The transposed-word effect provides no unequivocal evidence for parallel processing.

Studies using a grammaticality decision task have revealed surprising flexibility in the processing of word order during sentence reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts. Participants in these studies typically exhibit a transposed-word effect, in which they make more errors and slower correct responses for stimuli that contain a word transposition and are derived from grammatical as compared to ungrammatical base sentences. Some researchers have used this finding to argue that words are encoded in parallel during reading, such that multiple words can be processed simultaneously and might be recognised out of order. This contrasts with an alternative account of the reading process, which argues that words must be encoded serially, one at a time. We examined, in English, whether the transposed-word effect provides evidence for a parallel-processing account, employing the same grammaticality decision task used in previous research and display procedures that either allowed for parallel word encoding or permitted only the serial encoding of words. Our results replicate and extend recent findings by showing that relative word order can be processed flexibly even when parallel processing is not possible (i.e., within displays requiring serial word encoding). Accordingly, while the present findings provide further evidence for flexibility in the processing of relative word order during reading, they add to converging evidence that the transposed-word effect does not provide unequivocal evidence for a parallel-processing account of reading. We consider how the present findings may be accounted for by both serial and parallel accounts of word recognition in reading.

Syntactic prediction during self-paced reading is age invariant.

Controversy exists as to whether, compared to young adults, older adults are more, equally or less likely to make linguistic predictions while reading. While previous studies have examined age effects on the prediction of upcoming words, the prediction of upcoming syntactic structures has been largely unexplored. We compared the benefit that young and older readers gain when the syntactic structure is made predictable, as well as potential age differences in the costs involved in making predictions. In a self-paced reading study, 60 young and 60 older adults read sentences in which noun-phrase coordination (e.g. large pizza or tasty calzone) is made predictable through the inclusion of the word either earlier in the sentence. Results showed a benefit of the presence of either in the second half of the coordination phrase, and a cost of the presence of either in the first half. We observed no age differences in the benefit or costs of making these predictions; Bayes factor analyses offered strong evidence that these effects are age invariant. Together, these findings suggest that both older and younger adults make similar strength syntactic predictions with a similar level of difficulty. We relate this age invariance in syntactic prediction to specific aspects of the ageing process.

A transposed-word effect across space and time: Evidence from Chinese.

A compelling account of the reading process holds that words must be encoded serially, and so recognized strictly one at a time in the order they are encountered. However, this view has been challenged recently, based on evidence showing that readers sometimes fail to notice when adjacent words appear in ungrammatical order. This is argued to show that words are actually encoded in parallel, so that multiple words are processed simultaneously and therefore might be recognized out of order. We tested this account in an experiment in Chinese with 112 skilled readers, employing methods used previously to demonstrate flexible word order processing, and display techniques that allowed or disallowed the parallel encoding of words. The results provided evidence for flexible word order processing even when words must be encoded serially. Accordingly, while word order can be processed flexibly during reading, this need not entail that words are encoded in parallel.

No evidence of word-level uncertainty in younger and older adults in self-paced reading.

In a self-paced reading study, we investigated whether older adults maintain a greater level of uncertainty about the identity of words in a sentence than younger adults, potentially due to deficits in visuo-perceptual processing of high-spatial frequencies associated with normal aging. In the experiment, 60 older adults and 60 younger adults read sentences in which an early preposition was either perceptually confusable with another word (at; confusable with as) or not (toward), and in which the reading of a subsequent ambiguous verb (e.g., tossed) should be affected by the confusability of the preposition, while the reading of an unambiguous verb (e.g., thrown) should not be. This design replicated that of an earlier study conducted by Levy et al. (2009) that found evidence in favour of participants maintaining uncertainty about the confusable preposition in go-past times during natural reading. However, in our study, there was no evidence that either younger or older adults maintained uncertainty about the identity of the perceptually confusable preposition, such that there was no interaction between the preposition's form and subsequent verb ambiguity in self-paced reading times, although we did observe a main effect of verb ambiguity. This represents a failure to replicate the effect observed by Levy et al. when using a different experimental paradigm, and we consider potential causes of our findings at both a methodological and theoretical level.

