Identification of stuttering in bilingual Lebanese children across two presentation modes.

The goals of this study were to investigate whether Lebanese speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are accurate at identifying stuttering in bilingual children, to examine whether the use of video-recordings instead of audio-recordings allows for better analyses, and to explore factors that may affect the SLPs' judgments. In phase 1, 32 SLPs listened to narrative samples in Lebanese Arabic of 6 children who do not stutter (CWNS) and 2 who stutter (CWS). They were instructed to label each child as stuttering or not, and to explain what motivated their decisions. Afterwards, they were asked to provide background information by means of a questionnaire. In phase 2, they were asked to judge the same speech samples on the basis of video-recordings, and to explain for each child which speech characteristics they relied on to make their decisions. The results showed that misidentification happens frequently, is significantly more likely to happen with CWNS than with CWS, but also varies within these categories. Moreover, the use of video-recordings does not provide more reliable analyses of speech disfluencies, and speech samples' characteristics and bilingual profile rather than SLPs' characteristics seem to influence the judgments. Qualitative analyses indicate that, in the current study, misidentification may be driven by neglecting or misinterpreting physical concomitants. In general, the findings indicate that identifying and analyzing speech fluency behaviors remain a challenging perceptual task, which underlies the need for developing consistent methods for training students and clinicians in identifying stuttering, especially in a bilingual context.

Student Athletes' Causal Attributions for Sport and School Achievement in Relation to Sport Dropout and Grade Point Average.

The present study longitudinally examined stability and change in the attributional profiles of Finnish student athletes (n = 391) in upper secondary sport schools. Moreover, it examined the extent to which these profiles, and changes in them, were associated with athletes' level of sport competition and school achievements and dropouts at the end of upper secondary sport school. Using latent profile analysis, five different and highly stable attributional profiles were identified for student athletes: (a) depressive (6.9%), (b) athletic self-serving (23.0%), (c) average (16.4%), (d) learned helplessness (30.9%), and (e) responsible (22.8%). The results further showed that over the 3-year study period, the responsible attributional style, wherein individuals take responsibility for successes and failures, predicted student athletes' subsequent high grade point average and low sport dropout rates even after controlling for the impacts of their earlier grade point average, gender, and type of sport.

Stuttering Severity Judgments by Speech-Language Pathologists of Bilingual Children Who Do and Do Not Stutter.

INTRODUCTION: Recent studies conducted with bilingual populations have shown that bilingual children who do not stutter (CWNS) are often less fluent than their monolingual counterparts, which seems to affect the accuracy with which speech-language pathologists (SLPs) identify stuttering in bilinguals. That is, misdiagnosis appears frequently in bilingual children and is more likely to occur with bilingual CWNS (false positives) than with bilingual CWS (false negatives). METHODS: The goal of the current study was to gain insight in the extent of this misdiagnosis. Speech samples of 6 Lebanese bilingual CWNS and 2 CWS were rated by Lebanese SLPs in an audio-only and audiovisual presentation mode. SLPs had to identify each child as stuttering or not and subsequently rate on a 6-point scale the stuttering severity for each child. SLPs also provided background information by means of a questionnaire. RESULTS: The results showed that stuttering severity ratings (1) were on average significantly higher for CWS than for CWNS, (2) were for each CWS higher than for all but one of the CWNS, (3) varied significantly among the CWNS but not the CWS, (4) were not affected by the presentation mode, and (5) correlated positively with the percentage of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD) and the mean number of iterations, but not with the percentage of other disfluencies (OD). CONCLUSION: Misdiagnosed bilingual CWNS are perceived by the SLPs as having a mild stutter, primarily based on the frequency of their disfluencies, but can be occasionally rated at par with CWS. Further research differentiating the disfluent speech of bilingual children who do and do not stutter is needed to reach a more adequate diagnosis of stuttering.

Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO).

Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading behavior that are shared and those that vary systematically across languages through an investigation of eye-tracking data from 13 languages recorded during text reading. We begin with reporting a bibliometric analysis of eye-tracking studies showing that the current empirical base is insufficient for cross-linguistic comparisons. We respond to this empirical lacuna by presenting the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO), the product of an international multi-lab collaboration. We examine which behavioral indices differentiate between reading in written languages, and which measures are stable across languages. One of the findings is that readers of different languages vary considerably in their skipping rate (i.e., the likelihood of not fixating on a word even once) and that this variability is explained by cross-linguistic differences in word length distributions. In contrast, if readers do not skip a word, they tend to spend a similar average time viewing it. We outline the implications of these findings for theories of reading. We also describe prospective uses of the publicly available MECO data, and its further development plans.

Lexize: A test to quickly assess vocabulary knowledge in Finnish.

Proficiency in a language is strongly related to how well and how many words one knows. Vocabulary knowledge correlates with reading comprehension and general communication ability. Due to the increasing amount of research within the field of psycholinguistics and second language acquisition in Finnish, a standardized test to objectively measure Finnish vocabulary knowledge is called for. Lexize is such a test. It was modeled after LexTALE (Lemhöfer & Broersma, Behaviour Research Methods, 44:325-343, 2012), which was developed to measure vocabulary knowledge of English as a second language using visual lexical decision (VLD). Lexize is a VLD-based online test for Finnish that consists of 102 items. By comparing performance of L1 and L2 speakers of Finnish, Lexize was validated, returning considerable differences between test scores in native and non-native speakers. For non-native speakers there was a large range of test scores, correlating strongly with exposure to Finnish and self-ratings. In native speakers, test scores correlated with self-ratings, Finnish school grades, and age. In this group, higher Lexize scores were associated with a higher education level. We conclude that Lexize is a useful tool to assess Finnish vocabulary knowledge for non-native speakers and to some extent for native speakers. Lexize is available for free use at https://psyk.abo.fi/LexizeWeb/#/.

Prevalence of spelling errors affects reading behavior across languages.

This cross-linguistic study investigated the impact of spelling errors on reading behavior in five languages (Chinese, English, Finnish, Greek, and Hebrew). Learning theories predict that correct and incorrect spelling alternatives (e.g., "tomorrow" and "tommorrow") provide competing cues to the sound and meaning of a word: The closer the alternatives are to each other in their frequency of occurrence, the more uncertain the reader is regarding the spelling of that word. An information-theoretic measure of entropy was used as an index of uncertainty. Based on theories of learning, we predicted that higher entropy would lead to slower recognition of words even when they are spelled correctly. This prediction was confirmed in eye-tracking sentence-reading experiments in five languages widely variable in their writing systems' phonology and morphology. Moreover, in each language, we observed a characteristic Entropy × Frequency interaction; arguably, its functional shape varied as a function of the orthographic transparency of a given written language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Eye Movements of Radiologists Reflect Expertise in CT Study Interpretation: A Potential Tool to Measure Resident Development.

