First-pass Fixation Research Articles

Emojis elicit semantic parafoveal-on-foveal (PoF) effects during reading

ABSTRACT Semantic parafoveal-on-foveal (PoF) effects, in which the meaning of a parafoveal word influences the processing of the foveal word, indicate that readers engage in extensive parafoveal processing of upcoming words. To test if emojis elicit semantic PoF effects, we examined eye movements while participants read sentences containing a target word (e.g., coffee in “I enjoyed my tall coffee”) that was followed either by a semantically congruent emoji (e.g., ; Alt text: “coffee emoji”), an incongruent emoji (e.g., ; Alt text: “beer mug emoji”), or no emoji. First-pass fixation durations were shorter on the foveal target word when the parafoveal emoji was semantically congruent rather than incongruent. Furthermore, the presence of an emoji (compared to no emoji) led to faster first-pass fixation durations for the preceding target word, which indicates that emojis can modulate the processing of preceding words.

An eye movement study on the mechanisms of reading fluency development

Little is known about how word recognition processes, such as decoding, change when reading fluency improves during the school year. Such knowledge may have practical importance by determining which aspects of reading are most malleable at a certain age and reading level. The development of word-recognition subprocesses of third- and fourth-grade Finnish students (n = 81) with variable reading fluency was explored from longitudinal (6-month) text reading eye-tracking data. Generic development of the word recognition system was assessed from longitudinal changes in first fixation, average refixation durations and the number of first-pass fixations. The development of orthographic word representations and decoding was studied by examining the longitudinal changes in word frequency and word length effects, respectively. According to the results, the gain in reading fluency was mainly associated with decreases in first fixation and refixation durations. These decreases, in turn, inhibited the reduction in the number of fixations. However, students who could overcome this inhibitory effect, that is, by reading both with shorter fixation durations and with fewer fixations, developed most in reading fluency. The results seem to indicate that reading fluency development is driven by increased efficiency in representing letter strings in working memory. Over time, this development may lead to fewer fixations made into a word and, thus, more letters processed during each fixation.

Cognitive Mechanisms in Temporally Controlled Rhythm Reading

Music-reading research has not yet fully grasped the variety and roles of different cognitive mechanisms that underlie visual processing of music notation; instead, studies have often explored one factor at a time. Based on prior research, we identified three possible cognitive mechanisms regarding visual processing during music reading: symbol comprehension, visual anticipation, and symbol performance demands. We also summed up the eye-movement indicators of each mechanism. We then asked which of the three cognitive mechanisms were needed to explain how note symbols are visually processed during temporally controlled rhythm reading. In our eye-tracking study, twenty-nine participants performed simple rhythm-tapping tasks, in which the relative complexity of consecutive rhythm symbols was systematically varied. Eye-time span (i.e., “looking ahead”) and first-pass fixation time at target symbols were analyzed with linear mixed-effects modeling. As a result, the mechanisms symbol comprehension and visual anticipation found support in our empirical data, whereas evidence for symbol performance demands was more ambiguous. Future studies could continue from here by exploring the interplay of these and other possible mechanisms; in general, we argue that music-reading research should begin to emphasize the systematic creating and testing of cognitive models of eye movements in music reading.

Effects of negative emotional valence on readers’ text processing and memory for text: an eye-tracking study

AbstractComprehension of stories requires readers to take the perspective of the story characters and imagine or feel their cognitive and affective states. The study investigated how variations in emotional valence within a literary text affected readers’ global text processing, as reflected in their eye movements during the first and second-pass reading, and their memory for text. Processes of reading were also examined in relation to readers’ dispositional empathy. Undergraduate students (N = 42) were assigned to an emotionally negative or neutral reading condition. They read a natural text passage from a suspense story while their ocular behavior was registered. After reading, they responded to multiple-choice questions assessing their memory of the text. Results revealed longer first-pass fixation times for content evoking negative emotions than for neutral content, which could be suggestive of a more analytical processing of the former. These effects were however local and did not impact the processing of the text at global level. Memory for the emotionally negative content was more accurate than memory for the neutral content. Dispositional empathy did not contribute to reading processes and outcome. Findings are discussed against the mixed results in the current literature and practical implications are also outlined.

