Reading(,) with and without commas.

All major writing systems mandate the use of commas to separate clauses and list items. However, casual writers often omit mandatory commas. Little empirical or theoretical research has been done on the effect that omitting mandatory commas has on eye movement control during reading. We present an eye-tracking experiment in Spanish, a language with a clear standard as to mandatory comma use. Sentences were presented with or without mandatory commas while readers' eye movements were recorded. There was a local increase in the go-past time for the pre-comma region when commas were presented, which was balanced out by shorter first-pass and second-pass times on the subsequent regions. In global sentence reading time, there was no evidence for an advantage of presenting commas. These findings suggest that, even when commas are mandatory, their effect is primarily to shift when processing takes place rather than to facilitate processing overall.

Does online masked priming pass the test? The effects of prime exposure duration on masked identity priming.

Masked priming is one of the most important paradigms in the study of visual word recognition, but it is usually thought to require a laboratory setup with a known monitor and keyboard. To test if this technique can be safely used in an online setting, we conducted two online masked priming lexical decision task experiments using PsychoPy/PsychoJS (Peirce et al., 2019). Importantly, we also tested the role of prime exposure duration (33.3 vs. 50 ms in Experiment 1 and 16.7 vs. 33.3 ms in Experiment 2), thus allowing us to examine both across conditions and within-conditions effects. We found that our online data are indeed very similar to the masked priming data previously reported in the masked priming literature. Additionally, we found a clear effect of prime duration, with the priming effect (measured in terms of response time and accuracy) being stronger at 50 ms than 33.3 ms and no priming effect at 16.7 ms prime duration. From these results, we can conclude that modern online browser-based experimental psychophysics packages (e.g., PsychoPy) can present stimuli and collect responses on standard end user devices with enough precision. These findings provide us with confidence that masked priming can be used online, thus allowing us not only to run less time-consuming experiments, but also to reach populations that are difficult to test in a laboratory.

Sensory gating is related to positive and disorganised schizotypy in contrast to smooth pursuit eye movements and latent inhibition.

Since the characteristics and symptoms of both schizophrenia and schizotypy are manifested heterogeneously, it is possible that different endophenotypes and neurophysiological measures (sensory gating and smooth pursuit eye movement errors) represent different clusters of symptoms. Participants (N = 205) underwent a standard conditioned-pairing paradigm to establish their sensory gating ratio, a smooth-pursuit eye-movement task, a latent inhibition task, and completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. A Multidimensional Scaling analysis revealed that sensory gating was related to positive and disorganised dimensions of schizotypy. Latent inhibition and prepulse inhibition were not related to any dimension of schizotypy. Smooth pursuit eye movement error was unrelated to sensory gating and latent inhibition, but was related to negative dimensions of schizotypy. Our findings suggest that the symptom clusters associated with two main endophenotypes are largely independent. To fully understand symptomology and outcomes of schizotypal traits, the different subtypes of schizotypy (and potentially, schizophrenia) ought to be considered separately rather than together.

Repetition causes confusion: Insights to word segmentation during Chinese reading.

Since there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries in Chinese, it is common to see 2 identical neighboring characters in natural text. Usually, this occurs when there are 2 adjacent words containing the same character (we will call such a coincidental sequence of 2 identical characters repeated characters). In the present study, we examined how Chinese readers process words when there are repeated characters. In 3 experiments, we compared how Chinese readers process 4-character strings including 2 repeated characters (e.g. , pinyin: xíngdòng dòngji, meaning behavioral motivation) with a control condition where none of the characters repeat (e.g. , pinyin: xíngdòng yùwàng, meaning behavioral desire). In Experiment 1, the 4-character strings were presented for 40 ms and participants were asked to report as many characters as possible. Participants reported the second and third characters less accurately in the repeated condition than the control condition. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we embedded 2 different types of 4-character strings, compound Chinese characters and simple Chinese characters, into the same sentence frames, and asked participants to read these sentences normally. Gaze duration and total time on the second word were significantly longer in the repeated condition. These results suggest that the repeated characters increased the difficulty of word processing. Moreover, the results are consistent with the predictions of serial models, which assumes that words are processed serially in reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Reading is disrupted by intelligible background speech: Evidence from eye-tracking.

