@article{ParshinaLaurinavichyuteSekerina2021, author = {Parshina, Olga and Laurinavichyute, Anna and Sekerina, Irina A.}, title = {Eye-movement benchmarks in heritage language reading}, series = {Bilingualism : language and cognition}, volume = {24}, journal = {Bilingualism : language and cognition}, number = {1}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, address = {Cambridge}, issn = {1366-7289}, doi = {10.1017/S136672892000019X}, pages = {69 -- 82}, year = {2021}, abstract = {This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-year-old children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient HSs in exhibiting lower skipping probabilities, higher fixation counts, and larger frequency effects. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the weaker links account of bilingual language processing as well as the divergent attainment theory of HL.}, language = {en} } @article{KellerPreckelBrunner2021, author = {Keller, Lena and Preckel, Franzis and Brunner, Martin}, title = {Nonlinear relations between achievement and academic self-concepts in elementary and secondary school}, series = {Journal of educational psychology / American Psychological Association}, volume = {113}, journal = {Journal of educational psychology / American Psychological Association}, number = {3}, publisher = {American Psychological Association}, address = {Washington}, issn = {0022-0663}, doi = {10.1037/edu0000533}, pages = {585 -- 604}, year = {2021}, abstract = {It is well-documented that academic achievement is associated with students' self-perceptions of their academic abilities, that is, their academic self-concepts. However, low-achieving students may apply self-protective strategies to maintain a favorable academic self-concept when evaluating their academic abilities. Consequently, the relation between achievement and academic self-concept might not be linear across the entire achievement continuum. Capitalizing on representative data from three large-scale assessments (i.e., TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA; N = 470,804), we conducted an integrative data analysis to address nonlinear trends in the relations between achievement and the corresponding self-concepts in mathematics and the verbal domain across 13 countries and 2 age groups (i.e., elementary and secondary school students). Polynomial and interrupted regression analyses showed nonlinear relations in secondary school students, demonstrating that the relations between achievement and the corresponding self-concepts were weaker for lower achieving students than for higher achieving students. Nonlinear effects were also present in younger students, but the pattern of results was rather heterogeneous. We discuss implications for theory as well as for the assessment and interpretation of self-concept.}, language = {en} } @article{OezkanFikriKırkıcıetal.2020, author = {{\"O}zkan, Ay{\c{s}}eg{\"u}l and Fikri, Figen Beken and K{\i}rk{\i}c{\i}, Bilal and Kliegl, Reinhold and Acart{\"u}rk, Cengiz}, title = {Eye movement control in Turkish sentence reading}, series = {Quarterly journal of experimental psychology : QJEP / EPS, Experimental Psychology Society}, volume = {74}, journal = {Quarterly journal of experimental psychology : QJEP / EPS, Experimental Psychology Society}, number = {2}, publisher = {Sage Publ.}, address = {London}, issn = {1747-0218}, doi = {10.1177/1747021820963310}, pages = {377 -- 397}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Reading requires the assembly of cognitive processes across a wide spectrum from low-level visual perception to high-level discourse comprehension. One approach of unravelling the dynamics associated with these processes is to determine how eye movements are influenced by the characteristics of the text, in particular which features of the words within the perceptual span maximise the information intake due to foveal, spillover, parafoveal, and predictive processing. One way to test the generalisability of current proposals of such distributed processing is to examine them across different languages. For Turkish, an agglutinative language with a shallow orthography-phonology mapping, we replicate the well-known canonical main effects of frequency and predictability of the fixated word as well as effects of incoming saccade amplitude and fixation location within the word on single-fixation durations with data from 35 adults reading 120 nine-word sentences. Evidence for previously reported effects of the characteristics of neighbouring words and interactions was mixed. There was no evidence for the expected Turkish-specific morphological effect of the number of inflectional suffixes on single-fixation durations. To control for word-selection bias associated with single-fixation durations, we also tested effects on word skipping, single-fixation, and multiple-fixation cases with a base-line category logit model, assuming an increase of difficulty for an increase in the number of fixations. With this model, significant effects of word characteristics and number of inflectional suffixes of foveal word on probabilities of the number of fixations were observed, while the effects of the characteristics of neighbouring words and interactions were mixed.