An integrated model of word processing and eye-movement control during Chinese reading.

In the Chinese writing system, there are no interword spaces to mark word boundaries. To understand how Chinese readers conquer this challenge, we constructed an integrated model of word processing and eye-movement control during Chinese reading (CRM). The model contains a word-processing module and an eye-movement control module. The word-processing module perceives new information within the perceptual span around a fixation. The model uses the interactive activation framework (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) to simulate word processing, but some new assumptions were made to address the word segmentation problem in Chinese reading. All the words supported by characters in the perceptual span are activated and they compete for a winner. When one word wins the competition, it is identified and it is simultaneously segmented from text. The eye-movement control module makes the decision regarding when and where to move the eyes using the activation information of word units and character units provided by the word-processing module. The model estimates how many characters can be processed during a fixation, and then makes a saccade to somewhere beyond this point. The model successfully simulated important findings on the relation between word processing and eye-movement control, how Chinese readers choose saccade targets, how Chinese readers segment words with ambiguous boundaries, and how Chinese readers process information with parafoveal vision during Chinese sentence reading. The current model thus provides insights on how Chinese readers address some important challenges, such as word segmentation and saccade-target selection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

An eye-tracking study of reading long and short novel and lexicalized compound words.

An eye-tracking experiment examined the recognition of novel and lexicalized compound words during sentence reading. The frequency of the head noun in modifier-head compound words was manipulated to tap into the degree of compositional processing. This was done separately for long (12-16 letter) and short (7-9 letters) compound words. Based on the dual-route race model [Pollatsek et al., 4] and the visual acuity principle [Bertram & Hyönä, 2], long lexicalized and novel compound words were predicted to be processed via the decomposition route and short lexicalized compound words via the holistic route. Gaze duration and selective regression-path duration demonstrated a constituent frequency effect of similar size for long lexicalized and novel compound words. For short compound words the constituent frequency effect was negligible for lexicalized words but robust for novel words. The results are consistent with the visual acuity principle that assumes long novel compound words to be recognized via the decomposition route and short lexicalized compound words via the holistic route.

The processing of Chinese compound words with ambiguous morphemes in sentence context.

We employed a boundary paradigm to investigate how Chinese two-character compounds (i.e., compound words) are processed during reading. The first character of the compound was an ambiguous morpheme that had a dominant and subordinate meaning. In Experiment 1, there were three previews of the second character: identical to the target character; the preview provided subordinate biasing information (the subordinate condition); the preview provided dominant biasing information (the dominant condition). An invisible boundary was inserted between the two characters. We found that gaze durations and go-past times on the compounds were longer in the subordinate condition than those in the dominant or identical conditions. In Experiment 2, the semantic similarity between target and preview words in the dominant condition was manipulated to determine whether the differences in fixation durations in Experiment 1 resulted from the semantic similarity between the preview and target words. There were significant fixation duration differences on the target word between the dominant and subordinate conditions only when the preview and target words were semantically related. This finding indicated that the whole-word meaning plays an important role in processing Chinese compounds and that the whole-word access route is the principal processing route in reading two-character compounds in Chinese.

Chinese readers can perceive a word even when it's composed of noncontiguous characters.

This study explored whether readers could recognize a word composed of noncontiguous characters (a cross-character word) in Chinese reading. All 3 experiments employed Chinese 4-character strings ABCD, where both AB and CD were 2-character words. In the cross-character word condition, AC was a word but in the control condition, AC was not a word. A character identification task was employed in Experiment 1 and sentence reading tasks were employed in Experiments 2 and 3. In all 3 experiments, an AC word produced inhibition effects. In Experiment 1, an AC word decreased the accuracy of character B identification, but increased the accuracy of character C identification. In Experiments 2 and 3, an AC word slowed reading on CD, indicating that the cross-character words were activated. These results imply that Chinese character encoding leading to word recognition does not proceed in a strictly serial way from left to right, or is strictly constrained by invisible word boundaries. (PsycINFO Database Record

Examining Eye Movements in Visual Search through Clusters of Objects in a Circular Array.

