Sentence Reading Research Articles

Parafoveal grouping of characters facilitates encoding of morphological hierarchical structure during sentence reading

Parafoveal grouping of characters facilitates encoding of morphological hierarchical structure during sentence reading

Word order effects in sentence reading.

Word order effects in sentence reading.

Is Direction-Specific Reading Experience Transferrable Across Orthographies? Eye Tracking Evidence from Chinese-Japanese Bilinguals

ABSTRACT Purpose Writing systems adopt different directions of texts. While most scripts are written exclusively horizontally rightwards, other text orientations can also be found. In some rare cases such as Japanese, texts can be written horizontally and vertically, offering a unique opportunity to investigate cognitive processes in different reading directions. How readers’ direction-specific reading and perceptual experiences in their first-language influence their second-language reading remains to be explored. Method The present study recruited native Chinese university students (n = 65, mean age = 22.1, 47 females and 18 males), who were accustomed only to horizontal texts, and tested their eye movements during the reading of Japanese sentences printed in horizontal and vertical directions. In addition, their Japanese language proficiency was evaluated in an offline test. Results The readers showed an overall higher efficiency when reading horizontally than when reading vertically. However, with an increase of Japanese proficiency, they demonstrated a faster development trend in eye movements for vertical reading than for horizontal. Conclusion Direction-specific reading and perceptual experience, beyond vocabulary knowledge, is another factor to determine reading efficiency. Such experience is transferrable across orthographies, suggesting that the first language environment plays a critical role in second-language acquisition.

Cognate facilitation in different-script trilinguals as a function of task demands.

The present study examined how Arabic-Hebrew-English trilinguals process double and triple cognate words in their third language (L3) across three different experiments. Utilizing the same set of critical cognate items, trilinguals completed a semantic relatedness task, a lexical decision task, or a sentence reading eye-tracking task. The results revealed a significant cognate facilitation effect in the semantic relatedness task, with no consistent differences in the magnitude of facilitation across double and triple cognates, suggesting that both L1 and L2 are activated during L3 processing. In contrast, no cognate facilitation was observed in the lexical decision or the sentence reading tasks. These results demonstrate that the cognate facilitation is task-dependent, varying with the degree to which meaning is activated, sentential context is available, and orthographic cues are involved. Critically, the study extends findings of phonologically mediated cross-language activation from bilinguals to trilinguals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Early akshara knowledge in beginner readers in Sinhala: a cross-sectional study.

A descriptive cross-sectional study was undertaken with Sinhala speaking students from grades 1 and 2 in the Gampaha District of Sri Lanka to determine how akshara graphical features influence emerging reading skills. A battery of locally validated assessments evaluated akshara knowledge (recognition and production), word reading (accurate and fluent), accurate sentence reading and visual perceptual skills. The study examined the graphic complexity of akshara by examining the number of disconnected components (DC), connected points (CP) and simple features (SF). This preliminary study explored how graphic complexity measures and visual perceptual skills correlated with akshara knowledge and how visual perceptual skills and akshara knowledge independently correlated with word and sentence reading abilities. Students from 27 schools participated. Out of the total 4847 students, 2447 (50.5%) were females and 2400 (49.5%) were from grade 1. Results demonstrated that 21 (0.43%) of students could neither recognise nor produce a single akshara, whilst 640 (13.2%) students could not recognise a single akshara with diacritics. It was the graphic complexity ofthe base akshara in addition to the diacritics added to it and the akshara production with long vowel sounds what students found most challenging. The study found that akshara without diacritic recognition and production was significantly associated with the number of CP and SF and visual perceptual skills, matching and sequencing significantly correlated with akshara with and without diacritic recognition and production for students in both grades. Furthermore, akshara with and without diacritics recognition and production together with visual perceptual skills matching and sequencing independently correlated with accurate word reading, fluent word reading and sentence reading abilities in binary logistic regression analysis. The important implication of this preliminary study is that it urges the field of early educators to consider the role of visual perceptual skills on early akshara learning when teaching akshara to beginner learners, whilst it is essential to further explore factors contributing towards akshara with diacritic knowledge in beginner Sinhala readers.

