When language comprehension goes wrong for the right reasons: Good-enough, underspecified, or shallow language processing

Good-enough processing, home language proficiency, cognitive skills, and task effects for Korean heritage speakers' sentence comprehension

The present study investigates how heritage speakers conduct good-enough processing at the interface of home-language proficiency, cognitive skills (inhibitory control; working memory), and task types (acceptability judgement; self-paced reading). For this purpose, we employ two word-order patterns (verb-final vs. verb-initial) of two clausal constructions in Korean-suffixal passive and morphological causative-which contrast pertaining to the mapping between thematic roles and case-marking and the interpretive procedures driven by verbal morphology. We find that, while Korean heritage speakers demonstrate the same kind of acceptability-rating behaviour as monolingual Korean speakers do, their reading-time patterns are notably modulated by construction-specific properties, cognitive skills, and proficiency. This suggests a heritage speaker's ability and willingness to conduct both parsing routes, induced by linguistic cues in a non-dominant language, which are proportional to the computational complexity involving these cues. Implications of this study are expected to advance our understanding of a learner's mind for underrepresented languages and populations in the field.

Delayed onset facilitates subsequent retrieval of words during language comprehension

Prior research has shown that during language comprehension, memory representations associated with premodified words (e.g., the injured and dangerous bear) are retrieved faster from memory than those associated with unmodified words (e.g., the bear). Current explanations attribute this effect to the semantic richness of modified words. However, it is not clear whether the presence of modifying words are in fact necessary for a retrieval benefit. Premodifiers necessarily delay the onset of the target word (i.e., bear), and temporal delays may heighten attention to upcoming stimuli, and/or strengthen encoding by producing free time during encoding, facilitating subsequent retrieval. We therefore examined whether a simple delay in the onset of the target can produce a retrieval benefit. Our results show that delayed onset facilitates the subsequent retrieval of target words in the absence of any modifying information. These results lend support to models of language comprehension according to which delays may enhance attention to upcoming words, and also to models of working memory based on which free time replenishes encoding resources, strengthening the memory trace of encoded information and facilitating its retrieval at a subsequent point. Our results also contribute to current memory-based theories of sentence comprehension by showing that retrieval from memory may be affected by nonlinguistic factors such as delay-induced attention enhancement, or free time during encoding.

Elliptical Responses to Direct and Indirect Requests for Information

We present two studies examining the factors that lead speakers to produce elliptical responses to requests for information. Following Clark and Levelt and Kelter, experimenters called businesses and asked about their closing time (e.g., Can you tell me what time you close?). Participants provided the requested information in full sentence responses (We close at 9) or elliptical responses (At 9). A reanalysis of data from previous experiments using this paradigm shows that participants are more likely to produce an elliptical response when the question is a direct request for information (What time do you close?) than when the question is an indirect request for information (Can you tell me what time you close?). Participants were less likely to produce an elliptical response when they began their answer by providing a yes/no response (e.g., Sure . . . we close at 9). A new experiment replicated these findings, and further showed that elliptical responses were less likely when (1) irrelevant linguistic content was inserted between the question and the participant's response, and (2) participants verbalized signs of difficulty retrieving the requested information. This latter effect is most prominent in response to questions that are seen as very polite (May I ask you what time you close?). We discuss the role that the recoverability of the intended meaning of the ellipsis, the accessibility of potential antecedents for the ellipsis, pragmatic factors, and memory retrieval play in shaping the production of ellipsis.

Syntactic adaptation leads to updated knowledge for local structural frequencies

Syntactic adaptation has been shown to occur for various temporarily ambiguous structures, wherein an initially unexpected resolution becomes easier to process after repeated exposure. More controversial and less replicated is the claim that this adaptation towards a locally frequent structure occurs due to a strategic shifting of expectations to match short-term statistical regularities such that readers adapt away from the a priori more frequent structure. Experiment 1 replicates the initial adaptation towards a coordination garden path structure using self-paced reading; however, this paradigm has been criticised for its low reliability for detecting such small effects. To this end, Experiments 2 and 3 use a combination of self-paced reading and sentence completion tasks to replicate initial adaptation towards both coordination and reduced relative garden path structures and show evidence for a preference for these structures over their a priori more frequent alternatives. Together, these data reveal that participants may be tracking local structural statistics in real time; however, they may not be able to rapidly use that information to update processing behaviours.

