Eye movement control in reading: word predictability has little influence on initial landing positions in words.

We examined the initial landing position of the eyes in target words that were either predictable or unpredictable from the preceding sentence context. Although readers skipped over predictable words more than unpredictable words and spent less time on predictable words when they did fixate on them, there was no difference in the launch site of the saccade to the target word. Moreover, there was only a very small difference in the initial landing position on the target word as a function of predictability when the target words were fixated which is most parsimoniously explained by positing that a few programmed skips of the target word fell short of their intended target. These results suggest that low-level processing is primarily responsible for landing position effects in reading.

Contextual strength and the subordinate bias effect: comment on Martin, Vu, Kellas, and Metcalf.

Martin, Vu, Kellas, and Metcalf (this issue) claim to have demonstrated that the subordinate bias effect (when preceding context instantiates the subordinate meaning of an ambiguous word that has a highly dominant meaning, reading time on that word is lengthened) can be eliminated by strong context. They argue that this provides evidence critical to discriminating between competing models of lexical ambiguity resolution: the reordered access model (in which access of meanings for an ambiguous word is exhaustive but in which the order of access is influenced by prior disambiguating context) and the context-sensitive model (in which access is selective in the presence of prior disambiguating information). We argue that there are methodological problems with their demonstration, but even if there were not, it is unclear that the subordinate bias effect is appropriate for discriminating between competing models of lexical ambiguity resolution (the reordered access model and the context-sensitive model). The effect is an empirical finding and not a fundamental tenet of the reordered access model.

Activation of phonological codes during eye fixations in reading.

Two experiments addressed the issue of whether phonological codes are activated early in a fixation during reading using the fast-priming technique (S. C. Sereno & K. Rayner, 1992). Participants read sentences and, at the beginning of the initial fixation in a target location, a priming letter string was displayed, followed by the target word. Phonological priming was assessed by the difference in the gaze duration on the target word between when the prime was a homophone and when it was a control word equated with the homophone on orthographic similarity to the target. Both experiments demonstrated homophonic priming with prime durations of about 35 ms, but only for high-frequency word primes, indicating that lexicality was guiding the speed of the extraction of phonological codes early in a fixation. Evidence was also obtained for orthographic priming, and the data suggest that orthographic and phonological priming effects interact in a mutually facilitating manner.

The effects of "neighborhood size" in reading and lexical decision.

The effects of neighborhood size ("N")--the number of words differing from a target word by exactly 1 letter (i.e., "neighbors")--on word identification was assessed in 3 experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, the frequency of the highest frequency neighbor was equated, and N had opposite effects in lexical decision and reading. In Experiment 1, a larger N facilitated lexical decision judgments, whereas in Experiment 2, a larger N had an inhibitory effect on reading sentences that contained the words of Experiment 1. Moreover, a significant inhibitory effect in Experiment 2 that was due to a larger N appeared on gaze duration on the target word, and there was no hint of facilitation on the measures of reading that tap the earliest processing of a word. In Experiment 3, the number of higher frequency neighbors was equated for the high-N and low-N words, and a larger N caused target words to be skipped significantly more and produced inhibitory effects later in reading, some of which were plausibly due to misidentification of the target word when skipped. Regression analyses indicated that, in reading, increasing the number of higher frequency neighbors had a clear inhibitory effect on word identification and that increasing the number of lower frequency neighbors may have a weak facilitative effect on word identification.

Extraction of information to the left of the fixated word in reading.

The present experiment used 2 different eye-contingent display change techniques to determine whether information is extracted from English text even when it is to the left of the currently fixated word. Preview display changes were during the 1st saccade entering the target word region, whereas postview display changes were during the 1st saccade leaving that region. Previews and postviews were either identical, related, or unrelated to the target word. "Wrong" information in the target-word region affected reading even when that information was seen only after readers were fixating to the right of that region: When readers skipped the target word, such information caused readers to regress to the target word more; when readers initially fixated the target word, such information increased "2nd-pass" processing time on the target region. The data suggest that readers often still attend to a word after it is skipped and that when readers fixate a word, they occasionally attend to the word after they have begun to fixate the next word.

Does contextual strength modulate the subordinate bias effect? A reply to Kellas and Vu.

In their reply to Binder and Rayner (1998), Kellas and Vu (1999) raised questions about the criteria we used to exclude items from the Kellas, Martin, Yehling, Herman, and Vu (1995) stimulus set. In this reply, we further document these criteria and also address the issue of local versus published norms. We continue to believe that the stimulus set used by Kellas et al. (1995) was problematic. We also address the issue of strength of context, a concept used in earlier research that dealt with the subordinate bias effect. We argue that the contexts used by Kellas et al. (1995) were no stronger than the contexts previously used that established this effect. Therefore, we continue to think that our finding that context does not eliminate the subordinate bias effect is valid.

Phonological codes and eye movements in reading.

A number of recent studies using eye movement data have yielded evidence suggesting that phonological codes are activated early in an eye fixation. However, experiments reported by M. Daneman and E. Reingold (1993; M. Daneman, E. M. Reingold, & M. Davidson, 1995) yielded data that led them to argue that phonological codes are primarily activated after lexical access has occurred. In this study, 3 experiments were carried out that were conceptually similar to those of M. Daneman and E. Reingold, and the resulting data supported the position that phonological codes are activated very early in an eye fixation.

Aging, cognitive resources, and declarative learning.

A battery of cognitive tasks designed to assess information-processing speed, working memory capability, and declarative learning was administered to a cross-sectional sample of 477 adults ranging in age from 17 to 86 years. Results showed significant age-related decrements in all three constructs. A variety of structural equation models was fit to the results. The preferred model on empirical and conceptual grounds was one that showed (a) working memory capability as the most important mediator of age effects in declarative learning; (b) working memory capability as the mediator for the effects of general processing speed on declarative learning; and (c) differentiation among verbal, numeric, and spatial processing speed and between verbal and spatial working memory capability.

Eye movements and lexical ambiguity resolution: effects of prior encounter and discourse topic.

Eye movements were monitored as participants read passages that contained 2 occurrences of a balanced ambiguous word. In Experiment 1, local context was manipulated so that the meaning of the ambiguous word either remained the same or changed from the 1st to 2nd encounter. In Experiments 2 and 3. global context was manipulated by shifting the discourse topic between the 2 instances of the ambiguous word. Gaze durations on the 2nd instance of the ambiguous word were shorter when the meaning remained consistent than when the meaning changed, and this facilitation was impervious to changes in the discourse structure. In contrast, processing time in the region immediately following the target was longer when the word meaning changed, but only when the topic of the discourse remained the same throughout the passage. When the topic was shifted, this effect disappeared.