Participants were asked to search for a complete O in an array consisting of eight clusters of four Landolt Cs (i.e., Os with a gap) arranged in a ring. The size of the gap in the Cs varied from cluster to cluster but was held constant within a cluster. The manual response time data were consistent with a serial self-terminating search. More importantly, eye movement data supported a serial processing model as (a) clusters were fixated serially (either clockwise or counterclockwise) on most trials and (b) fixation times on a cluster reflected processing time on that cluster and were unaffected by the gap size of either the prior or succeeding cluster. Furthermore, the pattern of fixation times on a cluster was similar to the pattern of response times in a secondary task where a single cluster was presented at fixation. These data extend the findings of Williams and Pollatsek (2007) in which search was through a linear sequence of clusters, and indicate that a serial search pattern through clusters of these kinds of objects is not confined to reading-like linear arrays.

Comparing the Glance Patterns of Older versus Younger Experienced Drivers: Scanning for Hazards while Approaching and Entering the Intersection.

Older drivers are known to look less often for hazards when turning at T-intersections or at four way intersections. The present study is an extension of Romoser & Fisher (2009) and attempts to further analyze the differences in scanning behavior between older and experienced younger drivers in intersections. We evaluated four hypotheses that attempt to explain the older drivers' failure to properly scan in intersections: difficulty with head movements, decreases in working memory capacity, increased distractibility, and failure to recall specific scanning patterns. To test these hypotheses, older and younger experienced drivers' point-of-gaze was monitored while they drove a series of simulated intersections with hidden hazards outside of the turning path. Our results suggest that none of these hypotheses can fully explain our finding that older adults are more likely to remain fixated on their intended path of travel and look less than younger drivers towards other areas where likely hazards might materialize. Instead, the results support a complementary hypothesis that at least some of the difficulties older adults have scanning intersections are due to a specific attentional deficit in the older drivers' ability to inhibit what has become their prepotent goal of monitoring the vehicle's intended path of travel, thereby causing older drivers to fail to scan hazardous areas outside this intended path of travel.

The influence of word shading and word length on eye movements during reading.

An interesting issue in reading is how parafoveal information affects saccadic targeting and fixation durations. We investigated the influence of shading selected regions of text on eye movements during reading of long and short words within sentences. A target word, either four- or eight-letters long, was presented in one of four shading conditions: the whole target word shaded; the first half shaded; second half shaded; no shading. There was no evidence of a visually mediated parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Saccadic targeting was modulated by the shading on the first half of the word, such that fixations landed closer to the beginning of the word than in the other three shading conditions. Furthermore, partial word shading, resulting in visual non-uniformity of the target word, produced longer gaze durations than the other conditions. Finally, readers spent more time re-reading target words when they were partially shaded than in the other two conditions. We suggest that our effects are due to targeting of the optimal viewing location and revisits to check words that appear visually unusual. Together, the results indicate robust effects of low-level visual characteristics of the word on oculomotor decisions of where and when to move the eyes during reading.

Word properties of a fixated region affect outgoing saccade length in Chinese reading.

In two experiments, we investigated how forward saccades are targeted in Chinese reading. In Experiment 1, the critical region was a 4-character string which was either a word (one-word condition) or two 2-character word phrases (two-word condition). In Experiment 2, the critical region was either a high frequency word or a low frequency word. The outgoing saccade length from the last fixation on the critical region was longer in the one-word condition than the two-word condition in Experiment 1 and was longer in the high frequency condition than in the low frequency condition in Experiment 2. These results indicate that the properties of words in a fixated region affect the length of the outgoing saccade. We propose a processing-based strategy for saccade target selection in Chinese reading in which readers estimate how many characters they can process on each fixation, and then program their next saccade so that the eyes fixate somewhere beyond them. As a consequence, the easier the processing of the fixated region is, the longer the outgoing saccade is.

A simulator evaluation of the effects of attention maintenance training on glance distributions of younger novice drivers inside and outside the vehicle.

Driver distraction inside and outside the vehicle is increasingly a problem, especially for younger drivers. In many cases the distraction is associated with long glances away from the forward roadway. Such glances have been shown to be highly predictive of crashes. Ideally, one would like to develop and evaluate a training program which reduced these long glances. Thus, an experiment was conducted in a driving simulator to test the efficacy of a training program, FOCAL, that was developed to teach novice drivers to limit the duration of glances that are inside the vehicle while performing an in-vehicle task, such as looking for a CD or finding the 4-way flashers. The test in the simulator showed that the FOCAL trained group performed significantly better than the placebo trained group on several measures, notably on the percentage of within-vehicle glances that were greater than 2, 2.5, and 3 s. However, the training did not generalize to glances away from the roadway (e.g., when drivers were asked to attend to a sign adjacent to the roadway, both trained and untrained novice drivers were equally likely to make especially long glances at the sign).