Purpose To establish potential markers of visual expertise in eye movement (EM) patterns of early residents, advanced residents, and specialists who interpret abdominal computed tomography (CT) studies. Materials and Methods The institutional review board approved use of anonymized CT studies as research materials and to obtain anonymized eye-tracking data from volunteers. Participants gave written informed consent. Early residents (n = 15), advanced residents (n = 14), and specialists (n = 12) viewed 26 abdominal CT studies as a sequence of images at either 3 or 5 frames per second while EMs were recorded. Data were analyzed by using linear mixed-effects models. Results Early residents' detection rate decreased with working hours (odds ratio, 0.81; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.73, 0.91; P = .001). They detected less of the low visual contrast (but not of the high visual contrast) lesions (45% [13 of 29]) than did specialists (62% [18 of 29]) (odds ratio, 0.39; 95% CI: 0.25, 0.61; P < .001) or advanced residents (56% [16 of 29]) (odds ratio, 0.55; 95% CI: 0.33, 0.93; P = .024). Specialists and advanced residents had longer fixation durations at 5 than at 3 frames per second (specialists: ß = .01; 95% CI: .004, .026; P = .008; advanced residents: ß = .04; 95% CI: .03, .05; P < .001). In the presence of lesions, saccade lengths of specialists shortened more than those of advanced (ß = .02; 95% CI: .007, .04; P = .003) and of early residents (ß = .02; 95% CI: .008, 0.04; P = .003). Irrespective of expertise, high detection rate correlated with greater reduction of saccade length in the presence of lesions (ß = -.10; 95% CI: -.16, -.04; P = .002) and greater increase at higher presentation speed (ß = .11; 95% CI: .04, .17; P = .001). Conclusion Expertise in CT reading is characterized by greater adaptivity in EM patterns in response to the demands of the task and environment. © RSNA, 2016 Online supplemental material is available for this article.

Cascaded processing in written compound word production.

In this study we investigated the intricate interplay between central linguistic processing and peripheral motor processes during typewriting. Participants had to typewrite two-constituent (noun-noun) Finnish compounds in response to picture presentation while their typing behavior was registered. As dependent measures we used writing onset time to assess what processes were completed before writing and inter-key intervals to assess what processes were going on during writing. It was found that writing onset time was determined by whole word frequency rather than constituent frequencies, indicating that compound words are retrieved as whole orthographic units before writing is initiated. In addition, we found that the length of the first syllable also affects writing onset time, indicating that the first syllable is fully prepared before writing commences. The inter-key interval results showed that linguistic planning is not fully ready before writing, but cascades into the motor execution phase. More specifically, inter-key intervals were largest at syllable and morpheme boundaries, supporting the view that additional linguistic planning takes place at these boundaries. Bigram and trigram frequency also affected inter-key intervals with shorter intervals corresponding to higher frequencies. This can be explained by stronger memory traces for frequently co-occurring letter sequences in the motor memory for typewriting. These frequency effects were even larger in the second than in the first constituent, indicating that low-level motor memory starts to become more important during the course of writing compound words. We discuss our results in the light of current models of morphological processing and written word production.

The effect of expertise on eye movement behaviour in medical image perception.

The present eye-movement study assessed the effect of expertise on eye-movement behaviour during image perception in the medical domain. To this end, radiologists, computed-tomography radiographers and psychology students were exposed to nine volumes of multi-slice, stack-view, axial computed-tomography images from the upper to the lower part of the abdomen with or without abnormality. The images were presented in succession at low, medium or high speed, while the participants had to detect enlarged lymph nodes or other visually more salient abnormalities. The radiologists outperformed both other groups in the detection of enlarged lymph nodes and their eye-movement behaviour also differed from the other groups. Their general strategy was to use saccades of shorter amplitude than the two other participant groups. In the presence of enlarged lymph nodes, they increased the number of fixations on the relevant areas and reverted to even shorter saccades. In volumes containing enlarged lymph nodes, radiologists' fixation durations were longer in comparison to their fixation durations in volumes without enlarged lymph nodes. More salient abnormalities were detected equally well by radiologists and radiographers, with both groups outperforming psychology students. However, to accomplish this, radiologists actually needed fewer fixations on the relevant areas than the radiographers. On the basis of these results, we argue that expert behaviour is manifested in distinct eye-movement patterns of proactivity, reactivity and suppression, depending on the nature of the task and the presence of abnormalities at any given moment.

The role of hyphens at the constituent boundary in compound word identification.