Global measures of syntactic and lexical complexity are not strong predictors of eye-movement patterns in sentence and passage reading.

The link between the cognitive effort of word processing and the eye-movement patterns elicited by that word is well established in psycholinguistic research using eye-tracking. Yet less evidence or consensus exists regarding whether the same link exists between linguistic complexity measures of a sentence or passage and eye movements registered at the sentence or passage level. This article focuses on "global" measures of syntactic and lexical complexity, i.e., the measures that characterise the structure of the sentence or passage rather than aggregate lexical properties of individual words. We selected several commonly used global complexity measures and tested their predictive power against sentence- and passage-level eye movements in samples of text reading from 13 languages represented in the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus (MECO). While some syntactic or lexical complexity measures elicited statistically significant effects, they were negligibly small and not of practical relevance for predicting the processing effort either in individual languages or across languages. These findings suggest that the "eye-mind" link known to be valid at the word level may not scale up to larger linguistic units.

Individual differences in skilled reading and the word frequency effect.

Variation in eye movement patterns can be considerable even within skilled readers. Here, individual differences and eye movements of 88 average-to-very-skilled readers were assessed to examine the reliability of previous observations of a reduced word frequency effect associated with skilled reading. Shorter fixation durations and higher skipping rates were observed for high frequency compared to low-frequency words. High scores on reading ability tests and vocabulary knowledge tests predicted reduced frequency effects in gaze duration in models with single individual differences predictors, demonstrated by faster reading of low-frequency words compared to low scorers. A principal components analysis grouped individual differences tests based on shared variance. High "lexical proficiency" predicted shorter gaze durations, reading times, and increased word skipping. "Lexical proficiency" and the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-II comprehension test predicted a reduced frequency effect in go past times, and all tests apart from the Nelson Denny Reading Test comprehension test predicted a reduced frequency effect in sentence reading times. Data revealed surprising discrepancies in findings based on two subtests supposedly measuring comprehension (Nelson Denny Reading Test and Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-II), constituting an example of the jingle fallacy: the false assumption that two measures that share a name actually measure the same construct. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Breath control strategies for English coherent pronunciation based on the biomechanics of respiratory muscles

This paper aims to solve the problem of insufficient breath and lack of coordination between breathing and pronunciation in English learners’ coherent pronunciation. By analyzing the biomechanical characteristics of respiratory muscles, scientific breath control strategies are designed to optimize airflow management and improve speech fluency and expression efficiency. English learners of different language levels were recruited and divided into elementary, intermediate and advanced groups. Speech tasks including slow pronunciation, fast pronunciation and long sentence pronunciation were designed. Electromyography was used to record the activity characteristics of respiratory muscles, airflow meter was used to measure airflow output data, and high-sensitivity microphone combined with Praat software was used to extract speech features including speaking rate and pause frequency. This paper studies tasks such as slow pronunciation, fast pronunciation and long sentence pronunciation, clarifies the degree of involvement of key muscles such as the diaphragm, and designs targeted phased breath control strategies, including abdominal breathing training, long sentence reading and coherent reading simulation, and the introduction of speech tasks. The results show that the breath control strategy proposed in this paper significantly improves learners’ speech fluency, syllable and phonetic pronunciation accuracy under all task conditions. At a speaking speed of 180 words/minute, the correct pronunciation rate of phonetic symbols and syllables in this strategy intervention was 80%, and the correct pronunciation rate of syllables was 83%, and the breath maintenance rate and pause frequency were improved. The optimization strategy based on respiratory biomechanics can effectively improve language learners’ breath management ability and coherent pronunciation level, and provide an innovative theoretical basis and practical path for language learning and voice training.

