Selection mechanisms in reading lexically ambiguous words.

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing lexically ambiguous words. The ambiguous words were either biased (one strongly dominant interpretation) or nonbiased. Readers' gaze durations were longer on nonbiased than biased words when the disambiguating information followed the target word. In Experiment 1, reading times on the disambiguating word did not differ whether the disambiguation followed the target word immediately or occurred several words later. In Experiment 2, prior disambiguation eliminated the long gaze durations on nonbiased target words but resulted in long gaze durations on biased target words if the context demanded the subordinate meaning. The results indicate that successful integration of one meaning with prior context terminates the search for alternative meanings of that word. This results in selective (single meaning) access when integration of a dominant meaning is fast (due to a biasing context) and identification of a subordinate meaning is slow (a strongly biased ambiguity with low-frequency meaning). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic, phonological, and mediated priming in reading and lexical decisions.

Four experiments were conducted to investigate whether semantic activation of a concept spreads to phonologically and graphemically related concepts. In lexical decision or self-paced reading tasks, subjects responded to pairs of words that were semantically related (e.g., light–lamp), that rhymed (e.g., lamp–lamp), or that combined both of these relations through a mediating word (e.g., light–lamp). In one version of each task, test lists contained word–word pairs (e.g., light–lamp) as well as nonword–word (e.g., pown–table) and word–nonword pairs (e.g., month–poad); in another version, test lists contained only word–word pairs. The lexical decision and self-paced reading tasks were facilitated by semantic and rhyming relations regardless of the presence or absence of nonwords on the test lists. The effect of the mediated relation, however, depended on the presence of nonwords among the stimuli. When only words were included, there was no effect of the mediated relation, but when nonwords were included, lexical decision and self-paced reading responses were inhibited by the mediated relation. These inhibitory effects are attributed to processes occurring after lexical access, and the relative advantages of the self-paced reading task are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Elaborative inferences during reading: Do they occur on-line?

Four experiments were conducted to examine the extent to which readers construct elaborative inferences on-line during reading. In Experiment 1, gaze durations were measured while subjects read anaphors to target antecedents that referenced a particular category member either explicitly or implicitly. When the context strongly suggested a particular category member, gaze durations on an anaphor were the same following either an implicit or an explicit antecedent. When the context did not suggest any particular category member, gaze durations were significantly longer following an implicit antecedent. The results confirmed that, with sufficient context, readers will generate a simple elaborative inference on-line. These results were replicated in Experiment 2 in which the materials did not strongly signal the inference but a sentence designed to encourage subjects to infer was included. In Experiment 3, this "demand sentence" was not included, and readers did not appear to construct the targeted inference. The results of Experiment 4 confirmed that once generated, elaborative inferences are stored as part of the long-term-memory representation of a passage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A perceptual-economy account for the inverted-optimal viewing position effect.

In reading, fixation durations are longer when the eyes fall near the center of words than when fixation occurs toward the words' ends-the inverted-optimal viewing position (I-OVP) effect. This study assessed whether the I-OVP effect was based on the fixation position in the word or the fixation position in the visual stimulus. In Experiments 1-3, words were presented at variable locations within longer strings of symbols. On trials with short fixation durations, there were effects of fixation position in the string. When long fixations were made, there were effects of fixation position in the word. In Experiment 4, an I-OVP effect was found for meaningless number strings, and its strength depended on the task's processing demands. The findings show that (a) the I-OVP effect is unrelated to orthographic informativeness and (b) the eyes are not constrained to spend more time at the center of visual stimuli. These results support a perceptual-economy account: Fixations are held longer when the eyes are estimated to be at locations in words/stimuli in which greater amounts of information are anticipated. Implications for eye movements in reading are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word frequency effects and eye movements during two readings of a text.

Examined the influence of word frequency on rereading performance. 28 students read short passages, each twice in succession, while their eye movements were monitored. Two classes of data were presented: global measures, which were based on an entire passage, and target word measures, based on the target words. Results show that fixation durations were shorter for high frequency words during both readings and the decrease in fixation duration was similar in magnitude for low and high frequency words. It was concluded that word frequency and repetition independently influenced reading time. Replacing a target with a synonym did not increase processing time for the replacement word. This suggests that rereading can be used to gain insight into cognitive processes. (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)     

Reading aloud: Evidence for the use of a whole word nonsemantic pathway.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 48(1) of Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology (see record 2007-10228-001). In Table 1, an author's error caused the digits in the Related-Unfamiliar condition to be transposed. The correct table is presented in this erratum.] Tested the assumptions that (1) only whole word orthographic knowledge can produce priming and (2) it is automatic. Two experiments with 20 adult Japanese readers were conducted in the context of reading Japanese Kana. Results show that, taken alone, neither the presence nor the absence of priming effects in oral reading permits an inference as to whether the addressed or assembled routine is used. Converging operations that do permit such an inference are reported. The data support the view that (1) components of the word recognition system operate interactively such that use of the assembled routine yields priming under certain conditions and (2) normal readers of a shallow orthography use a nonsemantic, whole-word pathway to name words. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Reading Aloud: Evidence for the Use of a Whole Word Nonsemantic Pathway": Erratum.

Reports an error in "Reading aloud: Evidence for the use of a whole word nonsemantic pathway" by Lori Buchanan and Derek Besner (Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1993[Jun], Vol 47[2], 133-152). In Table 1, an author's error caused the digits in the Related-Unfamiliar condition to be transposed. The correct table is presented in this erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1994-04290-001.) Tested the assumptions that (1) only whole word orthographic knowledge can produce priming and (2) it is automatic. Two experiments with 20 adult Japanese readers were conducted in the context of reading Japanese Kana. Results show that, taken alone, neither the presence nor the absence of priming effects in oral reading permits an inference as to whether the addressed or assembled routine is used. Converging operations that do permit such an inference are reported. The data support the view that (1) components of the word recognition system operate interactively such that use of the assembled routine yields priming under certain conditions and (2) normal readers of a shallow orthography use a nonsemantic, whole-word pathway to name words. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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.     

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)     

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)     

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)     

The effects of "neighborhood size" in reading and lexical decision.

Assessed the effects of neighborhood size ("N")—the number of words differing from a target word by exactly 1 letter (i.e., "neighbors")—on word identification. In Exps 1 and 2, the frequency of the highest frequency neighbor was equated, and N had opposite effects in lexical decision and reading. In Exp 1, a larger N facilitated lexical decision judgments, whereas in Experiment 2, a larger N had an inhibitory effect on reading sentences that contained the words of Exp 1. Moreover, a significant inhibitory effect in Exp 2 that was due to a larger N appeared on gaze duration on the target word, and there was no hint of facilitation on the measures of reading that tap the earliest processing of a word. In Exp 3, the number of higher frequency neighbors was equated for the high-N and low-N words, and a larger N caused target words to be skipped significantly more and produced inhibitory effects later in reading, some of which were plausibly due to misidentification of the target word when skipped. Regression analyses indicated that, in reading, increasing the number of higher frequency neighbors had a clear inhibitory effect on word identification and that increasing the number of lower frequency neighbors may have a weak facilitative effect on word identification. (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)     

Immediate and delayed effects of word frequency and word length on eye movements in reading: A reversed delayed effect of word length.

Three experiments examined the effects in sentence reading of varying the frequency and length of an adjective on (a) fixations on the adjective and (b) fixations on the following noun. The gaze duration on the adjective was longer for low frequency than for high frequency adjectives and longer for long adjectives than for short adjectives. This contrasted with the spillover effects: Gaze durations on the noun were longer when adjectives were low frequency but were actually shorter when the adjectives were long. The latter effect, which seems anomalous, can be explained by three mechanisms: (a) Fixations on the noun are less optimal after short adjectives because of less optimal targeting; (b) shorter adjectives are more difficult to process because they have more neighbors; and (c) prior fixations before skips are less advantageous places to extract parafoveal information. The viability of these hypotheses as explanations of this reverse length effect on the noun was examined in simulations using an updated version of the E-Z Reader model (A. Pollatsek, K. Reichle, & E. D. Rayner, 2006c; E. D. Reichle, A. Pollatsek, D. L. Fisher, & K. Rayner, 1998). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic ambiguity effects in word identification.

The influence of semantic ambiguity on word identification processes was explored in a series of word naming and lexical-decision experiments. There was no reliable ambiguity effect in 2 naming experiments, although an ambiguity advantage in lexical decision was obtained when orthographically legal nonwords were used. No ambiguity effect was found in lexical decision when orthographically illegal nonwords were used, implying a semantic locus for the ambiguity advantage. These results were simulated by using a distributed memory model that also produces the ambiguity disadvantage in gaze duration that has been obtained with a reading comprehension task. Ambiguity effects in the model arise from the model's attempt to activate multiple meanings of an ambiguous word in response to presentation of that word's orthographic pattern. Reasons for discrepancies in empirical results and implications for distributed memory models are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spatial and verbal rivalry in a Stroop-like task.

Examined the adequacy of P. Fraisse's (see record 1970-11728-001) empirical rule that reading is faster than naming and its generalization to the notion that reading interferes with naming as an explanation of Stroop-like interference effects. A spatial analog of J. R. Stroop's (1935) experiment was used, in which a total of 12 paid graduate and undergraduate students responded either to the meaning of the words "above" and "below" or to their above and below positions on a screen. Exp I showed that when spatial position was processed faster than word meaning, incongruent spatial positions interfered with decisions about word meaning, but incongruent word meanings did not interfere with decisions about spatial position. Exp II showed that when word meaning was processed faster than spatial position, the direction of interference was reversed, and when the processing times were approximately equal, interference was bidirectional. It is concluded that whether one obtains verbal interference effects on nonverbal decisions or nonverbal interference effects on verbal decisions depends on the relative speeds with which the 2 forms of information are processed. (French summary) (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological typicality does not influence fixation durations in normal reading.

Using a word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm, T. A. Farmer, M. H. Christiansen, and P. Monaghan (2006) reported faster reading times for words that are phonologically typical for their syntactic category (i.e., noun or verb) than for words that are phonologically atypical. This result has been taken to suggest that language users are sensitive to subtle relationships between sound and syntactic function and that they make rapid use of this information in comprehension. The present article reports attempts to replicate this result using both eyetracking during normal reading (Experiment 1) and word-by-word self-paced reading (Experiment 2). No hint of a phonological typicality effect emerged on any reading-time measure in Experiment 1, nor did Experiment 2 replicate Farmer et al.’s finding from self-paced reading. Indeed, the differences between condition means were not consistently in the predicted direction, as phonologically atypical verbs were read more quickly than phonologically typical verbs, on most measures. Implications for research on visual word recognition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preventing reading failure in young children with phonological processing disabilities: Group and individual responses to instruction.

The relative effectiveness of 3 instructional approaches for the prevention of reading disabilities in young children with weak phonological skills was examined. Two programs varying in the intensity of instruction in phonemic decoding were contrasted with each other and with a 3rd approach that supported the children's regular classroom reading program. The children were provided with 88 hr of one-to-one instruction beginning the second semester of kindergarten and extending through 2nd grade. The most phonemically explicit condition produced the strongest growth in word level reading skills, but there were no differences between groups in reading comprehension. Word level skills of children in the strongest group were in the middle of the average range. Growth curve analyses showed that beginning phonological skills, home background, and ratings of classroom behavior all predicted unique variance in growth of word level skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)