the word frequency and case alternation manipulations on fixation times was examined. Although both manipulations had comparable effects on standard first-pass fixation measures, word frequency, but not case alternation was found to influence the duration of the first fixation in trials with multiple first-pass fixations. Assuming that lexical processing is more often incomplete at the termination of the first in multiple first-pass fixations than at the end of single first-pass fixations, the present findings provide strong evidence for an influence of word frequency on early lexical processing. Importantly, such a demonstration of a fast acting influence of a lexical variable on fixation times satisfies a critical prerequisite for establishing lexical control of eye movements in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Practice effects on the unit of word recognition.

Component processing in a word recognition task should be indicated by longer latencies with increased word length. This should not be observed if holistic processing is used. In the present study, mirror-image animal and nonanimal words of 3–6 letters were presented to 30 undergraduates in a reaction time categorization task. A significant interaction of Word Length by Block was found for words presented over all 4 blocks, and no interaction was found for words seen in only 1 block. A shift from component to holistic processing was found for the repeated words. The decrease in slope associated with word length suggested that with repeated exposure to a word, there is an increase in the size of the processing unit used in word recognition. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The frequency-predictability interaction in reading: It depends where you're coming from.

A word's frequency of occurrence and its predictability from a prior context are key factors determining how long the eyes remain on that word in normal reading. Past reaction-time and eye movement research can be distinguished by whether these variables, when combined, produce interactive or additive results, respectively. Our study addressed possible methodological limitations of prior experiments. Initial results showed additive effects of frequency and predictability. However, we additionally examined launch site (the distance from the pretarget fixation to the target) to index the extent of parafoveal target processing. Analyses revealed both additive and interactive effects on target fixations, with the nature of the interaction depending on the quality of the parafoveal preview. Target landing position and pretarget fixation time were also considered. Results were interpreted in terms of models of language processing and eye movement control. Our findings with respect to parafoveal preview and fixation time constraints aim to help parameterize eye movement behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movements when reading transposed text: The importance of word-beginning letters.

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words with transposed letters compared to the normal baseline condition, and the greatest disruption was observed for word-initial transpositions. In Experiment 1, transpositions within low frequency words led to longer reading times than when letters were transposed within high frequency words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the position of word-initial letters is most critical even when parafoveal preview of words to the right of fixation is unavailable. The findings have important implications for the roles of different letter positions in word recognition and the effects of parafoveal preview on word recognition processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Letter legibility and visual word recognition

Word recognition performance varies systematically as a function of where the eyes fixate in the word. Performance is maximal with the eye slightly left of the center of the word and decreases drastically to both sides of this optimal viewing position. While manipulations of lexical factors have only marginal effects on this phenomenon, previous studies have pointed to a relation between the viewing position effect (VPE) and letter legibility: When letter legibility drops, the VPE becomes more exaggerated. To further investigate this phenomenon, we improved letter legibility by magnifying letter size in a way that was proportional to the distance from fixation (e.g., TABLE). Contrary to what would be expected if the VPE were due to limits of acuity, improving the legibility of letters has only a restricted influence on performance. In particular, for long words, a strong VPE remains even when letter legibility is equalized across eccentricities. The failure to neutralize the VPE is interpreted in terms of perceptual learning: Since normally, because of acuity limitations, the only information available in parafoveal vision concerns low-resolution features of letters; even when magnification provides better information, readers are unable to make use of it.     

Reading Finnish compound words: eye fixations are affected by component morphemes

The role of morphemic processing in reading was investigated in 2 experiments in which participants read sentences as their eye movements were monitored. The target words were 2-morpheme Finnish compound words. In Experiment 1, the length of the component morphemes was varied and word length was held constant, and in Experiment 2, the uniqueness of the initial morpheme was varied and the rated familiarity and length of the word were held constant. The length of the initial morpheme influenced the location of the second fixation on the target word and the pattern of fixation durations (although it had a negligible influence on the gaze duration of the word). The frequency of the initial morpheme influenced the duration of the first fixation on the target word, had a substantial effect on the gaze duration, and also influenced the location of the first and second fixations on the target word. Subsidiary analyses indicated that these effects were unlikely to stem from orthographic factors such as bigram frequency.     