Proposal for Intervention in Neuromotor Skills to improve Reading and Writing Processes in Primary Education

Neuromotor skills are involved in reading and writing, since the latter is a complex skill that requires motor and visual skills for its consolidation. Therefore, these skills should be stimulated in the classroom since a deficiency in any of them will have a negative impact on learning and academic performance in students. Thus, the general objective of this article was to design an intervention proposal in neuromotor skills to improve reading and writing processes in primary school children aged 6 to 7 years and, thus, their academic performance. Based on the needs detected in the students, neuropsychological activities were designed to work on neuromotor and literacy processes through the stimulation of fine and gross motor skills, addressing grapho plasticity, motor coordination, kinesthetic capacity, visual-manual coordination and graphomotor training, involving the construction and reading of syllables, words, sentences, and texts, meaning and orthographic form, intonation, rhythm, and reorganizational comprehension. It is expected that the proposed activities will improve reading and writing processes and academic performance in primary school students belonging to the Aida Gallegos de Moncayo Educational Center located in the city of Quito, Ecuador. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the plan, an evaluation system involving three moments was proposed: pre-test, continuous and post-test. It is hoped that the intervention plan can be adopted by the educational institution and replicated in other grades of primary education and, if not, in other schools.

Studying the interplay of context and semantic content in the interpretation of adversative conjunctions with eye-tracking

The French adversative connective mais, much like its English counterpart but, takes two conjuncts and indicates that they stand in some kind of opposition. The nature of this opposition is often discussed in the existing literature of adversatives. Using an eyetracking experiment, we look at where and when this opposition appears to be manifested in a sentence reading task, using superiority comparatives sentences that appear degraded without a supportive context, as well as inferiority comparatives that do not seem to require such specific contextual information. We presented participants (n = 28) with four types of sentences, differing in the form of comparative, and in the information provided by the context. Some contexts contained a pivot property to help readers access the opposition of the two conjuncts, while others were neutral in that regard. Eye movements were recorded with a 250Hz Tobii Pro Fusion eyetracker, and mixed effect models were used to analyze the following eyetracking metrics : total fixation time and regression probability for the whole sentences, as well as first-fixation duration, first-gaze duration, regression-path duration, regressions-out and regressions-in for each individual words. Even if the helping context is shown to lower negative acceptability judgment on sentences with mais plus (Winterstein et al. 2014), we found no context effect in online reading processing, finding instead a persisting effect of the less/more dichotomy in all chosen measures, sometimes before fixation of those words, pointing towards a parafoveal effect of the aforementioned dichotomy, which merits closer look in future work.

Early markers of literacy and numeracy in Chinese children: The roles of counting and rapid automatized naming.

This study investigated the relationships between counting, Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), and reading and arithmetic abilities in Chinese children at different developmental stages. Study 1 examined 51 kindergarteners (mean age 5.43 years) for character reading accuracy and arithmetic accuracy before formal schooling. Study 2 extended the investigation to 158 primary school children in Grades 1-3, assessing word and sentence reading fluency, arithmetic fluency, and associated cognitive factors. The findings from both studies revealed that RAN significantly predicts reading abilities across all age groups, with its importance increasing in older children. Counting was a crucial predictor for arithmetic skills, especially in early grades. While counting correlated with reading abilities in Chinese, it did not explain unique variance beyond RAN and phonological awareness. These results highlight differences across age groups in cognitive and academic skills, emphasizing the increasing role of RAN in both reading and arithmetic fluency as children progress through primary school. The study underscores the need for linguistically sensitive frameworks in education and suggests potential targets for early screening and intervention to enhance academic outcomes in Chinese children.

The impact of relative word-length on effects of non-adjacent word transpositions.

A recent study (Wen et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50: 934-941, 2024) found no influence of relative word-length on transposed-word effects. However, following the tradition of prior research on effects of transposed words during sentence reading, the transposed words in that study were adjacent words (words at positions 2 and 3 or 3 and 4 in five-word sequences). We surmised that the absence of an influence of relative word-length might be due to word identification being too precise when the two words are located close to eye-fixation location, hence cancelling the impact of more approximate indices of word identity such as word length. We therefore hypothesized that relative word-length might impact on transposed-word effects when the transposition involves non-adjacent words. The present study put this hypothesis to test and found that relative word-length does modify the size of transposed-word effects with non-adjacent transpositions. Transposed-word effects are greater when the transposed words have the same length. Furthermore, a cross-study analysis confirmed that transposed-word effects are greater for adjacent than for non-adjacent transpositions.

