Readers encode absolute letter positions.

Reading research has long been concerned with the question of whether the reading brain accesses lexical representations via absolute or relative letter position information. In recent years, important results have been obtained with the flanker lexical decision task. Studies have shown faster decisions about target words (e.g., 'rock') when flanked by related letters ('ro rock ck') than unrelated letters ('st rock ep')-and crucially, equal facilitation upon switching flanker positions ('ck rock ro'), pointing to relative rather than absolute letter position coding. Yet, a later study employing longer targets and flankers yielded detrimental effects of switching flanker positions. In order to get a better grasp on the equivocal evidence thus far, here we carried out an extensive test of flanker relatedness and position effects, using various target and flanker lengths, all within a single experiment. We observed a clear reduction of flanker relatedness effects upon switching flanker positions, and this held true across target and flanker lengths. The present results unambiguously suggest that lexical access is driven by absolute letter position information, and furthermore, are accurately predicted by the recent PONG model (Snell, 2024b).

Flexible word position coding in reading: Roles for attention and memory.

Readers may fail to notice the error in 'Do love you me?': this is the recently established transposed-word (TW) phenomenon. Word position coding is a novel cognitive construct, and researchers are presently debating the underlying mechanisms. Here I investigated roles for attention and memory. Participants (N = 54) made grammaticality judgements to four-word sequences that formed correct sentences ('The man can run', 'The dog was here'), TW sentences ('The can man run', 'The was dog here'), or ungrammatical control sentences ('The man dog run', 'The was can here'). Sequences were replaced by post-masks after 200 ms, and that post-mask was accompanied by a 50-ms retro-cue in the form of an 'X' presented at a critical location (where one could have locally inferred grammaticality; e.g., between the first and second word of 'The was dog here') or a non-critical location (e.g., between the third and fourth word of 'The was dog here'). TW sentences were harder to reject than control sentences - the classic TW effect - and crucially, this effect was modulated by cue validity, with valid cues attenuating TW effects compared to invalid cues. The present results suggest that focused attention aids the process of binding words to locations. Furthermore, as cues appeared after sentence offset, these results suggest that word position coding may take place in memory.

No, Bionic Reading does not work.

It has recently been claimed that presenting text with the first half of each word printed in bold (as is done in this example), so-called Bionic Reading, facilitates reading. However, empirical tests of this claim are lacking, and theoretically one might expect a cost rather than a benefit. Here I tested participants' reading speed of 100 paragraphs that were presented either in 'Bionic' or in normal font. Statistical analyses revealed no significant difference in reading times between Bionic and normal reading. I conclude that Bionic Reading does not facilitate reading.

Explaining the Sentence Superiority Effect and N400s Elicited by Words and Short Sentences with OB1-Reader.

Research into reading has benefitted from the emergence of powerful computational models that account for reading behavior at different levels. Such models become more powerful when the underlying anatomy, architecture or 'physiology' can be linked to the behavior of interest. OB1-reader is a reading model that simulates the processes underlying reading in the human brain. Previous studies showed that OB1-reader can account for various phenomena in the word recognition and text reading literatures. Here we aim to extend OB1's scope, by simulating behavioral performance and evoked EEG activity for two experimental word-recognition tasks: a flanker task in which unrelated flankers generated less accurate responses combined with a larger N400, and a sentence reading task in which words were recognized more accurately at central positions and within intact sentences, than at peripheral positions and in scrambled sentences. OB1 simulated several behavioral findings in both paradigms, including the so-called sentence superiority effect. Moreover, virtual event-related potentials (ERPs) generated from node activity in OB1 were compared to human ERPs. More lexical activity in OB1 predicted the size of the N400 component of human readers in both experiments, but not the N250.

Do Love You Me? Failure to Notice Word Transpositions is Induced by Parallel Word Processing.

Recent research has shown that readers may to fail notice word transpositions during reading (e.g., the transposition of "fail" and "to" in this sentence). Although this transposed word (TW) phenomenon was initially taken as evidence that readers process multiple words in parallel, several studies now show that TW-effects may also occur when words are presented one-by-one. Critically however, in the majority of studies TW-effects are weaker in serial presentation. Here we argue that while word position coding may to some extent proceed post-lexically (allowing TW-effects to occur despite seeing words one-by-one), stronger TW-effects in parallel presentation nonetheless evidence a degree of parallel word processing. We additionally report an experiment wherein a sample of Dutch participants (N = 34) made grammaticality judgments about 4-word TW sentences (e.g., 'the was man here', 'the went dog away') and ungrammatical control sentences ('the man dog here', 'the was went away'), whereby the four words were presented either serially or in parallel. Ungrammaticality was decidedly more difficult to notice in the TW condition, but only when words were presented in parallel. No effects were observed in the serial presentation whatsoever. The present results bolster the notion that word order is encoded with a degree of flexibility, and further provide straightforward evidence for parallel word processing during reading.

