Looking for immediate and downstream evidence of lexical prediction in eye movements during reading.

Previous investigations of whether readers make predictions about the full identity of upcoming words have focused on the extent to which there are processing consequences when readers encounter linguistic input that is incompatible with their expectations. To date, eye-movement studies have revealed inconsistent evidence of the processing costs that would be expected to accompany lexical prediction. This study investigated whether readers' lexical predictions were observable during or downstream from their initial point of activation. Three experiments assessed readers' eye movements to predictable and unpredictable words, and then to subsequent downstream words, which probed the lingering activation of previously expected words. The results showed novel evidence of processing costs for unexpected input but only when supported by a plausible linguistic environment, suggesting that readers could strategically modulate their predictive processing. However, there was limited evidence that their lexical predictions affected downstream processing. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of prediction in language processing are discussed.

Measuring cognitive flexibility in anorexia nervosa: Wisconsin Card Sorting Test versus cued task-switching.

PURPOSE: The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is the most common measure of cognitive flexibility in anorexia nervosa (AN), but task-switching paradigms are beginning to be utilized. The current study directly compared performance on a cued task-switching measure and the WCST to evaluate their association in participants with a lifetime diagnosis of AN, and to assess which measure is more strongly associated with clinical symptoms. METHODS: Forty-five women with a lifetime diagnosis of AN completed the WCST, cued color-shape task-switching paradigm, Anti-saccade Keyboard Task, Running Memory Span, Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, Depression Anxiety Stress Scales short form and Eating Disorder Flexibility Index. RESULTS: There was no evidence of a significant association between WCST perseverative errors and cued task-switching switch costs. Results suggest lower working memory capacity is a determinant of higher perseverative error rate. When controlling for mood variables, neither cognitive flexibility measure was a significant independent predictor of symptom severity. CONCLUSIONS: Results provide support for previous suggestions that WCST perseverative errors could occur due to difficulties with working memory, sensitivity to feedback, and issues with concept formation. Cued task-switching paradigms may provide a useful measure of cognitive flexibility for future eating disorders research by reducing task-specific confounds. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Level III Case-control analytic study.

Lexical processing across the visual field.

This article reports six experiments in which participants made speeded binary decisions about letter strings that were displayed for 100 versus 300 ms at different retinal eccentricities in the left versus right visual field to examine how these variables and task demands influence word-identification accuracy and latency. Across the experiments, lexical-processing performance decreased with eccentricity, but to a lesser degree for words displayed in the right visual field, replicating previous reports. However, the effect of eccentricity was attenuated for the two tasks that required "deep" semantic judgments (e.g., discriminating words that referenced animals vs. objects) relative to the tasks that required "shallow" letter and/or lexical processing (e.g., detecting words containing a pre-specified target letter, discriminating words from nonwords). These results suggest that lexical and supra-lexical knowledge play a significant role in supporting lexical processing, especially at greater eccentricities, thereby allowing readers to extend the visual span, or region of effective letter processing, into the perceptual span, or region of useful information extraction. The broader theoretical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to existing and future models of reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

How do task demands and aging affect lexical prediction during online reading of natural texts?

Facilitated identification of predictable words during online reading has been attributed to the generation of predictions about upcoming words. But highly predictable words are relatively infrequent in natural texts, raising questions about the utility and ubiquity of anticipatory prediction strategies. This study investigated the contribution of task demands and aging to predictability effects for short natural texts from the Provo corpus. The eye movements of 49 undergraduate students (mean age 21.2) and 46 healthy older adults (mean age 70.8) were recorded while they read these passages in two conditions: (a) reading for meaning to answer occasional comprehension questions; (b) proofreading to detect "transposed letter" lexical errors (e.g., clam instead of calm) in intermixed filler passages. The results suggested that the young adults, but not the older adults, engaged anticipatory prediction strategies to detect semantic errors in the proofreading condition, but neither age group showed any evidence of costs of prediction failures. Rather, both groups showed facilitated reading times for unexpected words that appeared in a high constraint within-sentence position. These findings suggest that predictability effects for natural texts reflect partial, probabilistic expectancies rather than anticipatory prediction of specific words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding the visual constraints on lexical processing: New empirical and simulation results.