}, language = {en} } @article{StonevonderMalsburgVasishth2020, author = {Stone, Kate and von der Malsburg, Titus Raban and Vasishth, Shravan}, title = {The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading}, series = {PeerJ}, volume = {8}, journal = {PeerJ}, publisher = {PeerJ Inc.}, address = {London}, issn = {2167-8359}, doi = {10.7717/peerj.10438}, pages = {33}, year = {2020}, abstract = {To make sense of a sentence, a reader must keep track of dependent relationships between words, such as between a verb and its particle (e.g. turn the music down). In languages such as German, verb-particle dependencies often span long distances, with the particle only appearing at the end of the clause. This means that it may be necessary to process a large amount of intervening sentence material before the full verb of the sentence is known. To facilitate processing, previous studies have shown that readers can preactivate the lexical information of neighbouring upcoming words, but less is known about whether such preactivation can be sustained over longer distances. We asked the question, do readers preactivate lexical information about long-distance verb particles? In one self-paced reading and one eye tracking experiment, we delayed the appearance of an obligatory verb particle that varied only in the predictability of its lexical identity. We additionally manipulated the length of the delay in order to test two contrasting accounts of dependency processing: that increased distance between dependent elements may sharpen expectation of the distant word and facilitate its processing (an antilocality effect), or that it may slow processing via temporal activation decay (a locality effect). We isolated decay by delaying the particle with a neutral noun modifier containing no information about the identity of the upcoming particle, and no known sources of interference or working memory load. Under the assumption that readers would preactivate the lexical representations of plausible verb particles, we hypothesised that a smaller number of plausible particles would lead to stronger preactivation of each particle, and thus higher predictability of the target. This in turn should have made predictable target particles more resistant to the effects of decay than less predictable target particles. The eye tracking experiment provided evidence that higher predictability did facilitate reading times, but found evidence against any effect of decay or its interaction with predictability. The self-paced reading study provided evidence against any effect of predictability or temporal decay, or their interaction. In sum, we provide evidence from eye movements that readers preactivate long-distance lexical content and that adding neutral sentence information does not induce detectable decay of this activation. The findings are consistent with accounts suggesting that delaying dependency resolution may only affect processing if the intervening information either confirms expectations or adds to working memory load, and that temporal activation decay alone may not be a major predictor of processing time.}, language = {en} } @article{MeixnerNixonLaubrock2022, author = {Meixner, Johannes M. and Nixon, Jessie S. and Laubrock, Jochen}, title = {The perceptual span is dynamically adjusted in response to foveal load by beginning readers}, series = {Journal of experimental psychology : general}, volume = {151}, journal = {Journal of experimental psychology : general}, number = {6}, publisher = {American Psychological Association}, address = {Washington}, issn = {0096-3445}, doi = {10.1037/xge0001140}, pages = {1219 -- 1232}, year = {2022}, abstract = {The perceptual span describes the size of the visual field from which information is obtained during a fixation in reading. Its size depends on characteristics of writing system and reader, but-according to the foveal load hypothesis-it is also adjusted dynamically as a function of lexical processing difficulty. Using the moving window paradigm to manipulate the amount of preview, here we directly test whether the perceptual span shrinks as foveal word difficulty increases. We computed the momentary size of the span from word-based eye-movement measures as a function of foveal word frequency, allowing us to separately describe the perceptual span for information affecting spatial saccade targeting and temporal saccade execution. First fixation duration and gaze duration on the upcoming (parafoveal) word N + 1 were significantly shorter when the current (foveal) word N was more frequent. We show that the word frequency effect is modulated by window size. Fixation durations on word N + 1 decreased with high-frequency words N, but only for large windows, that is, when sufficient parafoveal preview was available. This provides strong support for the foveal load hypothesis. To investigate the development of the foveal load effect, we analyzed data from three waves of a longitudinal study on the perceptual span with German children in Grades 1 to 6. Perceptual span adjustment emerged early in development at around second grade and remained stable in later grades. We conclude that the local modulation of the perceptual span indicates a general cognitive process, perhaps an attentional gradient with rapid readjustment.