PONG: A computational model of visual word recognition through bihemispheric activation.

Orthographic processing is an open problem. Decades of visual word recognition research have fueled the development of various theoretical frameworks. Although these frameworks have had good explanatory power, various recent results cannot be satisfactorily captured in any model. In order to account for old and new phenomena alike, here I present a new theory of how the brain computes letter positions. According to PONG (which describes the Positional Ordering of N-Grams), each hemisphere of the brain comprises a set of mono- and multigram detectors. The crux is that the detectors for a given N-gram are activated to different extents in their respective hemispheres, depending on where in the visual field the N-gram is located. This differential activity allows the brain to estimate the leftness or rightness of that N-gram, whereby word activation is a function of the N-gram's identity plus its laterality relative to that of other activated N-grams. Simulations with PONG suggest that the framework effectively accounts for classic phenomena, as well as newer phenomena and cross-linguistic differences that cannot be explained by other models. I also reflect on the neurophysiological plausibility of the model and avenues for future inquiry. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The reading brain extracts syntactic information from multiple words within 50 milliseconds.

To what extent do readers process multiple words in parallel? Although it is now commonly accepted that letters are processed across multiple words simultaneously, higher-order (lexical, semantic, syntactic) parallel processing remains contentious. Recent use of the flanker paradigm has revealed that the syntactic recognition of foveal target words is influenced by the syntactic congruency of parafoveal flanking words even when target and flankers are shown for only 170 ms. It has been argued, however, that such settings may allow processing of multiple words even if this were to happen on a serial one-by-one basis. To circumvent this possibility, here I have tested participants in a syntactic categorization task whereby targets and flankers were shown for only 50 ms and replaced by post-masks. Significant effects of target-flanker congruency were observed in both response times and accuracy, indicating that readers extracted syntactic information from multiple words within the very brief presentation time. The present results strongly suggest that the brain extracts higher-order linguistic information from multiple words in parallel.

Readers use word length information to determine word order.

It is assumed by the OB1-reader model that activated words are flexibly associated with spatial locations. Supporting this notion, recent studies show that readers can confuse the order of words. As word position coding is assumed to rely, among other things, on low-level visual cues, OB1 predicts that it must be harder to determine the order of words when these are of equal length, and consequently, that it is more difficult to read uniform word length sentences. Here we review recent evidence, obtained by our peers, in line with this prediction. We additionally report an analysis of eye-movement data from the GECO corpus, replicating the phenomenon in a natural reading setting, and an experiment revealing a negative impact of length uniformity in a grammatical decision task. By virtue of the spatiotopic sentence-level representation, OB1-reader is currently the only model of reading to account for these behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Parallel word reading revealed by fixation-related brain potentials.

During reading, the brain is confronted with many relevant objects at once. But does lexical processing occur for multiple words simultaneously? Cognitive science has yet to answer this prominent question. Recently it has been argued that the issue warrants supplementing the field's traditional toolbox (response times, eye-tracking) with neuroscientific techniques (EEG, fMRI). Indeed, according to the OB1-reader model, upcoming words need not impact oculomotor behavior per se, but parallel processing of these words must nonetheless be reflected in neural activity. Here we combined eye-tracking with EEG, time-locking the neural window of interest to the fixation on target words in sentence reading. During these fixations, we manipulated the identity of the subsequent word so that it posed either a syntactically legal or illegal continuation of the sentence. In line with previous research, oculomotor measures were unaffected. Yet, syntax impacted brain potentials as early as 100 ms after the target fixation onset. Given the EEG literature on syntax processing, the presently observed timings suggest parallel word reading. We reckon that parallel word processing typifies reading, and that OB1-reader offers a good platform for theorizing about the reading brain.

Multi-res: An interface for improving reading without central vision.

Loss of sharp foveal vision, as is inherent to Macular Degeneration (MD), severely impacts reading. One strategy for preserving patients' reading ability involves a one-by-one serial visual presentation (SVP) of words, whereby words are viewed extrafoveally. However, the method is limited as patients often retain the natural tendency to foveate words, thus bringing those words in the scotomal region. Additionally, SVP offers no compensation for the fact that orthographic input is degraded outside the fovea. Addressing these issues, here we tested a novel interface wherein texts are presented word-by-word, but with multiple repetitions (Multi-Res) of each word being displayed simultaneously around the fovea. We hypothesized that the Multi-Res setup would lead readers to make fewer detrimental eye movements, and to recognize words faster as a consequence of multiplied orthographic input. We used eye-tracking to simulate a gaze-contingent foveal scotoma in normally-sighted participants, who read words either in classic SVP or in Multi-Res mode. In line with our hypotheses, reading was drastically better in the Multi-Res condition, with faster recognition, fewer saccades and increased oculomotor stability. We surmise that the Multi-Res method has good potential for improving reading in central vision loss, over and above classic SVP techniques.

