TY - JOUR A1 - Parshina, Olga A1 - Laurinavichyute, Anna A1 - Sekerina, Irina A. T1 - Eye-movement benchmarks in heritage language reading JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - 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. KW - bilingualism KW - heritage language KW - reading KW - eye movements KW - Russian KW - children KW - L2 learners Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672892000019X SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 1 SP - 69 EP - 82 PB - Cambridge University Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stone, Kate A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading JF - PeerJ N2 - 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. KW - reading KW - comprehension KW - temporal decay KW - preactivation KW - long distance KW - dependencies KW - entropy KW - psycholinguistics KW - locality KW - antilocality Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10438 SN - 2167-8359 VL - 8 PB - PeerJ Inc. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cunnings, Ian A1 - Patterson, Clare A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Structural constraints on pronoun binding and coreference: evidence from eye movements during reading JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - A number of recent studies have investigated how syntactic and non-syntactic constraints combine to cue memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. In this paper we investigate how syntactic constraints and gender congruence interact to guide memory retrieval during the resolution of subject pronouns. Subject pronouns are always technically ambiguous, and the application of syntactic constraints on their interpretation depends on properties of the antecedent that is to be retrieved. While pronouns can freely corefer with non-quantified referential antecedents, linking a pronoun to a quantified antecedent is only possible in certain syntactic configurations via variable binding. We report the results from a judgment task and three online reading comprehension experiments investigating pronoun resolution with quantified and non-quantified antecedents. Results from both the judgment task and participants' eye movements during reading indicate that comprehenders freely allow pronouns to corefer with non-quantified antecedents, but that retrieval of quantified antecedents is restricted to specific syntactic environments. We interpret our findings as indicating that syntactic constraints constitute highly weighted cues to memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. KW - pronoun resolution KW - memory retrieval KW - quantification KW - eye movements KW - reading KW - English Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00840 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER -