Eye Movements In Reading Research Articles

Erratum to: The effect of character contextual diversity on eye movements in Chinese sentence reading.

Erratum to: The effect of character contextual diversity on eye movements in Chinese sentence reading.

The effect of spectacle treatment in patients with mild traumatic brain injury: a pilot study

BackgroundVisual symptoms and dysfunctions may be a part of the long‐term issues following mild traumatic brain injury. These issues may have an impact on near work and reading, and thus affect activities of daily life and the ability to return to work. The purpose of the study was to assess the effect of spectacle treatment on near work‐related visual symptoms, visual function and reading performance in patients with persisting symptoms after mild traumatic brain injury.MethodsEight patients with persisting symptoms after mild traumatic brain injury and anomalies of binocular function were included. Binocular function, visual symptoms and reading performance were assessed before and after spectacle treatment. Reading eye movements were recorded with eye tracking.ResultsFour patients showed a considerable symptom reduction along with minor improvement in clinical visual measures. Reading performance improved in four patients; however, the relationship to symptom reduction was inconsistent. The improvement was correlated to reduced average number of fixations per word (r = −0.89, p = 0.02), reduced proportion of regressive saccades (r = −0.93, p = 0.01) and a significant increase of mean progressive saccade length (p = 0.03).ConclusionThis pilot study found that spectacle treatment, specifically directed at optimising near task visual function, significantly reduced symptoms in 50 per cent of patients and improved reading performance in 50 per cent. While promising, lack of placebo control and lack of correlation between reading performance and symptom improvements means we cannot decipher mechanisms without further study.

The effect of character contextual diversity on eye movements in Chinese sentence reading.

Chen, Huang, et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2017) found that when reading two-character Chinese words embedded in sentence contexts, contextual diversity (CD), a measure of the proportion of texts in which a word appears, affected fixation times to words. When CD is controlled, however, frequency did not affect reading times. Two experiments used the same experimental designs to examine whether there are frequency effects of the first character of two-character words when CD is controlled. In Experiment 1, yoked triples of characters from a control group, a group matched for character CD that is lower in frequency, and a group matched in frequency with the control group, but higher in character CD, were rotated through the same sentence frame. In Experiment 2 each character from a larger set was embedded in a separate sentence frame, allowing for a larger difference in log frequency compared to Experiment 1 (0.8 and 0.4, respectively). In both experiments, early and later eye movement measures were significantly shorter for characters with higher CD than for characters with lower CD, with no effects of character frequency. These results place constraints on models of visual word recognition and suggest ways in which Chinese can be used to tease apart the nature of context effects in word recognition and language processing in general.

Scotoma Visibility and Reading Rate with Bilateral Central Scotomas.

In this experiment, we tested whether perceptually delineating the scotoma location and border with a gaze contingent polygon overlay improves reading speed and reading eye movements in patients with bilateral central scotomas. Eight patients with age-related macular degeneration and bilateral central scotomas read aloud MNRead style sentences with their preferred eye. Eye movement signals from an EyeLink II eyetracker were used to create a gaze contingent display in which a polygon overlay delineating the area of the patient's scotoma was superimposed on the text during 18 of the 42 trials. Blocks of six trials with the superimposed polygon were alternated with blocks of six trials without the polygon. Reading speed and reading eye movements were assessed before and after the subjects practiced reading with the polygon overlay. All of the subjects but one showed an increase in reading speed. A paired-samples t-test for the group as a whole revealed a statistically significant increase in reading speed of 0.075 ± 0.060 (SD) log wpm after reading with the superimposed polygon. Individual subjects demonstrated significant changes in reading eye movements, with the greatest number of subjects demonstrating a shift in the average vertical fixation locus. Across subjects, there was no significant difference between the initial and final reading eye movements in terms of saccades per second, average fixation duration, average amplitude of saccades, or proportion of non-horizontal saccades. The improvement in reading speed (0.075 log wpm or 19%) over the short experimental session for the majority of subjects indicates that making the scotoma location more visible is potentially beneficial for improving reading speed in patients with bilateral central scotomas. Additional research to examine the efficacy of more extended training with this paradigm is warranted.

