Minimal Overlap in Language Control Across Production And Comprehension: Evidence from Read-Aloud Versus Eye-Tracking Tasks.

Bilinguals are remarkable at language control-switching between languages only when they want. However, language control in production can involve switch costs. That is, switching to another language takes longer than staying in the same language. Moreover, bilinguals sometimes produce language intrusion errors, mistakenly producing words in an unintended language (e.g., Spanish-English bilinguals saying "pero" instead of "but"). Switch costs are also found in comprehension. For example, reading times are longer when bilinguals read sentences with language switches compared to sentences with no language switches. Given that both production and comprehension involve switch costs, some language-control mechanisms might be shared across modalities. To test this, we compared language switch costs found in eye-movement measures during silent sentence reading (comprehension) and intrusion errors produced when reading aloud switched words in mixed-language paragraphs (production). Bilinguals who made more intrusion errors during the read-aloud task did not show different switch cost patterns in most measures in the silent-reading task, except on skipping rates. We suggest that language switching is mostly controlled by separate, modality-specific processes in production and comprehension, although some points of overlap might indicate the role of domain general control and how it can influence individual differences in bilingual language control.

Ongoing Cognitive Processing Influences Precise Eye-Movement Targets in Reading.

Reading is a highly complex learned skill in which humans move their eyes three to four times every second in response to visual and cognitive processing. The consensus view is that the details of these rapid eye-movement decisions-which part of a word to target with a saccade-are determined solely by low-level oculomotor heuristics. But maximally efficient saccade targeting would be sensitive to ongoing word identification, sending the eyes farther into a word the farther its identification has already progressed. Here, using a covert text-shifting paradigm, we showed just such a statistical relationship between saccade targeting in reading and trial-to-trial variability in cognitive processing. This result suggests that, rather than relying purely on heuristics, the human brain has learned to optimize eye movements in reading even at the fine-grained level of character-position targeting, reflecting efficiency-based sensitivity to ongoing cognitive processing.

Reading sentences of words with rotated letters: An eye movement study.

Participants' eye movements were measured as they read sentences in which individual letters within words were rotated. Both the consistency of direction and the magnitude of rotation were manipulated (letters rotated all in the same direction, or alternately clockwise and anti-clockwise, by 30° or 60°). Each sentence included a target word that was manipulated for frequency of occurrence. Our objectives were threefold: To quantify how change in the visual presentation of individual letters disrupted word identification, and whether disruption was consistent with systematic change in visual presentation; to determine whether inconsistent letter transformation caused more disruption than consistent letter transformation; and to determine whether such effects were comparable for words that were high and low frequency to explore the extent to which they were visually or linguistically mediated. We found that disruption to reading was greater as the magnitude of letter rotation increased, although even small rotations affected processing. The data also showed that alternating letter rotations were significantly more disruptive than consistent rotations; this result is consistent with models of lexical identification in which encoding occurs over units of more than one adjacent letter. These rotation manipulations also showed significant interactions with word frequency on the target word: Gaze durations and total fixation duration times increased disproportionately for low-frequency words when they were presented at more extreme rotations. These data provide a first step towards quantifying the relative contribution of the spatial relationships between individual letters to word recognition and eye movement control in reading.

Do resource constraints affect lexical processing? Evidence from eye movements.

Human language is massively ambiguous, yet we are generally able to identify the intended meanings of the sentences we hear and read quickly and accurately. How we manage and resolve ambiguity incrementally during real-time language comprehension given our cognitive resources and constraints is a major question in human cognition. Previous research investigating resource constraints on lexical ambiguity resolution has yielded conflicting results. Here we present results from two experiments in which we recorded eye movements to test for evidence of resource constraints during lexical ambiguity resolution. We embedded moderately biased homographs in sentences with neutral prior context and either long or short regions of text before disambiguation to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. The length of intervening material had no effect on ease of disambiguation. Instead, we found only a main effect of meaning at disambiguation, such that disambiguating to the subordinate meaning of the homograph was more difficult-results consistent with the reordered access model and contemporary probabilistic models, but inconsistent with the capacity-constrained model.

Baseball fans don't like lumpy batters: Influence of domain knowledge on the access of subordinate meanings.