When and where did it happen? Systematic differences in recall of core and optional sentence information

This article reports on four experiments aiming to examine immediate post-sentential recall of core sentence information (conveyed by direct objects), and optional/additional information (conveyed by temporal or locative adjuncts). Participants read simple and unambiguous Czech sentences such as Starší důchodce velmi pečlivě pročetl noviny v neděli v knihovně: "An older retiree read the newspaper very carefully on Sunday in the library." Sentences always appeared as a whole after pressing a space bar. Immediately after the sentence disappeared, an open-ended (free response) question was presented targeting either the direct object (e.g., newspaper), temporal adjunct (e.g., on Sunday), or locative adjunct (e.g., in the library). Altogether, it was found that the core information (conveyed by the direct object) was recalled almost perfectly, whereas additional information, conveyed by temporal and locative adjuncts, was recalled with significantly lower accuracy rates. Information structure also played a role: if the temporal or locative adjunct was focused, it was recalled better than if it was unfocused. The present article thus shows systematic differences in recall success for different pieces of information. These findings suggest the presence of selective attention mechanisms during early stages of sentence processing. Factors such as syntactic function or information structure influence the degree of attention to different pieces of information conveyed by a sentence. In turn, certain pieces of information may not be consciously accessible already after the sentence is processed.

Explainability of neural networks for child language: Agent-First strategy in comprehension of Korean active transitive construction

This study investigates how neural networks address the properties of children's linguistic knowledge, with a focus on the Agent-First strategy in comprehension of an active transitive construction in Korean. We develop various neural-network models and measure their classification performance on the test stimuli used in a behavioural experiment involving scrambling and omission of sentential components at varying degrees. Results show that, despite some compatibility of these models' performance with the children's response patterns, their performance does not fully approximate the children's utilisation of this strategy, demonstrating by-model and by-condition asymmetries. This study's findings suggest that neural networks can utilise information about formal co-occurrences to access the intended message to a certain degree, but the outcome of this process may be substantially different from how a child (as a developing processor) engages in comprehension. This implies some limits of neural networks on revealing the developmental trajectories of child language. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This study investigates how neural networks address properties of child language. We focus on the Agent-First strategy in comprehension of Korean active transitive. Results show by-model/condition asymmetries against children's response patterns. This implies some limits of neural networks on revealing properties of child language.

The ups and downs of bilingualism: A review of the literature on executive control using event-related potentials

Whether bilingualism enhances executive control (EC) is controversial. This article reviews 24 studies on the bilingual EC effect using event-related potentials (ERPs). It evaluates the evidence based on considerations of neural efficiency, different EC theories, and accounts regarding the locus of the bilingual effect. The review finds some evidence for a positive bilingual impact. This is more consistent for the P3 and response-locked ERPs. Moreover, when considering each component independently, evidence primarily supports a monitoring and secondarily an inhibition locus. Additionally, an N2/ERN (error-related negativity) dissociation (no bilingual N2 effect but positive ERN impact, evident as smaller ERN), coupled with the P3 results, suggest that monitoring may not be the (only) locus of a bilingual effect but (an)other post-monitoring mechanism(s). Attention disengagement also receives some support. Finally, results across studies are largely consistent with the Bilingualism Anterior to Posterior and Subcortical Shift model (BAPSS): Bilingual effects, when found, often manifest as shorter latencies, larger components or wider amplitude effects during earlier (N2, P3) but smaller components or narrower effects during later processing (stimulus-locked negativities and response-locked components). However, this evidence is not unequivocal. Many bilingual-monolingual comparisons reveal null or some suggest negative or opposite to prediction bilingual effects. Second, the scant evidence about which bilingual experiences impact EC is, generally, unclear, while some evidence indicates negative effects. Third, BAPSS is often not confirmed when multiple components are examined within subjects. Finally, this literature is challenged by confounds and small samples. Further research is required to conclude a positive bilingual effect on EC in ERPs.

