Learning new word meanings from context: A study of eye movements.

This study examined how readers establish the meaning of a new word from the sentence context during silent reading. Readers' eye movements were monitored while they read pairs of sentences containing a target word, context, and a word related to the target word. The target word varied in familiarity (high, low, or novel). The context varied in informativeness about the meaning of the target word (informative or neutral). The amount of time readers spent on the context depended on both the familiarity of the target word and the informativeness of the context. Readers spent additional time on the related word only when the context was neutral and the target was novel. These results indicate that readers were able to determine which areas of text were relevant and used the information to infer a meaning for the novel word. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movements of older and younger readers when reading disappearing text.

Older and younger readers read sentences in which target words were masked 40 to 60 ms after fixation onset. Masking only the target word caused more disruption than did masking each word in the sentence, and this effect was stronger for the younger readers than for the older readers. Although older readers had longer eye fixations than did younger readers, the results indicated that the masking effect was comparable for the 2 groups. However, for both groups, how long the eyes remained in place was strongly influenced by the frequency of the fixated word (even though it had been rapidly replaced by the mask and was no longer there when the eyes did move). This is compelling evidence that for both older and younger readers, cognitive/lexical processing has a very strong influence on when the eyes move in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integration of topic and subordinate information during reading.

Four experiments examined how readers integrate subordinate information with relevant context as they read. Ss read texts a sentence at a time with occasional interruptions lasting 30 sec. Following a distractor task, they resumed reading after being reminded of the topic sentence of the last paragraph they read (topic cue condition), being reminded of the last sentence they had read (local cue condition), or receiving no reminder of what they had been reading (no cue condition). Reading times on the 1st sentence following interruption were faster in the topic and local cue conditions than in the no cue condition (1) when the topic and local cues supplied missing referents for the target sentences, (2) when the target sentences were written to be understood as independent statements, and (3) whether the target sentences were embedded in short or long texts. Results are interpreted as demonstrating that readers integrate subordinate information with relevant topics, as well as with the immediate local context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye Movements and Phonological Parafoveal Preview: Effects of Reading Skill.

Eye movements of skilled and less skilled readers were monitored as they read sentences containing a target word. The boundary paradigm was used such that when their eyes crossed an invisible boundary location, a preview word changed to the target word. The preview could either be identical to the target word (beach as a preview for beach), a homophone of the target word (beech as a preview for beach), an orthographic control (bench as a preview for beach), or an unrelated consonant string (jfzrp as a preview for beach). Consistent with prior research, skilled readers obtained more preview benefit from the homophone preview than from the orthographic preview. The less skilled readers, however, did not show such an effect. The results indicate that less skilled readers do not use phonological codes to integrate information across eye movements. Indeed, the results also indicate that less skilled readers do not show normal preview benefit effects. (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)     

The Effect of Plausibility on Eye Movements in Reading.

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences describing events in which an individual performed an action with an implement. The noun phrase arguments of the verbs in the sentences were such that when thematic assignment occurred at the critical target word, the sentence was plausible (likely theme), implausible (unlikely theme), or anomalous (an inappropriate theme). Whereas the target word in the anomalous condition provided evidence of immediate disruption, the effect of the target word in the implausible condition was considerably delayed. The results thus indicate that when a word is anomalous, it has an immediate effect on eye movements, but that the effect of implausibility is not as immediate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodically enhanced comprehension fluency.

Explored fluent reading comprehension in 6 experiments involving sentences presented in normal and inverted typography. 226 college students served as Ss. Sentences read in a test phase had been read earlier in exactly the same form or in versions that were created by altering the word order within sentences to create randomly ordered word strings or exchanging causally related clauses to form new meaningful sentences. Variation increased the time taken to read the test sentences, and these effects were evident over retention intervals ranging from 1 day to 4 mo. Results support an episodic view of the basis for rereading fluency in which comprehension processes responsible for constructing and integrating propositions are automatically recruited and reapplied when a sentence is reread. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence of syntactic priming in sentence comprehension.