TRANSPOSED LETTER EFFECTS IN PREFIXED WORDS: IMPLICATIONS FOR MORPHOLOGICAL DECOMPOSITION.

A crucial issue in word encoding is whether morphemes are involved in early stages. One paradigm that tests for this employs the transposed letter (TL) effect - the difference in the times to process a word (misfile) when it is preceded by a TL prime (mifsile) and when it is preceded by a substitute letter (SL) prime (mintile) - and examines whether the TL effect is smaller when the two adjacent letters cross a morpheme boundary. The evidence from prior studies is not consistent. Experiments 1 and 2 employed a parafoveal preview paradigm in which the transposed letters either crossed the prefix-stem boundary or did not, and found a clear TL effect regardless of whether the two letters crossed the morpheme boundary. Experiment 3 replicated this finding employing a masked priming lexical-decision paradigm. It thus appears that morphemes are not involved in early processes in English that are sensitive to letter order. There is some evidence for morphemic modulation of the TL effect in other languages; thus, the properties of the language may modulate when morphemes influence early letter position encoding.

Identifying and Remediating Failures of Selective Attention in Older Drivers.

Older drivers are primarily overinvolved in crashes at intersections, and failure to attend to regions that contain relevant information about potential hazards is a major contributor to this problem. Corroborating this, we have found that older drivers in both controlled scenarios on a driving simulator and somewhat less controlled situations on the road attend to (i.e., fixate) target regions in intersections significantly less frequently than do younger experienced drivers. Moreover, we have developed a training program that substantially improves older drivers' attention to these regions. Together, these findings indicate that older drivers' less frequent scanning of regions at intersections from which hazards may emerge may be due to their developing something like an unsafe habit rather than to deteriorating physical or mental capabilities and thus that training may be effective in reducing crashes.

Eye movements in reading versus nonreading tasks: Using E-Z Reader to understand the role of word/stimulus familiarity.

In this article, we extend our previous work (Reichle, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2012) using the principles of the E-Z Reader model to examine the factors that determine when and where the eyes move in both reading and non-reading tasks, and in particular the role that word/stimulus familiarity plays in determining when the eyes move from one word/stimulus to the next. In doing this, we first provide a brief overview of E-Z Reader, including its assumption that word familiarity is the "engine" driving eye movements during reading. We then review the theoretical considerations that motivated this assumption, as well as recent empirical evidence supporting its validity. We also report the results of three new simulations that were intended to demonstrate the utility of the familiarity check in three tasks: (1) reading; (2) searching for a target word in embedded in text; and (3) searching for the letter O in linear arrays of Landolt Cs. The results of these simulations suggest that the familiarity check always improves task efficiency by speeding its rate of performance. We provide several arguments as to why this conclusion is not likely to be true for the two non-reading tasks, and in the final section of the paper, we provide a fourth simulation to test the hypothesis that problems associated with the mis-identification of words may also curtail the too liberal use of word familiarity.

Dividing lines at the word boundary position helps reading in Chinese.

Unlike in English, the Chinese printing and writing systems usually do not respect a word boundary when they split lines; thus, characters belonging to a word can be on two different lines. In this study, we examined whether dividing a word across two lines interferes with Chinese reading and found that reading times were shorter when characters belonging to a word were on a single line rather than on adjacent lines. Eye movement data indicated that gaze durations in a region around the word boundary were longer and fixations were closer to the beginnings and ends of the lines when words were split across lines. These results suggest that words are processed as a whole in Chinese reading, so that word boundaries should be respected when deciding how to split lines in the Chinese writing system. They also suggest that the length of return sweeps in reading can be cognitively guided.

Using E-Z Reader to simulate eye movements in nonreading tasks: a unified framework for understanding the eye-mind link.

Nonreading tasks that share some (but not all) of the task demands of reading have often been used to make inferences about how cognition influences when the eyes move during reading. In this article, we use variants of the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading to simulate eye-movement behavior in several of these tasks, including z-string reading, target-word search, and visual search of Landolt Cs arranged in both linear and circular arrays. These simulations demonstrate that a single computational framework is sufficient to simulate eye movements in both reading and nonreading tasks but also suggest that there are task-specific differences in both saccadic targeting (i.e., decisions about where to move the eyes) and the coupling between saccadic programming and the movement of attention (i.e., decisions about when to move the eyes). These findings suggest that some aspects of the eye-mind link are flexible and can be configured in a manner that supports efficient task performance.