Strategic Processing of Gender Stereotypes in Sentence Comprehension: An ERP Study

Gender stereotypes are often involved in language comprehension. This study investigated whether and to what extent their processing is under strategic control, by examining both proportion and order effects related to gender stereotypes for role nouns. We manipulated stereotypical gender consistencies, as in “Li’s daughter/son was a nurse…”, the relative proportions of gender-consistent and gender-inconsistent sentences (80%:20% and 50%:50% for high-proportion and equal-proportion sessions, respectively), and a between-participant factor of session order (high-proportion sessions preceding equal-proportion sessions and a reversed order for the high–equal and equal–high groups, respectively). Linear mixed-effect models revealed a larger N400 and a larger late negativity for stereotypically inconsistent compared to consistent sentences for the high–equal group only. These results indicate that even if sentence contexts have already determined the gender of target role characters, gender stereotypes for role nouns are still activated when the first half of the experiment facilitates their activation. The analyses of trial-by-trial dynamics showed that the N400 effects gradually decreased throughout equal-proportion sessions for the equal–high group. Our findings suggest that the processing of gender stereotypes can be under strategic control. In addition, readers may develop other strategies based on sentence contexts, when the processing strategy based on cue validity is not available.

Using self-paced reading in research with heritage speakers: a role for reading skill in the online processing of Spanish verb argument specifications

Relatively little is known about how heritage speakers process language in real time, despite recent calls for the use of online methods such as self-paced reading, eyetracking, and ERPs (event-related potentials) in research on this early bilingual population. The present study addressed this gap with an empirical study of the online processing of heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S. using self-paced reading, which is the online method that is most accessible to a wide body of researchers because it does not require specialized equipment. The processing target was related to the online integration of verb argument specifications, which was chosen because it does not involve ungrammatical sentences and therefore may be less likely to involve metalinguistic knowledge and less likely to put heritage speakers at a disadvantage than measures that rely on the recognition of grammatical errors. More specifically, this study examined an effect that occurs when a noun phrase appears after an intransitive verb, which can cause processing difficulty relative to a comparison condition in which the verb is transitive. The participants were 58 heritage speakers of Spanish and a comparison group of 16 first-generation immigrants raised in Spanish-speaking countries. Both groups showed the expected transitivity effect on the post-verbal noun phrase during self-paced reading, but the heritage speaker group also showed a spillover effect on the post-critical region. Among the heritage speakers, these effects were associated with lower self-ratings for reading skill in Spanish and with slower average reading speed during the experiment. Three theoretical accounts of the apparent susceptibility to spillover effects among heritage speakers are proposed: that it is a characteristic of shallow processing, that it is due to underdeveloped reading skill, and that it is an artifact of the self-paced reading method. The latter two possibilities are especially consistent with a role for reading skill in these results.

Do we rely on good-enough processing in reading under auditory and visual noise?

Noise, as part of real-life communication flow, degrades the quality of linguistic input and affects language processing. According to predictions of the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, noise should make comprehenders rely more on word-level semantics instead of actual syntactic relations. However, empirical evidence supporting this prediction is still lacking. For the first time, we investigated whether auditory (three-talker babble) and visual (short idioms appearing next to a target sentence on the screen) noise would trigger greater reliance on semantics and make readers of Russian sentences process the sentences superficially. Our findings suggest that, although Russian speakers generally relied on semantics in sentence comprehension, neither auditory nor visual noise increased this reliance. The only effect of noise on semantic processing was found in reading speed under auditory noise measured by first fixation duration: only without noise, the semantically implausible sentences were read slower than semantically plausible ones. These results do not support the predictions of the study based on the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, which is discussed in light of the methodological differences among the studies of noise and their possible limitations.

Rational speech comprehension: Interaction between predictability, acoustic signal, and noise

Introduction

During speech comprehension, multiple sources of information are available to listeners, which are combined to guide the recognition process. Models of speech comprehension posit that when the acoustic speech signal is obscured, listeners rely more on information from other sources. However, these models take into account only word frequency information and local contexts (surrounding syllables), but not sentence-level information. To date, empirical studies investigating predictability effects in noise did not carefully control the tested speech sounds, while the literature investigating the effect of background noise on the recognition of speech sounds does not manipulate sentence predictability. Additionally, studies on the effect of background noise show conflicting results regarding which noise type affects speech comprehension most. We address this in the present experiment.

