Stripes within words affect reading

In a series of eight studies it is shown that the first peak in the horizontal autocorrelation of the image of a word (which captures the similarity in shape between the neighbouring strokes of letters) determines (i) the appearance of the words as striped; (ii) the speed with which the words are read, both aloud and silently; and (iii) the speed with which a paragraph of text can be searched. By subtly distorting the horizontal dimension of text, and thereby reducing the first peak in the horizontal autocorrelation, it is shown that the speed of word recognition can be increased. The increase in speed is greater in poor readers.     

Selection mechanisms in reading lexically ambiguous words

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing lexically ambiguous words. The ambiguous words were either biased (one strongly dominant interpretation) or nonbiased. Readers' gaze durations were longer on nonbiased than biased words when the disambiguating information followed the target word. In Experiment 1, reading times on the disambiguating word did not differ whether the disambiguation followed the target word immediately or occurred several words later. In Experiment 2, prior disambiguation eliminated the long gaze durations on nonbiased target words but resulted in long gaze durations on biased target words if the context demanded the subordinate meaning. The results indicate that successful integration of one meaning with prior context terminates the search for alternative meanings of that word. This results in selective (single meaning) access when integration of a dominant meaning is fast (due to a biasing context) and identification of a subordinate meaning is slow (a strongly biased ambiguity with a low-frequency meaning).     

Examining misses in reading aloud repeated words

This study examined a novel task in which participants read aloud passages shown two words per line on a computer screen. There were four different passages, all of which included unrelated sentences, with each sentence containing one test word. The passages differed only in the text type (prose, scrambled) and in the identity of the test word (the, one). The word the is a common function word, whereas one is a less common content word. The test word was repeated in half of the sentences at the end of one line and at the start of the following line. Many more misses in reading aloud occurred on the than on one, especially for prose passages; almost all misses involved repeated words. These results were interpreted in terms of hypotheses and models that have been proposed for the letter-detection task. Specifically, it is concluded that reading aloud is influenced by structural processes that differentiate between function and content words.     

Critical reading of words and phrases in aphasia

To assess ability to read critically at the word and phrase level, four tests were administered to aphasic patients blocked on site of lesion and severity of auditory comprehension defect. Overall, site of lesion did not affect the quantitative scores or the patterns of errors in the four tests; this result suggests that there is a fixed order of difficulty in reading comprehension irrespective of the locus of the aphasic deficit. In contrast, profiles of performance differed significantly, depending on severity of comprehension difficulty. Patients with significant comprehension defect proved relatively superior at recognizing misspelled words; relatively poor at matching written nouns with their depicted referents; less likely to display improved comprehension when an additional substantive was included in a written phrase; relatively better at recognizing which words were the same parts of speech than at recognizing which words share salient semantic features; and relatively better at matching words which belonged together than at choosing the word which does not belong to a set. Taken together, the results suggest that strategies of reading may change in the presence of a severe aphasia, with such impaired patients relying less on semantic considerations and consequently more on orthographic information and on the distributional and sequential properties of words in sentences.     

Processing of words presented simultaneously to eye and ear

The simultaneous processing of auditorily and visually presented messages was examined in three experiments. Subjects searched lists of words for a target word while processing auditorily presented information. Across conditions, subjects searched for (a) target words in a list of words presented auditorily, (b) the same target words in lists presented visually, (c) a member of a taxonomic category in a visually presented list, and (d) a rhyme in a list of words presented visually. The level of processing of a simultaneous auditory message varied across experiments. In experiment 1, subjects shadowed lists of digits. In Experiment 2, subjects reported the antonym of each word in a list. In Experiment 3, subjects named the taxonomic category of each word in a list. In all three experiments, subject had high detection rates for target words presented visually and for category targets but low detection rates for target words presented auditorily and for rhyme targets. These results suggest that processing the semantic properties, but not the acoustic properties, of words presented to the visual modality is independent of simultaneous processing in the auditory modality. Implication for models of selective attention are discussed.     

