Fast priming during eye fixations in reading.

Near-threshold primes were "flashed" in a target location prior to the onset of a target word while Ss read. The type and duration of the prime were manipulated. In Exp 1, identical, related, and unrelated primes were presented for 60, 45, or 30 msec from onset of an eye fixation. The prime was then replaced with the target word, which remained in place while Ss finished reading the sentence. Fixation time on the target word was measured. Exp 2 replicated Exp 1, with 2 exceptions: A random letter string replaced the identical prime condition, and prime durations of 39, 30, or 21 msec were used. In both experiments, significant priming effects (related vs unrelated) were obtained when the prime was presented for 30 msec. Results are discussed with regard to subliminal priming effects. Applications to the study of word recognition processes are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Activation of phonological codes during eye fixations in reading.

Two experiments addressed the issue of whether phonological codes are activated early in a fixation during reading using the fast-priming technique (S. C. Sereno & K. Rayner, 1992). Participants read sentences and, at the beginning of the initial fixation in a target location, a priming letter string was displayed, followed by the target word. Phonological priming was assessed by the difference in the gaze duration on the target word between when the prime was a homophone and when it was a control word equated with the homophone on orthographic similarity to the target. Both experiments demonstrated homophonic priming with prime durations of about 35 ms, but only for high-frequency word primes, indicating that lexicality was guiding the speed of the extraction of phonological codes early in a fixation. Evidence was also obtained for orthographic priming, and the data suggest that orthographic and phonological priming effects interact in a mutually facilitating manner. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Against parafoveal semantic preprocessing during eye fixations in reading.

Investigated 2 reading models, focused attention and semantic preprocessing, in which nonfoveal information plays an important role. A reading experiment was conducted with 24 normally seeing members of a university community. Ss' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences, and a display change occurred before they fixated on a critical target word. In the target word location, 1 of 4 alternative previews was initially presented: the target word itself, a word semantically related to it, an unrelated word, and a nonword visually similar to the target. The various visual processes occurring during the experiment and the retinal regions involved are discussed. Results are inconsistent with the semantic preprocessing but consistent with the focused-attention model of reading. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Time course of phonological activation during reading: Evidence from eye fixations.

Eye fixation data suggest that readers use orthographic codes rather than phonological codes to activate word meanings. Whereas proofreading data show that readers are less likely to detect homophonic errors (e.g., He was in his silk stocking feat) than nonhomophonic errors (e.g., He was in his silk stocking fate), the eye fixations revealed that readers initially experienced as much difficulty encountering a homophonic error as a nonhomophonic one. However, homophony facilitated the recovery process, thus suggesting that phonology has its influence after lexical access. Exp 1 showed that the findings were consistent whether the error was the lower frequency homophone (stocking feat) or the higher frequency homophone (feet of courage). Exp 2 showed that proofreading responses are unreliable indices of error detection because even when readers fail to make an overt error detection response, their eye fixations reveal that they have detected the error. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What eye fixations tell us about phonological recoding during reading.

50 undergraduates in 2 experiments read text for comprehension, and their eye movements were monitored for spontaneous disruptions when encountering homophonic errors (e.g., He wore blew jeans) vs nonhomophonic errors (e.g., He wore blow jeans). Eye fixation behavior revealed that readers initially experienced as much difficulty when encountering a homophonic error as a nonhomophonic one; however, homophony facilitated the recovery process, at least for homophones that shared the same length as their context correct mates. Results support a theory of lexical access in which phonological sources of activation and influence are delayed relative to orthographic sources, rather than a theory in which phonological codes predominate. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parafoveal processing of words and saccade computation during eye fixations in reading.

Studied parafoveal word processing during eye fixations in reading to answer two questions: (a) Is the processing of parafoveally available words limited to the identification of beginning letters? (b) Does the parafoveal processing of words affect the following interword saccade? Reading afforded either no parafoveal preview, preview of beginning trigrams, preview of ending trigrams, or preview of the whole parafoveal word. Previews were controlled by replacing original letters either with X's or dissimilar letters. Preview benefits were larger for the whole word previews than for beginning or ending trigram previews. X-masks yielded preview benefits from intact beginning and ending trigrams but dissimilar letter masks yielded benefits from beginning trigrams only. Saccades were larger for whole word previews than for no previews. These results support Logogen-type models of word recognition and a model of saccade computation that posits a time-locked functional relation between the acquisition of parafoveal word information and the positioning of each fixation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preview benefit during eye fixations in reading for older and younger readers.