The predictability effect on eye movement in reading Korean dative sentences

Yun and Hong (2014) demonstrated the effect of role predictability and word predictability in the processing of Korean dative sentences. We aimed to investigate the nature of predictability effect that Yun and Hong observed, in particular, to explore whether the effect would reflect the early stage or the late stage of processing by observing readers` eye movement in reading. The significant effect of role predictability and word predictability were addictively observed in the measurement of early processing (i.e., first pass reading times) but not in the measurement of late processing (i.e., regression rates). Of interest, the effect of word predictability was mainly based on the processing of words of low role predictability. Our results indicate that when a thematic role for an upcoming word is not highly expected, word predictability contributes to the reduction of readers` integration difficulty, in a way that more predictable word is easier to be integrated into a sentence. We discuss our results in terms of Staub`s (2015) theoretical conclusion that the predictability effect depends on the process that multiple words are activated at once at graded degrees from the early stage. (Gachon University and Konkuk University)

Evidence for a differential interference of noise in sub-lexical and lexical reading routes in healthy participants and dyslexics

ABSTRACTThe ineffective exclusion of surrounding noise has been proposed to underlie the reading deficits in developmental dyslexia. However, previous studies supporting this hypothesis focused on low-level visual tasks, providing only an indirect link of noise interference on reading processes. In this study, we investigated the effect of noise on regular, irregular, and pseudoword reading in 23 dyslexic children and 26 age- and IQ-matched controls, by applying the white noise displays typically used to validate this theory to a lexical decision task. Reading performance and eye movements were measured. Results showed that white noise did not consistently affect dyslexic readers more than typical readers. Noise affected more dyslexic than typical readers in terms of reading accuracy, but it affected more typical than dyslexic readers in terms of response time and eye movements (number of fixations and regressions). Furthermore, in typical readers, noise affected more the speed of reading of pseudowords than real words. These results suggest a particular impact of noise on the sub-lexical reading route where attention has to be deployed to individual letters. The use of a lexical route would reduce the effect of noise. A differential impact of noise between words and pseudowords may therefore not be evident in dyslexic children if they are not yet proficient in using the lexical route. These findings indicate that the type of reading stimuli and consequent reading strategies play an important role in determining the effects of noise interference in reading processing and should be taken into account by further studies.

Word Skipping in Reading English as a Foreign Language: Evidence from Eye Tracking

Word Skipping in Reading English as a Foreign Language: Evidence from Eye Tracking

False Positives and Other Statistical Errors in Standard Analyses of Eye Movements in Reading.

In research on eye movements in reading, it is common to analyze a number of canonical dependent measures to study how the effects of a manipulation unfold over time. Although this gives rise to the well-known multiple comparisons problem, i.e. an inflated probability that the null hypothesis is incorrectly rejected (Type I error), it is accepted standard practice not to apply any correction procedures. Instead, there appears to be a widespread belief that corrections are not necessary because the increase in false positives is too small to matter. To our knowledge, no formal argument has ever been presented to justify this assumption. Here, we report a computational investigation of this issue using Monte Carlo simulations. Our results show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, false positives are increased to unacceptable levels when no corrections are applied. Our simulations also show that counter-measures like the Bonferroni correction keep false positives in check while reducing statistical power only moderately. Hence, there is little reason why such corrections should not be made a standard requirement. Further, we discuss three statistical illusions that can arise when statistical power is low, and we show how power can be improved to prevent these illusions. In sum, our work renders a detailed picture of the various types of statistical errors than can occur in studies of reading behavior and we provide concrete guidance about how these errors can be avoided.

Screening for Dyslexia Using Eye Tracking during Reading.

