Looking for a word or for its meaning? The impact of induction tasks on adolescents' visual search for verbal material.

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to examine whether the pre-activation of different word-processing pathways by means of semantic versus perceptual induction tasks could modify the way adults and 11- to 15-year-old adolescents searched for single target words within displays of nine words. The presence within the search displays of words either looking like the target word or semantically related to the target word was manipulated. The quality of participants' lexical representations was evaluated through three word-identification and vocabulary tests. Performing a semantic induction task rather than a perceptual one on the target word before searching for it increased search times by 15% in all age groups, reflecting an increase in both the number and duration of gazes directed to non-target words. Moreover, performing the semantic induction task increased the impact of distractor words that were semantically related to the target word on search efficiency. Participants' search efficiency increased with age because of a progressive increase in the quality of adolescents' lexical representations, which allowed participants to more quickly reject the distractors on which they fixated. Indeed, lexical quality scores explained 43% of the variance in search times independently of participants' age. In the simple visual search task used in this study, fostering semantic word processing through the semantic induction task slowed down visual search. However, the literature suggests that semantic induction tasks could, in contrast, help people find information more easily in more complex verbal environments where the meaning of words must be accessed to find task-relevant information.

Adolescents' Developing Sensitivity to Orthographic and Semantic Cues During Visual Search for Words.

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to assess the influence of words either looking like the target word (orthographic distractors) or semantically related to the target word (semantic distractors) on visual search for words within lists by adolescents of 11, 13, and 15 years of age. In Experiment 1 (literal search task), participants saw the target word before the search (e.g., "raven"), whereas in Experiment 2 (categorical task) the target word was only defined by its semantic category (e.g., "bird"). In both experiments, participants' search times decreased from fifth to ninth grade, both because older adolescents gazed less often at non-target words during the search and because they could reject non-target words more quickly once they were fixated. Progress in visual search efficiency was associated with a large increase in word identification skills, which were a strong determinant of average gaze durations and search times for the categorical task, but much less for the literal task. In the literal task, the presence of orthographic or semantic distractors in the list increased search times for all age groups. In the categorical task, the impact of semantic distractor words was stronger than in the literal task because participants needed to gaze at the semantic distractors longer than at the other words before rejecting them. Altogether, the data support the assumption that the progressive automation of word decoding up until the age of 12 and the better quality of older adolescents' lexical representations facilitate a flexible use of both the perceptual and semantic features of words for top-down guidance within the displays. In particular, older adolescents were better prepared to aim at or reject words without gazing at them directly. Finally, the overall similar progression of the maturation of single word visual search processes and that of more real-life information search within complex verbal documents suggests that the young adolescents' difficulties in searching the Web effectively could be due to their insufficiently developed lexical representations and word decoding abilities.

Readers' use of source information in text comprehension.

In two experiments, we examined the role of discrepancy on readers' text processing of and memory for the sources of brief news reports. Each story included two assertions that were attributed to different sources. We manipulated whether the second assertion was either discrepant or consistent with the first assertion. On the basis of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) assumption, we predicted that discrepant stories would promote deeper processing and better memory for the sources conveying the messages, as compared to consistent stories. As predicted, readers mentioned more sources in summaries of discrepant stories, recalled more sources, made more fixations, and displayed longer gaze times in source areas when reading discrepant than when reading consistent stories. In Experiment 2, we found enhanced memory for source-content links for discrepant stories even when intersentential connectors were absent, and regardless of the reading goals. Discussion was focused on discrepancies as one mechanism by which readers are prompted to encode source-content links more deeply, as a method of integrating disparate pieces of information into a coherent mental representation of a text.