Relative letter-position coding revisited.

The notion that the brain achieves visual word recognition by encoding the relative positions of letters with open-bigram representations (e.g., 'h-e', 'h-r' and 'e-r' driving recognition of 'her') has been successful in accounting for many behaviors and phenomena. However, one characteristic of open-bigrams has remained unexplored: How is the activation of a bigram modulated by the distance between its constituents in the visual field? On the one hand, contiguous letters (e.g., 'at' in 'father') may allow for a clearer percept of the bigram. On the other hand, an increasing distance between letters (e.g., 'ae' in 'father') should create more certainty about their relative positions, which is precisely what the bigram is meant to convey. This matter was investigated with two experiments in which participants indicated whether target pairs of letters occurred in random letter strings. They were instructed that letter order mattered (i.e., 'a-b' does not occur in 'kbac'), while letter contiguity did not (i.e., 'a-b' occurs in 'akcb'). Controlling for crowding and eccentricity, bigrams were recognized faster upon decreasing the letter distance. However, when switching the target letter order (meaning the string should be met by a 'no' response), shorter letter distances yielded slower responses and more false positives. Neither relative position-coding models nor absolute position-coding models accommodate both these patterns at once. We discuss how a complete account of our effects may instead combine elements from both model types.

Enhancing banknote authentication by guiding attention to security features and manipulating prevalence expectancy.

All banknotes have security features which are intended to help determine whether they are false or genuine. Typically, however, the general public has limited knowledge of where on a banknote these security features can be found. Here, we tested whether counterfeit detection can be improved with the help of salient elements, designed to guide bottom-up visuospatial attention. We also tested the influence of the participant's a priori level of trust in the authenticity of the banknote. In an online study (N = 422), a demographically diverse panel of Dutch participants distinguished genuine banknotes from banknotes with one (left- or right-sided) counterfeited security feature. Either normal banknotes (without novel design elements) or banknotes that contained a salient element (a pink rectangular frame) were presented for 1 s. To manipulate the participant's level of trust, trials were administered in three blocks, whereby at the start of each block, participants were instructed that either one third, one half, or two thirds of the upcoming banknotes were counterfeit (though the true ratio was always 1:1). We hypothesized (i) that in the presence of a salient element, counterfeits would be better detected when the location of the salient element aligned with the location of the counterfeited security feature-i.e. that it would act as an attentional cue; and (ii) that this effect would be stronger with lower trust. Our hypotheses were partly confirmed: counterfeit detection improved with 'valid cues' and decreasing trust, but the level of trust did not modulate the cueing effect. As the overall detection performance was rather poor, we replicated the study with a sample of university students (N = 66), this time presenting stimuli until response. While indeed observing better overall performance, all other patterns were replicated. Our results provide evidence that attention can be guided to enhance banknote authentication.

Attention extends beyond single words in beginning readers.

A common notion is that during the first stages of learning to read, attention is narrowly focused so as to encompass only a single or a few letters. In skilled adult readers, however, attention extends beyond single words. The latter is evidenced by faster recognition of words that have many letters in common with surrounding words, along with correlations between such integration effects and measures of attention. These premises suggest that the distribution of attention gradually increases as a function of reading skill, and that this progression can be mapped by measuring spatial integration effects across the course of reading development. The latter was undertaken in the present study, in which we employed the flanker paradigm combined with the lexical decision task. Children in grades 1-6 (N = 113) were shown central target words flanked by various types of orthographically related and unrelated flanking stimuli. Against expectations, significant effects of flanker relatedness on word recognition speed were found in the youngest children, and this effect was not modulated by reading age. Our results challenge the notion that attention is focused on single letters in beginning readers, and instead suggest that, from the earliest stages of reading development, orthographic processing can extend beyond single words.

Finding counterfeited banknotes: the roles of vision and touch.

Central banks incorporate various security features in their banknotes to enable themselves, the general public, retailers and professional cash handlers to detect counterfeits. In two field experiments, we tested central bank counterfeit experts and non-experts (the general public) in their ability to detect counterfeited euro banknotes. We varied exposure duration and perceptual modality (sight, touch or both). The counterfeit banknotes were actual counterfeits taken out of circulation. Experiment 1, in which participants only viewed the banknotes, showed that experts did reasonably well in detecting counterfeits even when exposure duration was limited to 500 ms. Non-experts did not reach the criterion for decent performance, marked by d' = 1.25, although they did perform above chance. In Experiment 2, participants could both see and touch the banknotes, which resulted in better performance especially with longer exposure durations. The main finding of the current study is that visual information mostly impacts the decision-making process during the first glance, whereas tactile information increasingly aids performance as it continues to be accrued over time. Implications for the design of security features of new banknotes are discussed.