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental reading disability estimated to affect 5–10% of the population. While there is yet no full understanding of the cause of dyslexia, or agreement on its precise definition, it is certain that many individuals suffer persistent problems in learning to read for no apparent reason. Although it is generally agreed that early intervention is the best form of support for children with dyslexia, there is still a lack of efficient and objective means to help identify those at risk during the early years of school. Here we show that it is possible to identify 9–10 year old individuals at risk of persistent reading difficulties by using eye tracking during reading to probe the processes that underlie reading ability. In contrast to current screening methods, which rely on oral or written tests, eye tracking does not depend on the subject to produce some overt verbal response and thus provides a natural means to objectively assess the reading process as it unfolds in real-time. Our study is based on a sample of 97 high-risk subjects with early identified word decoding difficulties and a control group of 88 low-risk subjects. These subjects were selected from a larger population of 2165 school children attending second grade. Using predictive modeling and statistical resampling techniques, we develop classification models from eye tracking records less than one minute in duration and show that the models are able to differentiate high-risk subjects from low-risk subjects with high accuracy. Although dyslexia is fundamentally a language-based learning disability, our results suggest that eye movements in reading can be highly predictive of individual reading ability and that eye tracking can be an efficient means to identify children at risk of long-term reading difficulties.

The effect of contextual diversity on eye movements in Chinese sentence reading.

Recent studies have demonstrated that when contextual diversity is controlled token word frequency has minimal effects on visual word recognition. With the exception of a single experiment by Plummer, Perea, & Rayner (2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 275-283), those studies have examined words in isolation. The current studies address two potential limitations of the Plummer et al. experiment. First, because Plummer et al. used different sentence frames for words in different conditions, the effects might be due to uncontrolled differences on the sentences. Second, the absence of a frequency effect might be attributed to comparing higher and lower frequency words within a limited range. Three eye-tracking experiments examined effects of contextual diversity and frequency on Mandarin Chinese, a logographic language, for words embedded in the normal sentences. In Experiment 1, yoked words were rotated through the same sentence frame. Experiments 2a and 2b used a design similar to Plummer et al., which allows use of a larger sample of words to compare results between experiments with a smaller and larger difference in log frequency (0.41 and 1.06, respectively). In all three experiments, first-pass and later eye movement measures were significantly shorter for targets with higher contextual diversity than for targets with lower contextual diversity, with no effects of frequency.

Evidence for a global oculomotor program in reading.

Recent corpus studies of eye-movements in reading revealed a substantial increase in saccade amplitudes and fixation durations as the eyes move over the first words of a sentence. This start-up effect suggests a global oculomotor program, which operates on the level of an entire line, in addition to the well-established local programs operating within the visual span. The present study investigates the nature of this global program experimentally and examines whether the start-up effect is predicated on generic visual or specific linguistic characteristics and whether it is mainly reflected in saccade amplitudes, fixation durations or both measures. Eye movements were recorded while 38 participants read (a) normal sentences, (b) sequences of randomly shuffled words and (c) sequences of z-strings. The stimuli were, therefore, similar in their visual features, but varied in the amount of syntactic and lexical information. Further, the stimuli were composed of words or strings that either varied naturally in length (Nonequal condition) or were all restricted to a specific length within a sentence (Equal). The latter condition constrained the variability of saccades and served to dissociate effects of word position in line on saccade amplitudes and fixation durations. A robust start-up effect emerged in saccade amplitudes in all Nonequal stimuli, and-in an attenuated form-in Equal sentences. A start-up effect in single fixation durations was observed in Nonequal and Equal normal sentences, but not in z-strings. These findings support the notion of a global oculomotor program in reading particularly for the spatial characteristics of motor planning, which rely on visual rather than linguistic information.

Study of the relationship between eye movements and the geometry of fovea

The objective of this research was to compare the features of the shape of the foveolar area with the characteristics of eye movements in reading. To measure the size of the fovea, we used the method of optical coherence tomography of the retina. Based on this method, the diameter of the upper part of fovea (fovea diameter) and fovea bottom (foveola diameter) were determined. We found a negative correlation between the fovea diameter and fixation duration and positive correlations at the level of tendency between the foveola diameter and the number of saccades performed and between the foveola diameter and the number of characters captured by eye per fixation.