Older and younger readers read sentences as their eye movements were recorded, and the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to present either a valid or an invalid parafoveal preview of a target word. During the saccade to the target word, the preview word changed to the target word. For early measures of processing time (first fixation duration and single fixation duration), the standard preview benefit effect (shorter fixation times on the target word with a valid preview than an invalid preview) was obtained for both older and younger readers. However, for gaze duration and go-past time, the preview benefit was somewhat attenuated in the older readers in comparison to the younger readers, suggesting that on some fixations older readers obtain less preview benefit from the word to the right of fixation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingual lexical access in context: Evidence from eye movements during reading.

Current models of bilingualism (e.g., BIA+) posit that lexical access during reading is not language selective. However, much of this research is based on the comprehension of words in isolation. The authors investigated whether nonselective access occurs for words embedded in biased sentence contexts (e.g., A. I. Schwartz & J. F. Kroll, 2006). Eye movements were recorded as French–English bilinguals read English sentences containing cognates (e.g., piano), interlingual homographs (e.g., coin, meaning corner in French), or matched control words. Sentences provided a low or high semantic constraint for target-language meanings. Both early-stage comprehension measures (e.g., first fixation duration, gaze duration, and skipping) and late-stage comprehension measures (e.g., go-past time and total reading time) showed significant cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference for low-constraint sentences. For high-constraint sentences, however, only early-stage comprehension measures were consistent with nonselective access. There was no evidence of cognate facilitation or interlingual homograph interference for late-stage comprehension measures. Thus, nonselective bilingual lexical access at early stages of comprehension is rapidly resolved in semantically biased contexts at later stages of comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parafoveal and foveal processing of abbreviations during eye fixations in reading: Making a case for case.

The processing of abbreviations in reading was examined with an eye movement experiment. Abbreviations were of 2 distinct types: acronyms (abbreviations that can be read with the normal grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations in which the GPCs are letter names, such as NCAA). Parafoveal and foveal processing of these abbreviations was assessed with the use of the boundary change paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975). Using this paradigm, previews of the abbreviations were either identical to the abbreviation (NASA or NCAA), orthographically legal (NUSO or NOBA), or illegal (NRSB or NRBA). The abbreviations were presented as capital letter strings within normal, predominantly lowercase sentences and also sentences in all capital letters such that the abbreviations would not be visually distinct. The results indicate that acronyms and initialisms undergo different processing during reading and that readers can modulate their processing based on low-level visual cues (distinct capitalization) in parafoveal vision. In particular, readers may be biased to process capitalized letter strings as initialisms in parafoveal vision when the rest of the sentence is normal, lowercase letters. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Task effects on eye movements during reading.

The present study examined how proofreading and reading-for-comprehension instructions influence eye movements during reading. Thirty-seven participants silently read sentences containing compound words as target words while their eye movements were being recorded. We manipulated word length and frequency to examine how task instructions influence orthographic versus lexical–semantic processing during reading. Task instructions influenced both temporal and spatial aspects of eye movements: The initial landing position in words was shifted leftward, the saccade length was shorter, first fixation and gaze duration were longer, and refixation probability was higher during proofreading than during reading for comprehension. Moreover, in comparison to instructions for reading for comprehension, proofreading instructions increased both orthographic and lexical–semantic processing. This became apparent in a greater word length and word frequency effect in gaze duration during proofreading than during reading for comprehension. The present study suggests that the allocation of attentional resources during reading is significantly modulated by task demands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Vowel processing during silent reading: Evidence from eye movements.

Two eye movement experiments examined whether skilled readers include vowels in the early phonological representations used in word recognition during silent reading. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which the vowel phoneme was concordant or discordant with the vowel phoneme in the target word. In Experiment 1, the orthographic vowel differed from the target in both the concordant and discordant preview conditions. In Experiment 2, the vowel letters in the preview were identical to those in the target word. The phonological vowel was ambiguous, however, and the final consonants of the previews biased the vowel phoneme either toward or away from the target's vowel phoneme. In both experiments, shorter reading times were observed for targets preceded by concordant previews than by discordant previews. Implications for models of word recognition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading.

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrating information across fixations during reading: The use of orthographic bodies and of exterior letters.

Eye movements were recorded to determine whether the parafoveally visible orthographic body of a bisyllabic target word facilitated recognition during the next target fixation. Eye-movement-contingent display changes revealed part of the target, including its orthographic body, or its beginning letters, when it was parafoveally available, but the full target was visible after it was fixated. Target viewing durations showed no benefit from parafoveal preview of orthographic bodies. Instead, preview benefits derived primarily from the preview of word-initial letters. Examination of oculomotor activity revealed that single target fixations were common when the pretarget word received more than one fixation; conversely, more than one target fixation was common when the pretarget word had received a single fixation. Interword fixation strategies thus affected target viewing, but use of parafoveal target previews was unaffected by these strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical access in children and adults.

