Positional character frequency and word spacing facilitate the acquisition of novel words during Chinese children's reading

The dynamics of multiword sequence extraction

Being able to process multiword sequences is central for both language comprehension and production. Numerous studies support this claim, but less is known about the way multiword sequences are acquired, and more specifically how associations between their constituents are established over time. Here we adapted the Hebb naming task into a Hebb lexical decision task to study the dynamics of multiword sequence extraction. Participants had to read letter strings presented on a computer screen and were required to classify them as words or pseudowords. Unknown to the participants, a triplet of words or pseudowords systematically appeared in the same order and random words or pseudowords were inserted between two repetitions of the triplet. We found that response times (RTs) for the unpredictable first position in the triplet decreased over repetitions (i.e., indicating the presence of a repetition effect) but more slowly and with a different dynamic compared with items appearing at the predictable second and third positions in the repeated triplet (i.e., showing a slightly different predictability effect). Implicit and explicit learning also varied as a function of the nature of the triplet (i.e., unrelated words, pseudowords, semantically related words, or idioms). Overall, these results provide new empirical evidence about the dynamics of multiword sequence extraction, and more generally about the role of statistical learning in language acquisition.

Reading spaced and unspaced Korean text: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading

In written Korean, spaces appear between phrasal units ("eojeols"). In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which space information had been manipulated. Results indicated that removing spaces or replacing them with a symbol hindered reading, but this effect was not as disruptive as previously found in English. Experiment 2 presented sentences varying in the proportion of eojeols that ended with postpositional particles as well as the presence/absence of spaces. Results showed that space removal interfered with reading, but its effects were weaker when the sentence contained more postpositional particles. This suggests that postpositional particles provide an extra cue to word segmentation in Korean texts. These findings are discussed in relation to the unique characteristics of the Korean writing system and to the models of eye-movement control during reading in different languages.

Lexicality effects on orthographic learning in beginning and advanced readers of Dutch: An eye-tracking study

Orthographic learning is the topic of many recent studies about reading, but much is still unknown about conditions that affect orthographic learning and their influence on reading fluency development over time. This study investigated lexicality effects on orthographic learning in beginning and relatively advanced readers of Dutch. Eye movements of 131 children in Grades 2 and 5 were monitored during an orthographic learning task. Children read sentences containing pseudowords or low-frequency real words that varied in number of exposures. We examined both offline learning outcomes (i.e., orthographic choice and spelling dictation) of target items and online gaze durations on target words. The results showed general effects of exposure, lexicality, and reading-skill level. Also, a two-way interaction was found between the number of exposures and lexicality when detailed orthographic representations were required, consistent with a larger overall effect of exposure on learning the spellings of pseudowords. Moreover, lexicality and reading-skill level were found to affect the learning rate across exposures based on a decrease in gaze durations, indicating a larger learning effect for pseudowords in Grade 5 children. Yet, further interactions between exposure and reading-skill level were not present, indicating largely similar learning curves for beginning and advanced readers. We concluded that the reading system of more advanced readers may cope somewhat better with words varying in lexicality, but is not more efficient than that of beginning readers in building up orthographic knowledge of specific words across repeated exposures.

Eye-movement control during learning and scanning of English pseudoword stimuli: Exposure frequency effects and spacing effects in a visual search task

Wang et al. (Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, in press, 2021) reported a Landolt-C learning and scanning experiment. In a learning session, they simulated exposure frequency effects successfully by training participants to learn target Landolt-C clusters with different exposures. The rate of learning high-frequency (HF) targets were greater than that of learning low-frequency (LF) targets. In a subsequent scanning session, participants were required to scan text-like Landolt-C strings to detect whether any pre-learnt target was embedded in the strings. The Landolt-C strings were displayed under different spacing formats (i.e., spaced format, unspaced format, and unspaced shaded format). However, the simulated exposure frequency effect did not occur in the scanning session. Wang et al. argued one straightforward reason for this might be because participants failed to maintain the memory of pre-learnt target to the scanning session. In the current study, we employed the same learning and scanning paradigm to investigate whether exposure frequency would occur in a target search task by using easier learning materials - pseudoword stimuli. The learning of pseudoword stimuli was much more successful than Landolt-C stimuli. Interestingly, however, we found a very different rate of learning effect such that the rate of learning LF targets was greater than HF targets. To our surprise, we did not find any influence of exposure frequency on eye movements during scanning even when participants were able to identify pre-learnt pseudowords in strings. Learning rate effect, exposure frequency effects, and saccadic targeting during the scanning of strings under different spacing formats are discussed in this paper.

Word's Contextual Predictability and Its Character Frequency Effects in Chinese Reading: Evidence From Eye Movements

The present study sought to establish how a word's contextual predictability impacts the early stages of word processing when reading Chinese. Two eye-movement experiments were conducted in which the predictability of the target two-character word was manipulated; the frequency of the target's initial character was manipulated in Experiment 1, as was the target's end character frequency in Experiment 2. No reliable interaction effect of predictability with initial character frequency was observed in Experiment 1. Reliable interactions of word predictability with end character frequency were observed in Experiment 2. The end character frequency effects, in which the words with high-frequency end characters were fixated for a shorter time and re-fixated less often, were only observed when reading unpredictable words. Reliable interactions were also observed with incoming saccade length, as high-frequency end character words elicited longer saccades to themselves than low-frequency end character words when reading predictable words. The effects of pervasive predictability on measures of fixation time, probability, and saccade length were noted in both experiments. Our findings suggest that a word's contextual predictability facilitates the processing of its constituent characters.

New Perspectives on Serialism and Parallelism in Oculomotor Control During Reading: The Multi-Constituent Unit Hypothesis

Currently there are several computational models of eye movement control that provide a good account of oculomotor behavior during reading of English and other alphabetic languages. I will provide an overview of two dominant models: E-Z Reader and SWIFT, as well as a recently proposed model: OB1-Reader. I will evaluate a critical issue of controversy among models, namely, whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel. I will then consider reading in Chinese, a character-based, unspaced language with ambiguous word boundaries. Finally, I will evaluate the concepts of serialism and parallelism of process central to these models, and how these models might function in relation to lexical processing that is operationalized over parafoveal multi-constituent units.