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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.
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.
Prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing in both spoken and written sentence comprehension, but it is unknown whether the processing of prosodic boundaries affects the processing of upcoming lexical information. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants read silently sentences that allow for 2 possible syntactic interpretations when there is no comma or other cue specifying which interpretation should be taken. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants heard a low-pass filtered auditory version of the sentence, which provided a prosodic boundary cue prior to each sentence. In Experiment 1, we found that the boundary cue helped syntactic disambiguation after the cue and led to longer fixation durations on regions right before the cue than on identical regions without prosodic boundary information. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a gaze-contingent display-change paradigm to manipulate the parafoveal visibility of the first constituent character of the target word after the disambiguating position. Results of Experiment 2 showed that previewing the first character significantly reduced the reading time of the target word, but this preview benefit was greatly reduced when the prosodic boundary cue was introduced at this position. In Experiment 3, instead of the acoustic cues, a visually presented comma was inserted at the disambiguating position in each sentence. Results showed that the comma effect on lexical processing was essentially the same as the effect of prosodic boundary cue. These findings demonstrate that processing a prosodic boundary could impair the processing of parafoveal information during sentence reading.
Dyslexic children are known to be slower than normal readers in rapid automatized naming (RAN). This suggests that dyslexics encounter local processing difficulties, which presumably induce a narrower perceptual span. Consequently, dyslexics should suffer less than normal readers from removing parafoveal preview. Here we used a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm in a RAN task to experimentally test this prediction. Results indicate that dyslexics extract less parafoveal information than control children. We propose that more attentional resources are recruited to the foveal processing because of dyslexics' less automatized translation of visual symbols into phonological output, thereby causing a reduction of the perceptual span. This in turn leads to less efficient preactivation of parafoveal information and, hence, more difficulty in processing the next foveal item.
We measured Chinese dyslexic and control children's eye movements during rapid automatized naming (RAN) with alphanumeric (digits) and symbolic (dice surfaces) stimuli. Both types of stimuli required identical oral responses, controlling for effects associated with speech production. Results showed that naming dice was much slower than naming digits for both groups, but group differences in eye-movement measures and in the eye-voice span (i.e. the distance between the currently fixated item and the voiced item) were generally larger in digit-RAN than in dice-RAN. In addition, dyslexics were less efficient in parafoveal processing in these RAN tasks. Since the two RAN tasks required the same phonological output and on the assumption that naming dice is less practiced than naming digits in general, the results suggest that the translation of alphanumeric visual symbols into phonological codes is less efficient in dyslexic children. The dissociation of the print-to-sound conversion and phonological representation suggests that the degree of automaticity in translation from visual symbols to phonological codes in addition to phonological processing per se is also critical to understanding dyslexia.