Visual word recognition: Reattending to the role of spatial attention.

Three experiments examine whether spatial attention and visual word recognition processes operate independently or interactively in a spatially cued lexical-decision task. Participants responded to target strings that had been preceded first by a prime word at fixation and then by an abrupt onset cue either above or below fixation. Targets appeared either in the cued (i.e., valid) or uncued (i.e., invalid) location. The proportion of validly cued trials and the proportion of semantically related prime-target pairs were manipulated independently. It is concluded that spatial attention and visual word recognition processes are best seen as interactive. Spatial attention affects word recognition in 2 distinct ways: (a) it affects the uptake of orthographic information, possibly acting as "glue" to hold letters in their proper places in words, and (b) it (partly) determines whether or not activation from the semantic level feeds down to the lexical level during word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Search for a singular word or nonword.

Observers looked for an out-of-category item, either a singular word in a list of nonwords (i.e., random collections of letters) or a singular nonword in a list of words. When list items were presented simultaneously (Exp 1), words were detected faster than nonwords, but a singular word in a nonword list was missed more often than a singular nonword in a word list. These results are consistent with the internal-noise principle (INP). According to the INP, legal letter sequences are more likely to be misperceived as illegal than are illegal sequences as legal; thus, there was more rechecking of perceived nonwords than perceived words. With rapid serial visual presentation of list items (Exp 2), the effect of list type vanished. The missing-feature principle, which credits unresolved letters and features to legal letter sequences wherever possible, was as strong and evident as the INP during early processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Binocular fixation disparity in single word displays.

It has been claimed that the recognition of words displayed in isolation is affected by the precise location at which they are fixated. However, this putative role for fixation location has yet to be reconciled with the finding from reading research that binocular fixations are often misaligned and, therefore, more than 1 location in a word is often fixated simultaneously. The accuracy and alignment of binocular fixations during single word processing have not been assessed previously. To investigate this issue, words were presented for lexical decision at locations around a central fixation point. Eye-tracking data revealed that participants often fixated inaccurately and that fixations were frequently misaligned, but that this did not affect word recognition. The findings show that binocular fixation disparity is pervasive even in single word displays and a potential source of confound for research into effects of fixation location on word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Low-frequency periodicity in the coordination of progressive handwriting

The paper addresses the question how the effector segments are coordinated during handwriting, in particular as a function of the left-to-right progression within words. It studies the phase relations between wrist and finger-joint rotations during a repetitive graphic task (long words consisting of letters 'e'), and it subjects the resulting continuous phase-relation plots to autocorrelation analysis. A novel phenomenon, viz. that of low-frequency (1-Hz) periodicity, is observed which presumably reflects adjustments of the coordination pattern about once per second, i.e., after every three or four letters 'e'. Moreover, word length and word position are found to affect this periodicity in a predictable manner. These results are related to those of an earlier study which used an ad-hoc method of analysing wrist-finger coordination adjustments. The paper underlines the value of phase-relation analysis for certain graphic tasks, but it also points out its limitations for this purpose.     

Embedded words in visual word recognition: Does the left hemisphere see the rain in brain?

To examine whether interhemispheric transfer during foveal word recognition entails a discontinuity between the information presented to the left and right of fixation, we presented target words in such a way that participants fixated immediately left or right of an embedded word (as in gr*apple, bull*et) or in the middle of an embedded word (grapp*le, bu*llet). Categorization responses to target words were faster and more accurate in a congruent condition (in which the embedded word was associated with the same response; e.g., Does bullet refer to an item of clothing?) than in an incongruent condition (e.g., Does bullet refer to a type of animal?). However, the magnitude of this effect did not vary as a function of position of fixation, relative to the embedded word, as might be expected if information from the 2 visual fields was initially split over the cerebral hemispheres and integrated only late in the word identification process. Equivalent results were observed in Experiment 1 (long stimulus duration) and Experiment 2 (in which stimulus duration was 200 ms; i.e., less than the time required to initiate a refixation). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)