The Beijing Sentence Corpus II: A cross-script comparison between traditional and simplified Chinese sentence reading

We introduce a sentence corpus with eye-movement data in traditional Chinese (TC), based on the original Beijing Sentence Corpus (BSC) in simplified Chinese (SC). The most noticeable difference between TC and SC character sets is their visual complexity. There are reaction time corpora in isolated TC character/word lexical decision and naming tasks. However, up to now natural TC sentence reading corpus with recorded eye movements has not been available for general public. We report effects of word frequency, visual complexity, and predictability on eye movements on fixation location and duration based on 60 native TC readers. In addition, because the current BSC-II sentences are nearly identical to the original BSC sentences, we report similarities and differences of the linguistic influences on eye movements for the two varieties of written Chinese. The results shed light on how visual complexity affects eye movements. Together, the two sentence corpora comprise a useful tool to establish cross-script similarities and differences in TC and SC.

Social presence effect in language comprehension: evidence from event-related potential (ERP) research.

This study aimed to examine the impact of social presence on Chinese reading comprehension and associated neural responses. Participants tasked with reading Chinese sentences either alone or in the presence of others and subsequently assessing the accuracy of the sentences' meanings. Concurrently, we recorded the participants' electrical brain responses to critical word processing. Behavioral results indicated no significant effect of social presence on the judgment of sentence accuracy. Electroencephalogram (EEG) results, however, revealed that reading in the presence of others elicited more pronounced left anterior negativity (LAN) components in the left front of the scalp compared to reading alone. Additionally, incorrect meanings triggered larger N400 and P600 amplitudes in the mid-parietal region than correct meanings. Social presence intensifies early neural responses during the reading of Chinese sentences, although it does not influence semantic integration or conflict resolution. These findings support the notion that social context affects language processing.

Effects of vertically aligned flankers during sentence reading.

We examine whether information lying above and below a line of text being read can impact on reading fluency. We did so by placing length-matched flankers above and below each word in a sequence of words. We found that identical flankers facilitated sentence reading, compared with syntactically correct different text flankers, in both reading-for-meaning (Experiment 1) and grammatical decisions (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 replicated the same text facilitation in grammatical decisions and found no significant difference between different word and nonword distractors. Experiment 4 tested for an impact of case matching across targets and flankers and found a significantly greater same text facilitation when targets and flankers were in the same case. These results suggest that the same text facilitation effect might well be driven by crowding mechanisms that are more sensitive to vertically aligned information when reading horizontally aligned text. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Language enables the acquisition of distinct sensorimotor memories for speech.

Interactions between the context in which a sensorimotor skill is learned and the recall of that memory have been primarily studied in limb movements, but speech production requires movement, and many aspects of speech processing are influenced by task-relevant contextual information. Here, in ecologically valid speech (read sentences), we test whether English-French bilinguals can use the language of production to acquire and recall distinct motor plans for similar speech sounds spanning the production workspace. Participants experienced real-time alterations of auditory feedback while producing interleaved English and French sentences. The alterations were equal in magnitude but opposite in direction between languages. Over three experiments (n=15 in each), we observed language-specific sensorimotor learning in speech that countered the alterations and persisted after the alterations were removed. The effects were not observed in a fourth experiment (n=15) when the feedback alterations were tied to a non-linguistic cue. In a fifth experiment (n=15), we provide further confirmation that the observed language-specific changes in speech production were confined to sentence production, the linguistic level at which they were learned. The results contrast with recent work and theories of second language learning that predict broad interference between L1 and L2 phonetic representations. When faced with contrasting sensorimotor demands between languages, bilinguals readily acquire and recall highly specific motor representations for speech.