Emotion words affect eye fixations during reading

Emotion words are generally characterized as possessing high arousal and extreme valence and have typically been investigated in paradigms in which they are presented and measured as single words. This study examined whether a word's emotional qualities influenced the time spent viewing that word in the context of normal reading. Eye movements were monitored as participants read sentences containing an emotionally positive (e.g., lucky), negative (e.g., angry), or neutral (e.g., plain) word. Target word frequency (high or low) was additionally varied to help determine the temporal locus of emotion effects, with interactive results suggesting an early lexical locus of emotion processing. In general, measures of target fixation time demonstrated significant effects of emotion and frequency as well as an interaction. The interaction arose from differential effects with negative words that were dependent on word frequency. Fixation times on emotion words (positive or negative) were consistently faster than those on neutral words with one exception-high-frequency negative words were read no faster than their neutral counterparts. These effects emerged in the earliest eye movement measures, namely, first and single fixation duration, suggesting that emotionality, as defined by arousal and valence, modulates lexical processing. Possible mechanisms involved in processing emotion words are discussed, including automatic vigilance and desensitization, both of which imply a key role for word frequency. Finally, it is important that early lexical effects of emotion processing can be established within the ecologically valid context of fluent reading.     

Event-related potentials indicate context effect in reading ambiguous words

The aim of the study was a comparison of lexical and contextual factors in understanding ambiguous words in German. First, a sample of native speakers selected 56 words having maximally strong differences between a dominant and a subordinate meaning. After this, another sample from the same population was visually presented with sentences that activated dominant or subordinate meanings of the words and were accompanied by probes associated with dominant or subordinate meanings. This resulted in a crossed design with two factors: sentence dominant vs. sentence subordinate and probe dominant vs. probe subordinate. An analysis of event-related brain potentials revealed a large, long-lasting and highly-significant N400 wave whenever the meaning of the probe was incongruent with the meaning of the sentence and the lack of this wave whenever the two meanings were congruent. In the typical N400 space and time, the effect was independent of whether the lexical word meaning was dominant or subordinate. At other sites and times, however (e.g., at lateral frontal electrodes F7/F8, and after 700 ms), the congruence effect was significant after dominant sentences only. The data indicate that lexical factors have a rather limited influence on the activation of a particular meaning of ambiguous words. A strong context can virtually override even a very strong difference in the preference for different meanings.     

On the segmentation of Chinese words during reading

Given that there are no spaces between words in Chinese, how words are segmented when reading is something of a mystery. Four Chinese characters, which either constituted one 4-character word or two 2-character words, were shown briefly to subjects. Subjects were quite accurate in reporting the 4-character word, but could usually only report the first 2-character word, demonstrating that word segmentation influences character recognition. The results suggest that even with these simple 4-character strings, there is an element of seriality in reading Chinese words: processing is initially focused at least to some extent on the first word. We also found that the processing of characters that are not consistent with the context is inhibited, suggesting inhibition from word representations to character representations. A simple model of Chinese word segmentation and word recognition is presented to account for the data.     

Perceptual differences between reading handwritten and typed words

Perceptual differences between reading handwritten and typed words were investigated in a series of three experiments. In the first two experiments, a Sternberg memory search paradigm was employed, with either typed or handwritten probes. The reaction time to classify handwritten probes was slower than for typed probes, but memory search took place at the same rate for both kinds of probe. In the third experiment, the latencies for naming the written and typed words differed by the same amount of time as the overall difference between the same stimuli in the memory search task. These findings indicate that only perceptual processes are differentially affected by the differences between typed and written words. Furthermore, in these tasks the independence of encoding and memory search makes it unlikely that processes of perceptual indentification use expectations or analysis-by-synthesis based on the information in immediate memory     

Subword activation in reading Japanese single Kanji character words.

Kanji are categorized into four types based on the combination of "subword validity" (when the right phonemic radical represents the same On reading as the whole Kanji character) and "radical-neighbor consistency" (when the whole Kanji character represents the same On reading with all its neighbor characters). The study demonstrated that both subword validity and radical-neighbor consistency affect naming latencies and error rates for relatively high-frequency Kanji character words. Moreover, both analytic and holistic decoding processes, which correspond to subword and whole-character activation, are used in the naming of Japanese single Kanji character words. Accounts of the findings by dual-route and connectionist models are discussed.     

Optimal landing position in reading isolated words and continuous text

During isolated-word reading, within-word eye-movement tactics (i.e., whether the eye makes one or more fixations on the word) depend strongly on the eye's first fixation position in the word; there exists an optimal landing position where the probability of having to refixate the word is much smaller than when the eye first fixates other parts of the word. The present experiment was designed to test whether the optimal landing position effect still exists during text reading, and to compare the nature and strength of the effect with the effect found for isolated words. The results confirmed the existence of an optimal landing position in both reading conditions, but the effect for words in texts was weaker than it was for isolated words, probably because of the presence of factors such as reading rhythm and linguistic context. However, the effect still existed in text reading; within-word tactics during text reading are dependent on the eye's initial landing position in words. Moreover, individual fixation durations were dependent on within-word tactics. Thus, the initial landing position in words must be taken into account if one wishes to understand eye-movement behavior during text reading. Further results concerned the effects of word length and word frequency in both reading conditions.     

Phonological representation of words in working memory during sentence reading

The temporal dynamics of a visual target word’s phonological representation was examined by presentation of an irrelevant spoken companion word when the participant’s eyes reached the target’s location during sentence reading. The spoken word was identical, similar, or dissimilar to the phonological specification of the visual target. All spoken words increased the time spent viewing the target, with larger effects in thesimilar anddissimilar spoken word conditions than in theidentical condition. The reading of posttarget text was disrupted when the spoken word was similar but not when it was identical or dissimilar to the target. Phonological interference indicates that a word’s phonological representation remains active after it has been identified during sentence reading.     

How aging affects the reading of words in noisy backgrounds

Young and old adults were shown simple sentences masked by visual noise. In half of the sentences, the final word was predictable; in the other half, it was not. The older participants were able to identify the same number of final words as the younger ones only when the intensity of the visual noise was significantly diminished. However, the difference in the number of correct identifications between predictable and unpredictable conditions was higher for the older observers than for the younger observers, indicating that older observers benefit from context more.     

中文词间词和词内词预视加工的差异：词间阴影的作用

为了考察词语的属性特征对预视加工的影响, 实验操纵注视字与预视字是否属于一个语言单元, 利用眼动轨迹记录法并结合边界范式以探讨其对预视效应的影响。此外, 考察了词边界信息对词间词和词内词预视加工的影响。结果显示, 词内词的预视效应大于词间词, 词间阴影、非词阴影条件下的预视效应和正常条件之间没有差异。说明阴影提供的词边界对词间词和词内词的预视加工无影响, 支持词切分和词汇识别模型, 即词切分和词汇识别是同时进行的。     

The role of morphological constituents in reading Finnish compound words

The processing of transparent Finnish compound words was investigated in 2 experiments in which eye movements were recorded while sentences were read silently. The frequency of the second constituent had a large influence (95 ms) on gaze duration on the target words, but its influence was relatively late in processing: A clear effect only occurred on the probability of a third fixation. The frequency of the whole compound word had a similar influence on gaze duration (82 ms) and influenced eye movements at least as rapidly as did the frequency of the second constituent. These results, together with an earlier finding that the frequency of the first constituent affected the first fixation duration, indicate that the identification of these compound words involves parallel processing of both morphological constituents and whole-word representations.     

Development of automatic and speeded reading of printed words

Two experiments explored the development of automaticity and speed in dealing with the meanings of printed words. Subjects were first-, second-, third-, and fifth-graders and college students. Automaticity was assessed with a dual-task procedure that required subjects to match words on the basis of semantic category while monitoring a tone (Experiment 1). Speed was assessed by requiring subjects to make rapid decisions about a word's identity and meaning (Experiment 2). A sharp decline in amount of attention allocated to reading and categorizing printed words was found between first and second grade. A smaller, but reliable, decrease occurred after third grade. A large decrease in the time required to identify and categorize words was also observed between first and second grade, as well as at each succeeding grade. Adults allocated some attention to reading words, and the amount declined over three practice sessions. The results indicate that automaticity and speed in recognizing the meanings of familiar printed words take slightly different developmental courses, although the most rapid changes in both measures occur prior to second grade. The study also revealed that adults may not be fully “automatic”, in the sense of allocating no attention to word reading.     

Context effects of pictures and words in naming objects,reading words,and generating simple phrases

In five language production experiments it was examined which aspects of words are activated in memory by context pictures and words. Context pictures yielded Stroop-like and semantic effects on response times when participants generated gender-marked noun phrases in response to written words (Experiment 1A). However, pictures yielded no such effects when participants simply read aloud the noun phrases (Experiment 2). Moreover, pictures yielded a gender congruency effect in generating gender-marked noun phrases in response to the written words (Experiments 3A and 3B). These findings suggest that context pictures activate lemmas (i.e., representations of syntactic properties), which leads to effects only when lemmas are needed to generate a response (i.e., in Experiments 1A, 3A, and 3B, but not in Experiment 2). Context words yielded Stroop-like and semantic effects in picture naming (Experiment 1B). Moreover, words yielded Stroop-like but no semantic effects in reading nouns (Experiment 4) and in generating noun phrases (Experiment 5). These findings suggest that context words activate the lemmas and forms of their names, which leads to semantic effects when lemmas are required for responding (Experiment 1B) but not when only the forms are required (Experiment 4). WEAVER++ simulations of the results are presented.