Word skipping in deaf and hearing bilinguals: Cognitive control over eye movements remains with increased perceptual span

AbstractDeaf readers may have larger perceptual spans than ability-matched hearing native English readers, allowing them to read more efficiently (Belanger & Rayner, 2015). To further test the hypothesis that deaf and hearing readers have different perceptual spans, the current study uses eye-movement data from two experiments in which deaf American Sign Language–English bilinguals, hearing native English speakers, and hearing Chinese–English bilinguals read semantically unrelated sentences and answered comprehension questions after a proportion of them. We analyzed skip rates, fixation times, and accuracy on comprehension questions. In addition, we analyzed how lexical properties of words affected skipping behavior and fixation durations. Deaf readers skipped words more often than native English speakers, who skipped words more often than Chinese–English bilinguals. Deaf readers had shorter first-pass fixation times than the other two groups. All groups’ skipping behaviors were affected by lexical frequency. Deaf readers’ comprehension did not differ from hearing Chinese–English bilinguals, despite greater skipping and shorter fixation times. Overall, the eye-tracking findings align with Belanger’s word processing efficiency hypothesis. Effects of lexical frequency on skipping behavior indicated further that eye movements during reading remain under cognitive control in deaf readers.

Individual differences in first-pass fixation duration in reading are related to resting-state functional connectivity

Although there are considerable individual differences in eye movements during text reading, their neural correlates remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the first-pass fixation duration (FPFD) in natural reading and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) in the brain. We defined the brain regions associated with early visual processing, word identification, attention shifts, and oculomotor control as seed regions. The results showed that individual FPFDs were positively correlated with individual RSFCs between the early visual network, visual word form area, and eye movement control/dorsal attention network. Our findings provide new evidence on the neural correlates of eye movements in text reading and indicate that individual differences in fixation time may shape the RSFC differences in the brain through the time-on-task effect and the mechanism of Hebbian learning.

Handling of incongruences in music notation during singing or playing

During music reading, performers create expectations of the upcoming music. When these expectations are violated due to changes in the notation, performers have to adjust their reading and adapt their motor responses to match this new information. In this study, we examine how selected background, outcome, and process measures reflect the successful handling of incongruences during music reading. Twenty-four performers were tasked with singing or playing versions of “Mary had a little lamb” in two different tonalities. Some versions contained a surprising element: a bar shifted down a tone. Selected outcome and process measures, such as performance accuracy and eye-movements during music reading (eye-time span, duration of first-pass fixations and pupil dilation), were analyzed. In sum, incongruence in music notation not only increased the number of performance mistakes, but incongruent melodies also led to micro-level changes in the reading processes. We propose that understanding the cognitive strategies for successful music reading requires going beyond the more traditional outcome measures and focus on the detailed analyses of the reading process itself.

Literacy skill and intra-individual variability in eye-fixation durations during reading: Evidence from a diverse community-based adult sample.

To understand the effects of literacy on fundamental processes involved in reading, we report a secondary data analysis examining individual differences in global eye-movement measures and first-pass eye-movement distributions in a diverse sample of community-dwelling adults aged 16 to 64. Participants (n = 80) completed an assessment battery probing verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities and read simple two-sentence passages while their eye movements were recorded. Analyses were focused on characterising the effects of literacy skill on both global indices of eye-fixation distributions and distributional differences in the sensitivity to lexical features. Global reading measures showed that lower literate adults read more slowly on average. However, distributional analyses of fixation durations revealed that the first-pass fixation durations of adults with lower literacy skill were not slower in general (i.e., there was no shift in the fixation duration distribution among lower literate adults). Instead, lower literacy was associated with greater intra-individual variability in first-pass fixation durations, including an increased proportion of extremely long fixations, differentially skewing the distribution of both first-fixation and gaze durations. Exploratory repeated-measures quantile regression analyses of gaze duration revealed differentially greater influences of word length among lower literate readers and greater activation of phonological and orthographic neighbours among higher literate readers, particularly in the tail of the distribution. Collectively, these findings suggest that literacy skill in adulthood is associated with systematic differences in both global and lexically driven eye-movement control during reading.