Word identification is slower and less accurate outside central vision, but the precise relationship between retinal eccentricity and lexical processing is not well specified by models of either word identification or reading. In a seminal eye-movement study, Rayner and Morrison (1981) found that participants made remarkably accurate naming and lexical-decision responses to words displayed more than 3 degrees from the center of vision-even under conditions requiring fixed gaze. However, the validity of these findings is challenged by a range of methodological limitations. We report a series of gaze-contingent lexical-decision and naming experiments that replicate and extend Rayner and Morrison's study to provide a more accurate estimate of how visual constraints delimit lexical processing. Simulations were conducted using the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2012) to assess the implications for understanding eye-movement control during reading. Augmenting the model's assumptions about the impact of both eccentricity and visual crowding on the rate of lexical processing provided good fits to the observed data without impairing the model's ability to simulate benchmark eye-movement effects. The findings are discussed with a view toward the development of a complete model of reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A multitask comparison of word- and character-frequency effects in Chinese reading.

In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of two-character target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The character-frequency effects, however, were facilitatory for naming but inhibitory for both lexical decision and reading. Further correlational analyses indicated that participants' performance (as measured using overall response latencies and the sizes of the frequency effects) was not consistent across tasks but was relatively reliable within the lexical-decision and reading tasks. These findings are discussed in relation to what is known about the reading of Chinese versus alphabetic scripts, word-identification tasks, and models of word identification. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Are there independent effects of constraint and predictability on eye movements during reading?

Evidence of processing costs for unexpected words presented in place of a more expected completion remains elusive in the eye-movement literature. The current study investigated whether such prediction error costs depend on the source of constraint violation provided by the prior context. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read predictable words and unpredictable alternatives that were either semantically related or unrelated in three-sentence passages. The passages differed in whether the source of constraint originated solely from the global context provided by the first two semantically rich sentences of the passage, from the local context provided by the final sentence of the passage, from both the global and local context, or from none of the three sentences of the passage. The results revealed the expected processing advantage for predictable completions in any constraining context, although the relative contributions of the different sources of constraint varied across the time course of word processing. Unpredictable completions, however, did not yield any processing costs when the context constrained toward a different word, instead producing immediate processing benefits in the presence of any constraining context. Moreover, the initial processing of related unpredictable completions was enhanced further by the provision of a supportive global context. Predictability effects therefore do not appear to be determined by cloze probability alone but also by the nature of the prior contextual constraint especially when they encourage the construction of higher-level discourse representations. The implications of these findings for understanding existing theoretical models of predictive processing are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Assessing cognitive flexibility in anorexia nervosa using eye tracking: A registered report.

OBJECTIVE: Cognitive flexibility research in anorexia nervosa (AN) has primarily focused on group differences between clinical and control participants, but research in the general population utilizing the mixed pro- anti-saccade flexibility task has demonstrated individual differences in trait anxiety are a determinant of switching performance, and switching impairments are more pronounced for keypress than saccadic (eye-movement) responses. The aim of the current research is to explore trait anxiety and differences in saccadic and keypress responding as potential determinants of performance on flexibility tasks in AN. METHOD: We will compare performance on the mixed pro- anti-saccade paradigm between female adult participants with a current diagnosis of AN and matched control participants, observing both saccadic and keypress responses while controlling for trait anxiety (State - Trait Anxiety Inventory) and spatial working memory (Corsi Block Tapping Test). Associations with eating disorder-related symptoms (Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire), flexibility in everyday life (Eating Disorder Flexibility Index), and the Clinical Perfectionism Questionnaire will also be assessed. RESULTS: Data which controls for individual differences in trait anxiety and assesses flexibility at both the task- and response-set level may be used to more accurately understand differences in performance on cognitive flexibility tasks by participants with AN. DISCUSSION: Clarifying the effects of trait anxiety on flexibility, and differences between task- and response-set switching may advance our understanding of how cognitive flexibility relates to flexibility in everyday life and improve translation to therapeutic approaches. PUBLIC SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: This research will compare performance on a flexibility task between participants with anorexia nervosa (AN) and controls while observing their eye-movements to examine whether trait anxiety and type of response (eye-movement and keypress) are associated with performance. This data may improve our understanding of why participants with AN perform more poorly on cognitive flexibility tasks, and how poor cognitive flexibility relates to eating disorder-related issues with flexibility in everyday life.

Predictability effects and parafoveal processing in older readers.