Effect of chromatic filters on visual performance in individuals with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI): A pilot study

PurposeSpectral filters have been used clinically in patients with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). However, they have not been formally assessed using objective techniques in this population. Thus, the aim of the present pilot study was to determine the effect of spectral filters on reading performance and visuo-cortical responsivity in adults with mTBI. Methods12 adults with mTBI/concussion were tested. All reported photosensitivity and reading problems. They were compared to 12 visually-normal, asymptomatic adults. There were several test conditions: three luminance-matched control filters (gray neutral density, blue, and red), the patient-selected ‘precision tint lens’ that provided the most comfort and clarity of text using the Intuitive Colorimeter System, and baseline without any filters. The Visagraph was used to assess reading eye movements and reading speed objectively with each filter. In addition, both the amplitude and latency of the visual-evoked potential (VEP) were assessed with the same filters. ResultsThere were few significant group differences in either the reading-related parameters or VEP latency for any of the test filter conditions. Subjective improvements were noted in most with mTBI (11/12). ConclusionsThe majority of patients with mTBI chose a tinted filter that resulted in increased visual comfort. While significant findings based on the objective testing were found for some conditions, the subjective results suggest that precision tints should be considered as an adjunctive treatment in patients with mTBI and photosensitivity.

Child readers’ eye movements in reading Thai

It has recently been found that adult native readers of Thai, an alphabetic scriptio continua language, engage similar oculomotor patterns as readers of languages written with spaces between words; despite the lack of inter-word spaces, first and last characters of a word appear to guide optimal placement of Thai readers’ eye movements, just to the left of word-centre. The issue addressed by the research described here is whether eye movements of Thai children also show these oculomotor patterns. Here the effect of first and last character frequency and word frequency on the eye movements of 18 Thai children when silently reading normal unspaced and spaced text was investigated. Linear mixed-effects model analyses of viewing time measures (first fixation duration, single fixation duration, and gaze duration) and of landing site location revealed that Thai children’s eye movement patterns were similar to their adult counterparts. Both first character frequency and word frequency played important roles in Thai children’s landing sites; children tended to land their eyes further into words, close to the word centre, if the word began with higher frequency first characters, and this effect was facilitated in higher frequency words. Spacing also facilitated more effective use of first character frequency and it also assisted in decreasing children’s viewing time. The use of last-character frequency appeared to be a later development, affecting mainly single fixation duration and gaze duration. In general, Thai children use the same oculomotor control mechanisms in reading spaced and unspaced texts as Thai adults, who in turn have similar oculomotor control as readers of spaced texts. Thus, it appears that eye movements in reading converge on the optimal landing site using whatever cues are available to guide such placement.

The Influence of Content Meaningfulness on Eye Movements across Tasks: Evidence from Scene Viewing and Reading.

The present study investigated the influence of content meaningfulness on eye-movement control in reading and scene viewing. Texts and scenes were manipulated to make them uninterpretable, and then eye-movements in reading and scene-viewing were compared to those in pseudo-reading and pseudo-scene viewing. Fixation durations and saccade amplitudes were greater for pseudo-stimuli. The effect of the removal of meaning was seen exclusively in the tail of the fixation duration distribution in both tasks, and the size of this effect was the same across tasks. These findings suggest that eye movements are controlled by a common mechanism in reading and scene viewing. They also indicate that not all eye movements are responsive to the meaningfulness of stimulus content. Implications for models of eye movement control are discussed.

