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)     

Previewing the neighborhood: The role of orthographic neighbors as parafoveal previews in reading.

In 2 experiments, a boundary technique was used with parafoveal previews that were identical to a target (e.g., sleet), a word orthographic neighbor (sweet), or an orthographically matched nonword (speet). In Experiment 1, low-frequency words in orthographic pairs were targets, and high-frequency words were previews. In Experiment 2, the roles were reversed. In Experiment 1, neighbor words provided as much preview benefit as identical words and greater benefit than nonwords, whereas in Experiment 2, neighbor words provided no greater preview benefit than nonwords. These results indicate that the frequency of a preview influences the extraction of letter information without setting up appreciable competition between previews and targets. This is consistent with a model of word recognition in which early stages largely depend on excitation of letter information, and competition between lexical candidates becomes important only in later stages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 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)     

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)     

Do chinese readers obtain preview benefit from word n + 2? Evidence from eye movements.

The boundary paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975) was used to determine the extent to which Chinese readers obtain information from the right of fixation during reading. As characters are the basic visual unit in written Chinese, they were used as targets in Experiment 1 to examine whether readers obtain preview information from character n + 1 and character n + 2. The results from Experiment 1 suggest they do. In Experiment 2, 2-character target words were used to determine whether readers obtain preview information from word n + 2 as well as word n + 1. Robust preview effects were obtained for word n + 1. There was also evidence from gaze duration (but not first fixation duration), suggesting preview effects for word n + 2. Moreover, there was evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Chinese reading in both experiments. Implications of these results for models of eye movement control are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological codes are used in integrating information across saccades in word identification and reading.

A major issue in reading is the extent to which phonological information is used in visual word perception. The present experiments demonstrated that phonological information acquired on 1 fixation from a word in the parafovea is used to help identify that word when it is later fixated. A homophone of a target word, when presented as a preview in the parafovea, facilitated processing in the target word seen on the next fixation more than a preview of a word matched with the homophone in visual similarity to the target word. This facilitation was observed both in the time to name an isolated target word and in the fixation time on the target word while silently reading a sentence; the preview was virtually never consciously identified in either task. Because the visual similarity of the preview to the target also plays a part in the facilitative effect on the preview, however, codes other than phonological codes are preserved across saccades. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological representations in young readers

Second through 6th graders were presented with nonword primes (orthographic, pseudohomophone, and control) and target words displayed for durations (30 and 60 ms) that were brief enough to prevent complete processing. Word reading skills were assessed by 3 word and nonword naming tasks. Good readers exhibited more orthographic priming than poor readers at both durations and more pseudohomophone priming at the short duration only. This suggests that good readers activate letter and phonemic information more efficiently than poor readers. Good readers also exhibited an equal amount of priming at both durations, whereas poor readers showed greater priming at the longer duration. This suggests that activation was not under strategic control. Finally, priming was reliable for both high- and low-frequency targets. This suggests that readers activate consistent information regardless of target word characteristics. Thus, quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological information in skilled readers results from the precision and redundancy of their lexical representations.     

Evidence for the use of assembled phonology in accessing the meaning of printed words.

The role of assembled phonology in visual word recognition was investigated using a task in which participants judged whether 2 words (e.g., PILLOW–BEAD) were semantically related. Of primary interest was whether it would be more difficult to respond "no" to "false homophones" (e.g., BEAD) of words (BED) that are semantically related to target words than to orthographic controls (BEND). (BEAD is a false homophone of BED because –EAD can be pronounced /εd/.) In Experiment 1, there was an interference effect in the response time data, but not in the error data. These results were replicated in a 2nd experiment in which a parafoveal preview was provided for the 2nd word of the pair. A 3rd experiment ruled out explanations of the false homophone effect in terms of inconsistency in spelling-to-sound mappings or inadequate spelling knowledge. It is argued that assembled phonological representations activate meaning in visual word recognition. (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)     

A rose by any other name is not the same: The role of orthographic knowledge in homophone confusion errors.

Homophone confusion errors were examined in a series of 6 experiments. Across a variety of tasks, readers consistently made more errors on homophone trials than on control trials. These effects were established in Experiment 1 using a semantic-decision task in which participants judged whether pairs of words were related or unrelated. For both related and unrelated trials, error rates were higher for homophones as compared with controls. Results such as these have previously been taken as evidence for the role of phonology in lexical access and reading. However, differences in orthographic knowledge (more specifically, knowledge of spelling-to-meaning correspondences) across participants and homophone items significantly predicted homophone errors across all tasks. In addition, spelling tasks and multiple-choice questionnaires revealed differences in orthographic knowledge across participants and homophone items. Although these results do not rule out a role for phonology in lexical access, they indicate that homophone confusion errors may also be due to factors other than phonology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do readers obtain preview benefit from word n + 2? A test of serial attention shift versus distributed lexical processing models of eye movement control in reading.