The current eye-movement study investigated whether a salient segmentation cue like the hyphen facilitates the identification of long and short compound words. The study was conducted in Finnish, where compound words exist in great abundance. The results showed that long hyphenated compounds (musiikki-ilta) are identified faster than concatenated ones (yllätystulos), but short hyphenated compounds (ilta-asu) are identified slower than their concatenated counterparts (kesäsää). This pattern of results is explained by the visual acuity principle (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003): A long compound word does not fully fit in the foveal area, where visual acuity is at its best. Therefore, its identification begins with the access of the initial constituent and this sequential processing is facilitated by the hyphen. However, a short compound word fits in the foveal area, and consequently the hyphen slows down processing by encouraging sequential processing in cases where it is possible to extract and use information of the second constituent as well.

Flexible letter-position coding is unlikely to hold for morphologically rich languages.

We agree with Frost that flexible letter-position coding is unlikely to be a universal property of word recognition across different orthographies. We argue that it is particularly unlikely in morphologically rich languages like Finnish. We also argue that dual-route models are not overly flexible and that they are well equipped to adapt to the linguistic environment at hand.

The hyphen as a segmentation cue in triconstituent compound processing: it's getting better all the time.

Inserting a hyphen in Dutch and Finnish compounds is most often illegal given spelling conventions. However, the current two eye movement experiments on triconstituent Dutch compounds like voetbalbond"footballassociation" (Experiment 1) and triconstituent Finnish compounds like lentokenttätaksi"airporttaxi" (Experiment 2) show that inserting a hyphen at constituent boundaries does not have to be detrimental to compound processing. In fact, when hyphens were inserted at the major constituent boundary (voetbal-bond"football-association"; lentokenttä-taksi"airport-taxi"), processing of the first part (voetbal"football"; lentokenttä"airport") turns out to be faster when it is followed by a hyphen than when it is legally concatenated. Inserting a hyphen caused a delay in later eye movement measures, which is probably due to the illegality of inserting hyphens in normally concatenated compounds. However, in both Dutch and Finnish we found a learning effect in the course of the experiment, such that by the end of the experiments hyphenated compounds are read faster than in the beginning of the experiment. By the end of the experiment, compounds with a hyphen at the major constituent boundary were actually processed equally fast as (Dutch) or even faster than (Finnish) their concatenated counterparts. In contrast, hyphenation at the minor constituent boundary (voet-balbond"foot-ballassociation"; lento-kenttätaksi"air-porttaxi") was detrimental to compound processing speed throughout the experiment. The results imply that the hyphen may be an efficient segmentation cue and that spelling illegalities can be overcome easily, as long as they make sense.

Optimal viewing position effects in reading Finnish.

The present study examined effects of the initial landing position in words on eye behavior during reading of long and short Finnish compound words. The study replicated OVP and IOVP effects previously found in French, German and English - languages structurally distinct from Finnish, suggesting that the effects generalize across structurally different alphabetic languages. The results are consistent with the view that the landing position effects appear at the prelexical stage of word processing, as landing position effects were not modulated by word frequency. Moreover, the OVP effects are in line with a visuomotor explanation making recourse to visual acuity constraints.

Processing Novel and Lexicalized Finnish Compound Words.

Participants read sentences in which novel and lexicalized two-constituent compound words appeared while their eye movements were measured. The frequency of the first constituent of the compounds was also varied factorially and the frequency of the lexicalized compounds was equated over the two conditions. The sentence frames prior to the target word were matched across conditions. Both lexicality and first constituent frequency had large and significant effects on gaze durations on the target word; moreover the constituent frequency effect was significantly larger for the novel words. These results indicate that first constituent frequency has an effect in two stages: in the initial encoding of the compound and in the construction of meaning for the novel compound. The difference between this pattern of results and those for English prefixed words (Pollatsek, Slattery, & Juhasz, 2008) is apparently due to differences in the construction of meaning stage. A general model of the relationship of the processing of polymorphemic words to how they are fixated is presented.

Development of parafoveal processing within and across words in reading: evidence from the boundary paradigm.

