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Parafoveal semantic processing has recently been well documented in reading Chinese sentences, presumably because of language-specific features. However, because of a large variation of fixation landing positions on pretarget words, some preview words actually were located in foveal vision when readers' eyes landed close to the end of the pretarget words. None of the previous studies has completely ruled out a possibility that the semantic preview effects might mainly arise from these foveally processed preview words. This case, whether previously observed positive evidence for parafoveal semantic processing can still hold, has been called into question. Using linear mixed models, we demonstrate in this study that semantic preview benefit from word N+1 decreased if fixation on pretarget word N was close to the preview. We argue that parafoveal semantic processing is not a consequence of foveally processed preview words.
In reading, word frequency is commonly regarded as the major bottom-up determinant for the speed of lexical access. Moreover, language processing depends on top-down information, such as the predictability of a word from a previous context. Yet, however, the exact role of top-down predictions in visual word recognition is poorly understood: They may rapidly affect lexical processes, or alternatively, influence only late post-lexical stages. To add evidence about the nature of top-down processes and their relation to bottom-up information in the timeline of word recognition, we examined influences of frequency and predictability on event-related potentials (ERPs) in several sentence reading studies. The results were related to eye movements from natural reading as well as to models of word recognition. As a first and major finding, interactions of frequency and predictability on ERP amplitudes consistently revealed top-down influences on lexical levels of word processing (Chapters 2 and 4). Second, frequency and predictability mediated relations between N400 amplitudes and fixation durations, pointing to their sensitivity to a common stage of word recognition; further, larger N400 amplitudes entailed longer fixation durations on the next word, a result providing evidence for ongoing processing beyond a fixation (Chapter 3). Third, influences of presentation rate on ERP frequency and predictability effects demonstrated that the time available for word processing critically co-determines the course of bottom-up and top-down influences (Chapter 4). Fourth, at a near-normal reading speed, an early predictability effect suggested the rapid comparison of top-down hypotheses with the actual visual input (Chapter 5). The present results are compatible with interactive models of word recognition assuming that early lexical processes depend on the concerted impact of bottom-up and top-down information. We offered a framework that reconciles the findings on a timeline of word recognition taking into account influences of frequency, predictability, and presentation rate (Chapter 4).
The lexical database dlexDB supplies in form of an online database frequency-based norms of numerous process-related word properties for psychological and linguistic research. These values include well known variables such as printed frequency of word form and lemma as documented also in CELEX (Baayen, Piepenbrock und Gulikers, 1995). In addition, we compute new values like frequencies based on syllables, and morphemes as well as frequencies of character chains, and multiple word combinations. The statistics are based on the Kernkorpus des Digitalen Wrterbuchs der deutschen Sprache (DWDS) with over 100 million running words. We illustrate the validity of these norms with new results about fixation durations in sentence reading.
When we read a text, we obtain information at different levels of representation from abstract symbols. A reader’s ultimate aim is the extraction of the meaning of the words and the text. The reserach of eye movements in reading covers a broad range of psychological systems, ranging from low-level perceptual and motor processes to high-level cognition. Reading of skilled readers proceeds highly automatic, but is a complex phenomenon of interacting subprocesses at the same time. The study of eye movements during reading offers the possibility to investigate cognition via behavioral measures during the excercise of an everyday task. The process of reading is not limited to the directly fixated (or foveal) word but also extends to surrounding (or parafoveal) words, particularly the word to the right of the gaze position. This process may be unconscious, but parafoveal information is necessary for efficient reading. There is an ongoing debate on whether processing of the upcoming word encompasses word meaning (or semantics) or only superficial features. To increase the knowledge about how the meaning of one word helps processing another word, seven experiments were conducted. In these studies, words were exachanged during reading. The degree of relatedness between the word to the right of the currently fixated one and the word subsequently fixated was experimentally manipulated. Furthermore, the time course of the parafoveal extraction of meaning was investigated with two different approaches, an experimental one and a statistical one. As a major finding, fixation times were consistently lower if a semantically related word was presented compared to the presence of an unrelated word. Introducing an experimental technique that allows controlling the duration for which words are available, the time course of processing and integrating meaning was evaluated. Results indicated both facilitation and inhibition due to relatedness between the meanings of words. In a more natural reading situation, the effectiveness of the processing of parafoveal words was sometimes time-dependent and substantially increased with shorter distances between the gaze position and the word. Findings are discussed with respect to theories of eye-movement control. In summary, the results are more compatible with models of distributed word processing. The discussions moreover extend to language differences and technical issues of reading research.
Eye movements during reading proverbs and regular sentences: the incoming word predictability effect
(2014)
This is the first attempt at characterizing reading difficulty in Hindi using naturally occurring sentences. We created the Potsdam-Allahabad Hindi Eyetracking Corpus by recording eye-movement data from 30 participants at the University of Allahabad, India. The target stimuli were 153 sentences selected from the beta version of the Hindi-Urdu treebank. We find that word- or low-level predictors (syllable length, unigram and bigram frequency) affect first-pass reading times, regression path duration, total reading time, and outgoing saccade length. An increase in syllable length results in longer fixations, and an increase in word unigram and bigram frequency leads to shorter fixations. Longer syllable length and higher frequency lead to longer outgoing saccades. We also find that two predictors of sentence comprehension difficulty, integration and storage cost, have an effect on reading difficulty. Integration cost (Gibson, 2000) was approximated by calculating the distance (in words) between a dependent and head; and storage cost (Gibson, 2000), which measures difficulty of maintaining predictions, was estimated by counting the number of predicted heads at each point in the sentence. We find that integration cost mainly affects outgoing saccade length, and storage cost affects total reading times and outgoing saccade length. Thus, word-level predictors have an effect in both early and late measures of reading time, while predictors of sentence comprehension difficulty tend to affect later measures. This is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration using eye-tracking that both integration and storage cost influence reading difficulty.
Semantic processing from parafoveal words is an elusive phenomenon in alphabetic languages, but it has been demonstrated only for a restricted set of noncompound Chinese characters. Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, this experiment examined whether parafoveal lexical and sublexical semantic information was extracted from compound preview characters. Results generalized parafoveal semantic processing to this representative set of Chinese characters and extended the parafoveal processing to radical (sublexical) level semantic information extraction. Implications for notions of parafoveal information extraction during Chinese reading are discussed.
Despite the well-known influence of emotional meaning on cognition, relatively less is known about its effects on reading behavior. We investigated whether fixation behavior during the reading of Chinese sentences is influenced by emotional word meaning in the parafovea. Two-character target words embedded into the same sentence frames provided emotionally positive, negative, or neutral contents. Fixation durations on neutral pretarget words were prolonged for positive parafoveal words and for highly frequent negative parafoveal words. In addition, fixation durations on foveal emotional words were shorter than those on neutral words. We also found that the role of emotional words varied as a function of their valence during foveal and parafoveal processing. These findings suggest a processing advantage for emotional words relative to emotionally neutral stimuli in foveal and parafoveal vision. We discuss implications for the notion of attention attraction due to emotional content.
Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm with the boundary placed after word n, we manipulated preview of word n+2 for fixations on word n. There was no preview benefit for first-pass reading on word n+2, replicating the results of Rayner, Juhasz, and Brown (2007), but there was a preview benefit on the three-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.