Abstract
Although 10–15% of eye-movements during reading are regressions, we still know little about the information that is processed during regressive episodes. Here, we report an eye-movement study that uses what we call the reverse boundary change technique to examine the processing of lexical-semantic information during regressions, and to establish the role of this information during recovery from processing difficulty. In the critical condition of the experiment, an initially implausible sentence (e.g., There was an old house that John had ridden when he was a boy) was rendered plausible by changing a context word (house) to a lexical neighbor (horse) using a gaze-contingent display change, at the point where the reader's gaze crossed an invisible boundary further on in the sentence. Due to the initial implausibility of the sentence, readers often launched regressions from the later part of the sentence. However, despite this initial processing difficulty, reading was facilitated, relative to a condition where the display change did not occur (i.e., the word house remained on screen throughout the trial). This result implies that the relevant lexical semantic information was processed during the regression, and was used to aid recovery from the initial processing difficulty.
Highlights
A reader’s gaze predominantly moves forwards through the text, approximately 10–15% of eye-movements during reading are regressions (Rayner, 1998)
This is in contrast to the traditional boundary change paradigm, where display changes may occur on a word while it is currently being fixated
In the beginning of this paper, we posed several questions about regressions; what is the role of regressions, when do they take place, and how can this process be measured? Previous research indicated that regressions facilitate comprehension (Schotter et al, 2014), that information processed during regressions leads to memory update (Booth and Weger, 2013), and that readers fixate linguistically relevant information during regressions (Mitchell et al, 2008; von der Marlsburg and Vasishth, 2011, 2013)
Summary
A reader’s gaze predominantly moves forwards through the text, approximately 10–15% of eye-movements during reading are regressions (Rayner, 1998). The reader may initially fail to integrate the current word into the sentence, and regressions will allow reprocessing of the previous context, for example, to compute an alternative analysis in the case of a garden path sentence (Frazier and Rayner, 1982). Another possibility is that a new word that poorly fits the context may decrease the reader’s confidence about the preceding text, and regressions may provide a useful means to confirm the relevant properties of the context (Levy et al, 2009; Bicknell and Levy, 2011). As we discuss below, it has been proposed that regressions may serve to postpone further input in situations of increased processing load (Blanchard and Iran-Nejad, 1987; Mitchell et al, 2008), in which case, the main purpose of regressions is not to re-read previous input, but to delay moving
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