Online representations of non-canonical sentences are more than good-enough.

Proponents of good-enough processing suggest that readers often (mis)interpret certain sentences using fast-and-frugal heuristics, such that for non-canonical sentences (e.g., The dog was bitten by the man) people confuse the thematic roles of the nouns. We tested this theory by examining the effect of sentence canonicality on the reading of a follow-up sentence. In a self-paced reading study, 60 young and 60 older adults read an implausible sentence in either canonical (e.g., It was the peasant that executed the king) or non-canonical form (e.g., It was the king that was executed by the peasant), followed by a sentence that was implausible given a good-enough misinterpretation of the first sentence (e.g., Afterwards, the peasant rode back to the countryside) or a sentence that was implausible given a correct interpretation of the first sentence (e.g., Afterwards, the king rode back to his castle). We hypothesised that if non-canonical sentences are systematically misinterpreted, then sentence canonicality would differentially affect the reading of the two different follow-up types. Our data suggested that participants derived the same interpretations for canonical and non-canonical sentences, with no modulating effect of age group. Our findings suggest that readers do not derive an incorrect interpretation of non-canonical sentences during initial parsing, consistent with theories of misinterpretation effects that instead attribute these effects to post-interpretative processes.

Readers detect an low-level phonological violation between two parafoveal words.

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated whether readers can detect a violation of the phonological-grammatical convention for the indefinite article an to be followed by a word beginning with a vowel when these two words appear in the parafovea. Across two experiments participants read sentences in which the word an was followed by a parafoveal preview that was either correct (e.g. Icelandic), incorrect and represented a phonological violation (e.g. Mongolian), or incorrect without representing a phonological violation (e.g. Ethiopian), with this parafoveal preview changing to the target word as participants made a saccade into the space preceding an. Our data suggests that participants detected the phonological violation while the target word was still two words to the right of fixation, with participants making more regressions from the previewed word and having longer go-past times on this word when they received a violation preview as opposed to a non-violation preview. We argue that participants were attempting to perform aspects of sentence integration on the basis of low-level orthographic information from the previewed word.

The activation of contextually predictable words in syntactically illegal positions.

We present an eye-tracking study testing a hypothesis emerging from several theories of prediction during language processing, whereby predictable words should be skipped more than unpredictable words even in syntactically illegal positions. Participants read sentences in which a target word became predictable by a certain point (e.g., "bone" is 92% predictable given, "The dog buried his. . ."), with the next word actually being an intensifier (e.g., "really"), which a noun cannot follow. The target noun remained predictable to appear later in the sentence. We used the boundary paradigm to present the predictable noun or an alternative unpredictable noun (e.g., "food") directly after the intensifier, until participants moved beyond the intensifier, at which point the noun changed to a syntactically legal word. Participants also read sentences in which predictable or unpredictable nouns appeared in syntactically legal positions. A Bayesian linear-mixed model suggested a 5.7% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in syntactically legal positions, and a 3.1% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in illegal positions. We discuss our findings in relation to theories of lexical prediction during reading.

Capitalization interacts with syntactic complexity.

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative clause's overt argument was a proper noun (e.g., The tall lanky guard who alerted Charlie/Charlie alerted to the danger was young) across three experiments. In Experiment 1 these sentences were presented in normal sentence casing or entirely in upper case. In Experiment 2 participants received either valid or invalid parafoveal previews of the relative clause. In Experiment 3 participants viewed relative clauses in only normal conditions. We hypothesized that we would observe relative clause effects (i.e., inflated fixation times for object relative clauses) while readers were still fixated on the word who, if readers use capitalization to infer a parafoveal word's syntactic class. This would constitute a syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Furthermore, we hypothesized that this effect should be influenced by sentence casing in Experiment 1 (with no cue for syntactic category being available in upper case sentences) but not by parafoveal preview validity of the target words. We observed syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Experiment 1 and 3, and a Bayesian analysis of the combined data from all three experiments. These effects seemed to be influenced more by noun capitalization than lexical processing. We discuss our findings in relation to models of eye movement control and sentence processing theories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Reading sentences of uniform word length - II: Very rapid adaptation of the preferred saccade length.

In the current study we investigated whether readers adjust their preferred saccade length (PSL) during reading on a trial-by-trial basis. The PSL refers to the distance between a saccade launch site and saccade target (i.e., the word center during reading) when participants neither undershoot nor overshoot this target (McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola in Vision Research, 28, 1107-1118, 1988). The tendency for saccades longer or shorter than the PSL to under or overshoot their target is referred to as the range error. Recent research by Cutter, Drieghe, and Liversedge (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2017) has shown that the PSL changes to be shorter when readers are presented with 30 consecutive sentences exclusively made of three-letter words, and longer when presented with 30 consecutive sentences exclusively made of five-letter words. We replicated and extended this work by this time presenting participants with these uniform sentences in an unblocked design. We found that adaptation still occurred across different sentence types despite participants only having one trial to adapt. Our analyses suggested that this effect was driven by the length of the words readers were making saccades away from, rather than the length of the words in the rest of the sentence. We propose an account of the range error in which readers use parafoveal word length information to estimate the length of a saccade between the center of two parafoveal words (termed the Centre-Based Saccade Length) prior to landing on the first of these words.

Is orthographic information from multiple parafoveal words processed in parallel: An eye-tracking study.

In the current study we investigated whether orthographic information available from 1 upcoming parafoveal word influences the processing of another parafoveal word. Across 2 experiments we used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to present participants with an identity preview of the 2 words after the boundary (e.g., hot pan), a preview in which 2 letters were transposed between these words (e.g., hop tan), or a preview in which the same 2 letters were substituted (e.g., hob fan). We hypothesized that if these 2 words were processed in parallel in the parafovea then we may observe significant preview benefits for the condition in which the letters were transposed between words relative to the condition in which the letters were substituted. However, no such effect was observed, with participants fixating the words for the same amount of time in both conditions. This was the case both when the transposition was made between the final and first letter of the 2 words (e.g., hop tan as a preview of hot pan; Experiment 1) and when the transposition maintained within word letter position (e.g., pit hop as a preview of hit pop; Experiment 2). The implications of these findings are considered in relation to serial and parallel lexical processing during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record

Reading sentences of uniform word length: Evidence for the adaptation of the preferred saccade length during reading.

In the current study, the effect of removing word length variability within sentences on spatial aspects of eye movements during reading was investigated. Participants read sentences that were uniform in terms of word length, with each sentence consisting entirely of three-, four-, or five-letter words, or a combination of these word lengths. Several interesting findings emerged. Adaptation of the preferred saccade length occurred for sentences with different uniform word length; participants would be more accurate at making short saccades while reading uniform sentences of three-letter words, while they would be more accurate at making long saccades while reading uniform sentences of five-letter words. Furthermore, word skipping was affected such that three- and four-letter words were more likely, and five-letter words less likely, to be directly fixated in uniform compared to non-uniform sentences. It is argued that saccadic targeting during reading is highly adaptable and flexible toward the characteristics of the text currently being read, as opposed to the idea implemented in most current models of eye movement control during reading that readers develop a preference for making saccades of a certain length across a lifetime of experience with a given language. (PsycINFO Database Record

Preview benefit in English spaced compounds.

In an eye tracking experiment during reading we examined whether preview benefit could be observed from 2 words to the right of the currently fixated word if that word was the 2nd constituent of a spaced compound. The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to orthogonally manipulate whether participants saw an identity or nonword preview of the 1st (e.g., teddy) and 2nd constituent (e.g., bear) of a spaced compound located immediately beyond the boundary, respectively, words n + 1 and n + 2. Linear mixed-effects models revealed that participants gained an n + 2 preview benefit, such that they spent less time fixated on word n + 1 when given an identity preview of word n + 2. However, this effect was only observed if there was also an identity preview of word n + 1. Our findings suggest that the 2 constituent words of spaced compounds are processed as part of a larger lexical unit during natural reading.