Predictive Variables of Developmental Dyslexia in Early Elementary School Children from a Longitudinal Study

Objectives: Early screening and intervention for developmental dyslexia in children is crucial. This study aimed to identify predictive variables for efficiently screening young elementary school children with developmental dyslexia by examining first and second graders. Methods: A longitudinal observation was conducted with 58 dyslexic children and 82 typically developing children at two time points: the first semester of first grade (T1) and the first semester of second grade (T2). Logistic regression was conducted using word reading, sentence reading, text reading fluency, word writing, and sentence writing as predictive variables. Results: In the first semester of first grade (T1), text reading fluency and word writing were identified as predictive variables, with odds ratios of 1.963 and 2.194, respectively. In the first semester of second grade (T2), word reading, sentence writing, and text reading fluency were confirmed as predictors, with odds ratios of 1.855, 1.913, and 3.938, respectively. Conclusion: This study found that text reading fluency was the most significant predictor for distinguishing between dyslexic and typical children in the early grades. Additionally, word writing was significant in first graders, while word decoding and sentence writing were significant in second graders. These findings may inform the development of effective screening tools for dyslexia in the future.

The CASE of brand names during sentence reading.

Brand names typically maintain a distinctive letter case (e.g., IKEA, Google). This element is essential for theoretical (word recognition models) and practical (brand design) reasons. In abstractionist models, letter case is considered irrelevant, whereas instance-based models use surface information like letter case during lexical retrieval. Previous brand identification tasks reported faster responses to brands in their characteristic letter case (e.g., IKEA and Google faster than ikea and GOOGLE), favoring instance-based models. We examined whether this pattern can be generalized to normal sentence reading: Participants read sentences in which well-known brand names were presented intact (e.g., IKEA, Google) or with a modified letter case (e.g., Ikea, GOOGLE). Results showed a cost for brands written in uppercase, independently of their characteristic letter case, in early eye fixation measures (probability of first-fixation, first-fixation duration). However, for later measures (gaze duration and total times), fixation times were longer when the brand's letter case was modified, restricted to those brands typically written in lowercase (e.g., GOOGLE > Google, whereas Ikea ≲ IKEA). Thus, during sentence reading, both the actual letter case and the typical letter case of brand names interact dynamically, posing problems for abstractionist models of reading.

SPEECH AS MAIN COGNITIVE FUNCTION IN CHILDREN WITH CONGENITAL HEART DEFECT: STUDYING THE FORMATION OF THE GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE

HighlightsThis review presents the latest available literature data on cognitive and speech characteristics of children with congenital heart defects (CHD), and describes the findings regarding the formation of the grammatical structure of speech in adolescent children with congenital heart defects. Aim. To assess the development of the grammatical structure of speech in adolescents undergoing surgery for congenital heart defects.Methods. The prospective study of the formation of grammatical structure of speech included 37 adolescent children in the early postoperative period after radical surgical treatment of septal heart defects at the Research Institute for Complex Issues of Cardiovascular Diseases.Results. The grammatical structure of speech in adolescents aged 13–16 years with septal congenital heart disease after surgical intervention is not sufficiently formed, the greatest difficulties are associated with changing the form of words. The lowest average score was obtained when performing the task of selecting the appropriate preposition in a sentence (average score – 6.70) and when verifying errors in sentences (average score – 4.97). The highest success rate occurred in the tasks consisting of repeating read sentences and completing unfinished sentences (average scores 10.7 and 13.10, respectively).Conclusion. For adolescents after surgical correction of CHD to be able to freely chose profession and properly socialize, it is necessary to take into account postoperative results with an assessment of clinical and hemodynamic characteristics, and the quality of life, including neurocognitive status.

TEACHING PRACTICE OF DAOQING SHADOW PLAY IN HUAN COUNTY, CHINA - SOME REFLECTIONS ON NOTATION

Daoqing shadow play in Huan County, as an important part of Chinese shadow play, has been attached importance by the local government and schools. At present, Longdong University has built a relatively complete shadow play curriculum system, which makes it a model for the inheritance of shadow play in colleges and universities. In the teaching practice of shadow play and a large number of literature reviews, researchers found that the music score of shadow play is a few fragments, which only records the singing part of the monophonic music, and there is no total score that can fully present the whole picture of shadow play music. Based on the theory of C. Seeger descriptive notation, this paper explains the characteristics of shadow play music in rhythm, beat, time and intonation by recording and analyzing it. In the background of local culture of Huan County, the author thinks about the rhythm, rhythm, sentence reading and dialect tuning, and expounds the methods and key points of recording the music score of Huan County Daoqing shadow play.