Event-related potentials and eye tracking were used to investigate the nature of priming effects in sentence comprehension. Participants read 2 sentences (a prime sentence and a target sentence), both of which had a difficult and ambiguous sentence structure. The prime and target sentences contained either the same verb or verbs that were very close in meaning. Priming effects were robust when the verb was repeated. In the event-related potential experiment, the amplitude of the P600 was reduced in target sentences that followed prime sentences with the same verb but not in prime sentences with a synonymous verb. In the eye-tracking experiment, total reading times on the disambiguating region were reduced when the targets followed prime sentences with the same verb but not when targets followed prime sentences with a synonymous verb. The fact that verb overlap greatly boosted priming effects in reduced relative sentences may indicate that verb argument structures play an important role in online parsing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhibition of smoking-related information in smokers and nonsmokers.

Twenty-four smokers and 24 nonsmokers performed a modified version of M. A. Gemsbacher, K. R. Varner, and M. E. Faust's (1990) suppression task, involving presentations of sentences on a computer screen. Each sentence was followed by a word that either was or was not related to the meaning of the sentence. Participants judged whether the word was related to the sentence by pressing either a "yes" or "no" key on a button box. In the experimental sentences, the test word was related to one meaning of the final word of the sentence, but this was not necessarily the meaning intended in the sentence. In half of the experimental sentences, the last word was a smoking-related word (e.g., tar or ashes). Smokers had relatively longer response latencies and lower accuracy scores than nonsmokers when the final word was smoking related, whereas both groups performed similarly on items unrelated to smoking, suggesting that smokers had more difficulty than nonsmokers inhibiting task-irrelevant, smoking-related information but that they did not have a general inability to inhibit irrelevant information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A constraint-based lexicalist account of the subject/object attachment preference

When a noun phrase could either be the object of the preceding verb or the subject of a new clause or a sentence complement, readers and listeners show a strong preference to parse the noun phrase as the object of the verb. This can result in clear garden paths for sentences such as The student read the book was stolen and While the student read the book was stolen. Even when the verb does not permit a noun phrase complement, some processing difficulty is still found. This has led some theorists to propose models in which initial attachments are lexically blind, with lexical information subsequently used as a filter to evaluate and revise initial analyses. In contrast, we show that these results emerge naturally from constraint-based lexicalist models. We present a modeling experiment with a simple recurrent network that was trained to predict upcoming complements for a sample of verbs taken from the Penn Treebank corpus. The model exhibits an object bias and it also shows effects of verb frequency which are similar to those found in the psycholinguistic literature.     

Effects of stimulus emotionality and sentence generation on memory for words in adults with unilateral brain damage.

Does sentence generation and/or stimulus emotionality enhance verbal memory in patients with neurological impairment? This question was addressed by testing 40 patients with unilateral stroke (20 with left-brain and 20 with right-brain damage) and 20 healthy control participants for recall and recognition of 48 target words. During encoding, emotional and nonemotional words were either presented in sentences (read condition) or used to form sentences (generate condition). Both word emotionality and generative processing improved memory performance in all groups. The authors suggest that a similar influence (i.e., cognitive activation) underlies both of these memory-enhancing effects, although the putative origins of the 2 effects are quite different. Neuropsychological underpinnings and clinical implications of these phenomena are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Topic overviews and processing of topic structure.

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the information included in a topic overview that is accessed during reading. In each experiment, participants read on a computer, 3 expository passages that discussed 6 topics related to a common theme. The type of information found in the overview was manipulated. In all experiments, the presence of topic but not order information (i.e., order of topic appearance) led to faster topic sentence reading times regardless of whether participants read to glean general information from the passage or to attend specifically to the topic structure. Analyses of reading times on sentences indicating a shift in topic revealed that information about global passage structure was also encoded from the overview even in the absence of specific topic structure information. The General Discussion focuses on the type of information readers encoded from overviews as well as mechanisms by which overview information may be accessed during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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)     

Making sense of sentences in schizophrenia: Electrophysiological evidence for abnormal interactions between semantic and syntactic processing.