Normative aging is accompanied by visual and cognitive changes that impact the systems that are critical for fluent reading. The patterns of eye movements during reading displayed by older adults have been characterized as demonstrating a trade-off between longer forward saccades and more word skipping versus higher rates of regressions back to previously read text. This pattern is assumed to reflect older readers' reliance on top-down contextual information to compensate for reduced uptake of parafoveal information from yet-to-be fixated words. However, the empirical evidence for these assumptions is equivocal. This study investigated the depth of older readers' parafoveal processing as indexed by sensitivity to the contextual plausibility of parafoveal words in both neutral and highly constraining sentence contexts. The eye movements of 65 cognitively intact older adults (61-87 years) were compared with data previously collected from young adults in two sentence reading experiments in which critical target words were replaced by valid, plausible, related, or implausible previews until the reader fixated on the target word location. Older and younger adults showed equivalent plausibility preview benefits on first-pass reading measures of both predictable and unpredictable words. However, older readers did not show the benefit of preview orthographic relatedness that was observed in young adults and showed significantly attenuated preview validity effects. Taken together, the data suggest that older readers are specifically impaired in the integration of parafoveal and foveal information but do not show deficits in the depth of parafoveal processing. The implications for understanding the effects of aging on reading are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Morphological preview effects in English are restricted to suffixed words.

Much of the evidence for morphological decomposition accounts of complex word identification has relied on the masked-priming paradigm. However, morphologically complex words are typically encountered in sentence contexts and processing begins before a word is fixated, when it is in the parafovea. To evaluate whether the single word-identification data generalize to natural reading, Experiment 1 investigated the contribution of morphological structure to the very earliest stages of lexical processing indexed by preview effects during sentence reading in the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. Preview conditions systematically assessed the impact of prefixed and suffixed nonword previews that manipulated stem and affix overlap, and affix status, against an orthographically legal control baseline. Initial fixations on suffixed target words showed a preview benefit from nonwords that combined the target stem with a legitimate affix, but not with a nonaffix, whereas prefixed targets only benefited from an identical preview. When presented in a masked prime lexical-decision task in Experiment 2, the same stimuli yielded equivalent stem priming from suffixed and prefixed primes regardless of affix status, consistent with previous masked priming studies using similar nonword primes. The early effects of morphological structure selectively observed on parafoveal processing of suffixed words are inconsistent with recent nonmorphological, position-invariant accounts of embedded stem activation. These results provide the first evidence of morphological parafoveal processing in English and contribute to recent evidence that readers extract a higher level of information from the parafovea during natural reading than was previously assumed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Reading proficiency predicts the extent of the right, but not left, perceptual span in older readers.

The gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm was used to assess the size and symmetry of the perceptual span in older readers. The eye movements of 49 cognitively intact older adults (60-88 years of age) were recorded as they read sentences varying in difficulty, and the availability of letter information to the right and left of fixation was manipulated. To reconcile discrepancies in previous estimates of the perceptual span in older readers, individual differences in written language proficiency were assessed with tests of vocabulary, reading comprehension, reading speed, spelling ability, and print exposure. The results revealed that higher proficiency older adults extracted information up to 15 letter spaces to the right of fixation, while lower proficiency readers showed no additional benefit beyond 9 letters to the right. However, all readers showed improvements to reading with the availability of up to 9 letters to the left-confirming previous evidence of reduced perceptual span asymmetry in older readers. The findings raise questions about whether the source of age-related changes in parafoveal processing lies in the adoption of a risky reading strategy involving an increased propensity to both guess upcoming words and make corrective regressions.

Is it smart to read on your phone? The impact of reading format and culture on the continued influence of misinformation.

Despite advances in digital technology that have resulted in more people accessing information via mobile devices, little is known about reading comprehension on mobile phones. This research investigated the impact of reading format by comparing sensitivity to misinformation presented either in printed texts or in digital format on mobile phones to readers of English versus Chinese. Participants read pairs of short newspaper-style articles containing a critical piece of information that was either retracted or not retracted, and were later assessed on their memory for critical and general details, as well as inferential judgements related to the retracted information. The average results replicated previous evidence that repeating the original misinformation at the time of retraction enhanced memory updating. However, reading on a mobile phone reduced the likelihood that readers noticed the retraction and updated their memory with alternative information in both language groups and reduced the extent to which inferences were modified by the alternative information in readers of Chinese but not English. Chinese readers showed significantly better general memory, but were more affected by the continued influence of the misinformation. These differences between Chinese and English-speaking participants may reflect cultural influences on the tendency to apply a dialectical rather than an analytic reasoning strategy and incorporate contradictory information into the memory representation of a discourse or event.