Methods

We investigate how listeners combine information from different sources when listening to sentences embedded in background noise. We manipulate top-down predictability, type of noise, and characteristics of the acoustic signal, thus creating conditions which differ in the extent to which a specific speech sound is masked in a way that is grounded in prior work on the confusability of speech sounds in noise. Participants complete an online word recognition experiment.

Results and discussion

The results show that participants rely more on the provided sentence context when the acoustic signal is harder to process. This is the case even when interactions of the background noise and speech sounds lead to small differences in intelligibility. Listeners probabilistically combine top-down predictions based on context with noisy bottom-up information from the acoustic signal, leading to a trade-off between the different types of information that is dependent on the combination of a specific type of background noise and speech sound.

A transposed-word effect on word-in-sequence identification

The present study investigated transposed-word effects in a post-cued word-in-sequence identification experiment. Five horizontally aligned words were simultaneously presented for a brief duration and followed by a backward mask and cue for the position of the word to be identified within the sequence. The five-word sequences could form a grammatically correct sentence (e.g., The boy can run fast), an ungrammatical transposed-word sequence (e.g., The can boy run fast) or an ungrammatical control sequence (e.g., The can get run fast), and the same target word at the same position (e.g., the word 'run') was tested in the three conditions. Consistent with previous studies using a grammatical decision task and a same-different matching task, a transposed-word effect was observed, with word identification being more accurate in transposed-word sequences than in control sequences. Furthermore, here we could show for the first time that word identification was more accurate in correct sentences compared with transposed-word sequences. We suggest that the word identification advantage found for transposed-word sequences compared with ungrammatical control sequences is due to facilitatory feedback to word identities from sentence-level representations, albeit with less strength compared to the feedback provided by correct sentences.

Misretrieval but not misrepresentation: A feature misbinding account of post-interpretive effects in number attraction

Attraction effects in comprehension have reliably shown a grammaticality asymmetry in which mismatching plural attractors confer facilitatory interference for ungrammatical verbs, but no processing cost for grammatical verbs. While this has favoured cue-based retrieval accounts of attraction phenomena in comprehension, Patson and Husband offered offline evidence suggesting that comprehenders systematically misrepresent number information in attraction phrases, leaving open the possibility for faulty noun phrase (NP) representations later in processing. The current study employs two self-paced reading discourse experiments to test for number attraction misrepresentations in real time. Specifically, the attraction phrases occurred as embedded direct object phrases, allowing for a direct test of the role of attractor noun number in head noun number misrepresentation (i.e., no number cue from verb). Although no online evidence for misrepresentation was found, a third single-sentence rapid serial visual presentation experiment showed error rates to offline probes corroborating the post-interpretive findings from Patson and Husband, suggesting that a search in memory for associative features may not employ the same processes as the formation of dependencies in discourse comprehension. The findings are discussed in the framework of feature misbinding in memory in line with recent post-interpretive accounts of offline comprehension errors.

Reliance on semantic and structural heuristics in sentence comprehension across the lifespan

People sometimes misinterpret the sentences that they read. One possible reason suggested in the literature is a race between slow bottom-up algorithmic processing and "fast and frugal" top-down heuristic processing that serves to support fast-paced communication but sometimes results in incorrect representations. Heuristic processing can be both semantic, relying on world knowledge and semantic relations between words, and structural, relying on structural economy. Scattered experimental evidence suggests that reliance on heuristics may change from greater reliance on syntactic information in younger people to greater reliance on semantic information in older people. We tested whether the reliance on structural and semantic heuristics changes with age in 137 Russian-speaking adolescents, 135 young adults, and 77 older adults. In a self-paced reading task with comprehension questions, participants read unambiguous high- versus low-attachment sentences that were either semantically plausible or implausible: i.e., the syntactic structure either matched or contradicted the semantic relations between words. We found that the use of top-down heuristics in comprehension increased across the lifespan. Adolescents did not rely on structural heuristics, in contrast to young and older adults. At the same time, older adults relied on semantic heuristics more than young adults and adolescents. Importantly, we found that top-down heuristic processing was faster than bottom-up algorithmic processing: slower reading times were associated with greater accuracy specifically in implausible sentences.