Investigated the retrieval of words from lexical memory in 12 kindergartners, 11 1st graders, 11 3rd graders, and 11 graduate students. Ss named color slides depicting 100 stimulus pictures. Picture-naming latency was the dependent variable. Results of multiple-regression analyses indicate that the codability of pictorial representations of a concept and the frequency of the concept's label contributed to the prediction of naming latency. The effects of these sociolinguistic variables were relatively constant across all age groups. Results support a model of vocabulary growth in which the lexicons of both children and adults in a language community are internally structured and accessed along parameters that reflect the salience of concepts and linguistic events in the environment. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpreting chicken-scratch: Lexical access for handwritten words.

Handwritten word recognition is a field of study that has largely been neglected in the psychological literature, despite its prevalence in society. Whereas studies of spoken word recognition almost exclusively employ natural, human voices as stimuli, studies of visual word recognition use synthetic typefaces, thus simplifying the process of word recognition. The current study examined the effects of handwriting on a series of lexical variables thought to influence bottom-up and top-down processing, including word frequency, regularity, bidirectional consistency, and imageability. The results suggest that the natural physical ambiguity of handwritten stimuli forces a greater reliance on top-down processes, because almost all effects were magnified, relative to conditions with computer print. These findings suggest that processes of word perception naturally adapt to handwriting, compensating for physical ambiguity by increasing top-down feedback. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comprehension of arithmetic word problems: Evidence from students' eye fixations.

Students have difficulty solving arithmetic word problems containing a relational term that is inconsistent with the required arithmetic operation (e.g., containing the term less, yet requiring addition) rather than consistent. To investigate this consistency effect, students' eye fixations were recorded as they read arithmetic word problems on a computer monitor and stated a solution plan for each problem. As predicted, low-accuracy students made more reversal errors on inconsistent than consistent problems, students took more time for inconsistent than consistent problems, this additional time was localized in the integration/planning stages of problem solving rather than in the initial reading of the problem, these response-time patterns were obtained for high-accuracy but not for low-accuracy students, and high-accuracy students required more rereadings of previously fixated words for inconsistent than for consistent problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Basic processes in reading: Computation of abstract letter identities.

A speeded classification experiment examined the hypothesis that an early processing stage in reading involves the computation of abstract letter identities. When 20 undergraduates were asked to base their classification on physical criteria, letter strings that differed in case but shared the same letter identities (e.g., HILE/hile) were classified as "different" less efficiently than strings with a common phonological code but different spelling (e.g., HILE/hyle). Letter strings with a common phonological code but different spelling were classified as efficiently as letter strings without a common phonological code (e.g., HILE/hule). Results of the present experiment, along with other experimental findings and some neuropsychological observations, provide converging evidence for a representation and comparison process that is neither visual nor phonological but is based on abstract letter identities. It is suggested that the computation of abstract letter identities is a precursor to lexical access during reading. Implications for the interpretation of certain developmental reading difficulties are noted. (French abstract) (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical control of within-word eye movements.

Eye movements were recorded during the reading of long words, which were presented in isolation at their optimal viewing position. Refixations were found to be preferentially directed toward the region of the word that contained the critical letters for distinguishing it from its competitors. In Experiments 1 and 2, low-frequency stimulus words sharing all letters except the initial ones with a high-frequency stimulus word (critical letters at the beginning of the word) elicited more left refixations than low-frequency stimulus words sharing all letters except the final ones with a high-frequency stimulus word (critical letters at the end of the word). A similar result was found in Experiments 3 and 4, using an orthographic priming paradigm. These results suggest that refixations are linked to the selection stage of lexical access, aimed at isolating a single lexical entry among a set of candidates activated during the first fixation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teaching rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategies to prereaders: Effects on prereading skills and word reading.

Two experiments and a longitudinal study examined teaching rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategies to prereaders. Grade 1 children with weak prereading skills were assigned to rime analogy, letter recoding, or control groups. Treatment groups had equal word reading except for with words like sight, where the rime analogy group excelled. Experience with rime analogy increased letter recoding ability, but teaching in letter recoding did not enhance rime analogy. Treatment groups read as many nonwords as did children with high prereading skills, and this was maintained 4 months later. Treatment effects on prereading skills with kindergartners paralleled the Grade 1 results, but reading effects were weaker. Children changed reading strategies when a clue word was present that shared a rime spelling with the test word. Children learned to read with a rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategy, and many developed new reading strategies independently. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)