中文阅读中预视阶段和注视阶段内词汇视觉编码的过程特点:来自消失文本的证据

研究采用消失文本范式考察中文阅读中双字词汇视觉信息编码的过程特点。实验一操控词n+1上字词消失方式及其延迟时间,结果发现,注视词n时,词n+1上不同位置的汉字及时消失(延迟时间为0 ms)都影响总阅读时间,且影响程度与消失汉字的具体位置与消失汉字的数量有关;延迟时间为60 ms时,词n+1上的左侧字消失不再影响总阅读时间,而词n+1上的右侧字消失仍会影响总阅读时间。实验二操控词n上字词消失方式及其延迟时间,结果发现,注视词n时,词n上不同位置的汉字及时消失对总阅读时间的影响程度完全一致,说明词n上汉字视觉编码不受消失汉字的具体位置与消失汉字的数量的调节;延迟时间为60 ms时,各消失条件都不影响总阅读时间,说明词n上不同汉字的视觉编码同时完成。基于两项实验结果可得出,在预视阶段内中文读者以汉字单元编码内双字词汇的视觉信息,在注视阶段内以整词为单元编码双字词汇的视觉信息。     

Encoding of text, manual movement planning, and eye-hand coordination during copytyping.

Typing span and coordination of word viewing times with word typing times in copytyping were examined. In Experiment 1, typists copied passages of text while their eye movements were measured. Viewing location was determined during each eye fixation and was used to control the amount of usable visual information. Viewing constraints decreased interword saccade size when fewer than 7 character spaces of text were visible to the right of fixation and increased interkeypress times when fewer than 3 character spaces of text were visible. The eye-hand span amounted to 2.8 character spaces. Experiment 2 revealed increases in word typing times and word viewing times as biomechanic typing difficulty increased and word frequency decreased. These findings are consistent with a model of eye-hand coordination that postulates that eye-hand coordination involves central and peripheral processes.     

中文阅读中副中央凹区域文本信息加工时程的眼动研究

副中央凹文本对阅读有非常重要的作用,考察读者在注视何时起对其加工有助于解决阅读中词汇加工方式的理论问题,当前研究结果存在很大争论。本研究采用消失文本范式,操纵词n-1和n+1的呈现时间(0m/40ms),考察读者加工两侧副中央凹信息的时程。结果发现,相比0ms,在注视早期40ms内,词n+1的呈现能够显著促进阅读加工,而词n-1未对阅读产生影响,表明右侧副中央凹信息的加工发生在注视早期,而左侧则未发生在该早期阶段。结果支持阅读眼动控制的并列加工模型。     

Neighborhood frequency effects and letter visibility in visual word recognition.

Two experiments are described that measured lexical decision latencies and errors to five-letter French words with a single higher frequency orthographic neighbor and control words with no higher frequency neighbors. The higher frequency neighbor differed from the stimulus word by either the second letter (e.g., ASTRE-AUTRE) or the fourth letter (CHOPE-CHOSE). Neighborhood frequency effects were found to interact with this factor, and significant interference was observed only to CHOPE-type words. The effects of neighborhood frequency were also found to interact with the position of initial fixation in the stimulus word (either the second letter or the fourth letter). Interference was greatly reduced when the initial fixation was on the critical disambiguating letter (i.e., the letter P in CHOPE). Moreover, word recognition was improved when subjects initially fixated the second letter relative to when they initially fixated the fourth letter of a five-letter word, but this second-letter advantage practically disappeared when the stimulus differed from a more frequent word by its fourth letter. The results are interpreted in terms of the interaction between visual and lexical factors in visual work recognition.     

Contextual constraint and N + 2 preview effects in reading

Extracting linguistic information from locations beyond the currently fixated word is a core component of skilled reading. Recent debate on this topic is focused on the question of whether useful linguistic information can be extracted from more than one (parafoveally visible) word to the right of a fixated word (N). The current study examined this issue through the use parafoveal previews with a short and high-frequency next (N?+?1) word, as this should increase the opportunity for the extraction of useful information from the subsequent (N?+?2) word. Pairs of N?+?2 words were selected so that contextual constraint was either high or low. Using saccade contingent display manipulations, preview of a N?+?2 target word during word N viewing consisted of either a visually dissimilar nonword or a word. The results revealed a substantial drop in fixation probability for word N?+?1 when the N?+?2 preview was masked with a nonword. Furthermore, the masking of word N?+?2 influenced its viewing duration even when word N?+?1 was fixated prior to word N?+?2 viewing. These results provide compelling evidence for the view that the linguistic processing can encompass more than one word at a time.     

Influences on and consequences of parafoveal preview in reading

During reading, information is extracted from upcoming words to the right of the currently fixated word, which facilitates recognition of those words when they are later fixated. According to the foveal load hypothesis (Henderson & Ferreira, 1990), this parafoveal preview benefit depends on how difficult the currently fixated word is to recognize. Furthermore, there is evidence that the influence of lexical variables (frequency and predictability) on word processing changes when no preview of that word is available. The present study reports two moving-window experiments in which the upcoming word to the right of fixation was either included in or excluded from the window. Through this manipulation, accurate parafoveal information was either available or not for each word in the paragraph. Two critical interactions between preview condition and lexical variables were observed. First, the word frequency at word N was found to be the primary influence on the amount of preview benefit obtained at word N+1, consistent with the foveal load hypothesis. Second, denial of preview eliminated the word predictability effect. These findings have implications for models of eye movement control in reading.     

Word frequency during copytyping.

Two experiments examined effects of visual encoding and of manual motor programming during copytyping. In Experiment 1, expert typists copied sentences containing high- or low-frequency target words; instructions emphasized either the speed of typing or text comprehension. The results showed increased typing times for words preceding low frequency targets in the comprehension condition. However, pretarget typing was not affected by target frequency when speed of typing was emphasized, indicating that the visual encoding of text does not affect concurrent keypresses. Low-frequency words themselves were typed slower than high-frequency words. Supplementary analyses indicated that word frequency may affect the programming of a sequence of keystrokes forming a word. Consistent with this assessment, Experiment 2 showed that effects of word frequency cannot be reduced to movement practice.     

How strongly do word reading times and lexical decision times correlate? Combining data from eye movement corpora and megastudies

We assess the amount of shared variance between three measures of visual word recognition latencies: eye movement latencies, lexical decision times, and naming times. After partialling out the effects of word frequency and word length, two well-documented predictors of word recognition latencies, we see that 7–44% of the variance is uniquely shared between lexical decision times and naming times, depending on the frequency range of the words used. A similar analysis of eye movement latencies shows that the percentage of variance they uniquely share either with lexical decision times or with naming times is much lower. It is 5–17% for gaze durations and lexical decision times in studies with target words presented in neutral sentences, but drops to 0.2% for corpus studies in which eye movements to all words are analysed. Correlations between gaze durations and naming latencies are lower still. These findings suggest that processing times in isolated word processing and continuous text reading are affected by specific task demands and presentation format, and that lexical decision times and naming times are not very informative in predicting eye movement latencies in text reading once the effect of word frequency and word length are taken into account. The difference between controlled experiments and natural reading suggests that reading strategies and stimulus materials may determine the degree to which the immediacy-of-processing assumption and the eye–mind assumption apply. Fixation times are more likely to exclusively reflect the lexical processing of the currently fixated word in controlled studies with unpredictable target words rather than in natural reading of sentences or texts.     

中央凹加工负荷与副中央凹信息在汉语阅读眼跳目标选择中的作用

研究探讨汉语读者选择眼跳目标时, 中央凹注视词的加工负荷是否影响副中央凹获取信息量, 进而调节随后的眼跳长度。采用眼动追踪技术, 操纵了中央凹注视词的词频(高频、低频)和副中央凹词的笔画数(多笔画、少笔画)。结果发现：从中央凹词到副中央凹少笔画词的眼跳长度显著地长于到多笔画词的, 且这种笔画数效应并不受中央凹加工负荷的调节; 从高频中央凹词到副中央凹词的眼跳长度显著地长于低频词的。在本实验条件下结果提示：中央凹加工负荷在眼跳目标选择中的作用不是通过调节副中央凹获取信息量的多少来实现的。     

Reading disappearing text: cognitive control of eye movements

Participants read sentences containing high- or low-frequency target words under normal reading conditions or disappearing-text conditions (in which the word that was fixated disappeared after 60 ms). Even though the fixated word had disappeared after 60 ms, there was still a robust frequency effect wherein readers fixated longer on low-frequency words than on high-frequency words. Thus, the results are consistent with cognitive-control models of eye movement control and inconsistent with visual/oculomotor-control models. Although the uptake of visual information is clearly important for reading, it is the cognitive processes associated with understanding the fixated words that drive the eyes through the text.     