The Influence of the German Capitalization Rules on Reading

German orthography systematically marks all nouns (even other nominalized word classes) by capitalizing their first letter.It is often claimed that readers benefit from the uppercase-letter syntactic and semantic information,which makes the processing of sentences easier (e.g Bock et al. 1985, 1989). In order to test this hypothesis, we asked 54 German readers to read single sentences systematically manipulated by a target word (N).In the experimental condition (EXP), we used semantic priming (in the following example: sick → cold) in order to build up a strong expectation of a noun, which was actually an attribute for the following noun (N+1) (translated to English e.g. sick writer had a cold (N) nose (N+1) …).The sentences in the control condition were built analogously, but word N was purposefully altered (keeping word length and frequency constant) to make its interpretation as a noun extremely unlikely (e.g. sick writer had a blue (N) nose (N+1) …). In both conditions, the sentences were presented either following German standard orthography (Cap) or in lowercase spelling (NoCap). The capitalized nouns in the EXP/Cap condition should then prevent garden-path parsing, as capital letters can be recognized parafoveally. However, in the EXP/NoCap condition, we expected a garden-path effect on word N+1 affecting first-pass fixations and the number of regressions, as the reader realizes that word N is instead an adjective. As the control condition does not include a garden path, we expected to find (small) effects of the violation of the orthographic rule in the CON/NoCap condition, but no garden-path effect.As a global result, it can be stated that reading sentences in which nouns are not marked by a majuscule slows a native German reader down significantly, but from an absolute point of view, the effect is small. Compared with other manipulations (e.g. transpositions or substitutions), a lowercase letter still represents the correct allograph in the correct position without affecting phonology. Furthermore, most German readers do have experience with other alphabetic writing systems that lack consistent noun capitalization, and in (private) digital communication lowercase nouns are quite common.Although our garden-path sentences did: last words missing, see PDF!

Reading is disrupted by intelligible background speech: Evidence from eye-tracking.

It is not well understood whether background speech affects the initial processing of words during reading or only the later processes of sentence integration. Additionally, it is not clear how eye movements support text comprehension in the face of distraction by background speech and noise. In the present research, participants read single sentences (Experiment 1) and short paragraphs (Experiments 2-3) in 4 sound conditions: silence, speech-spectrum Gaussian noise, English speech (intelligible to participants), and Mandarin speech (unintelligible to participants). Intelligible speech did not affect the lexical access of words and had a limited effect on the first-pass fixations of words. However, it led to more regressions and more rereading fixations compared with both unintelligible speech and silence. The results suggested that the distraction is mostly semantic in nature, and there was only limited evidence for a contribution of phonology. Finally, intelligible speech disrupted comprehension only when participants were prevented from rereading previous words. These findings suggest that the semantic properties of irrelevant speech can disrupt the ongoing reading process, but that this disruption occurs in the postlexical stages of reading when participants need to integrate words to form the sentence context and to construct a coherent discourse of the text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Beyond cloze probability: Parafoveal processing of semantic and syntactic information during reading

Abstract Theories of eye movement control in reading assume that early oculomotor decisions are determined by a word’s frequency and cloze probability. This assumption is challenged by evidence that readers are sensitive to the contextual plausibility of an upcoming word: First-pass fixation probability and duration are reduced when the parafoveal preview is a plausible, but unpredictable, word relative to an implausible word. The present study sought to establish whether the source of this effect is sensitivity to violations of syntactic acceptability. In two experiments, the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to compare contextually plausible previews to semantically acceptable and anomalous previews that either matched or violated syntactic rules. Results showed that readers benefited from the convergence of semantic and syntactic acceptability early enough in the timecourse of reading to affect skipping. In addition, both semantic and syntactic plausibility yielded preview effects on target fixation duration measures, providing direct evidence of parafoveal syntactic processing in reading. These results highlight the limitations of relying solely on cloze probability to index contextual influences on early lexical processing. The implications of the data for models of eye movement control and language comprehension are discussed.

Where is the locus of the lowercase advantage during sentence reading?

While most models of visual word identification and reading posit that a word's visual codes are rapidly transformed onto case-invariant representations (i.e., table and TABLE would equally activate the word unit corresponding to “table”), a number of experiments have shown a lowercase advantage in various word identification and reading tasks. In the present experiment, we examined the locus of this lowercase advantage by comparing the pattern of eye movements when reading sentences in lowercase vs. uppercase. Each sentence contained a target word that was high or low in word-frequency. Overall, results showed faster reading times for lowercase than for uppercase sentences. More important, while the word-frequency effect was sizeable in the first-fixation durations on the target word, the lowercase advantage only arose in the gaze durations (i.e., the sum of durations of first-pass fixations on the target word, including refixations). Furthermore, we found an effect of word-frequency, but not of letter case, in the first-fixation duration on target words with multiple first-pass fixations. Taken together, these findings suggest that the lowercase advantage reflects operations that do not occur in the initial contact with the lexical entries.

