TY - JOUR A1 - Meixner, Johannes M. A1 - Nixon, Jessie S. A1 - Laubrock, Jochen T1 - The perceptual span is dynamically adjusted in response to foveal load by beginning readers JF - Journal of experimental psychology : general N2 - 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. KW - eye movements KW - attention KW - perceptual span KW - foveal load KW - reading KW - development Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001140 SN - 0096-3445 SN - 1939-2222 VL - 151 IS - 6 SP - 1219 EP - 1232 PB - American Psychological Association CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nixon, Jessie S. A1 - van Rij, Jacolien A1 - Mok, Peggy A1 - Baayen, Harald R. A1 - Chen, Yiya T1 - The temporal dynamics of perceptual uncertainty: eye movement evidence from Cantonese segment and tone perception JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Two visual world eyetracking experiments investigated how acoustic cue value and statistical variance affect perceptual uncertainty during Cantonese consonant (Experiment 1) and tone perception (Experiment 2). Participants heard low- or high-variance acoustic stimuli. Euclidean distance of fixations from target and competitor pictures over time was analysed using Generalised Additive Mixed Modelling. Distance of fixations from target and competitor pictures varied as a function of acoustic cue, providing evidence for gradient, nonlinear sensitivity to cue values. Moreover, cue value effects significantly interacted with statistical variance, indicating that the cue distribution directly affects perceptual uncertainty. Interestingly, the time course of effects differed between target distance and competitor distance models. The pattern of effects over time suggests a global strategy in response to the level of uncertainty: as uncertainty increases, verification looks increase accordingly. Low variance generally creates less uncertainty, but can lead to greater uncertainty in the face of unexpected speech tokens. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Discriminative learning KW - Statistical learning KW - Speech perception KW - Cantonese KW - Lexical tone Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.03.005 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 90 SP - 103 EP - 125 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - GEN A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Nixon, Jessie S. A1 - Lentz, Tomas O. A1 - Liu, Liquan A1 - van Ommen, Sandrien A1 - Coeltekin, Cagri A1 - van Rij, Jacolien T1 - Neural response development during distributional learning T2 - 19 th annual conference of the international speech communicaton association (INTERSPEECH 2018), VOLS 1-6: Speech research for emerging marjets in multilingual societies N2 - We investigated online electrophysiological components of distributional learning, specifically of tones by listeners of a non tonal language. German listeners were presented with a bimodal distribution of syllables with lexical tones from a synthesized continuum based on Cantonese level tones. Tones were presented in sets of four standards (within-category tokens) followed by a deviant (across-category token). Mismatch negativity (MMN) was measured. Earlier behavioral data showed that exposure to this bimodal distribution improved both categorical perception and perceptual acuity for level tones [I]. In the present study we present analyses of the electrophysiological response recorded during this exposure, i.e., the development of the MMN response during distributional learning. This development over time is analyzed using Generalized Additive Mixed Models and results showed that the MMN amplitude increased for both within and across-category tokens, reflecting higher perceptual acuity accompanying category formation. This is evidence that learners zooming in on phonological categories undergo neural changes associated with more accurate phonetic perception. KW - lexical tone KW - distributional learning KW - mismatch negativity KW - Generalized additive mixed-effects modeling Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5108-7221-9 U6 - https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2072 SN - 2308-457X SP - 1432 EP - 1436 PB - ISCA-International Speech Communication Association CY - Baixas ER -