Sensitivity to verb-argument anomalies in aphasia is driven by event knowledge

Sensitivity to verb-argument anomalies in aphasia is driven by event knowledge

World knowledge affects prediction as quickly as selectional restrictions: evidence from the visual world paradigm

ABSTRACTThere has been considerable debate regarding the question of whether linguistic knowledge and world knowledge are separable and used differently during processing or not (Hagoort et al, 2004). Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension (Matsuki et al, 2011). Event-based plausibility immediately influences on-line language comprehension (Paczynski et al, 2012). Multiple influences of semantic memory on sentence processing: Distinct effects of semantic relatedness on violations of real-world event/state knowledge and animacy selection restrictions (Warren et al, 2007). Investigating effects of selectional restriction violations and plausibility violation severity on eye movements in reading. Previous investigations into this question have provided mixed evidence as to whether violations of selectional restrictions are detected earlier than violations of world knowledge. We report a visual world eye-tracking study comparing the timing of facilitation contributed by selectional restrictions vs. world knowledge. College-aged adults (n = 36) viewed photographs of natural scenes while listening to sentences. Participants anticipated upcoming direct objects similarly regardless of whether facilitation was provided by only world knowledge or a combination of selectional restrictions and world knowledge. These results suggest that selectional restrictions are not available earlier in comprehension than world knowledge.

Vision and Reading Deficits in Post-Concussion Patients: A Retrospective Analysis

The prevalence of vision deficits in the pediatric/young adult concussion population in the private optometric practice setting remains unknown. Thus, a retrospective chart review in this area was conducted in the practice of the first author. Twenty-five consecutive patients with a medical diagnosis of concussion received a comprehensive vision and ocular health examination, which also included an objectively-based Visagraph reading assessment and clinical vergence/accommodative facility testing. Three primary categories of oculomotor-based deficits were found: convergence insufficiency (56%), accommodative insufficiency (76%), and oculomotor-based reading dysfunctions (68-82%). The most common symptom was headaches (84%), with 25% of the symptoms related to reading. 68% (15/22) were categorized as reading at least 2 grade levels below their current school grade level for reading eye movements based on the Visagraph findings. These overall findings are consistent with the general oculomotor-based/reading findings in the concussion/mTBI literature. The present results have important practical ramifications regarding the importance of preconcussion baseline oculomotor and Visagraph testing, as well as post-concussion follow-up testing, to help assess a student’s ability to return-to-learn (RTL).

Visual-orthographic complexity of Akshara and eye movements in reading: A study in Kannada alphasyllabary

Eye movement patterns in reading vary across languages depending upon the grain size and transparency of the orthography. We studied eye movements in reading Kannada akshara, an alphasyllabary used in South India. Kannada is a very transparent orthography in which the complexity of script layout of orthographic syllables, called akshara, increases when vowel ligatures or more consonants are incorporated into them. There are three levels of such akshara complexity in Kannada: akshara representing vowel alone or a consonant with inherent shwa (basic letters), akshara representing consonant and vowel ligature combination, and akshara representing conjunct consonants and vowel combination. We recorded eye movement patterns from 51 children—17 typically developing (TD), 17 with reading disability (RD) and 17 reading-level-matched typically developing readers (RL) when reading sentences made of different types of akshara. The results showed that the visual-orthographic complexity of akshara in conjunct consonan...

The effect of plausibility on eye movements in reading: Testing E-Z Reader’s null predictions

The E-Z Reader 10 model of eye movements in reading (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009) posits that the process of word identification strictly precedes the process of integration of a word into its syntactic and semantic context. The present study reports a single large-scale (N = 112) eyetracking experiment in which the frequency and plausibility of a target word in each sentence were factorially manipulated. The results were consistent with E-Z Reader’s central predictions: frequency but not plausibility influenced the probability that the word was skipped over by the eyes rather than directly fixated, and the two variables had additive, not interactive, effects on all reading time measures. Evidence in favor of null effects and null interactions was obtained by computing Bayes factors, using the default priors and sampling methods for ANOVA models implemented by Rouder, Morey, Speckman, and Province (2012). The results suggest that though a word’s plausibility may have a measurable influence as early as the first fixation duration on the target word, in fact plausibility may be influencing only a post-lexical processing stage, rather than lexical identification itself.