The transposed-word effect revisited: the role of syntax in word position coding

Skilled readers may misinterpret “you that read wrong” for “you read that wrong”: a transposed-word effect. This relatively novel finding, which supports parallel word processing during sentence reading, is attributed to a combination of noisy bottom-up word position coding and top-down syntactic constraints. The present study focussed on the contribution of syntactic constraints in driving transposed-word effects. In a speeded grammatical decision experiment, two types of ungrammatical transposed-word sequences were compared, namely a transposition either across a syntactic phrase (“the have girls gone home”) or within a syntactic phrase (“the girls gone have home”). We found longer response times and lower accuracy rates for within-phrase transpositions than across-phrase transpositions, demonstrating a direct influence of syntactic structures on the transposed-word effect. We conclude that the assignment of words to positions in a sentence is guided by top-down syntactic constraints.

The Principle of Least Effort and Comprehension of Spoken Sentences by Younger and Older Adults

There is considerable evidence that listeners' understanding of a spoken sentence need not always follow from a full analysis of the words and syntax of the utterance. Rather, listeners may instead conduct a superficial analysis, sampling some words and using presumed plausibility to arrive at an understanding of the sentence meaning. Because this latter strategy occurs more often for sentences with complex syntax that place a heavier processing burden on the listener than sentences with simpler syntax, shallow processing may represent a resource conserving strategy reflected in reduced processing effort. This factor may be even more important for older adults who as a group are known to have more limited working memory resources. In the present experiment, 40 older adults (M age = 75.5 years) and 20 younger adults (M age = 20.7) were tested for comprehension of plausible and implausible sentences with a simpler subject-relative embedded clause structure or a more complex object-relative embedded clause structure. Dilation of the pupil of the eye was recorded as an index of processing effort. Results confirmed greater comprehension accuracy for plausible than implausible sentences, and for sentences with simpler than more complex syntax, with both effects amplified for the older adults. Analysis of peak pupil dilations for implausible sentences revealed a complex three-way interaction between age, syntactic complexity, and plausibility. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence comprehension, and pupillometry as an index of intentional task engagement.

The Effect of Ambiguity Awareness on Second Language Learners' Prosodic Disambiguation

Three tasks were reported to examine the effect of ambiguity awareness on Chinese-speaking English learners' use of prosody in resolving prepositional-phrase attachment ambiguity. In the first (Task 1) and second (Task 2) tasks, listeners were not informed of the syntactic ambiguity. In the third task (Task 3), listeners were given the specific information about syntactic ambiguity. The analysis of the overall accuracy rate showed that before receiving specific information about syntactic ambiguity, learners did not detect the ambiguity within the structure and tended to interpret the sentence in a "good-enough" heuristic to reduce the computational burden. After being aware of the syntactic ambiguity, they could use prosodic cues to resolve the ambiguity. However, the finding that the learners reversed their parsing bias from verb phrase attachment (VP-attachment) toward noun phrase attachment (NP-attachment) indicated their difficulty in integrating prosodic information to syntactic structure efficiently. The analysis of individual accuracy rate demonstrated learners' individual variations in using prosodic cues. The result suggests that learners' failure to use prosodic cues may be attributed to a lack of ambiguity awareness and difficulty in information integration, rather than their low sensitivity to prosodic cues.

Does comprehension (sometimes) go wrong for noncanonical sentences?

This article addresses the question of whether the human parsing mechanism (HPM) derives sentence meaning always from representations that are computed algorithmically or whether the HPM sometimes resorts to non-algorithmic strategies that may result in misinterpretations. Misinterpretation effects for noncanonical sentences, such as passives, constitute important evidence in favour of models allowing for nonveridical representations. However, it is unclear whether these effects reflect errors in the mapping of form to meaning, or difficulties specific to the procedure used to test comprehension. We report two experiments combining two different comprehension tasks to address these alternative possibilities. In Experiment 1, participants first judged the plausibility of canonical and noncanonical sentences and then named the agent or patient of the sentence. In Experiment 2, the order of the two tasks was reversed. Both tasks require the correct identification of agent or patient/theme, but differ regarding the complexity of operations required to complete the task successfully. In both experiments, participants made a substantial number of errors with agent/patient naming, even when they had correctly assessed sentence plausibility. We conclude that misinterpretation effects do not indicate parsing errors and therefore cannot serve as evidence for non-algorithmic processing. Our results support models of the HPM that assume algorithmic processing only.