It is not well understood whether background speech affects the initial processing of words during reading or only the later processes of sentence integration. Additionally, it is not clear how eye movements support text comprehension in the face of distraction by background speech and noise. In the present research, participants read single sentences (Experiment 1) and short paragraphs (Experiments 2-3) in 4 sound conditions: silence, speech-spectrum Gaussian noise, English speech (intelligible to participants), and Mandarin speech (unintelligible to participants). Intelligible speech did not affect the lexical access of words and had a limited effect on the first-pass fixations of words. However, it led to more regressions and more rereading fixations compared with both unintelligible speech and silence. The results suggested that the distraction is mostly semantic in nature, and there was only limited evidence for a contribution of phonology. Finally, intelligible speech disrupted comprehension only when participants were prevented from rereading previous words. These findings suggest that the semantic properties of irrelevant speech can disrupt the ongoing reading process, but that this disruption occurs in the postlexical stages of reading when participants need to integrate words to form the sentence context and to construct a coherent discourse of the text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Distraction by deviant sounds during reading: An eye-movement study.

Oddball studies have shown that sounds unexpectedly deviating from an otherwise repeated sequence capture attention away from the task at hand. While such distraction is typically regarded as potentially important in everyday life, previous work has so far not examined how deviant sounds affect performance on more complex daily tasks. In this study, we developed a new method to examine whether deviant sounds can disrupt reading performance by recording participants' eye movements. Participants read single sentences in silence and while listening to task-irrelevant sounds. In the latter condition, a 50-ms sound was played contingent on the fixation of five target words in the sentence. On most occasions, the same tone was presented (standard sound), whereas on rare and unexpected occasions it was replaced by white noise (deviant sound). The deviant sound resulted in significantly longer fixation durations on the target words relative to the standard sound. A time-course analysis showed that the deviant sound began to affect fixation durations around 180 ms after fixation onset. Furthermore, deviance distraction was not modulated by the lexical frequency of target words. In summary, fixation durations on the target words were longer immediately after the presentation of the deviant sound, but there was no evidence that it interfered with the lexical processing of these words. The present results are in line with the recent proposition that deviant sounds yield a temporary motor suppression and suggest that deviant sounds likely inhibit the programming of the next saccade.

Beyond the leftward limit of the perceptual span: Parafoveal processing to the left of fixation in Chinese reading.

During reading, Chinese readers have been found to obtain useful visual information from one character to the left to three characters to the right of fixation. The perceptual span is asymmetrical, and its leftward extent seems to be limited compared with the rightward extent. We conducted an experiment to investigate whether Chinese readers could process written information beyond the leftward extent of the perceptual span. We did this by using a variation of the gaze-contingent display change paradigm (Rayner, Cognitive Psychology, 81, 65-81, 1975) in order to manipulate the parafoveal "postview" that was available to the left of where readers were fixating. Each sentence contained an invisible boundary. Once the readers' eyes crossed the boundary, all of the characters to the left of the boundary except for one, two, or three characters directly to the left of the boundary were replaced with visually similar characters. The change lasted for only one single fixation, resulting in four different "postview" conditions including a control condition (n - 1, n - 2, n - 3, control). The results showed that, compared with the control condition, there were more regressions to the display change area immediately after readers' eyes crossed the boundary in the n - 1, n - 2, and n - 3 conditions, demonstrating that readers can acquire information from the three characters to the left of fixation at least.

Auditory Distraction During Reading: A Bayesian Meta-Analysis of a Continuing Controversy.

Everyday reading occurs in different settings, such as on the train to work, in a busy cafeteria, or at home while listening to music. In these situations, readers are exposed to external auditory stimulation from nearby noise, speech, or music that may distract them from their task and reduce their comprehension. Although many studies have investigated auditory-distraction effects during reading, the results have proved to be inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory. In addition, the broader theoretical implications of the findings have not always been explicitly considered. We report a Bayesian meta-analysis of 65 studies on auditory-distraction effects during reading and use metaregression models to test predictions derived from existing theories. The results showed that background noise, speech, and music all have a small but reliably detrimental effect on reading performance. The degree of disruption in reading comprehension did not generally differ between adults and children. Intelligible speech and lyrical music resulted in the biggest distraction. Although this last result is consistent with theories of semantic distraction, there was also reliable distraction by noise. It is argued that new theoretical models are needed that can account for distraction by both background speech and noise.

