167 research outputs found
Developmental changes in eye movements and visual information encoding associated with learning to read
No full textA great deal of eye-movement research has resulted in sophisticated computational models of skilled adult reading. As yet, insufficient eye-movement research has been conducted with children to allow a more thorough understanding of the developmental trajectory leading up to this end state. I argue that, in order to fully understand how children progress to skilled adult reading, it is necessary to consider changes in both cognitive processing and eye-movement behavior. By recording children’s eye movements during reading, researchers can document how printed text is encoded and incrementally delivered for subsequent cognitive processing, and understand how developmental changes in these two aspects of reading are interdependent
The Changing Role of Phonology in Reading Development
Get PDFProcessing of both a word’s orthography (its printed form) and phonology (its associated speech sounds) are critical for lexical identification during reading, both in beginning and skilled readers. Theories of learning to read typically posit a developmental change, from early readers’ reliance on phonology to more skilled readers’ development of direct orthographic-semantic links. Specifically, in becoming a skilled reader, the extent to which an individual processes phonology during lexical identification is thought to decrease. Recent data from eye movement research suggests, however, that the developmental change in phonological processing is somewhat more nuanced than this. Such studies show that phonology influences lexical identification in beginning and skilled readers in both typically and atypically developing populations. These data indicate, therefore, that the developmental change might better be characterised as a transition from overt decoding to abstract, covert recoding. We do not stop processing phonology as we become more skilled at reading; rather, the nature of that processing changes
Saccade target selection: do distractors affect saccade accuracy? [In special issue: Visual Attention: Psychophysics, Electrophysiology and Neuroimaging]
No full textA study is reported in which eye movements were recorded when observers attempted to make a saccade to a target in the presence of a nearby and visually identical distractor. It was found that saccade targeting accuracy was completely unaffected by the presence of the distractor, except in the cases where the distractor was on the same axis as that of the saccadic movement. In this condition, some saccades landed between target and distractor, thus showing the global effect finding, known to occur when saccades are made to stimuli with sudden onset. The result demonstrates that a perceptual selection process, operating with higher resolution than that often associated with covert visual attention, can be used in the selection of saccadic targets
Lexical and sublexical influences on eye movements during reading.
No full textIn this paper, we briefly review some recent studies that have clearly demonstrated in importance of lexical factors on eye movements during reading. We introduce the reader to eye-movement recording and explain its importance within the field of experimental psychology as a tool with which we can examine the psychological processes underlying reading. We then provide a summary of (mainly) eye-movement experiments in three areas: reading disappearing text, reading text with transposed letters, and morphological processing of compound words. Throughout the paper our central claim is that processes associated with lexical identification exert a strong and quite immediate effect on eye-movement behaviour during reading
Beyond decoding: phonological processing during silent reading in beginning readers
No full textIn this experiment, the extent to which beginning readers process phonology during lexical identification in silent sentence reading was investigated. The eye movements of children aged seven to nine years and adults were recorded as they read sentences containing either a correctly spelled target word (e.g., girl), a pseudohomophone (e.g., gerl), or a spelling control (e.g., garl). Both children and adults showed a benefit from the valid phonology of the pseudohomophone, compared to the spelling control during reading. This indicates that children as young as seven years old exhibit relatively skilled phonological processing during reading, despite having moved past the use of overt phonological decoding strategies. In addition, in comparison to adults, children’s lexical processing was more disrupted by the presence of spelling errors, suggesting a developmental change in the relative dependence upon phonological and orthographic processing in lexical identification during silent sentence reading
Binocular coordination: Reading stereoscopic sentences in depth
Get PDFThe present study employs a stereoscopic manipulation to present sentences in three dimensions to subjects as they read for comprehension. Subjects read sentences with (a) no depth cues, (b) a monocular depth cue that implied the sentence loomed out of the screen (i.e., increasing retinal size), (c) congruent monocular and binocular (retinal disparity) depth cues (i.e., both implied the sentence loomed out of the screen) and (d) incongruent monocular and binocular depth cues (i.e., the monocular cue implied the sentence loomed out of the screen and the binocular cue implied it receded behind the screen). Reading efficiency was mostly unaffected, suggesting that reading in three dimensions is similar to reading in two dimensions. Importantly, fixation disparity was driven by retinal disparity; fixations were significantly more crossed as readers progressed through the sentence in the congruent condition and significantly more uncrossed in the incongruent condition. We conclude that disparity depth cues are used on-line to drive binocular coordination during reading.<br/
Investigating eye movement acquisition and analysis technologies as a causal factor in differential prevalence of crossed and uncrossed fixation disparity during reading and dot scanning
Get PDFPrevious studies examining binocular coordination during reading have reported conflicting results in terms of the nature of disparity (e.g. Kliegl, Nuthmann, & Engbert (Journal of Experimental Psychology General 135:12-35, 2006); Liversedge, White, Findlay, & Rayner (Vision Research 46:2363-2374, 2006). One potential cause of this inconsistency is differences in acquisition devices and associated analysis technologies. We tested this by directly comparing binocular eye movement recordings made using SR Research EyeLink 1000 and the Fourward Technologies Inc. DPI binocular eye-tracking systems. Participants read sentences or scanned horizontal rows of dot strings; for each participant, half the data were recorded with the EyeLink, and the other half with the DPIs. The viewing conditions in both testing laboratories were set to be very similar. Monocular calibrations were used. The majority of fixations recorded using either system were aligned, although data from the EyeLink system showed greater disparity magnitudes. Critically, for unaligned fixations, the data from both systems showed a majority of uncrossed fixations. These results suggest that variability in previous reports of binocular fixation alignment is attributable to the specific viewing conditions associated with a particular experiment (variables such as luminance and viewing distance), rather than acquisition and analysis software and hardware.<br/
Parafoveal pre-processing of word initial trigrams during reading in adults and children
Get PDFAlthough previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the preprocessing of letter identity and position information of a parafoveal word’s initial trigram by adults and children using the boundary paradigm during normal sentence reading. Seven previews were generated: Identity (captain); transposed letter and substituted letter nonwords in Positions 1 and 2 (acptain-imptain); 1 and 3 (pactain-gartain), and 2 and 3 (cpatain-cgotain). Results showed a transposed letter effect (TLE) in Position 13 for gaze duration in the pretarget word; and TLE in Positions 12 and 23 but not in Position 13 in the target word for both adults and children. These findings suggest that children, similar to adults, extract letter identity and position information flexibly using a spatial coding mechanism; supporting isolated word recognition models such as SOLAR (Davis, 1999, 2010) and SERIOL (Whitney, 2001) models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved
Individual differences in skilled reading and the word frequency effect
No full textVariation 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 lowfrequency 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.</p
Reading transposed text: effects of transposed letter distance and consonant-vowel status on eye movements
No full textTwo experiments were conducted to investigate the flexibility of letter-position encoding in word identification during reading. In both experiments, two tasks were used. First, participants’ eye movements were measured as they read sentences containing transposed letter (TL) strings. Second, participants were presented with the TL strings in isolation and were asked to discriminate them from nonwords. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the distance between transposed letters (ligament vs. liagment vs. limagent vs. lieamgnt). Reading/response times increased with the distance between TLs. In Experiment 2, we manipulated whether the TLs were consonants, vowels, or one of each (ssytem vs. faeture vs. fromat). Reading/response times showed that CV transpositions were the most disruptive. In both experiments, response accuracy was particularly poor for words presented in isolation when there was an intervening letter between TLs. These data show that processing across multiple fixations, and the presence of a meaningful sentence context, are important for flexible letter position encoding in lexical identification
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