How well do word recognition measures correlate? Effects of language context and repeated presentations

GECO-CN: Ghent Eye-tracking COrpus of sentence reading for Chinese-English bilinguals

The current work presents the very first eye-tracking corpus of natural reading by Chinese-English bilinguals, whose two languages entail different writing systems and orthographies. Participants read an entire novel in these two languages, presented in paragraphs on screen. Half of the participants first read half of the novel in their native language (Simplified Chinese) and then the rest of the novel in their second language (English), while the other half read in the reverse language order. This article presents some important basic descriptive statistics of reading times and compares the difference between reading in the two languages. However, this unique eye-tracking corpus also allows the exploration of theories of language processing and bilingualism. Importantly, it provides a solid and reliable ground for studying the difference between Eastern and Western languages, understanding the impact and consequences of having a completely different first language on bilingual processing. The materials are freely available for use by researchers interested in (bilingual) reading.

The database of eye-movement measures on words in Chinese reading

Eye movements are one of the most fundamental behaviors during reading. A growing number of Chinese reading studies have used eye-tracking techniques in the last two decades. The accumulated data provide a rich resource that can reflect the complex cognitive mechanisms underlying Chinese reading. This article reports a database of eye-movement measures of words during Chinese sentence reading. The database contains nine eye-movement measures of 8,551 Chinese words obtained from 1,718 participants across 57 Chinese sentence reading experiments. All data were collected in the same experimental environment and from homogenous participants, using the same protocols and parameters. This database enables researchers to test their theoretical or computational hypotheses concerning Chinese reading efficiently using a large number of words. The database can also indicate the processing difficulty of Chinese words during text reading, thus providing a way to control or manipulate the difficulty level of Chinese texts.

Visual attention and reading: A test of their relation across paradigms

Relations of visual attention to reading have long been hypothesized; however, findings in this literature are quite mixed. These relations have been investigated using several different visual attention paradigms and with variable controls for other competing reading-related processes. We extended current knowledge by evaluating four of the key visual attention paradigms used in this research-visual attention span, attention blink, visual search, and visuospatial attention-in a single study. We tested the relations of these to reading in 90 middle schoolers at high risk for reading difficulties while considering their effect in the context of known language predictors. Performance on visual-spatial, visual search, and attentional blink paradigms showed weak nonsignificant relations to reading. Visual attention span tasks showed robust relations to reading even when controlling for language, but only when stimuli were alphanumeric. Although further exploration of visual attention in relation to reading may be warranted, the robustness of this relationship appears to be questionable, particularly beyond methodological factors associated with the measurement of visual attention. Findings extend and refine our understanding of the contribution of attention to reading skill and raise questions about the mechanism by which visual attention is purported to affect reading.

Now you see it, now you don't: Flanker presence induces the word concreteness effect

Can the presence of unrelated flanker words change the way that lexical decisions are made to target words in the flankers task? Here we examined the impact of flanker presence on the effects of word concreteness. Target words had high or low concreteness ratings (e.g., fork, free) and were either presented in isolation or flanked to the left and right by an unrelated word (e.g., cold free cold) that was irrelevant for the task. Results revealed that the facilitatory effect of concreteness (faster responses to concrete words compared with abstract words) was significantly greater in the presence of flankers. A control experiment revealed the same pattern with pseudoword and nonword flankers. We conclude that the mere presence of flanking letter strings causes a greater depth of processing of target words. We further speculate that this might arise by flankers inducing a more “sentence-like” context by the presence of multiple, spatially distinct letter strings, that prohibits the use of more superficial decision processes and can be used to make lexical decisions to isolated words.

Hands Down: Cognate Effects Persist During Written Word Production

Words that share form and meaning across two or more languages (i.e., cognates) are generally processed faster than control words (non-cognates) by bilinguals speaking these languages. This so-called cognate effect is considered to be a demonstration of language non-selectivity during bilingual lexical access. Still, research up till now has focused mainly on visual and auditory comprehension. For production, research is almost exclusively limited to speech, leaving written production out of the equation. Hence, the goal of the current study was to examine whether bilinguals activate representations from both languages during typewriting. Dutch-English bilinguals completed second-language written sentences with names of displayed pictures. Low-constraint sentences yielded a cognate facilitation effect, whereas high-constraint sentences did not. These findings suggest that co-activation of similar words across languages also occurs during written production, just as in reading and speaking. Also, the interaction effect with sentence constraint shows that grammatical and semantic sentence restrictions may overrule interlingual facilitation effects.

How context changes the neural basis of perception and language

Cognitive processes-from basic sensory analysis to language understanding-are typically contextualized. While the importance of considering context for understanding cognition has long been recognized in psychology and philosophy, it has not yet had much impact on cognitive neuroscience research, where cognition is often studied in decontextualized paradigms. Here, we present examples of recent studies showing that context changes the neural basis of diverse cognitive processes, including perception, attention, memory, and language. Within the domains of perception and language, we review neuroimaging results showing that context interacts with stimulus processing, changes activity in classical perception and language regions, and recruits additional brain regions that contribute crucially to naturalistic perception and language. We discuss how contextualized cognitive neuroscience will allow for discovering new principles of the mind and brain.