Measuring Lexical Quality: The Role of Spelling Ability.

The construct of 'lexical quality' (Perfetti Scientific Studies of Reading 11, 357-383, 2007) is widely invoked in literature on word recognition and reading to refer to a systematic dimension of individual differences that predicts performance in a range of word identification and reading tasks in both developing readers and skilled adult populations. Many different approaches have been used to assess lexical quality, but few have captured the orthographic precision that is central to the construct. This paper describes, evaluates, and disseminates spelling dictation and spelling recognition tests that were developed to provide sensitive measures of the precision component of lexical quality in skilled college student readers - the population that has provided most of the benchmark data for models of word recognition and reading. Analyses are reported for 785 students who completed the spelling tests in conjunction with standardized measures of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and reading speed, of whom 107 also completed author recognition and phonemic decoding tests. Internal consistency analyses showed that both spelling tests were relatively unidimensional and displayed good internal consistency, although the recognition test contained too many easy items. Item-level analyses are included to provide the basis for further refinement of these instruments. The spelling tests were moderately correlated with the other measures of written language proficiency, but factor analyses revealed that they consistently defined a separate component, demonstrating that they tap a dimension of variability that is partially independent of variance in reading comprehension, speed, and vocabulary. These components appear to align with the precision and coherence dimensions of lexical quality.

The effect of contextual plausibility on word skipping during reading.

Recent eye-movement evidence suggests readers are more likely to skip a high-frequency word than a low-frequency word independently of the semantic or syntactic acceptability of the word in the sentence. This has been interpreted as strong support for a serial processing mechanism in which the decision to skip a word is based on the completion of a preliminary stage of lexical processing prior to any assessment of contextual fit. The present large-scale study was designed to reconcile these findings with the plausibility preview effect: higher skipping and reduced first-pass reading times for words that are previewed by contextually plausible, compared to implausible, sentence continuations that are unrelated to the target word. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a short (3-4 letters) or long (6 letters) target word. The boundary paradigm was used to present parafoveal previews which were either higher or lower frequency than the target, and either plausible or implausible in the sentence context. The results revealed strong, independent effects of all three factors on target skipping and early measures of target fixation duration, while frequency and plausibility interacted on later measures of target fixation duration. Simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading demonstrated that plausibility effects on skipping are potentially consistent with the assumption that higher-level contextual information only affects post-lexical integration processes. However, no current model of eye movements in reading provides an explicit account of the information or processes that allow readers to rapidly detect an integration failure.

Visual Attention to Sexual Stimuli in Mostly Heterosexuals.

Individuals who report mostly heterosexual orientations (i.e., mostly sexually attracted to the opposite sex, but occasionally attracted to the same sex) outnumber all other non-heterosexual individuals combined. The present study examined whether mostly heterosexual men and women view same- and other-sex sexual stimuli differently than exclusively heterosexual men and women. A novel eye-tracking paradigm was used with 162 mostly and exclusively heterosexual men and women. Compared to exclusively heterosexual men, mostly heterosexual men demonstrated greater attention to sexually explicit features (i.e., genital regions and genital contact regions) of solo male and male-male erotic stimuli, while demonstrating equivalent attention to sexually explicit features of solo female and female-female erotic stimuli. Mediation analyses suggested that differences between mostly and exclusively heterosexual profiles in men could be explained by mostly heterosexual men's increased sexual attraction to solo male erotica, and their increased sexual attraction and reduced disgust to the male-male erotica. No comparable differences in attention were observed between mostly and exclusively heterosexual women-although mostly heterosexual women did demonstrate greater fixation on visual erotica overall-a pattern of response that was found to be mediated by reduced disgust.

The influence of number of syllables on word skipping during reading revisited.