}, language = {en} } @article{SeeligRabeMalemShinitskietal.2020, author = {Seelig, Stefan A. and Rabe, Maximilian Michael and Malem-Shinitski, Noa and Risse, Sarah and Reich, Sebastian and Engbert, Ralf}, title = {Bayesian parameter estimation for the SWIFT model of eye-movement control during reading}, series = {Journal of mathematical psychology}, volume = {95}, journal = {Journal of mathematical psychology}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {San Diego}, issn = {0022-2496}, doi = {10.1016/j.jmp.2019.102313}, pages = {32}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Process-oriented theories of cognition must be evaluated against time-ordered observations. Here we present a representative example for data assimilation of the SWIFT model, a dynamical model of the control of fixation positions and fixation durations during natural reading of single sentences. First, we develop and test an approximate likelihood function of the model, which is a combination of a spatial, pseudo-marginal likelihood and a temporal likelihood obtained by probability density approximation Second, we implement a Bayesian approach to parameter inference using an adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure. Our results indicate that model parameters can be estimated reliably for individual subjects. We conclude that approximative Bayesian inference represents a considerable step forward for computational models of eye-movement control, where modeling of individual data on the basis of process-based dynamic models has not been possible so far.}, language = {en} } @article{PaulyNottbusch2020, author = {Pauly, Dennis Nikolas and Nottbusch, Guido}, title = {The Influence of the German Capitalization Rules on Reading}, series = {Frontiers in Communication}, volume = {5}, journal = {Frontiers in Communication}, publisher = {Frontiers Media}, address = {Lausanne}, issn = {2297-900X}, doi = {10.3389/fcomm.2020.00015}, pages = {15}, year = {2020}, abstract = {German orthography systematically marks all nouns (even other nominalized word classes) by capitalizing their first letter. It is often claimed that readers benefit from the uppercase-letter syntactic and semantic information, which makes the processing of sentences easier (e.g., Bock et al., 1985, 1989). In order to test this hypothesis, we asked 54 German readers to read single sentences systematically manipulated by a target word (N). In the experimental condition (EXP), we used semantic priming (in the following example: sick -> cold) in order to build up a strong expectation of a noun, which was actually an attribute for the following noun (N+1) (translated to English e.g., "The sick writer had a cold (N) nose (N+1) ..."). The sentences in the control condition were built analogously, but word N was purposefully altered (keeping word length and frequency constant) to make its interpretation as a noun extremely unlikely (e.g., "The sick writer had a blue (N) nose (N+1) ..."). In both conditions, the sentences were presented either following German standard orthography (Cap) or in lowercase spelling (NoCap). The capitalized nouns in the EXP/Cap condition should then prevent garden-path parsing, as capital letters can be recognized parafoveally. However, in the EXP/NoCap condition, we expected a garden-path effect on word N+1 affecting first-pass fixations and the number of regressions, as the reader realizes that word N is instead an adjective. As the control condition does not include a garden-path, we expected to find (small) effects of the violation of the orthographic rule in the CON/NoCap condition, but no garden-path effect. As a global result, it can be stated that reading sentences in which nouns are not marked by a majuscule slows a native German reader down significantly, but from an absolute point of view, the effect is small. Compared with other manipulations (e.g., transpositions or substitutions), a lowercase letter still represents the correct allograph in the correct position without affecting phonology. Furthermore, most German readers do have experience with other alphabetic writing systems that lack consistent noun capitalization, and in (private) digital communication lowercase nouns are quite common. Although our garden-path sentences did not show the desired effect, we found an indication of grammatical pre-processing enabled by the majuscule in the regularly spelled sentences: In the case of high noun frequency, we post hoc located parafovea-on-fovea effects, i.e., longer fixation durations, on the attributive adjective (word N). These benefits of capitalization could only be detected under specific circumstances. In other cases, we conclude that longer reading durations are mainly the result of disturbance in readers' habituation when the expected capitalization is missing.}, language = {en} } @article{LiWangMoetal.2018, author = {Li, Nan and Wang, Suiping and Mo, Luxi and Kliegl, Reinhold}, title = {Contextual constraint and preview time modulate the semantic preview effect}, series = {The quarterly journal of experimental psychology}, volume = {71}, journal = {The quarterly journal of experimental psychology}, number = {1}, publisher = {Sage Publ.