No Evidence of Word-Level Uncertainty in Younger and Older Adults in Self-Paced Reading

In a self-paced reading study, we investigated whether older adults maintain a greater level of uncertainty about the identity of words in a sentence than younger adults, potentially due to deficits in visuo-perceptual processing of high-spatial frequencies associated with normal aging. In the experiment, 60 older adults and 60 younger adults read sentences in which an early preposition was either perceptually confusable with another word (at; confusable with as) or not (toward), and in which the reading of a subsequent ambiguous verb (e.g. tossed) should be affected by the confusability of the preposition, while the reading of an unambiguous verb (e.g. thrown) should not be. This design replicated that of an earlier study which found evidence in favour of participants maintaining uncertainty about the confusable preposition in go-past times during natural reading (Levy et al., 2009). However, in our study there was no evidence that either younger or older adults maintained uncertainty about the identity of the perceptually confusable preposition, such that there was no interaction between the preposition’s form and subsequent verb ambiguity in self-paced reading times, although we did observe a main effect of verb ambiguity. This represents a failure to replicate the effect observed by Levy et al. when using a different experimental paradigm, and we consider potential causes of our findings at both a methodological and theoretical level

Online representations of non-canonical sentences are more than good-enough

Proponents of good-enough processing suggest that readers often (mis)interpret certain sentences using fast-and-frugal heuristics, such that for non-canonical sentences (e.g., The dog was bitten by the man) people confuse the thematic roles of the nouns. We tested this theory by examining the effect of sentence canonicality on the reading of a follow-up sentence. In a self-paced reading study, 60 young and 60 older adults read an implausible sentence in either canonical (e.g., It was the peasant that executed the king) or non-canonical form (e.g., It was the king that was executed by the peasant), followed by a sentence that was implausible given a good-enough misinterpretation of the first sentence (e.g., Afterwards, the peasant rode back to the countryside) or a sentence that was implausible given a correct interpretation of the first sentence (e.g., Afterwards, the king rode back to his castle). We hypothesised that if non-canonical sentences are systematically misinterpreted, then sentence canonicality would differentially affect the reading of the two different follow-up types. Our data suggested that participants derived the same interpretations for canonical and non-canonical sentences, with no modulating effect of age group. Our findings suggest that readers do not derive an incorrect interpretation of non-canonical sentences during initial parsing, consistent with theories of misinterpretation effects that instead attribute these effects to post-interpretative processes.<br

A Transposed-Word Effect in Chinese Reading

Studies using a grammaticality decision task suggest surprising flexibility in the processing of the relative order of words in sentences when reading alphabetic scripts like French. In these studies, participants made rapid grammaticality decisions for ungrammatical stimuli created by transposing two adjacent words in either a grammatical or an ungrammatical base sentence, which were intermixed with equal numbers of grammatically correct stimuli. The key finding was that participants made more errors and were slower to reject transposed-word stimuli created from grammatical than ungrammatical base sentences. This suggested that flexibility in the processing of word order allowed participants to access representations of the base grammatical sentences, interfering with their decisions to correctly reject transposed-word stimuli. With the present research, we investigated if a similar transposed-word effect is observed for a non-alphabetic script (Chinese) that uses few grammatical markers and primarily conveys grammatical structure via word order. Such scripts may require stricter processing of word order during reading and so provide a strong test of the cross-linguistic generality of the transposed-word effect. We report three experiments using the same design and procedure as previous research, while varying the length of the transposed words across experiments. In all three experiments, participants made more errors and were slower to reject transposed-word stimuli derived from grammatical than ungrammatical base sentences. This replicates previous findings with alphabetic scripts and provides novel evidence for a transposed-word effect in Chinese reading. We consider the implications for models of reading in alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts.<br

Pragmatic Influences on Sentence Integration: Evidence from Eye Movements

To understand a discourse, readers must rapidly process semantic and syntactic information and extract the pragmatic information these sources imply. An important question concerns how this pragmatic information influences discourse processing in return. We address this issue in two eye movement experiments that investigate the influence of pragmatic inferences on the processing of inter-sentence integration. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants read two-sentence discourses in Chinese in which the first sentence introduced an event and the second described its consequence, where the sentences were linked using either the causal connective “suoyi” (meaning “so” or “therefore”) or not. The second sentence included a target word that was unmarked or marked using the focus particle “zhiyou” (meaning “only”) in Experiment 1a or “shi” (equivalent to an it-cleft) in Experiment 1b. These particles have the pragmatic function of implying a contrast between a target element and its alternatives. The results showed that while the causal connective facilitated the processing of unmarked words in causal contexts (a connective facilitation effect), this effect was eliminated by the presence of the focus particle. This implies that contrastive information is inferred sufficiently rapidly during reading that it can influence semantic processes involved in sentence integration. Experiment 2 showed that disruption due to conflict between the processing requirements of focus and intersentence integration occurred only in causal and not adversative connective contexts, confirming that processing difficulty occurred when a contrastive relationship was not possible

A Further Look at Ageing and Word Predictability Effects in Chinese Reading: Evidence from One-Character Words