The Role of Attention in Word Recognition: Results from OB1-Reader.

When reading, orthographic information is extracted not only from the word the reader is looking at, but also from adjacent words in the parafovea. Here we examined, using the recently introduced OB1-reader computational model, how orthographic information can be processed in parallel across multiple words and how orthographic information can be integrated across time and space. Although OB1-reader is a model of text reading, here we used it to simulate single-word recognition experiments in which parallel processing has been shown to play a role by manipulating the surrounding context in flanker and priming paradigms. In flanker paradigms, observers recognize a central word flanked by other letter strings located left and right of the target and separated from the target by a space. The model successfully accounts for the finding that such flankers can aid word recognition when they contain bigrams of the target word, independent of where those flankers are in the visual field. In priming experiments, in which the target word is preceded by a masked prime, the model accounts for the finding that priming occurs independent of whether the prime and target word are in the same location or not. Crucial to these successes is the key role that spatial attention plays within OB1-reader, as it allows the model to receive visual input from multiple locations in parallel, while limiting the kinds of errors that can potentially occur under such spatial pooling of orthographic information.

How readers process syntactic input depends on their goals.

During reading, the recognition of words is influenced by the syntactic compatibility of surrounding words: a sentence-superiority effect. However, when the goal is to make syntactic categorization decisions about single target words, these decisions are influenced by the syntactic congruency rather than compatibility of surrounding words. Although both these premises imply that readers can extract syntactic information from multiple words in parallel, they also suggest that how the brain organizes syntactic input-and consequently how surrounding stimuli affect word recognition-depends on the reader's top-down goals. The present study provides a direct test of this conception. Participants were offered nouns and verbs amidst a grammatical context ('this horse fell') and ungrammatical context ('fell horse this'). Using a conditional task setup, we manipulated the amount of emphasis put on respectively sentences and single words. In two blocks readers were instructed to make sentence grammaticality judgments only if the middle word was respectively noun or verb; in two other blocks readers were instructed to syntactically categorize the middle word only if the sentence was respectively correct or incorrect. We established an interaction effect whereby the impact of grammatical correctness on syntactic categorization decisions was greater than the effect of grammatical correctness per se. This first sentence-superiority effect in the categorization of single words, combined with the absence of this effect in prior flanker studies, leads us to surmise that word-to-word syntactic constraints only operate if the reader is engaged in sentence processing.

Unified syntax in the bilingual mind.

Are syntactic representations shared across languages, and how might that inform the nature of syntactic computations? To investigate these issues, we presented French-English bilinguals with mixed-language word sequences for 200 ms and asked them to report the identity of one word at a post-cued location. The words either formed an interpretable grammatical sequence via shared syntax (e.g., ses feet sont big - where the French words ses and sont translate into his and are, respectively) or an ungrammatical sequence with the same words (e.g., sont feet ses big). Word identification was significantly greater in the grammatical sequences - a bilingual sentence superiority effect. These results not only provide support for shared syntax, but also reveal a fascinating ability of bilinguals to simultaneously connect words from their two languages through these shared syntactic representations.

Readers Are Parallel Processors.

Reading research has long endorsed the view that words are processed strictly one by one. The primary empirical test of this notion is the search for effects from upcoming words on readers' eye movements during sentence reading. Here we argue that no conclusions can be drawn from the absence of such effects, and that the serial versus parallel processing debate cannot be resolved without treading beyond the methodological scope of tracking eye movements. Recent considerations of how the brain organizes linguistic input have sparked key predictions in- and outside the realm of text reading, with ensuing research revealing phenomena that complicate the serial processing perspective. A case is made for parallelism, along with new methods to infer the cognitive architecture driving reading.

Letter migration errors reflect spatial pooling of orthographic information.

Prior research has shown that readers may misread words by switching letters across words (e.g., the word sand in sand lane being recognized as land). These so-called letter migration errors have been observed using a divided attention paradigm whereby two words are briefly presented simultaneously, and one is postcued for identification. Letter migrations might therefore be due to a task-induced division of attention across the two words. Here, we show that a similar rate of migration errors is obtained in a flanker paradigm in which a central target word is flanked to the left and to the right by task-irrelevant flanking words. Three words were simultaneously presented for the same brief duration. Asked to type the target word postoffset, participants produced more migration errors when the migrating letter occupied the same position in the flanker and target words, with significantly fewer migrations occurring across adjacent positions, and the effect disappearing across nonadjacent positions. Our results provide further support for the hypothesis that orthographic information spanning multiple words is processed in parallel and spatially integrated (pooled) within a single channel. It is the spatial pooling of sublexical orthographic information that is thought to drive letter migration errors.