Two experiments investigated the effects of domain knowledge on the resolution of ambiguous words with dominant meanings related to baseball. When placed in a sentence context that strongly biased toward the non-baseball meaning (positive evidence), or excluded the baseball meaning (negative evidence), baseball experts had more difficulty than non-experts resolving the ambiguity. Sentence contexts containing positive evidence supported earlier resolution than did the negative evidence condition for both experts and non-experts. These experiments extend prior findings, and can be seen as support for the reordered access model of lexical access, where both prior knowledge and discourse context influence the availability of word meanings.

So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help?

The prospect of speed reading--reading at an increased speed without any loss of comprehension--has undeniable appeal. Speed reading has been an intriguing concept for decades, at least since Evelyn Wood introduced her Reading Dynamics training program in 1959. It has recently increased in popularity, with speed-reading apps and technologies being introduced for smartphones and digital devices. The current article reviews what the scientific community knows about the reading process--a great deal--and discusses the implications of the research findings for potential students of speed-reading training programs or purchasers of speed-reading apps. The research shows that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. It is unlikely that readers will be able to double or triple their reading speeds (e.g., from around 250 to 500-750 words per minute) while still being able to understand the text as well as if they read at normal speed. If a thorough understanding of the text is not the reader's goal, then speed reading or skimming the text will allow the reader to get through it faster with moderate comprehension. The way to maintain high comprehension and get through text faster is to practice reading and to become a more skilled language user (e.g., through increased vocabulary). This is because language skill is at the heart of reading speed.

Two stages of parafoveal processing during reading: Evidence from a display change detection task.

We used a display change detection paradigm (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner Human Perception and Performance, 37, 1924-1938 2011) to investigate whether display change detection uses orthographic regularity and whether detection is affected by the processing difficulty of the word preceding the boundary that triggers the display change. Subjects were significantly more sensitive to display changes when the change was from a nonwordlike preview than when the change was from a wordlike preview, but the preview benefit effect on the target word was not affected by whether the preview was wordlike or nonwordlike. Additionally, we did not find any influence of preboundary word frequency on display change detection performance. Our results suggest that display change detection and lexical processing do not use the same cognitive mechanisms. We propose that parafoveal processing takes place in two stages: an early, orthography-based, preattentional stage, and a late, attention-dependent lexical access stage.

Looking, seeing and believing in autism: Eye movements reveal how subtle cognitive processing differences impact in the social domain.

Adults with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) viewed scenes with people in them, while having their eye movements recorded. The task was to indicate, using a button press, whether the pictures were normal, or in some way weird or odd. Oddities in the pictures were categorized as violations of either perceptual or social norms. Compared to a Typically Developed (TD) control group, the ASD participants were equally able to categorize the scenes as odd or normal, but they took longer to respond. The eye movement patterns showed that the ASD group made more fixations and revisits to the target areas in the odd scenes compared with the TD group. Additionally, when the ASD group first fixated the target areas in the scenes, they failed to initially detect the social oddities. These two findings have clear implications for processing difficulties in ASD for the social domain, where it is important to detect social cues on-line, and where there is little opportunity to go back and recheck possible cues in fast dynamic interactions. Autism Res 2016, 9: 879-887. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

What Eye Movements Reveal about Deaf Readers.

Levels of illiteracy in the deaf populations around the world have been extremely high for decades and much higher than the illiteracy levels found in the general population. Research has mostly focused on deaf readers' difficulties rather than on their strengths, which can then inform reading education. Deaf readers are a unique population. They process language and the world surrounding them mostly via the visual channel and this greatly affects how they read or might learn to read. The study of eye movements in reading provides highly sophisticated information about how words and sentences are processed and our research with deaf readers reveals the importance of their uniqueness.

The effect of contextual constraint on parafoveal processing in reading.