Older adults are thought to compensate for slower lexical processing by making greater use of contextual knowledge, relative to young adults, to predict words in sentences. Accordingly, compared to young adults, older adults should produce larger contextual predictability effects in reading times and skipping rates for words. Empirical support for this account is nevertheless scarce. Perhaps the clearest evidence to date comes from a recent Chinese study showing larger word predictability effects for older adults in reading times but not skipping rates for two-character words (Zhao et al., 2019). However, one possibility is that the absence of a word-skipping effect in this experiment was due to the older readers skipping words infrequently because of difficulty processing two-character words parafoveally. We therefore took a further look at this issue, using one-character target words to boost word-skipping. Young (18-30 years) and older (65+ years) adults read sentences containing a target word that was either highly predictable or less predictable from the prior sentence context. Our results replicate the finding that older adults produce larger word predictability effects in reading times but not word-skipping, despite high skipping rates. We discuss these findings in relation to ageing effects on reading indifferent writing systems

A Transposed-Word Effect Across Space and Time: Evidence from Chinese

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Similarity between Referents Constrains the Processing of Contrastive Focus during Reading

Contrastive focus implies a contrast between two elements. However, it is unclear whether and how any interplay between such a contrast and similarity between potentially contrasting elements might affect focus processing. Accordingly, we report an eye movement experiment investigating this issue. The experiment used a background story to introduce eight characters whose social identities were manipulated to be similar or dissimilar. Participants first read this background story, then a series of two-sentence discourses while their eye movements were recorded. Each discourse referred to two characters from the passage who had either similar or dissimilar identities, with one (the target character) either focused using the Chinese particle zhiyou (meaning only) or unfocused. The results showed a typical focus facilitation effect, such that target character names were processed more quickly when focused than unfocused. We also observed a main effect of the similarity / dissimilarly of characters and, crucially, an interaction between this variable and focus. This interaction was due to slower processing of a post-target region when the target character was focused and the two characters had similar rather than dissimilar identities, but no such effect when the target character was unfocused. The findings suggest that establishing a contrast between referents is effortful during reading when these have similar rather than dissimilar social identities and so are more difficult to differentiate. The distinctiveness of referents in a discourse context may therefore constrain the establishment of contrastive focus during reading. We discuss these findings in relation to current theories of focus interpretation

Effects of Word Predictability on Eye Movements during Arabic Reading

Contextual predictability influences both the probability and duration of eye fixations on words when reading Latinate alphabetic scripts like English and German. However, it is unknown whether word predictability influences eye movements in reading similarly for Semitic languages like Arabic, which are alphabetic languages with very different visual and linguistic characteristics. Such knowledge is nevertheless important for establishing the generality of mechanisms of eye-movement control across different alphabetic writing systems. Accordingly, we investigated word predictability effects in Arabic in two eye-movement experiments. Both produced shorter fixation times for words with high compared to low predictability, consistent with previous findings. Predictability did not influence skipping probabilities for (four- to eight-letter) words of varying length and morphological complexity (Experiment 1). However, it did for short (three- to four-letter) words with simpler structures (Experiment 2). We suggest that word-skipping is reduced, and affected less by contextual predictability, in Arabic compared to Latinate alphabetic reading, because of specific orthographic and morphological characteristics of the Arabic script.</p

Eye movements of developing Chinese readers: Effects of word frequency and predictability.

The frequency and contextual predictability of words have a fundamental role in determining where and when the eyes move during reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. However, surprising little is known about the how the influence of these variables develops, although this is important for understanding how children learn to read. Accordingly, to gain insight into their use during reading development, we examined the effects of orthogonally manipulating the frequency and contextual predictability of a specific target word in sentences on the eye movements of developing Chinese readers. The findings show that both factors influence eye movement behavior associated with the early processing of words during reading, but that effects of contextual predictability are mediated by the lexical frequency of words. We consider these effects in the context of visual and linguistic demands associated with reading Chinese and in relation to current models of eye movement control during reading.</p

Flexible Parafoveal Encoding of Character Order Supports Word Predictability Effects in Chinese Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements

Several eye movement studies have revealed flexibility in the parafoveal processing of character order information in Chinese reading. In particular, studies show that processing a two-character word in a sentence benefits more from parafoveal preview of a nonword created by transposing rather than replacing its two characters. One issue that has not been investigated is whether the contextual predictability of the target word influences this processing of character order information. However, such a finding would provide novel evidence for an early influence of context on lexical processing in Chinese reading. Accordingly, we investigated this issue in an eye movement experiment using the boundary paradigm and sentences containing two-character target words with high or low contextual predictability. Prior to the reader’s gaze crossing an invisible boundary, each target word was shown normally (i.e., a valid preview) or with its two characters either transposed or replaced by unrelated characters to create invalid nonword previews. These invalid previews reverted to the target word once the reader’s gaze crossed the invisible boundary. The results showed larger preview benefits(i.e., a decrease in fixation times)for target words following transposed-character than substituted-character previews, revealing a transposed-character effect similar to that in previous research. In addition, a word predictability effect (shorter fixation times for words with high than low predictability) was observed following both valid and transposed-character previews, but not substituted-character previews. The findings therefore reveal that context can influence an early stage of lexical processing in Chinese reading during which character order is processed flexibly.</p