Beyond sentence boundaries: Grammatical gender information in short-term recall of texts

In the context of text recall it is often stated that surface representations are quickly forgotten. Jarvella (1971) and Sachs (1967) argued that what is retained beyond sentence boundaries is meaning information, whereas lexical and syntactic information is only available for the most recent constituent. We based a text recall experiment on Jarvella’s paradigm, in order to demonstrate that both meaning and grammatical gender information contribute to the recall of short text passages. Although it is known that grammatical gender information is used in anaphor resolution, even if noun and pronoun do not belong to adjacent sentences, there is no direct evidence for a gender contribution to text memory so far. The present experiment demonstrates that grammatical gender information, even when of no semantic importance, is retained beyond sentence boundaries and can contribute to the memory representation of subsequent text. All materials and additional statistics may be downloaded from mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

What’s left? An eye movement study of the influence of interword spaces to the left of fixation during reading

In English and other alphabetic systems read from left to right, the useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend 14–15 character spaces to the right of each fixation, but only 3–4 character spaces to the left, and certainly no farther than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is remarkably small and seems inconsistent with the general bilateral symmetry of vision. Accordingly, in the present study we investigated the influence of a fundamental component of text to the left of fixation—interword spaces—using a well-established eyetracking paradigm in which invisible boundaries were set up along individual sentence displays that were then read. Each boundary corresponded to the leftmost edge of a word in a sentence, so that as the eyes crossed a boundary, interword spaces in the text to the left of that word were obscured (by inserting a letter x). The proximity of the obscured text during each fixational pause was maintained at one, two, three, or four interword spaces from the left boundary of each fixated word. Normal fixations, regressions, and progressive saccades were disrupted when the obscured text was up to three interword spaces (an average of over 12 character spaces) away from the fixated word, while four interword spaces away produced no disruption. These findings suggest that influential information from text is acquired during each fixational pause from much farther leftward than is generally realized and that this information contributes to normal reading performance. Implications of these findings for reading are discussed.     

Neighborhood frequency effects and letter visibility in visual word recognition

Two experiments are described that measured lexical decision latencies and errors to five-letter French words with a single higher frequency orthographic neighbor and control words with no higher frequency neighbors. The higher frequency neighbor differed from the stimulus word by either the second letter (e.g.,astre-autre) or the fourth letter (chope-chose). Neighborhood frequency effects were found to interact with this factor, and significant interference was observed only tochope-type words. The effects of neighborhood frequency were also found to interact with the position of initial fixation in the stimulus word (either the second letter or the fourth letter). Interference was greatly reduced when the initial fixation was on the critical disambiguating letter (i.e., the letterp inchope). Moreover, word recognition was improved when subjects initially fixated the second letter relative to when they initially fixated the fourth letter of a five-letter word, but this second-letter advantage practically disappeared when the stimulus differed from a more frequent word by its fourth letter. The results are interpreted in terms of the interaction between visual and lexical factors in visual word recognition.     

Examining the word identification stages hypothesized by the E-Z Reader model

A critical prediction of the E-Z Reader model is that experimental manipulations that disrupt early encoding of visual and orthographic features of the fixated word without affecting subsequent lexical processing should influence the processing difficulty of the fixated word without affecting the processing of the next word. We tested this prediction by monitoring participants' eye movements while they read sentences in which a target word was presented either normally or altered. In the critical condition, the contrast between the target word and the background was substantially reduced. Such a reduction in stimulus quality is typically assumed to have an impact that is largely confined to a very early stage of word recognition. Results were consistent with the E-Z Reader model: This faint presentation had a robust influence on the duration of fixations on the target word without substantially altering the processing of the next word.     

Extraction of information to the left of the fixated word in reading.

The present experiment used 2 different eye-contingent display change techniques to determine whether information is extracted from English text even when it is to the left of the currently fixated word. Preview display changes were during the 1st saccade entering the target word region, whereas postview display changes were during the 1st saccade leaving that region. Previews and postviews were either identical, related, or unrelated to the target word. "Wrong" information in the target-word region affected reading even when that information was seen only after readers were fixating to the right of that region: When readers skipped the target word, such information caused readers to regress to the target word more; when readers initially fixated the target word, such information increased "2nd-pass" processing time on the target region. The data suggest that readers often still attend to a word after it is skipped and that when readers fixate a word, they occasionally attend to the word after they have begun to fixate the next word.     