Effects of word frequency and contextual predictability on sentence reading in aphasia: an eye movement analysis

ABSTRACTBackground: Mild reading difficulties are a pervasive symptom of aphasia. While much research in aphasia has been devoted to the study of single word reading, little is known about the process of (silent) sentence reading. Reading research in the non-brain-damaged population has benefited from the use of eye-tracking methodology, allowing inferences on cognitive processing without participants making an articulatory response. This body of research identified two factors, which strongly influence reading at the sentence level: word frequency and contextual predictability (influence of context).Aims: The main aim of this study was to investigate whether word frequency and contextual predictability influence sentence reading by people with aphasia (PWA), in parallel to that of neurologically healthy individuals (NHI). A second aim was to examine whether readers with aphasia show individual differences in the effects, and whether these are related to their underlying language profile.Methods & Procedures: Seventeen PWA and associated mild reading difficulties and 20 NHI took part in this study. Individuals with aphasia completed a range of language assessments. For the eye-tracking experiment, participants silently read sentences that included target words varying in word frequency and predictability while their eye movements were recorded. Comprehension accuracy, fixation durations, and the probability of first-pass fixations and first-pass regressions were measured.Outcomes & Results: Eye movements by both groups were significantly influenced by word frequency and predictability, but the predictability effect was stronger for the PWA than the neurologically healthy participants. Additionally, effects of word frequency and predictability were independent for the NHI, but the individuals with aphasia showed a more interactive pattern. Correlational analyses revealed (i) a significant relationship between lexical-semantic impairments and the word frequency effect score and (ii) a marginally significant association between the sentence comprehension skills and the predictability effect score.Conclusions: Consistent with compensatory processing theories, these findings indicate that decreased reading efficiency may trigger a more interactive reading strategy that aims to compensate for poorer reading by putting more emphasis on a sentence context, particularly for low-frequency words. For those individuals who have difficulties applying the strategy automatically, using a sentence context could be a beneficial strategy to focus on in reading intervention.

Attention and eye-movement control in reading: The selective reading paradigm.

We introduced a novel paradigm for investigating covert attention and eye-movement control in reading. In 2 experiments, participants read sentence words (shown in blue color) while ignoring interleaved distractor strings (shown in orange color). Each single-line text display contained a target word and a critical distractor. Critical distractors were located just prior to the target in the text and were either words or symbol strings (e.g., @#%&). Target word availability for parafoveal processing (i.e., preview validity) was also manipulated. The results indicated much shallower processing of distractors than targets, and this pattern was more pronounced for symbol than word distractors. The influences of word frequency and fixation location on first-pass fixation durations on distractors were dramatically different than the well-documented pattern obtained in normal reading. Robust preview benefits were demonstrated both when the critical distractors were fixated and when the critical distractors were skipped. Finally, with the exception of larger preview benefits that were obtained in the condition in which the target and critical distractor were identical, the magnitude of the preview effect was largely unaffected by the nature of the critical distractor. Implications of the present paradigm and findings to the study of eye-movement control in reading are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Eye movements during reading and topic scanning: effects of word frequency.

The study examined the nature of eye movement control and word recognition during scanning for a specific topic, compared with reading for comprehension. Experimental trials included a manipulation of word frequency: the critical word was frequent (and orthographically familiar) or infrequent (2 conditions: orthographically familiar and orthographically unfamiliar). First-pass reading times showed effects of word frequency for both reading and scanning, with no interactions between word characteristics and task. Therefore, in contrast to the task of searching for a single specific word (Rayner & Fischer, 1996), there were immediate and localized influences of lexical processing when scanning for a specific topic, indicating that early word recognition processes are similar during reading and topic scanning. In contrast, there were interactions for later measures, with larger effects of word frequency during reading than scanning, indicating that reading goals can modulate later processes such as the integration of words into sentence context. Additional analyses of the distribution of first-pass single fixation durations indicated that first-pass fixations of all durations were shortened during scanning compared with reading, and reading for comprehension produced a larger subset of longer first-pass fixations compared with scanning. The implications for the nature of word recognition and eye movement control are discussed.

Learners' eye movements during construction of mechanical kinematic representations from static diagrams

We investigated the influence of numbered arrows on construction of mechanical kinematic representations by using static diagrams. Undergraduate participants viewed a two-stage diagram depicting a flushing cistern (with or without numbered arrows) and answered questions about its function, step-by-step. The arrow group demonstrated greater overall accuracy and made fewer errors on the measure of continuous relations than did the non-arrow group. The arrow group also spent more time looking at components relevant to the operational sequence and had longer first-pass fixation times and shorter saccade lengths. The non-arrow group made more saccades between the two diagrams. Analysis of transition probabilities indicated that both groups viewed components according to their continuous relations. The arrow group followed the numbered arrows whereas the unique pathway of the non-arrow group was to compare the two diagrams. These findings indicate that numbered arrows provide perceptual information but also facilitate cognitive processing.

The Time-Course of Lexical Activation in Japanese Morphographic Word Recognition: Evidence for a Character-Driven Processing Model

This lexical decision study with eye tracking of Japanese two-kanji-character words investigated the order in which a whole two-character word and its morphographic constituents are activated in the course of lexical access, the relative contributions of the left and the right characters in lexical decision, the depth to which semantic radicals are processed, and how nonlinguistic factors affect lexical processes. Mixed-effects regression analyses of response times and subgaze durations (i.e., first-pass fixation time spent on each of the two characters) revealed joint contributions of morphographic units at all levels of the linguistic structure with the magnitude and the direction of the lexical effects modulated by readers' locus of attention in a left-to-right preferred processing path. During the early time frame, character effects were larger in magnitude and more robust than radical and whole-word effects, regardless of the font size and the type of nonwords. Extending previous radical-based and character-based models, we propose a task/decision-sensitive character-driven processing model with a level-skipping assumption: Connections from the feature level bypass the lower radical level and link up directly to the higher character level.

Word length effects on novel words: Evidence from eye movements

The present study investigated the effects of word length on eye movement behavior during initial processing of novel words while reading. Adult skilled readers' eye movements were monitored as they read novel or known target words in sentence frames with neutral context preceding the target word. Comparable word length effects on all single-fixation measures for novel and known words suggested that both types of words were subject to similar initial encoding strategies. The impact of the absence of an existing lexical entry emerged in multiple first-pass fixation measures in the form of interactions between word length (long and short) and word type (novel and known). Specifically, readers spent significantly more first-pass time refixating long novel targets than short novel targets; however, the first-pass time spent refixating known controls did not differ as a function of length. Implications of these findings for models of eye movement control while reading, as well as for vocabulary acquisition in reading, are discussed.

Musical Sight-Reading Expertise: Cross Modality Investigations

It is often said that expert musicians are capable of hearing what they read and vice versa. This suggests that they are able to process and to integrate multimodal information. The study investigates this issue with an eye-tracking technique. Two groups of musicians chosen on the basis of their level of expertise (expert and non-experts) had to read excerpts of classical piano music and play them on a keyboard. In half the conditions, the participants heard the music before the reading phases. The excerpts contained suggested fingering of variable difficulty (difficult, easy, or no fingering). Analyses of first-pass fixation duration, second-pass fixation duration, probability of refixations, and playing mistakes validated the hypothesized modal independence of information among expert musicians as compared to non-experts. The results are discussed in terms of amodal memory for expert musicians, and they extend clearly our previous findings (Drai-Zerbib & Baccino, 2005). The talk will demonstrate that more experienced performers are better able to transfer learning from one modality to another, which can be in support of theoretical work by Ericsson and Kintsch (1995): more experienced performers better integrate knowledge across modalities. This view relies on the general flexibility shown in the experts' behaviour.

Sight-reading expertise: Cross-modality integration investigated using eye tracking

It is often said that experienced musicians are capable of hearing what they read (and vice versa). This suggests that they are able to process and to integrate multimodal information. The present study investigates this issue with an eye-tracking technique. Two groups of musicians chosen on the basis of their level of expertise (experts, non-experts) had to read excerpts of poorly-known classical piano music and play them on a keyboard. The experiment was run in two consecutive phases during which each excerpt was (1) read without playing and (2) sight-read (read and played). In half the conditions, the participants heard the music before the reading phases. The excerpts contained suggested fingering of variable difficulty (difficult, easy, or no fingering). Analyses of first-pass fixation duration, second-pass fixation duration, probability of re-fixation, and playing mistakes validated the hypothesized modal independence of information among expert musicians as compared to non-experts. The results are discussed in terms of the processing cues and retrieval structures postulated by Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) in their model of expert memory.