}, address = {London}, issn = {1747-0218}, doi = {10.1080/17470218.2017.1310914}, pages = {241 -- 249}, year = {2018}, abstract = {Word recognition in sentence reading is influenced by information from both preview and context. Recently, semantic preview effect (SPE) was observed being modulated by the constraint of context, indicating that context might accelerate the processing of semantically related preview words. Besides, SPE was found to depend on preview time, which suggests that SPE may change with different processing stages of preview words. Therefore, it raises the question of whether preview time-dependent SPE would be modulated by contextual constraint. In this study, we not only investigated the impact of contextual constraint on SPE in Chinese reading but also examined its dependency on preview time. The preview word and the target word were identical, semantically related or unrelated to the target word. The results showed a significant three-way interaction: The SPE depended on contextual constraint and preview time. In separate analyses for low and high contextual constraint of target words, the SPE significantly decreased with an increase in preview duration when the target word was of low constraint in the sentence. The effect was numerically in the same direction but weaker and statistically nonsignificant when the target word was highly constrained in the sentence. The results indicate that word processing in sentences is a dynamic process of integrating information from both preview (bottom-up) and context (top-down).}, language = {en} } @article{BalbivonHagenCuadroetal.2018, author = {Balbi, Mar{\´i}a Alejandra and von Hagen, Alexa and Cuadro, Ariel and Ruiz, Carola}, title = {A systematic review on early literacy interventions}, series = {Revista Latinoamericana de Psicolog{\´i}a}, volume = {50}, journal = {Revista Latinoamericana de Psicolog{\´i}a}, number = {1}, publisher = {Foundation advancement psychology}, address = {Bogota}, issn = {0120-0534}, doi = {10.14349/rlp.2018.v50.n1.4}, pages = {31 -- 48}, year = {2018}, abstract = {An area of increasing interest amongst teachers and researchers is the availability of tools for the design and implementation of literacy interventions with Spanish speaking children. The present systematic literature review contributes to this need by summarizing available findings on evidence-based literacy interventions (EBI) for children from first to third year of primary school. Our results are based on 20 EBI that aimed at improving at least one of the critical components mentioned by the NRP (2000): phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. As 90\% of the studies were completed with English-speaking children, we critically discussed the applicability of this evidence to the specific context of Spanish-speaking countries. Although many of the general characteristics of the EBI completed with English speaking children could also guide interventions in Spanish, it remains crucial to take into account structural differences between the orthographies of both languages. Moreover, we identified transversal strategies and implementation techniques that due to their universal character could also be useful for early literacy interventions in Spanish. (c) 2018 Fundacion Universitaria Konrad Lorenz. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/).}, language = {en} } @article{SchottervonderMalsburgLeinenger2019, author = {Schotter, Elizabeth Roye and von der Malsburg, Titus Raban and Leinenger, Mallorie}, title = {Forced Fixations, Trans-Saccadic Integration, and Word Recognition}, series = {Journal of experimental psychology : Learning, memory, and cognition}, volume = {45}, journal = {Journal of experimental psychology : Learning, memory, and cognition}, number = {4}, publisher = {American Psychological Association}, address = {Washington}, issn = {0278-7393}, doi = {10.1037/xlm0000617}, pages = {677 -- 688}, year = {2019}, abstract = {Recent studies using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm reported a reversed preview benefit- shorter fixations on a target word when an unrelated preview was easier to process than the fixated target (Schotter \& Leinenger, 2016). This is explained viaforeedfixatiotzs-short fixations on words that would ideally be skipped (because lexical processing has progressed enough) but could not be because saccade planning reached a point of no return. This contrasts with accounts of preview effects via trans-saccadic integration-shorter fixations on a target word when the preview is more similar to it (see Cutter. Drieghe, \& Liversedge, 2015). In addition, if the previewed word-not the fixated target-determines subsequent eye movements, is it also this word that enters the linguistic processing stream? We tested these accounts by having 24 subjects read 150 sentences in the boundary paradigm in which both the preview and target were initially plausible but later one, both, or neither became implausible, providing an opportunity to probe which one was linguistically encoded. In an intervening buffer region, both words were plausible, providing an opportunity to investigate trans-saccadic integration. The frequency of the previewed word affected progressive saccades (i.e.. forced fixations) as well as when transsaccadic integration failure increased regressions, but, only the implausibility of the target word affected semantic encoding. These data support a hybrid account of saccadic control (Reingold, Reichle. Glaholt, \& Sheridan, 2012) driven by incomplete (often parafoveal) word recognition, which occurs prior to complete (often foveal) word recognition.}, language = {en} }