Word knowledge influences character perception.

In two experiments, we examined whether context information can affect the activity of the nodes at the character level. Chinese readers viewed two Chinese characters; one was intact, but the other (the target) was embedded in a rectangle of visual noise and increased in visibility over time. The two characters constituted a word in one condition but did not in the other condition. The task was to press a button to indicate whether the character in the noise was at the top or bottom of the rectangle. (They did not have to identify the character.) Response times were faster in the word condition than in the nonword condition. Because the "wordness" of the stimulus was logically irrelevant to judging the location of the target character, the data indicate that processing at the word level can feed back to fairly low-level judgments, such as where a character is.

TEXTING WHILE DRIVING: EVALUATION OF GLANCE DISTRIBUTIONS FOR FREQUENT/INFREQUENT TEXTERS AND KEYPAD/TOUCHPAD TEXTERS.

The threat that cell-phones pose to driving has been a well researched topic. There are fewer studies of the threat that texting creates for drivers, but the risks are obvious and the few existing studies confirm this. What is not obvious is whether frequent texters will expose themselves to the same risks as infrequent texters. This is important to know because many texters, especially teens who text frequently, may consider themselves immune to the dangers of texting while driving. As such, a comparison of frequent and infrequent texters was undertaken on a driving simulator. It is also not immediately clear what effects the different types of interfaces have on driving performance while text messaging. The interfaces under evaluation included keypad or "qwerty" phones (e.g., Blackberries) and touchpad phones (iPhone). It was found that the frequent and infrequent texters were equally likely to glance at least once for more than 2s inside the vehicle while sending a text message. It was also found that touchpad texters had a larger number of glances above the 2s threshold than keypad users, though this difference was not significant. The implications of this for future public policy are discussed.

Long Term Effects of Hazard Anticipation Training on Novice Drivers Measured on the Open Road.

(a) The purpose of this study was to determine whether novice drivers that were trained to anticipate hazards did so better than novice drivers who were not so trained immediately after training and up to one year after training occurred. (b) Novice drivers who had held their restricted license for about one month were randomly assigned to a PC-based hazard anticipation training program (RAPT) or a placebo (control) training program. The programs took about one hour to complete. The effects of training were assessed in a field drive by using patterns of eye movements to assess whether drivers anticipated a potential unseen hazard. (c) The effects of training persisted over time. In the field test immediately after training, the RAPT group anticipated the hazards 65.8% of the time whereas; the control group anticipated them only 47.3% of the time. Six or more months later, the groups were brought back for a second field test and the effects of training did not diminish; the RAPT group anticipated the hazards 61.9% of the time compared to 37.7% for the control group.

Do Crashes and Near Crashes in Simulator-Based Training Enhance Novice Drivers' Visual Search for Latent Hazards?

Young drivers (younger than 25 years of age) are overrepresented in crashes. Research suggests that a relevant cause is inadequate visual search for possible hazards that are hidden from view. The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a low-cost, fixed-base simulator training program that would address this failure. It was hypothesized that elicited crashes in the simulator training would result in better scanning for latent hazards in scenarios that were similar to the training scenarios but situated in a different environment (near transfer), and, to a lesser degree, would result in better scanning in scenarios that had altogether different latent hazards than those contained in the training scenarios (far transfer). To test the hypotheses, 18 trained and 18 untrained young novice drivers were evaluated on an advanced driving simulator (different from the training simulator). The eye movements of both groups were measured. In near transfer scenarios, trained drivers fixated the hazardous region 84% of the time, compared with only 57% of untrained drivers. In far transfer scenarios, trained drivers fixated the hazardous region 71 % of the time, compared with only 53% of untrained drivers. The differences between trained and untrained drivers in both the near transfer scenarios and the far transfer scenarios were significant, with a large effect size in the near transfer scenarios and a medium effect size in the far transfer scenarios [respectively: U = 63.00, p(2-tailed) < .01, r = -.53, and U = 88.00, p(2-tailed)<.05,r = -.39].

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.