Error-Driven Retrieval in Agreement Attraction Rarely Leads to Misinterpretation

Previous work on agreement computation in sentence comprehension motivates a model in which the parser predicts the verb's number and engages in retrieval of the agreement controller only when it detects a mismatch between the prediction and the bottom-up input. It is the error-driven second stage of this process that is prone to similarity-based interference and can result in the illusory licensing of a subject-verb number agreement violation in the presence of a structurally irrelevant noun matching the number marking on the verb ('The bed by the lamps were…'), giving rise to an effect known as 'agreement attraction'. Here we ask to what extent the error-driven retrieval process underlying the illusory licensing alters the structural and thematic representation of the sentence. We use a novel dual-task paradigm that combines self-paced reading with a speeded forced choice task to investigate whether agreement attraction leads comprehenders to erroneously interpret the attractor as the thematic subject, which would indicate structural reanalysis. Participants read sentence fragments ('The bed by the lamp/lamps was/were undoubtedly quite') and completed the sentences by choosing between two adjectives ('comfortable'/'bright') which were either compatible with the subject's head noun or with the attractor. We found the expected agreement attraction profile in the self-paced reading data but the interpretive error occurs on only a small subset of attraction trials, suggesting that in agreement attraction agreement checking rarely matches the thematic relation. We propose that illusory licensing of an agreement violation often reflects a low-level rechecking process that is only concerned with number and does not have an impact on the structural representation of the sentence. Interestingly, this suggests that error-driven repair processes can result in a globally inconsistent final sentence representation with a persistent mismatch between the subject and the verb.

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of "reading wars." Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children's earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.

When Structure Competes with Semantics: Reading Chinese Relative Clauses

An ongoing debate in Chinese psycholinguistics is whether subject-relative clauses or object-relative clauses are more difficult to process. The current study asks what happens when structure and plausibility are pitted against each other in Chinese relative clause processing. Chinese relative clause structures and semantic plausibility were manipulated to create both plausible and implausible versions of subject- and object-relative clauses. This method has been used in other languages (e.g., English) to elicit thematic role reversal comprehension errors. Importantly, these errors—as well as online processing difficulties—are especially frequent in implausible versions of dispreferred (noncanoncial) structures. If one relative clause structure in Chinese is highly dispreferred, the structural factor and plausibility factor should interact additively. If, however, the structures are relatively equally difficult to process, then there should be only a main effect of plausibility. Sentence reading times as well as analyses on lexical interest areas revealed that Chinese readers used plausibility information almost exclusively when reading the sentences. Relative clause structure had no online effect and small but consistent offline effects. Taken together, the results support a slight preference in offline comprehension for Chinese subject-relative clauses, as well as a central role for semantic plausibility, which appears to be the dominant factor in online processing and a strong determinant of offline comprehension.

Why reread? Evidence from garden-path and local coherence structures

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to compare the online reading and offline comprehension of main verb/reduced relative garden-path sentences and local coherence sentences. Rereading of early material in garden-path reduced relatives should be revisionary, aimed at reanalysing an earlier misparse; however, rereading of early material in a local coherence reduced relative need only be confirmatory, as the original parse of the earlier portion of these sentences is ultimately correct. Results of online and offline measures showed that local coherence structures elicited signals of reading disruption that arose earlier and lasted longer, and local coherence comprehension was also better than garden path comprehension. Few rereading measures in either sentence type were predicted by structural features of these sentences, nor was rereading related to comprehension accuracy, which was extremely low overall. Results are discussed with respect to selective reanalysis and good-enough processing.

