scholarly journals Eye movements and the modulation of parafoveal processing by foveal processing difficulty: A reexamination

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 891-896 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. White ◽  
Keith Rayner ◽  
Simon P. Liversedge
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 915
Author(s):  
Marianna Stella ◽  
Paul E. Engelhardt

In this study, we examined eye movements and comprehension in sentences containing a relative clause. To date, few studies have focused on syntactic processing in dyslexia and so one goal of the study is to contribute to this gap in the experimental literature. A second goal is to contribute to theoretical psycholinguistic debate concerning the cause and the location of the processing difficulty associated with object-relative clauses. We compared dyslexic readers (n = 50) to a group of non-dyslexic controls (n = 50). We also assessed two key individual differences variables (working memory and verbal intelligence), which have been theorised to impact reading times and comprehension of subject- and object-relative clauses. The results showed that dyslexics and controls had similar comprehension accuracy. However, reading times showed participants with dyslexia spent significantly longer reading the sentences compared to controls (i.e., a main effect of dyslexia). In general, sentence type did not interact with dyslexia status. With respect to individual differences and the theoretical debate, we found that processing difficulty between the subject and object relatives was no longer significant when individual differences in working memory were controlled. Thus, our findings support theories, which assume that working memory demands are responsible for the processing difficulty incurred by (1) individuals with dyslexia and (2) object-relative clauses as compared to subject relative clauses.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren V Hadley ◽  
Patrick Sturt ◽  
Tuomas Eerola ◽  
Martin J Pickering

To investigate how proficient pianists comprehend pitch relationships in written music when they first encounter it, we conducted two experiments in which proficient pianists’ eyes were tracked while they read and played single-line melodies. In Experiment 1, participants played at their own speed; in Experiment 2, they played with an external metronome. The melodies were either congruent or anomalous, with the anomaly involving one bar being shifted in pitch to alter the implied harmonic structure (e.g. non-resolution of a dominant). In both experiments, anomaly led to rapid disruption in participants’ eye movements in terms of regressions from the target bar, indicating that pianists process written pitch relationships online. This is particularly striking because in musical sight-reading, eye movement behaviour is constrained by the concurrent performance. Both experiments also showed that anomaly induced pupil dilation. Together, these results indicate that proficient pianists rapidly integrate the music that they read into the prior context and that anomalies in terms of pitch relationships lead to processing difficulty. These findings parallel those of text reading, suggesting that structural processing involves similar constraints across domains.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shun-nan Yang

In reading, text difficulties increase the duration of eye fixation and the frequency of refixation and regression. The present article reviews previous attempts to quantify these effects based on the frequency of effect theory (FET), and links these effects to results from microstimulation of primate supple-mentary eye fields. Observed stimulation effects on the latency and frequency of visually-guided saccades depend on the onset time of electric current relative to target onset, and the strength of applied current. Resultant saccade delay was only observed for those made towards a highly predictive location ipsilateral to stimulated SEF sites. These findings are inter-preted in the context of reading, where the detection of processing difficulty allows a suppression signal to supersede a forward saccade signal in a time race. This in turn permits a cognitively-based refixation/regression to be initiated in place of the suppressed forward saccade.


2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 1053-1078 ◽  
Author(s):  
Young-Suk Kim ◽  
Ralph Radach ◽  
Christian Vorstius

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (12) ◽  
pp. 2742-2751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lijing Chen ◽  
Kevin B Paterson ◽  
Xingshan Li ◽  
Lin Li ◽  
Yufang Yang

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 inter-sentence integration occurred only in causal and not adversative connective contexts, confirming that processing difficulty occurred when a contrastive relationship was not possible.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tessa Warren ◽  
Erik D. Reichle ◽  
Nikole D. Patson

The current study investigated how a post-lexical complexity manipulation followed by a lexical complexity manipulation affects eye movements during reading. Both manipulations caused disruption in all measures on the manipulated words, but the patterns of spillover differed. Critically, the effects of the two kinds of manipulations did not interact, and there was no evidence that post-lexical processing difficulty delayed lexical processing on the next word (c.f. Henderson & Ferreira, 1990). This suggests that post-lexical processing of one word and lexical processing of the next can proceed independently and likely in parallel. This finding is consistent with the assumptions of the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009).


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