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Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty, but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated; and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension.
Letter knowledge is considered an important cognitive foundation for learning to read. The underlying mechanisms of the association between letter knowledge and reading skills are, however, not fully understood. Acquiring letter knowledge depends on the ability to learn and retrieve sound–symbol pairings. In the current study, this process was explored by setting preschool children’s (N = 242, mean age = 5.57 years) performance in the acquisition and retrieval of a paired associate learning (PAL) task in relation to their letter knowledge as well as to their performance in tasks assessing precursors of reading skills (i.e., phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, phonological short-term memory, backward recall, and response inhibition). Multiple regression analyses revealed that performance in the acquisition of the PAL task was significantly associated with phonological awareness and backward recall, whereas performance in the retrieval of the PAL task was significantly associated with rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, and backward recall. Moreover, PAL proved to be mediating the relation between reading precursors and letter knowledge. Together, these findings indicate that the acquisition of letter knowledge may depend on a visual–verbal associative learning mechanism and that different factors contribute to the acquisition and retrieval of such visual–verbal associations.
We explore the interaction between oculomotor control and language comprehension on the sentence level using two well-tested computational accounts of parsing difficulty. Previous work (Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011) has shown that surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and cue-based memory retrieval (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are significant and complementary predictors of reading time in an eyetracking corpus. It remains an open question how the sentence processor interacts with oculomotor control. Using a simple linking hypothesis proposed in Reichle, Warren, and McConnell (2009), we integrated both measures with the eye movement model EMMA (Salvucci, 2001) inside the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson et al., 2004). We built a reading model that could initiate short Time Out regressions (Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) that compensate for slow postlexical processing. This simple interaction enabled the model to predict the re-reading of words based on parsing difficulty. The model was evaluated in different configurations on the prediction of frequency effects on the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. The extension of EMMA with postlexical processing improved its predictions and reproduced re-reading rates and durations with a reasonable fit to the data. This demonstration, based on simple and independently motivated assumptions, serves as a foundational step toward a precise investigation of the interaction between high-level language processing and eye movement control.
We examined how the frequency of the fixated word influences the spatiotemporal distribution of covert attention during reading. Participants discriminated gaze-contingent probes that occurred with different spatial and temporal offsets from randomly chosen fixation points during reading. We found that attention was initially focused at fixation and that subsequent defocusing was slower when the fixated word was lower in frequency. Later in a fixation, attention oriented more towards the next saccadic target for high- than for low-frequency words. These results constitute the first report of the time course of the effect of load on attentional engagement and orienting in reading. They are discussed in the context of serial and parallel models of reading.
Even before formal schooling, children map numbers onto space in a directional manner. The origin of this preliterate spatial–numerical association is still debated. We investigated the role of enculturation for shaping the directionality of the association between numbers and space, focusing on counting behavior in 3- to 5-year-old preliterate children. Two studies provide evidence that, after observing reading from storybooks (left-to-right or right-to-left reading) children change their counting direction in line with the direction of observed reading. Just observing visuospatial directional movements had no such effect on counting direction. Complementarily, we document that book illustrations, prevalent in children’s cultures, exhibit directionality that conforms to the direction of a culture’s written language. We propose that shared book reading activates spatiotemporal representations of order in young children, which in turn affect their spatial representation of numbers.
Morphological structure influences the initial landing position in words during reading Finnish
(2018)
The preferred viewing location in words [Rayner, K. (1979). Eye guidance in reading: Fixation locations within words. Perception, 8, 21–30] during reading is near the word centre. Parafoveal word length information is utilized to guide the eyes toward it. A recent study by Yan and colleagues [Yan, M., Zhou, W., Shu, H., Yusupu, R., Miao, D., Krügel, A., & Kliegl, R. (2014). Eye movements guided by morphological structure: Evidence from the Uighur language. Cognition, 132, 181–215] demonstrated that the word’s morphological structure may also be used in saccadic targeting. The study was conducted in a morphologically rich language, Uighur. The present study aimed at replicating their main findings in another morphologically rich language, Finnish. Similarly to Yan et al., it was found that the initial fixation landed closer to the word beginning for morphologically complex than for monomorphemic words. Word frequency, saccade launch site, and word length were also found to influence the initial landing position. It is concluded that in addition to low-level factors (word length and saccade launch site), also higher level factors related to the word’s morphological structure and frequency may be utilized in saccade programming during reading.