Semantic preview benefit in reading is an elusive and controversial effect because empirical studies do not always (but sometimes) find evidence for it. Its presence seems to depend on (at least) the language being read, visual properties of the text (e.g., initial letter capitalization), the type of relationship between preview and target, and as shown here, semantic constraint generated by the prior sentence context. Schotter (2013) reported semantic preview benefit for synonyms, but not semantic associates when the preview/target was embedded in a neutral sentence context. In Experiment 1, we embedded those same previews/targets into constrained sentence contexts and in Experiment 2 we replicated the effects reported by Schotter (2013; in neutral sentence contexts) and Experiment 1 (in constrained contexts) in a within-subjects design. In both experiments, we found an early (i.e., first-pass) apparent preview benefit for semantically associated previews in constrained contexts that went away in late measures (e.g., total time). These data suggest that sentence constraint (at least as manipulated in the current study) does not operate by making a single word form expected, but rather generates expectations about what kinds of words are likely to appear. Furthermore, these data are compatible with the assumption of the E-Z Reader model that early oculomotor decisions reflect "hedged bets" that a word will be identifiable and, when wrong, lead the system to identify the wrong word, triggering regressions.

Readers extract character frequency information from nonfixated-target word at long pretarget fixations during Chinese reading.

We performed 2 eye movement studies to explore whether readers can extract character or word frequency information from nonfixated-target words in Chinese reading. In Experiments 1A and 1B, we manipulated the character frequency of the first character in a 2-character target word and the word frequency of a 2-character target word, respectively. We found that fixation durations on the pretarget words were shorter when the first character of a 2-character target word was presented with high frequency. Such effects were not observed for word frequency manipulations of a 2-character target word. In particular, further analysis revealed that such effects only occurred for long pretarget fixations. These results for character and word frequency manipulations were replicated in a within-subjects design in Experiment 2. These findings are generally consistent with the notion that characters are processed in parallel during Chinese reading. However, we did not find evidence that words are processed in parallel during Chinese reading.

Skipping syntactically illegal the previews: The role of predictability.

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates the-skipping behavior. The results provide further evidence that readers frequently skip the article the when infelicitous in context. Readers skipped predictable words more often than unpredictable words, even when the, which was syntactically illegal and unpredictable from the prior context, was presented as a parafoveal preview. The results of the experiment were simulated using E-Z Reader 10 by assuming that cloze probability can be dissociated from parafoveal visual input. It appears that when a short word is predictable in context, a decision to skip it can be made even if the information available parafoveally conflicts both visually and syntactically with those predictions.

Saccade target selection in Chinese reading.

In Chinese reading, there are no spaces to mark the word boundaries, so Chinese readers cannot target their saccades to the center of a word. In this study, we investigated how Chinese readers decide where to move their eyes during reading. To do so, we introduced a variant of the boundary paradigm in which only the target stimulus remained on the screen, displayed at the saccade landing site, after the participant's eyes crossed an invisible boundary. We found that when the saccade target was a word, reaction times in a lexical decision task were shorter when the saccade landing position was closer to the end of that word. These results are consistent with the predictions of a processing-based strategy to determine where to move the eyes. Specifically, this hypothesis assumes that Chinese readers estimate how much information is processed in parafoveal vision and saccade to a location that will carry novel information.

Transsaccadic processing: stability, integration, and the potential role of remapping.

While our frequent saccades allow us to sample the complex visual environment in a highly efficient manner, they also raise certain challenges for interpreting and acting upon visual input. In the present, selective review, we discuss key findings from the domains of cognitive psychology, visual perception, and neuroscience concerning two such challenges: (1) maintaining the phenomenal experience of visual stability despite our rapidly shifting gaze, and (2) integrating visual information across discrete fixations. In the first two sections of the article, we focus primarily on behavioral findings. Next, we examine the possibility that a neural phenomenon known as predictive remapping may provide an explanation for aspects of transsaccadic processing. In this section of the article, we delineate and critically evaluate multiple proposals about the potential role of predictive remapping in light of both theoretical principles and empirical findings.

Reading transposed text: effects of transposed letter distance and consonant-vowel status on eye movements.

Two 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.

Encoding the target or the plausible preview word? The nature of the plausibility preview benefit in reading Chinese.