词素位置概率在中文阅读中的作用：词汇判断和眼动研究

中文词切分的认知机制一直是心理语言学关注的焦点问题之一,研究发现中文读者可使用词素位置概率等语言学线索帮助词切分,而首、尾词素位置概率的重要程度以往研究观点并不一致。本研究通过词汇判断和眼动实验,考察中文读者对首、尾词素位置概率的利用情况。实验1a和1b采用词汇判断任务,考察在不同词频条件下词首与词尾词素位置概率对词汇识别的影响。在错误率和反应时指标上,高频词条件下词首与词尾词素位置概率效应不显著;低频词条件下词首词素位置概率效应显著,词尾词素位置概率效应不显著。实验2a和2b采用句子阅读任务,考察在自然阅读情境中被试对词素位置概率的运用。在凝视时间、回视路径时间和总注视时间指标上,低频词条件下词首词素位置概率效应显著,词尾词素位置概率效应不显著。高频词条件下词首与词尾词素位置概率效应均不显著。词汇判断和眼动证据共同表明,词素位置概率信息是中文读者重要的语言词切分线索,且与词尾词素位置概率相比,词首词素位置概率在词汇切分与识别过程中发挥的作用更大。同时,词素位置概率线索的运用会受到词频的影响,研究结果支持复合词加工的混合通达表征模型。     

Do readers obtain preview benefit from word N + 2? A test of serial attention shift versus distributed lexical processing models of eye movement control in reading

Two experiments tested predictions derived from serial lexical processing and parallel distributed models of eye movement control in reading. The boundary paradigm (K. Rayner, 1975) was used, and the boundary location was set either at the end of word n - 1 (the word just to the left of the target word) or at the end of word n - 2. Serial lexical processing models predict that there should be preview benefit only when the boundary is set at word n - 1 (when the target word will be the next word fixated) and no preview benefit when the boundary is set at word n - 2. Parallel lexical models, on the other hand, predict that there should be some preview benefit in both situations. Consistent with the predictions of the serial lexical processing models, there was no preview benefit for a target word when the boundary was set at the end of word n - 2. Furthermore, there was no evidence of parafoveal-on-foveal effects.     

The influence of visual contrast and case changes on parafoveal preview benefits during reading

Reingold and Rayner (2006) showed that the visual contrast of a fixated target word influenced its viewing duration, but not the viewing of the next (posttarget) word in the text that was shown in regular contrast. Configurational target changes, by contrast, influenced target and posttarget viewing. The current study examined whether this effect pattern can be attributed to differential processing of the posttarget word during target viewing. A boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to provide an informative or uninformative posttarget preview and to reveal the word when it was fixated. Consistent with the earlier study, more time was spent viewing the target when its visual contrast was low and its configuration unfamiliar. Critically, target contrast had no effect on the acquisition of useful information from a posttarget preview, but an unfamiliar target configuration diminished the usefulness of an informative posttarget preview. These findings are consistent with Reingold and Rayner's (2006) claim that saccade programming and attention shifting during reading can be controlled by functionally distinct word recognition processes.     

Vertical perceptual span and the processing of visual signals in reading

A previous study by Pollatsek et al. ( 1993 ) claims that the perceptual span in reading is restricted to the fixated line, i.e. readers typically focus their visual attention on the line of text being read. The present study investigated whether readers make use of content structure signals (paragraph indentations and topic headings) present several lines away from the currently fixated line. We reasoned that as these signals are low-resolution visual objects (as opposed to letter and word identity), readers may attend to them even if they are located some distance away from the fixated line. Participants read a hierarchically organized multi-topic expository text containing structure signals in either a normal condition or a window condition, where the text disappeared above and below a vertical 3° gaze-contingent region. After reading, participants were asked to produce a written recall of the text. The results showed that the overall reading rate was not affected by the window. Nevertheless, the headings were reread more in the normal condition than in the window one. In addition, more topics were recalled in the normal than in the window condition. We interpret the results as indicating that the readers visually attend to useful text layout features while considering bigger units than single text lines. The perception of topic headings located away from the fixated line may favour long-range regressions towards them, which in turn may favour text comprehension. This claim is consistent with previous studies that showed that look-back fixations to headings are performed with an integrative intent.