What are the costs of degraded parafoveal previews during silent reading?

It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline. We report 2 experiments of skilled adults reading silently. In Experiment 1, we found no compelling evidence that degraded previews reduced processing costs associated with traditional letter masks. Moreover, participants were highly sensitive to detecting degraded display changes. Experiment 2 used the boundary detection paradigm (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner, 2011) to explore whether participants were capable of detecting actual letter changes or if they were responding purely to changes in degradation. Half of the participants were instructed to respond to any noticed display changes; the other half were instructed to respond only to changes in letter identities. Participants were highly sensitive to degraded changes. In fact, these changes were so apparent that they reduced the sensitivity to letter masks. In the context of the model proposed by Angele, Slattery, and Rayner (2016), we suggest that degraded previews interfere with the attentional stage, as evidenced by the general lack of foveal load effects. In summary, we found that increasingly degrading parafoveal letter masks does not reduce their processing costs in adults, but that both degraded valid and invalid previews introduce additional costs in terms of greater display change awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record

Skipping of Chinese characters does not rely on word-based processing.

Previous eye-movement studies have indicated that people tend to skip extremely high-frequency words in sentence reading, such as "the" in English and "/de" in Chinese. Two alternative hypotheses have been proposed to explain how this frequent skipping happens in Chinese reading: one assumes that skipping happens when the preview has been fully identified at the word level (word-based skipping); the other assumes that skipping happens whenever the preview character is easy to identify regardless of whether lexical processing has been completed or not (character-based skipping). Using the gaze-contingent display change paradigm, we examined the two hypotheses by substituting the preview of the third character of a four-character Chinese word with the high-frequency Chinese character "/de", which should disrupt the ongoing word-level processing. The character-based skipping hypothesis predicts that this manipulation will enhance the skipping probability of the target character (i.e., the third character of the target word), because the character "/de" has much higher character frequency than the original character. The word-based skipping hypothesis instead predicts a reduction of the skipping probability of the target character because the presence of the character "/de" is lexically infelicitous at word level. The results supported the character-based skipping hypothesis, indicating that in Chinese reading the decision of skipping a character can be made before integrating it into a word.

False Positives and Other Statistical Errors in Standard Analyses of Eye Movements in Reading.

In research on eye movements in reading, it is common to analyze a number of canonical dependent measures to study how the effects of a manipulation unfold over time. Although this gives rise to the well-known multiple comparisons problem, i.e. an inflated probability that the null hypothesis is incorrectly rejected (Type I error), it is accepted standard practice not to apply any correction procedures. Instead, there appears to be a widespread belief that corrections are not necessary because the increase in false positives is too small to matter. To our knowledge, no formal argument has ever been presented to justify this assumption. Here, we report a computational investigation of this issue using Monte Carlo simulations. Our results show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, false positives are increased to unacceptable levels when no corrections are applied. Our simulations also show that counter-measures like the Bonferroni correction keep false positives in check while reducing statistical power only moderately. Hence, there is little reason why such corrections should not be made a standard requirement. Further, we discuss three statistical illusions that can arise when statistical power is low, and we show how power can be improved to prevent these illusions. In sum, our work renders a detailed picture of the various types of statistical errors than can occur in studies of reading behavior and we provide concrete guidance about how these errors can be avoided.

Parafoveal preview effects from word N + 1 and word N + 2 during reading: A critical review and Bayesian meta-analysis.

The use of gaze-contingent display techniques to study reading has shown that readers attend not only the currently fixated word, but also the word to the right of the current fixation. However, a critical look at the literature shows that a number of questions cannot be readily answered from the available literature reviews on the topic. First, there is no consensus as to whether readers also attend the second word to the right of fixation. Second, it is not clear whether parafoveal processing is more efficient in languages such as Chinese. Third, it is not well understood whether the measured effects are confounded by the properties of the parafoveal mask. In the present study, we addressed these issues by performing a Bayesian meta-analysis of 93 experiments that used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, Cognitive Psychology, 7, 65-81. doi: 10.1016/0010-028590005-5 , 1975). We describe three main findings: (1) The advantage of previewing the second word to the right is modest in size and likely is not centered on zero; (2) Chinese readers do seem to make more efficient use of parafoveal processing, but this is mostly evident in gaze durations; and (3) there are interference effects associated with using different parafoveal masks that roughly increase when the mask is less word-like.

Skipping of the very-high-frequency structural particle de () in Chinese reading.

How do readers decide whether to skip or fixate a word? Angele and Rayner [2013. Processing the in the parafovea: Are articles skipped automatically? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39, 649-662] showed that English readers base skipping decisions on the parafoveal information available, but not the sentential context. Due to the increased visual density of the language, Chinese readers may be able to process a parafoveal word and integrate it with the sentence context to a greater extent than English readers. Consequently, influences on skipping decisions in Chinese may differ from those in English. In a boundary paradigm experiment, participants read sentences containing a single-character target verb (e.g., meaning get) whose preview was manipulated in three conditions: identity preview; a preview consisting of the syntactically anomalous high-frequency structural particle de (), or a pseudocharacter preview. The results showed that Chinese readers were more likely to skip the target when the preview was de than in either of the other conditions, suggesting that de-skipping is triggered by the parafoveal preview of a highly frequent particle word rather than on the likelihood of the upcoming word given the sentential context..

Interword and interletter spacing effects during reading revisited: Interactions with word and font characteristics.

Despite the large number of eye movement studies conducted over the past 30+ years, relatively few have examined the influence that font characteristics have on reading. However, there has been renewed interest in 1 particular font characteristic, letter spacing, which has both theoretical (visual word recognition) and applied (font design) importance. Recently published results that letter spacing has a bigger impact on the reading performance of dyslexic children have perhaps garnered the most attention (Zorzi et al., 2012). Unfortunately, the effects of increased interletter spacing have been mixed with some authors reporting facilitation and others reporting inhibition (van den Boer & Hakvoort, 2015). The authors present findings from 3 experiments designed to resolve the seemingly inconsistent letter-spacing effects and provide clarity to researchers and font designers and researchers. The results indicate that the direction of spacing effects depend on the size of the default spacing chosen by font developers. Experiment 3 found that interletter spacing interacts with interword spacing, as the required space between words depends on the amount of space used between letters. Interword spacing also interacted with word type as the inhibition seen with smaller interword spacing was evident with nouns and verbs but not with function words. (PsycINFO Database Record

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.

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.

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.

On the processing of canonical word order during eye fixations in reading: Do readers process transposed word previews?

Whether readers always identify words in the order they are printed is subject to considerable debate. In the present study, we used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to manipulate the preview for a two-word target region (e.g. white walls in My neighbor painted the white walls black). Readers received an identical (white walls), transposed (walls white), or unrelated preview (vodka clubs). We found that there was a clear cost of having a transposed preview compared to an identical preview, indicating that readers cannot or do not identify words out of order. However, on some measures, the transposed preview condition did lead to faster processing than the unrelated preview condition, suggesting that readers may be able to obtain some useful information from a transposed preview. Implications of the results for models of eye movement control in reading are discussed.

Using singular value decomposition to investigate degraded Chinese character recognition: evidence from eye movements during reading.

Previous research indicates that removing initial strokes from Chinese characters makes them harder to read than removing final or internal ones. In the present study, we examined the contribution of important components to character configuration via singular value decomposition. The results indicated that when the least important segments, which did not seriously alter the configuration (contour) of the character, were deleted, subjects read as fast as when no segments were deleted. When the most important segments, which are located in the left side of a character and written first, were deleted, reading speed was greatly slowed. These results suggest that singular value decomposition, which has no information about stroke writing order, can identify the most important strokes for Chinese character identification. Furthermore, they also suggest that contour may be correlated with stroke writing order.

Processing the in the parafovea: are articles skipped automatically?

One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article the. Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string t-h-e automatically. We tested whether skipping of articles in English is sensitive to context information or whether it is truly automatic in the sense that any occurrence of the letter string the will trigger a skip. This was done using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to provide readers with false parafoveal previews of the article the. All experimental sentences contained a short target verb, the preview of which could be correct (i.e., identical to the actual subsequent word in the sentence; e.g., ace), a nonword (tda), or an infelicitous article preview (the). Our results indicated that readers tended to skip the infelicitous the previews frequently, suggesting that, in many cases, they seemed to be unable to detect the syntactic anomaly in the preview and based their skipping decision solely on the orthographic properties of the article. However, there was some evidence that readers sometimes detected the anomaly, as they also showed increased skipping of the pretarget word in the the preview condition.