Previous studies have shown that a plausible preview word can facilitate the processing of a target word as compared to an implausible preview word (a plausibility preview benefit effect) when reading Chinese (Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012; Yang, 2013). Regarding the nature of this effect, it is possible that readers processed the meaning of the plausible preview word and did not actually encode the target word (given that the parafoveal preview word lies close to the fovea). The current experiment examined this possibility with three conditions wherein readers received a preview of a target word that was either (1) identical to the target word (identical preview), (2) a plausible continuation of the pre-target text, but the post-target text in the sentence was incompatible with it (initially plausible preview), or (3) not a plausible continuation of the pre-target text, nor compatible with the post-target text (implausible preview). Gaze durations on target words were longer in the initially plausible condition than the identical condition. Overall, the results showed a typical preview benefit, but also implied that readers did not encode the initially plausible preview. Also, a plausibility preview benefit was replicated: gaze durations were longer with implausible previews than the initially plausible ones. Furthermore, late eye movement measures did not reveal differences between the initially plausible and the implausible preview conditions, which argues against the possibility of misreading the plausible preview word as the target word. In sum, these results suggest that a plausible preview word provides benefit in processing the target word as compared to an implausible preview word, and this benefit is only present in early but not late eye movement measures.

Word frequency in fast priming: Evidence for immediate cognitive control of eye-movements during reading.

Numerous studies have demonstrated effects of word frequency on eye movements during reading, but the precise timing of this influence has remained unclear. The fast priming paradigm (Sereno & Rayner, 1992) was previously used to study influences of related versus unrelated primes on the target word. Here, we used this procedure to investigate whether the frequency of the prime word has a direct influence on eye movements during reading when the prime-target relation is not manipulated. We found that with average prime intervals of 32 ms readers made longer single fixation durations on the target word in the low than in the high frequency prime condition. Distributional analyses demonstrated that the effect of prime frequency on single fixation durations occurred very early, supporting theories of immediate cognitive control of eye movements. Finding prime frequency effects only 207 ms after visibility of the prime and for prime durations of 32 ms yields new time constraints for cognitive processes controlling eye movements during reading. Our variant of the fast priming paradigm provides a new approach to test early influences of word processing on eye movement control during reading.

Semantic preview benefit in reading English: The effect of initial letter capitalization.

A major controversy in reading research is whether semantic information is obtained from the word to the right of the currently fixated word (word n + 1). Although most evidence has been negative in English, semantic preview benefit has been observed for readers of Chinese and German. In the present experiment, we investigated whether the discrepancy between English and German may be attributable to a difference in visual properties of the orthography: the first letter of a noun is always capitalized in German, but is only occasionally capitalized in English. This visually salient property may draw greater attention to the word during parafoveal preview and thus increase preview benefit generally (and lead to a greater opportunity for semantic preview benefit). We used English target nouns that can either be capitalized (e.g., We went to the critically acclaimed Ballet of Paris while on vacation.) or not (e.g., We went to the critically acclaimed ballet that was showing in Paris.) and manipulated the capitalization of the preview accordingly, to determine whether capitalization modulates preview benefit in English. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used with identical, semantically related, and unrelated previews. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found numerically larger preview benefits when the preview/target was capitalized than when it was lowercase. Crucially, semantic preview benefit was not observed when the preview/target word was not capitalized, but was observed when the preview/target word was capitalized.

The effect of high- and low-frequency previews and sentential fit on word skipping during reading.

In a previous gaze-contingent boundary experiment, Angele and Rayner (2013) found that readers are likely to skip a word that appears to be the definite article the even when syntactic constraints do not allow for articles to occur in that position. In the present study, we investigated whether the word frequency of the preview of a 3-letter target word influences a reader's decision to fixate or skip that word. We found that the word frequency rather than the felicitousness (syntactic fit) of the preview affected how often the upcoming word was skipped. These results indicate that visual information about the upcoming word trumps information from the sentence context when it comes to making a skipping decision. Skipping parafoveal instances of the therefore may simply be an extreme case of skipping high-frequency words.

Don't believe what you read (only once): comprehension is supported by regressions during reading.

Recent Web apps have spurred excitement around the prospect of achieving speed reading by eliminating eye movements (i.e., with rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP, in which words are presented briefly one at a time and sequentially). Our experiment using a novel trailing-mask paradigm contradicts these claims. Subjects read normally or while the display of text was manipulated such that each word was masked once the reader's eyes moved past it. This manipulation created a scenario similar to RSVP: The reader could read each word only once; regressions (i.e., rereadings of words), which are a natural part of the reading process, were functionally eliminated. Crucially, the inability to regress affected comprehension negatively. Furthermore, this effect was not confined to ambiguous sentences. These data suggest that regressions contribute to the ability to understand what one has read and call into question the viability of speed-reading apps that eliminate eye movements (e.g., those that use RSVP).