Temporal overlap in the linguistic processing of successive words in reading: reply to Pollatsek, Reichle, and Rayner (2006a)

Parafoveal syntactic processing from word N + 2 during reading: the case of gender-specific German articles

Previous research has suggested that some syntactic information such as word class can be processed parafoveally during reading. However, it is still unclear to what extent early syntactic cueing within noun phrases can facilitate word processing during dynamic reading. Two experiments (total N = 72) were designed to address this question using a gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm to manipulate the syntactic fit within a nominal phrase. Either the article (Experiment 1) or the noun (Experiment 2) was manipulated in the parafovea, resulting in a syntactic mismatch, depending on the condition. Results indicated a substantial elevation of viewing times on both parts of the noun phrase when conflicting syntactic information had been present in the parafovea. In Experiment 1, the article was also fixated more often in the syntactic mismatch condition. These results provide direct evidence of parafoveal syntactic processing. Based on the early time-course of this effect, it can be concluded that grammatical gender is used to generate constraints for the processing of upcoming nouns. To our knowledge, these results also provide the first evidence that syntactic information can be extracted from a parafoveal word N + 2.

Age-related sparing of parafoveal lexical processing

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: This study examined the role of increased adult age in the processing of lexical information presented in foveal and parafoveal areas of the retina (right and left visual fields). Previous research has shown that older adults are able to compensate for age-related changes though a highly practiced skill (Salthouse, 1984 , Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 345-371). The authors examined if older adults would show a lexical-only parafoveal benefit.

METHODS

Two experiments were conducted on both younger and older adults. In Experiment 1, participants completed a lexical decision task that presented words in the fovea and parafovea in both visual fields. In Experiment 2, the task was a font discrimination task (nonlexical) with foveal and parafoveal presentation in both visual fields.

RESULTS

In Experiment 1, the authors observed word frequency effects for both foveal and right parafoveal presentation locations. This effect was present for both older and younger adults. Experiment 2 was a font discrimination task and there was no right parafoveal advantage for older adults on this task, suggesting that this effect observed in Experiment 1 was lexical in nature due to the highly overlearned nature of word recognition.

CONCLUSION

These results suggest that older adults may compensate for slower encoding time in reading by encoding text to the right of fixation more efficiently than younger adults. This suggests an asymmetrical change in the useful field of view that is lexical in nature.

Using reinforcement learning to examine dynamic attention allocation during reading

A fundamental question in reading research concerns whether attention is allocated strictly serially, supporting lexical processing of one word at a time, or in parallel, supporting concurrent lexical processing of two or more words (Reichle, Liversedge, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2009). The origins of this debate are reviewed. We then report three simulations to address this question using artificial reading agents (Liu & Reichle, 2010; Reichle & Laurent, 2006) that learn to dynamically allocate attention to 1-4 words to "read" as efficiently as possible. These simulation results indicate that the agents strongly preferred serial word processing, although they occasionally attended to more than one word concurrently. The reason for this preference is discussed, along with implications for the debate about how humans allocate attention during reading.

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.

The 35th Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture: Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search

Eye movements are now widely used to investigate cognitive processes during reading, scene perception, and visual search. In this article, research on the following topics is reviewed with respect to reading: (a) the perceptual span (or span of effective vision), (b) preview benefit, (c) eye movement control, and (d) models of eye movements. Related issues with respect to eye movements during scene perception and visual search are also reviewed. It is argued that research on eye movements during reading has been somewhat advanced over research on eye movements in scene perception and visual search and that some of the paradigms developed to study reading should be more widely adopted in the study of scene perception and visual search. Research dealing with “real-world” tasks and research utilizing the visual-world paradigm are also briefly discussed.

Early parafoveal processing in reading Chinese sentences

The possibility that during Chinese reading information is extracted at the beginning of the current fixation was examined in this study. Twenty-four participants read for comprehension while their eye movements were being recorded. A pretarget-target two-character word pair was embedded in each sentence and target word visibility was manipulated in two time intervals (initial 140 ms or after 140 ms) during pretarget viewing. Substantial beginning- and end-of-fixation preview effects were observed together with beginning-of-fixation effects on the pretarget. Apparently parafoveal information at least at the character level can be extracted relatively early during ongoing fixations. Results are highly relevant for ongoing debates on spatially distributed linguistic processing and address fundamental questions about how the human mind solves the task of reading within the constraints of different writing systems.

Using E-Z Reader to model the effects of higher level language processing on eye movements during reading

Although computational models of eye-movement control during reading have been used to explain how saccadic programming, visual constraints, attention allocation, and lexical processing jointly affect eye movements during reading, these models have largely ignored the issue of how higher level, postlexical language processing affects eye movements. The present article shows how one of these models, E-Z Reader (Pollatsek, Reichle, & Rayner, 2006c), can be augmented to redress this limitation. Simulations show that with a few simple assumptions, the model can account for the fact that effects of higher level language processing are not observed on eye movements when such processing is occurring without difficulty, but can capture the patterns of eye movements that are observed when such processing is slowed or disrupted.