Two experiments tested predictions derived from serial lexical processing and parallel distributed models of eye movement control in reading. The boundary paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975) was used, and the boundary location was set either at the end of word n - 1 (the word just to the left of the target word) or at the end of word n - 2. Serial lexical processing models predict that there should be preview benefit only when the boundary is set at word n - 1 (when the target word will be the next word fixated) and no preview benefit when the boundary is set at word n - 2. Parallel lexical models, on the other hand, predict that there should be some preview benefit in both situations. Consistent with the predictions of the serial lexical processing models, there was no preview benefit for a target word when the boundary was set at the end of word n - 2. Furthermore, there was no evidence of parafoveal-on-foveal effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rowed to recovery: The use of phonological and orthographic information in reading Chinese and English.

To examine how readers of Chinese and English take advantage of orthographic and phonological features in reading, the authors investigated the effects of spelling errors on reading text in Chinese and English using the error disruption paradigm of M. Daneman and E. Reingold (1993). Skilled readers in China and the United States read passages in their native language that contained occasional spelling errors. Results showed that under some circumstances very early phonological activation can be identified in English, but no evidence for early phonology was found in Chinese. In both languages, homophone errors showed a benefit in measures of later processing, suggesting that phonology helps readers recover from the disruptive effects of errors. These results suggest that skilled readers take advantage of the special features of particular orthographies but that these orthographic effects may be most pronounced in the early stages of lexical access. (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)     

Relation between early reading acquisition and word decoding with and without context: A longitudinal study of first-grade children.

The speed and accuracy with which 56 skilled or less skilled readers read words in and out of context was assessed in the fall and spring of the 1st grade by having both groups read random lists of words and coherent paragraphs. The context of the coherent paragraph facilitated word recognition performance to a greater degree in the spring than in the fall, and this developmental trend was similar for both groups. Although the word recognition performance of the skilled readers was superior to that of the less skilled readers on the coherent paragraphs, the former were also better at reading random lists of words. Data indicate that the less skilled readers were getting as much contextual facilitation from the coherent paragraph as were the skilled readers when the latter were at a similar level of context-free decoding ability. This finding, combined with other research, indicates that less skilled readers of this age perform relatively poorly on coherent paragraphs because of poor decoding skills, not because of a strategic inability to use context to facilitate word recognition. (67 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the perceptual span during reading.

Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N + 2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N + 2 or word N + 2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N + 1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N + 2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N + 2 preview both for young and for old adults, with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N + 1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effects from word n + 2.

Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm with the boundary placed after word n, the experiment manipulated preview of word n + 2 for fixations on word n. There was no preview benefit for 1st-pass reading on word n + 2, replicating the results of K. Rayner, B. J. Juhasz, and S. J. Brown (2007), but there was a preview benefit on the 3-letter word n + 1, that is, after the boundary but before word n + 2. Additionally, both word n + 1 and word n + 2 exhibited parafoveal-on-foveal effects on word n. Thus, during a fixation on word n and given a short word n + 1, some information is extracted from word n + 2, supporting the hypothesis of distributed processing in the perceptual span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological and orthographic processing of Hebrew words: electrophysiological aspects

Brain activity among 15 male, college-level, normal readers in Israel was examined during phonological and orthographic word-recognition tasks. Both electrophysiological (event-related potentials, or ERPs) and behavioral measures were obtained. Data indicated that (a) behavioral accuracy was almost perfect for all the experimental tasks, and (b) although P200 and N400 ERP components were elicited in the experimental tasks, the latencies of those components were significantly longer and their amplitudes significantly higher in the phonological task. Variations in vowel information had no effect on word recognition in either type of task. The results suggest that among skilled readers of Hebrew, phonological processing during word recognition may be more effortful and may demand greater cognitive resources than orthographic processing. Furthermore, the additional phonological information represented in vowels appears to contribute little to word recognition in this population. These findings support earlier research on skilled reading in Hebrew as well as current theoretical models of reading.     

Decomposing words into their constituent morphemes: Evidence from English and Hebrew.

Participants segmented and shifted a sequence of letters from a source word to a target word and then named the product aloud. Morphemic and nonmorphemic letter sequences (e.g., EN) from phonemically matched words such as HARDEN and GARDEN were compared. In 4 experiments, naming latencies were faster for morphemic sequences than their nonmorphemic controls in both English, in which the morphemic status of the shifted sequence was varied and sequences were appended after the base morpheme (linearly concatenated), and in Hebrew, in which morphological transparency of the root (base morpheme) was varied and 1 morpheme was infixed inside the other (nonconcatenative) so that the phonological and orthographic integrity of the morphemic constituents was disrupted. Moreover, the likelihood with which both affixes and bases combine to form words influenced segment shifting times. In conclusion, skilled readers are sensitive to the morphological components of words whether or not they form contiguous orthographic or phonological units. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of phonological codes in integrating information across saccadic eye movements in Chinese character identification.

Prior research has generally assumed either that phonological codes do not contribute to Chinese character identification or that they do so only through a look-up process at the character level. In 3 experiments, a homophone seen parafoveally aided the identification of a target character that was fixated following an eye movement to the preview location. Moreover, high-frequency phonetically regular characters were named faster than high frequency, phonetically irregular characters. Thus, both lexical and sublexical phonological codes of Chinese characters are involved early in the process of character identification. Orthographic information from the preview was also used in character identification, as orthographically similar previews facilitated target identification as well. The evidence for the extraction of semantic information from parafoveal previews was mixed, as synonym previews facilitated in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 1. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)