Word Recognition During Reading

Four eye-tracking experiments were conducted to understand how sentential context and lexical factors affect word recognition during reading. Experiment 1 examined whether readers use preceding sentential context to pre-activate a specific word and whether any processing cost is found when the prediction is wrong. The results showed that readers obtain a processing benefit when the target word was expected based on a strongly constraining context, whereas they experienced a processing cost when the target word was not the expected one even though it was semantically plausible into the context. Experiment 2 investigated how word recognition is influenced by prior activation of lexical information due to word repetition within a sentence. The result showed that gaze duration on a target word with many neighbor words was shorter relative to a target word with few neighbors but only when the target word was repeated; when the target word was not repeated gaze duration did not differ as a function of neighborhood size. This interaction indicates that word recognition at the orthographic level can be influenced by repetition-induced lexical activation. The null effect of the orthographic neighborhood size in the unrepeated condition was unexpected. Previous studies using the lexical-decision task have consistently shown a facilitative effect of orthographic neighborhood size. Therefore, Experiment 3 and 4 studied the role of neighborhood size during sentence reading with better controlled stimuli. The results showed an opposite pattern of results between gaze duration and word skipping such that gaze duration was longer when a word had many neighbors than when one had few neighbors, whereas skipping rates were higher in the many neighbor condition than in the few condition. The results indicate that having many neighbor words inhibits processes responsible for precise recognition of a word, but that it facilitates word skipping by increasing global lexical activity.Doctor of Philosoph

Parafoveal processing and word skipping during reading

In this study, two questions related to eye movements during reading and word recognition were addressed: 1) Does the process of word recognition influence eye movements during reading? 2) If so, to what extent does lexical processing influence word skipping? Experiment 1 showed a greater rate of skipping for high-frequency target words than low-frequency target words when full-parafoveal preview of those target words was available but not when parafoveal preview consisted of nonwords created by transposing two word-internal letters of the target. Experiment 2 investigated further how lexical status influences eye movements during reading by manipulating word repetition and parafoveal preview. The results showed that lexicality of letter string in parafoveal preview is a crucial determinant of word skipping. These results support models of reading in which control of eye movements is strongly influenced by word recognition and where lexical processing occurs for one input word at a time

The neural substrates of natural reading: a comparison of normal and nonword text using eyetracking and fMRI

Most previous studies investigating the neural correlates of reading have presented text using serial visual presentation (SVP), which may not fully reflect the underlying processes of natural reading. In the present study, eye movements and BOLD data were collected while subjects either read normal paragraphs naturally or moved their eyes through paragraphs of pseudo-text (pronounceable pseudowords or consonant letter strings) in two pseudo-reading conditions. Eye movement data established that subjects were reading and scanning the stimuli normally. A conjunction fMRI analysis across natural- and pseudo-reading showed that a common eye-movement network including frontal eye fields, supplementary eye fields, and intraparietal sulci was activated, consistent with previous studies using simpler eye movement tasks. In addition, natural reading versus pseudo-reading showed different patterns of brain activation: normal reading produced activation in a well-established language network that included superior temporal gyrus/sulcus, middle temporal gyrus, angular gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and middle frontal gyrus, whereas pseudo-reading produced activation in an attentional network that included anterior/posterior cingulate and parietal cortex. These results are consistent with results found in previous single-saccade eye movement tasks and SVP reading studies, suggesting that component processes of eye-movement control and language processing observed in past fMRI research generalize to natural reading. The results also suggest that combining eyetracking and fMRI is a suitable method for investigating the component processes of natural reading in fMRI research