Improving reading rate prediction with word length information: Evidence from Dutch

Previous research in English has suggested that reading rate predictions can be improved considerably by taking average word length into account. In this study, we investigated whether the same regularity holds for Dutch. The Dutch language is very similar to English, but words are on average half a letter longer: 5.1 letters per word (in non-fiction) instead of 4.6. We collected reading rates of 62 participants reading 12 texts with varying word lengths and examined which change in the English equation accounts for the Dutch findings. We observed that predictions were close to the best-fitting curve as soon as the average English word length was replaced by the average Dutch word length. The equation predicts that Dutch texts with an average word length of 5.1 letters will be read at a rate of 238 words per minute (wpm). Texts with an average word length of 4.5 letters will be read at 270 wpm, and texts with an average word length of 6.0 letters will be read at a rate of 202 wpm. The findings are in line with the assumption that the longer words in Dutch do not slow down silent reading relative to English and that the word length effect observed in each language is due to word processing effort and not to low-level visual factors.

Rapid online assessment of reading ability

An accurate model of the factors that contribute to individual differences in reading ability depends on data collection in large, diverse and representative samples of research participants. However, that is rarely feasible due to the constraints imposed by standardized measures of reading ability which require test administration by trained clinicians or researchers. Here we explore whether a simple, two-alternative forced choice, time limited lexical decision task (LDT), self-delivered through the web-browser, can serve as an accurate and reliable measure of reading ability. We found that performance on the LDT is highly correlated with scores on standardized measures of reading ability such as the Woodcock-Johnson Letter Word Identification test (r = 0.91, disattenuated r = 0.94). Importantly, the LDT reading ability measure is highly reliable (r = 0.97). After optimizing the list of words and pseudowords based on item response theory, we found that a short experiment with 76 trials (2-3 min) provides a reliable (r = 0.95) measure of reading ability. Thus, the self-administered, Rapid Online Assessment of Reading ability (ROAR) developed here overcomes the constraints of resource-intensive, in-person reading assessment, and provides an efficient and automated tool for effective online research into the mechanisms of reading (dis)ability.

Recognition times for 62 thousand English words: Data from the English Crowdsourcing Project

We present a new dataset of English word recognition times for a total of 62 thousand words, called the English Crowdsourcing Project. The data were collected via an internet vocabulary test in which more than one million people participated. The present dataset is limited to native English speakers. Participants were asked to indicate which words they knew. Their response times were registered, although at no point were the participants asked to respond as quickly as possible. Still, the response times correlate around .75 with the response times of the English Lexicon Project for the shared words. Also, the results of virtual experiments indicate that the new response times are a valid addition to the English Lexicon Project. This not only means that we have useful response times for some 35 thousand extra words, but we now also have data on differences in response latencies as a function of education and age.

Eye movements and mental imagery during reading of literary texts with different narrative styles

Based on Kuzmičová's [1] phenomenological typology of narrative styles, we studied the specific contributions of mental imagery to literary reading experience and to reading behavior by combining questionnaires with eye-tracking methodology. Specifically, we focused on the two main categories in Kuzmičová's [1] typology, i.e., texts dominated by an "enactive" style, and texts dominated by a "descriptive" style. "Enactive" style texts render characters interacting with their environment, and "descriptive" style texts render environments dissociated from human action. The quantitative analyses of word category distributions of two dominantly enactive and two dominantly descriptive texts indicated significant differences especially in the number of verbs, with more verbs in enactment compared to descriptive texts. In a second study, participants read two texts (one theoretically cueing descriptive imagery, the other cueing enactment imagery) while their eye movements were recorded. After reading, participants completed questionnaires assessing aspects of the reading experience generally, as well as their text-elicited mental imagery specifically. Results show that readers experienced more difficulties conjuring up mental images during reading descriptive style texts and that longer fixation duration on words were associated with enactive style text. We propose that enactive style involves more imagery processes which can be reflected in eye movement behavior.

Recognition Times for 54 Thousand Dutch Words: Data from the Dutch Crowdsourcing Project

We present a new database of Dutch word recognition times for a total of 54 thousand words, called the Dutch Crowdsourcing Project. The data were collected with an internet vocabulary test. The database is limited to native Dutch speakers. Participants were asked to indicate which words they knew. Their response times were registered, even though the participants were not asked to respond as fast as possible. Still, the response times correlate around .7 with the response times of the Dutch Lexicon Projects for shared words. Also results of virtual experiments indicate that the new response times are a valid addition to the Dutch Lexicon Projects. This not only means that we have useful response times for some 20 thousand extra words, but we now also have data on differences in response latencies as a function of education and age. The new data correspond better to word use in the Netherlands.