Event-related potentials to critical verbs were measured as patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls read sentences word by word. Relative to their preceding context, critical verbs were (a) congruous, (b) incongruous and semantically unrelated to individual preceding words (pragmatic-semantic violations), (c) incongruous but semantically related to individual preceding words (animacy-semantic violations), or (d) syntactically anomalous. The N400 was modulated normally in patients, suggesting that semantic integration between individual words within sentences was normal in schizophrenia. The amplitude of the P600 to both syntactic and animacy-semantic violations was reduced in patients relative to controls. The authors suggest that, in schizophrenia, an abnormality in combining semantic and syntactic information online to build up propositional meaning leaves sentence processing to be primarily driven by semantic relationships between individual words. (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)     

Discourse-based emotional consistency modulates early and middle components of event-related potentials.

In this study, participants read stories describing emotional episodes with either a positive or negative valence (Experiment 1). Following each story, participants were exposed to short sentences referring to the protagonist, and the event-related potential (ERP) for each sentence's last word was recorded. Some sentences described the protagonist's emotion, either consistent or inconsistent with the story; others were neutral; and others involved a semantically anomalous word. Inconsistent emotions were found to elicit larger N100/P200 and N400 than consistent emotions. However, when participants were exposed to the same critical sentences in a control experiment (Experiment 2) in which the stories had been removed, emotional consistency effects disappeared in all ERP components, demonstrating that these effects were discourse-level phenomena. By contrast, the ordinary N400 effect for locally anomalous words in the sentence was obtained both with and without story context. In conclusion, reading stories describing events with emotional significance determines strong and very early anticipations of an emotional word. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recall of sentence meaning in aphasic and nonaphasic adults

The hypothesis that memory for spoken sentences is facilitated by memory for sentence meaning was tested with 16 aphasic and 8 nonaphasic adults. Subjects were asked to make judgments of same or different on pairs of active and passive sentences separated in time. Sentence pairs were either identical in all respects or identical in just grammatical structure, subject-verb-object word order, or meaning. Nonaphasic subjects had higher sentence recognition scores, and larger percentages of meaning preserving responses than aphasic subjects. Aphasic subjects with the highest recognition scores made more meaning preserving responses than aphasic subjects with the lowest recognition scores. The results suggested that memory for spoken sentences is facilitated more by memory for sentence meaning than memory for structure of wording.     

Concreteness of relational effects on recall of adjective–noun pairs.

Studied the effects of concreteness and relatedness of adjective–noun pairs on free recall, cued recall, and memory integration. The authors report on 2 experiments in which Ss read phrases or sentences containing adjective–noun pairs that vary in rated concreteness and intrapair relatedness. In Exp 1 normative ratings on imagery and relatedness were provided by 23 graduate and 20 undergraduate students. 64 undergraduates participated in the memory experiment. Exp 2 extended Exp 1 by using complete sentences rather than adjective–noun word pairs. 72 undergraduates volunteered to participate in the memory experiment and a separate group of 14 volunteered to participate in a sentence rating task. Consistent with predictions from dual coding theory and prior results with noun–noun pairs, both experiments showed that the effects of concreteness were strong and independent of relatedness in free recall and cued recall. The 2 attributes also had independent (additive) effects on integrative memory as measured by conditionalized free recall of pairs. Integration as measured by the increment from free to cued recall occurred consistently only when pairs were high in both concreteness and relatedness. Relatedness, adjective imagery, and noun imagery ratings, along with word frequencies for adjectives and nouns, and sentences with relatedness ratings are appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visuospatial cues for reinstating mental models in working memory during interrupted reading.

Reading involves constructing a mental representation in long-term working memory of the world described by the text. Disrupting short-term working memory can interfere with the maintenance of mental models (sets of retrieval cues) needed to access these representations, producing detrimental effects on reading time. In two experiments, subjects read passages that included pairs of coreferential sentences interrupted by unrelated text. As in previous research, reading times increased for the first sentence after the interruption, likely reflecting a reinstatement process for mental models in working memory. In the present research, pictures were provided as visuospatial cues to aid the reinstatement process. The interruption effect was found to be smaller with pictures related to the passages than with unrelated pictures (Experiment 1) or titles (Experiment 2); however, both of these effects occurred only for slow readers. The authors hypothesize that slow readers take the time needed to integrate visuospatial information into their mental models, providing more resilient access to long-term working memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)