Development and Assessment of the Korean Author Recognition Test

This research reports the development and evaluation of a Korean Author Recognition Test (KART), designed as a measure of print exposure among young adults. Based on the original, English-language version of the Author Recognition Test (ART), the KART demonstrates significant relationships with offline measures of language ability, as well as online measures of word recognition. In particular, KART scores were related to participants\u27 responses on the Comparative Reading Habits (CRH) checklist, suggesting that KART is a valid measure of print exposure. In addition, KART scores showed reliable correlations with offline measures of vocabulary knowledge and language comprehension. Finally, results from a lexical decision task showed that KART scores modulated the magnitude of the word familiarity effect, such that the effect was smaller for participants with higher KART scores The results suggest that the ART is a language-universal task that measures print exposure, which is useful for explaining individual differences in language comprehension abilities and word recognition processes

Lexical Predictability during Natural Reading: Effects of Surprisal and Entropy Reduction

What are the effects of word‐by‐word predictability on sentence processing times during the natural reading of a text? Although information complexity metrics such as surprisal and entropy reduction have been useful in addressing this question, these metrics tend to be estimated using computational language models, which require some degree of commitment to a particular theory of language processing. Taking a different approach, this study implemented a large‐scale cumulative cloze task to collect word‐by‐word predictability data for 40 passages and compute surprisal and entropy reduction values in a theory‐neutral manner. A separate group of participants read the same texts while their eye movements were recorded. Results showed that increases in surprisal and entropy reduction were both associated with increases in reading times. Furthermore, these effects did not depend on the global difficulty of the text. The findings suggest that surprisal and entropy reduction independently contribute to variation in reading times, as these metrics seem to capture different aspects of lexical predictability

Word skipping during sentence reading: effects of lexicality on parafoveal processing

Two experiments examined how lexical status affects the targeting of saccades during reading by using the boundary technique to vary independently the content of a letter string when seen in parafoveal preview and when directly fixated. Experiment 1 measured the skipping rate for a target word embedded in a sentence under three parafoveal preview conditions: full preview (e.g. brain-brain), pseudohomophone preview (e.g. brane-brain), and orthographic nonword control preview (e.g. brant-brain); in the first condition the preview string was always an English word while in the second and third conditions it was always a nonword. Experiment 2 investigated three conditions where the preview string was always a word: full preview (e.g. beach-beach), homophone preview (e.g. beech-beach), and orthographic control preview (e.g. bench-beach). None of the letter string manipulations used to create the preview conditions in the experiments disrupted sub-lexical orthographic or phonological patterns. In Experiment 1 higher skipping rates were observed for the full (lexical) preview condition, which consisted of a word, compared to the nonword preview conditions (pseudohomophone and orthographic-control). In contrast Experiment 2 showed no difference in skipping rates across the three types of lexical preview conditions (full, homophone and orthographic control), though preview type did influence reading times. This pattern indicates that skipping depends not only on the presence of disrupted sub-lexical patterns of orthography or phonology but is also critically dependent on processes that are sensitive to the lexical status of letter strings in the parafovea

Coordination of word recognition and oculomotor control during reading: The role of implicit lexical decisions.

The coordination of word-recognition and oculomotor processes during reading was evaluated in two eye-tracking experiments that examined how word skipping, where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading, is affected by the lexical status of a letter string in the parafovea and ease of recognizing that string. Ease of lexical recognition was manipulated through target-word frequency (Experiment 1) and through repetition priming between prime-target pairs embedded in a sentence (Experiment 2). Using the gaze-contingent boundary technique the target word appeared in the parafovea either with full preview or with transposed-letter (TL) preview. The TL preview strings were nonwords in Experiment 1 (e.g., bilnk created from the target blink), but were words in Experiment 2 (e.g., sacred created from the target scared). Experiment 1 showed greater skipping for high-frequency than low-frequency target words in the full preview condition but not in the TL preview (nonword) condition. Experiment 2 showed greater skipping for target words that repeated an earlier prime word than for those that did not, with this repetition priming occurring both with preview of the full target and with preview of the target’s TL neighbor word. However, time to progress from the word after the target was greater following skips of the TL preview word, whose meaning was anomalous in the sentence context, than following skips of the full preview word whose meaning fit sensibly into the sentence context. Together, the results support the idea that coordination between word-recognition and oculomotor processes occurs at the level of implicit lexical decisions