Previous studies (Hyona, Yan, & Vainio, 2018; Yan et al., 2014) have demonstrated that in morphologically rich languages a word's morphological status is processed parafoveally to be used in modulating saccadic programming in reading. In the present parafoveal preview study conducted in Finnish, we examined the exact nature of this effect by comparing reading of morphologically complex words (a stem + two suffixes) to that of monomorphemic words. In the preview-change condition, the final 3-4 letters were replaced with other letters making the target word a pseudoword; for suffixed words, the word stem remained intact but the suffix information was unavailable; for monomorphemic words, only part of the stem was parafoveally available. Three alternative predictions were put forth. According to the first alternative, the morphological effect in initial fixation location is due to parafoveally perceiving the suffix as a highly frequent letter cluster and then adjusting the saccade program to land closer to the word beginning for suffixed than monomorphemic words. The second alternative, the processing difficulty hypothesis, assumes a morphological complexity effect: suffixed words are more complex than monomorphemic words. Therefore, the attentional window is narrower and the saccade is shorter. The third alternative posits that the effect reflects parafoveal access to the word's stem. The results for the initial fixation location and fixation durations were consistent with the parafoveal stem-access view.
How preview space/time translates into preview cost/benefit for fixation durations during reading
(2013)
Eye-movement control during reading depends on foveal and parafoveal information. If the parafoveal preview of the next word is suppressed, reading is less efficient. A linear mixed model (LMM) reanalysis of McDonald (2006) confirmed his observation that preview benefit may be limited to parafoveal words that have been selected as the saccade target. Going beyond the original analyses, in the same LMM, we examined how the preview effect (i.e., the difference in single-fixation duration, SFD, between random-letter and identical preview) depends on the gaze duration on the pretarget word and on the amplitude of the saccade moving the eye onto the target word. There were two key results: (a) The shorter the saccade amplitude (i.e., the larger preview space), the shorter a subsequent SFD with an identical preview; this association was not observed with a random-letter preview. (b) However, the longer the gaze duration on the pretarget word, the longer the subsequent SFD on the target, with the difference between random-letter string and identical previews increasing with preview time. A third patternincreasing cost of a random-letter string in the parafovea associated with shorter saccade amplitudeswas observed for target gaze durations. Thus, LMMs revealed that preview effects, which are typically summarized under preview benefit, are a complex mixture of preview cost and preview benefit and vary with preview space and preview time. The consequence for reading is that parafoveal preview may not only facilitate, but also interfere with lexical access.
During reading, saccadic eye movements are generated to shift words into the center of the visual field for lexical processing. Recently, Krugel and Engbert (Vision Research 50:1532-1539, 2010) demonstrated that within-word fixation positions are largely shifted to the left after skipped words. However, explanations of the origin of this effect cannot be drawn from normal reading data alone. Here we show that the large effect of skipped words on the distribution of within-word fixation positions is primarily based on rather subtle differences in the low-level visual information acquired before saccades. Using arrangements of "x" letter strings, we reproduced the effect of skipped character strings in a highly controlled single-saccade task. Our results demonstrate that the effect of skipped words in reading is the signature of a general visuomotor phenomenon. Moreover, our findings extend beyond the scope of the widely accepted range-error model, which posits that within-word fixation positions in reading depend solely on the distances of target words. We expect that our results will provide critical boundary conditions for the development of visuomotor models of saccade planning during reading.