In this study we used the boundary paradigm to examine whether readers extract more parafoveal information within than across words. More specifically, we examined whether readers extract more parafoveal information from a compound word's second constituent than from the same word when it is the noun in an adjective-noun phrase (kummitustarina "ghost story" vs. lennokas tarina "vivid story"). We also examined whether the processing of compound word constituents is serial or parallel and how parafoveal word processing develops over the elementary school years. Participants were Finnish adults and 8-year-old second-, 10-year-old fourth-, and 12-year-old sixth-graders. The results showed that for all age groups more parafoveal information is extracted from the second constituent within compounds than from the noun in adjective-noun phrases. Moreover, for all age groups we found evidence for parallel processing of constituents within compounds, but only when the compounds were of high frequency. In sum, the present study shows that attentional allocation extends further to the right and is more simultaneous when words are linguistically and spatially unified, providing evidence that attention in text processing is flexible in nature.

Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: toward a multiple route model of lexical processing.

This article reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2,500 polymorphemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision while readers' eye movements were registered. The authors found evidence that both full forms of compounds (dishwasher) and their constituent morphemes (e.g., dish, washer) and morphological families of constituents (sets of compounds with a shared constituent) played a role in compound processing. They observed simultaneous effects of compound frequency, left constituent frequency, and family size early (i.e., before the whole compound has been scanned) and also observed effects of right constituent frequency and family size that emerged after the compound frequency effect. The temporal order of these and other observed effects goes against assumptions of many models of lexical processing. The authors propose specifications for a new multiple-route model of polymorphemic compound processing that is based on time-locked, parallel, and interactive use of all morphological cues as soon as they become even partly available to the visual uptake system.

Development of the letter identity span in reading: evidence from the eye movement moving window paradigm.

By means of the moving window paradigm, we examined how many letters can be identified during a single eye fixation and whether this letter identity span changes as a function of reading skill. The results revealed that 8-year-old Finnish readers identify approximately 5 characters, 10-year-old readers identify approximately 7 characters, and 12-year-old and adult readers identify approximately 9 characters to the right of fixation. Comparison with earlier studies revealed that the letter identity span is smaller than the span for identifying letter features and that it is as wide in Finnish as in English. Furthermore, the letter identity span of faster readers of each age group was larger than that of slower readers, indicating that slower readers, unlike faster readers, allocate most of their processing resources to foveally fixated words. Finally, slower second graders were largely not disrupted by smaller windows, suggesting that their word decoding skill is not yet fully automatized.

Semantic processing of previews within compound words.

Previous studies have suggested that previews of words prior to fixation can be processed orthographically, but not semantically, during reading of sentences (K. Rayner, D. A. Balota, & A. Pollatsek, 1986). The present study tested whether semantic processing of previews can occur within words. The preview of the second constituent of 2-constituent Finnish compound nouns was manipulated. The previews were either identical to the 2nd constituent or they were incorrect in the form of a semantically related word, a semantically unrelated word, or a semantically meaningless nonword. The results indicate that previews of 2nd constituents within compound words can be semantically processed. The results have important implications for understanding the nature of preview and compound word processing. These issues are crucial to developing comprehensive models of eye-movement control and word recognition during reading.

The role of interword spacing in reading Japanese: an eye movement study.

The present study investigated the role of interword spacing in a naturally unspaced language, Japanese. Eye movements were registered of native Japanese readers reading pure Hiragana (syllabic) and mixed Kanji-Hiragana (ideographic and syllabic) text in spaced and unspaced conditions. Interword spacing facilitated both word identification and eye guidance when reading syllabic script, but not when the script contained ideographic characters. We conclude that in reading Hiragana interword spacing serves as an effective segmentation cue. In contrast, spacing information in mixed Kanji-Hiragana text is redundant, since the visually salient Kanji characters serve as effective segmentation cues by themselves.

Ambiguous pronoun resolution: contrasting the first-mention and subject-preference accounts.

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents of each pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns.