Eye movements,the perceptual span,and reading speed

The perceptual span or region of effective vision during eye fixations in reading was examined as a function of reading speed (fast readers were compared with slow readers), font characteristics (fixed width vs. proportional width), and intraword spacing (normal or reduced). The main findings were that fast readers (reading at about 330 wpm) had a larger perceptual span than did slow readers (reading about 200 wpm) and that the span was not affected by whether or not the text was fixed width or proportional width. In addition, there were interesting font and intraword spacing effects that have important implications for the optimal use of space in a line of text.     

Future Directions for Eye Movement Research

Eyemovementdatahaveproventobeex鄄tremelyusefulinthestudyofmanytopicsrelatedtocognitiveprocessing.Indeed,theymaybethebeston-linemeasureofmoment-to-momentcogni鄄tiveprocesses.Thisisnottosaythateyemove鄄mentswillproveusefulineveryaspectofcognitiveprocessing.Forexample,itisdifficulttoseehoweyemovementsmayrevealagreatdealaboutbasicmemoryprocesses(but,evenhere,theycouldbeusefulindeterminingexactlywhatpeoplerememberfromasceneorvisualdisplay).Inthisarticle,Iwillbrieflysummarizesomeimportantfindingsth…     

Letter transpositions within and across morphemes

Three masked-prime naming experiments were conducted to examine the impact of morpheme boundaries on letter transposition confusability effects. In Experiment 1, the priming effects of primes containing letter transpositions within (sunhsine) and transpositions across (susnhine) the constituents of compound words were compared with correctly spelled primes and primes containing letter substitutions in naming correctly spelled targets. Primes containing transpositions within morphemes facilitated naming as much as correctly spelled primes. Primes with transpositions across morphemes did not facilitate naming more than primes with letter substitutions. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and extended the effects to so-called pseudocompounds (mayhem). Experiment 3 extended the results to agentive derivational morphology (boaster). The results are discussed in the context of visual word recognition.     

Effects of contextual predictability and transitional probability on eye movements during reading

In 2 eye-movement experiments, the authors tested whether transitional probability (the statistical likelihood that a word precedes or follows another word) affects reading times and whether this occurs independently from contextual predictability effects. Experiment 1 showed early effects of predictability, replicating S. A. McDonald and R. C. Shillcock's (2003a) finding that words with a high transitional probability (defeat following accept) are read faster than words with a low transitional probability (losses following accept). However, further analyses suggested that the transitional probability effect was likely due to differences in predictability rather than transitional probability. Experiment 2, using a better controlled set of items, again showed an effect of predictability, but no effect of transitional probability. The authors conclude that effects of transitional probability are part of regular predictability effects. Their data also show that predictability effects are detectable very early in the eye-movement record and between contexts that are weakly constraining.     

Eye movements and the modulation of parafoveal processing by foveal processing difficulty: A reexamination

Henderson and Ferreira (1990) found that foveal load (manipulated via word frequency) modulates parafoveal processing, thereby affecting the amount of preview benefit obtained from the word to the right of fixation. The present experiment used the eye-contingent boundary paradigm and, consistent with Henderson and Ferreira, showed that foveal load modulated preview benefit for participants who were not aware of the display changes during reading. Also, for these participants, foveal load modulated preview benefit regardless of fixation durations on the foveal word. For participants who were aware of the display change, preview benefits occurred regardless of foveal processing difficulty. These results have important implications for understanding the way in which foveal load influences parafoveal processing during reading.     

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.     

Taking on semantic commitments, II: Collective versus distributive readings

In earlier work, Frazier and Rayner (1990) provided evidence for a processing principle termed the Minimal Semantic Commitment (MSC)hypothesis. In the present study, we used the MSC hypothesis as a starting point in addressing the issue of when to treat mental representations as vague versus determinate and ambiguous. Given ambiguous representations, the MSC hypothesis predicts that the processor will commit to one interpretation (the grammatical ambiguity hypothesis). On the other hand, given a single underspecified representation, the MSC hypothesis predicts that the processor will await disambiguating information before fully committing to an interpretation (the vagueness hypothesis). In an experiment designed to evaluate these hypotheses with respect to the representation of distributivity, participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing distributive or collective predicates that were either disambiguated by a preceding adverb or left locally ambiguous by delaying the disambiguating adverb until the end of the predicate. The results suggested that a semantic commitment is made in locally indeterminate cases as evidenced by a significant interaction of ambiguity and distributivity in first pass times, total times, and regressions. If the difficulty of distributives simply reflected the difficulty of postulating a distributive operator when evidence warranting it is encountered, then no interaction would be expected. Hence we argue that the distributive/collective distinction is treated as a matter of ambiguity rather than as one of vagueness. In the absence of evidence for a distributive reading, the processor commits itself to a collective reading sometime during the processing of the predicate (before the disambiguation in our late disambiguation examples). The findings are discussed in relation to recent linguistic work on the representation of distributivity.     

Hemispheric specialization in reading and word recognition

Three experiments dealing with hemispheric specialization are presented. In Experiment 1, words and/or faces were presented tachistoscopically to the left or right of fixation. Words were more accurately identified in the right visual field and faces were more accurately identified in the left visual field. A forced choice error analysis for words indicated that errors made for word stimuli were most frequently visually similar words and this effect was particularly pronounced in the left visual field. Two additional experiments supported this finding. On the basis of the results, it was argued that word identification is a multistage process, with visual feature analysis carried out by the right hemisphere and identification and naming by the left hemisphere. In addition, Kinsbourne's attentional model of brain function was rejected in favor of an anatomical model which suggests that simultaneous processing of verbal and nonverbal information does not constrict the attention of either hemisphere.     

Attention to one word at a time in reading is still a viable hypothesis: rejoinder to Inhoff, Radach, and Eiter (2006)

A. W. Inhoff, R. Radach, and B. Eiter argue that the current version of the E-Z Reader model (A. Pollatsek, E. D. Reichle, & K. Rayner) cannot explain 2 key findings in their data, and as a result, the assumption of words being attended to 1 at a time is likely to be false. In this rejoinder, the authors argue that the E-Z Reader model can easily explain the 1st of the 2 phenomena and that the 2nd phenomenon is likely to be at least partially an artifact of changing displays during fixations. The authors also argue that their assumptions about attention shifting are not contrary to the attention literature and that the assumption that A. W. Inhoff et al. deem to be unrealistic (i.e., instantaneous shifting of attention) is easily modified within the architecture of the model.