Writing direction influences the spatial representations of past- and future-tense forms: Evidence from eye tracking.

The present study tests the hypothesis that the directionality of reading habits (left-to-right or right-to-left) impacts individuals' representation of nonspatial events. Using the blank screen paradigm, we examine whether eye movements reflect culture-specific spatial biases in processing temporal information, specifically, grammatical tense in Russian and Hebrew. Sixty-two native speakers of Russian (a language with a left-to-right reading and writing system) and 62 native speakers of Hebrew (a language with a right-to-left reading and writing system) listened to verbs in the past or future tense while their spontaneous gaze positions were recorded. Following the verb, a visual spatial probe appeared in one of the five locations of the screen, and participants responded manually to indicate its position. While participants' response latencies to the spatial probe revealed no significant effects, their gaze positions along the horizontal axis for past- and future-tensed verbs aligned with the reading and writing direction in their language. These results provide novel evidence that eye movements during auditory processing of grammatical tense are influenced by culturally specific reading and writing conventions, shifting leftward or rightward on the horizontal plane depending on the stimuli's time reference (past or future) and the participants' language (Russian or Hebrew). This spatial bias indicates a common underlying cognitive mechanism that uses spatial dimensions to represent temporal constructs.

Phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian children and adults.

Studies on German and English have shown that children and adults can rely on phonological and orthographic information from the parafovea during reading, but this reliance differs between ages and languages. In the current study, we investigated the development of phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian-speaking 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The participants read sentences with embedded nouns that were presented in original, pseudohomophone, control for pseudohomophone, transposed-letter, and control for transposed-letter conditions in the parafoveal area to assess phonological and orthographic preview benefit effects. The results revealed that all groups of participants relied only on orthographic but not phonological parafoveal information. These findings indicate that 8-year-old children already preprocess parafoveal information similarly to adults.