Fitzsimmons and Drieghe (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 736-741, 2011) showed that a monosyllabic word was skipped more often than a disyllabic word during reading. This finding was interpreted as evidence that syllabic information was extracted from the parafovea early enough to influence word skipping. In the present, large-scale replication of this study, in which we additionally measured the reading, vocabulary, and spelling abilities of the participants, the effect of number of syllables on word skipping was not significant. Moreover, a Bayesian analysis indicated strong evidence for the absence of the effect. The individual differences analyses replicate previous observations showing that spelling ability uniquely predicts word skipping (but not fixation times) because better spellers skip more often. The results indicate that high-quality lexical representations allow the system to reach an advanced stage in the word-recognition process of the parafoveal word early enough to influence the decision of whether or not to skip the word, but this decision is not influenced by number of syllables.

Spelling ability selectively predicts the magnitude of disruption in unspaced text reading.

We examined the effect of individual differences in written language proficiency on unspaced text reading in a large sample of skilled adult readers who were assessed on reading comprehension and spelling ability. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a low or high frequency target word, presented with standard interword spacing, or in one of three unsegmented text conditions that either preserved or eliminated word boundary information. The average data replicated previous studies: unspaced text reading was associated with increased fixation durations, a higher number of fixations, more regressions, reduced saccade length, and an inflation of the word frequency effect. The individual differences results provided insight into the mechanisms contributing to these effects. Higher reading ability was associated with greater overall reading speed and fluency in all conditions. In contrast, spelling ability selectively modulated the effect of interword spacing with poorer spelling ability predicting greater difficulty across the majority of sentence- and word-level measures. These results suggest that high quality lexical representations allowed better spellers to extract lexical units from unfamiliar text forms, inoculating them against the disruptive effects of being deprived of spacing information. (PsycINFO Database Record

Parafoveal preview benefit in sentence reading: Independent effects of plausibility and orthographic relatedness.

Recent evidence from studies using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm has suggested that parafoveal preview benefit is contingent on the fit between a preview word and the sentence context. We investigated whether this plausibility preview benefit is modulated by preview-target orthographic relatedness. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which the parafoveal preview of a target word was manipulated. The nonidentical previews were plausible or implausible continuations of the sentence and were either orthographic neighbors of the target or unrelated to the target. All first-pass reading measures showed strong plausibility preview benefits. There was also a benefit from preview-target orthographic relatedness across the reading measures. These two preview effects did not interact for any fixation measure. We also found no evidence that the relatedness effect was caused by misperception of an orthographically similar preview as the target word. These data highlight the existence of two independent mechanisms underlying preview effects: a benefit from the contextual fit of the preview word in the sentence, and a benefit from the sublexical overlap between the preview and target words.

Parafoveal preview effects depend on both preview plausibility and target predictability.

Recent studies using the boundary paradigm have shown that readers benefit from a parafoveal preview of a plausible continuation of the sentence. This plausibility preview effect occurs irrespective of the semantic or orthographic relatedness of the preview and target word, suggesting that it depends on the degree to which a preview word fits the preceding context. The present study tested this hypothesis by examining the impact of contextual constraint on processing a plausible word in the parafovea. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which a target word was either highly predictable or unpredictable. The boundary paradigm was used to compare predictable, unpredictable, and implausible previews. The results showed that target predictability significantly modulated the effects of identical and plausible previews. Identical previews yielded significantly more benefit than plausible previews for highly predictable targets, but for unpredictable targets a plausible preview was as beneficial as an identical preview. The results shed light on the role of contextual predictability in early lexical processing. Furthermore, these data support the view that readers activate a set of appropriate words from the preceding sentence context, prior to the presentation of the target word.

Is semantic preview benefit due to relatedness or plausibility?

There is increasing evidence that skilled readers of English benefit from processing a parafoveal preview of a semantically related word. However, in previous investigations of semantic preview benefit using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm the semantic relatedness between the preview and target has been confounded with the plausibility of the preview word in the sentence. In the present study, preview relatedness and plausibility were independently manipulated in neutral sentences read by a large sample of skilled adult readers. Participants were assessed on measures of reading and spelling ability to identify possible sources of individual differences in preview effects. The results showed that readers benefited from a preview of a plausible word, regardless of the semantic relatedness of the preview and the target. However, there was limited evidence of a semantic relatedness benefit when the plausibility of the preview was controlled. The plausibility preview benefit was strongest for low proficiency readers, suggesting that poorer readers were more likely to program a forward saccade based on information extracted from the preview. High proficiency readers showed equivalent disruption from all nonidentical previews suggesting that they were more likely to suffer interference from the orthographic mismatch between preview and target. (PsycINFO Database Record