Comprehension demands modulate re-reading, but not first pass reading behavior

Several studies have examined effects of explicit task demands on eye movements in reading. However, there is relatively little prior research investigating the influence of implicit processing demands. In the present study, processing demands were manipulated by means of a between-subject manipulation of comprehension question difficulty. Consistent with previous results from Wotschack and Kliegl (2013), the question difficulty manipulation influenced the probability of regressing from late in sentences and re-reading earlier regions; readers who expected difficult comprehension questions were more likely to re-read. However, this manipulation had no reliable influence on eye movements during first pass reading of earlier sentence regions. Moreover, for the subset of sentences that contained a plausibility manipulation, the disruption induced by implausibility was not modulated by the question manipulation. We interpret these results as suggesting that comprehension demands influence reading behavior primarily by modulating a criterion for comprehension that readers apply after completing first-pass processing.

Pace Yourself: Intraindividual Variability in Context Use Revealed by Self-paced Event-related Brain Potentials

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have revealed multiple mechanisms by which contextual constraints impact language processing. At the same time, little work has examined the trial-to-trial dynamics of context use in the brain. In the current study, we probed intraindividual variability in behavioral and neural indices of context processing during reading. In a concurrent self-paced reading and ERP paradigm, participants read sentences that were either strongly or weakly constraining completed with an expected or unexpected target word. Our findings revealed substantial within-subject variability in behavioral and neural responses to contextual constraints. First, context-based amplitude reductions of the N400, a component linked to semantic memory access, were largest among trials eliciting the slowest RTs. Second, the RT distribution of unexpected words in strongly constraining contexts was positively skewed, reflecting an increased proportion of very slow RTs to trials that violated semantic predictions. Among those prediction-violating trials eliciting faster RTs, a late sustained anterior positivity was observed. However, among trials producing the differentially slowed RTs to prediction violations, we observed a markedly earlier effect of constraint in the form of an anterior N2, a component linked to conflict resolution and the cognitive control of behavior. The current study provides the first neurophysiological evidence for the direct role of cognitive control functions in the volitional control of reading. Collectively, our findings suggest that context use varies substantially within individual participants and that coregistering behavioral and neural indices of online sentence processing offers a window into these single-item dynamics.

Ageing and the misperception of words: Evidence from eye movements during reading

Research with lexical neighbours (words that differ by a single letter while the number and order of letters are preserved) indicates that readers frequently misperceive a word as its higher frequency neighbour (HFN) even during normal reading. But how this lexical influence on word identification changes across the adult lifespan is largely unknown, although slower lexical processing and reduced visual abilities in later adulthood may lead to an increased incidence of word misperception errors. In particular, older adults may be more likely than younger adults to misidentify a word as its HFN, especially when the HFN is congruent with prior sentence context, although this has not been investigated. Accordingly, to address this issue, young and older adults read sentences containing target words with and without an HFN, where the HFN was either congruent with prior sentence context or not. Consistent with previous findings for young adults, eye movements were disrupted more for words with than without an HFN, especially when the HFN was congruent with prior context. Crucially, however, there was no indication of an adult age difference in this word misperception effect. We discuss these findings in relation to the nature of misperception effects in older age.

Auditory perceptual simulation: Simulating speech rates or accents?

When readers engage in Auditory Perceptual Simulation (APS) during silent reading, they mentally simulate characteristics of voices attributed to a particular speaker or a character depicted in the text. Previous research found that auditory perceptual simulation of a faster native English speaker during silent reading led to shorter reading times that auditory perceptual simulation of a slower non-native English speaker. Yet, it was uncertain whether this difference was triggered by the different speech rates of the speakers, or by the difficulty of simulating an unfamiliar accent. The current study investigates this question by comparing faster Indian-English speech and slower American-English speech in the auditory perceptual simulation paradigm. Analyses of reading times of individual words and the full sentence reveal that the auditory perceptual simulation effect again modulated reading rate, and auditory perceptual simulation of the faster Indian-English speech led to faster reading rates compared to auditory perceptual simulation of the slower American-English speech. The comparison between this experiment and the data from Zhou and Christianson (2016) demonstrate further that the "speakers'" speech rates, rather than the difficulty of simulating a non-native accent, is the primary mechanism underlying auditory perceptual simulation effects.