Effect on comprehension of preposed versus postposed adverbial phrases.

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as In the park.... Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the 'Discourse Framing Hypothesis' according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan's Event Indexing Model.

Visual and linguistic determinants of the eyes' initial fixation position in reading development.

Two eye-movement experiments with one hundred and seven first- through fifth-grade children were conducted to examine the effects of visuomotor and linguistic factors on the recognition of words and pseudowords presented in central vision (using a variable-viewing-position technique) and in parafoveal vision (shifted to the left or right of a central fixation point). For all groups of children, we found a strong effect of stimulus location, in both central and parafoveal vision. This effect corresponds to the children's apparent tendency, for peripherally located targets, to reach a position located halfway between the middle and the left edge of the stimulus (preferred viewing location, PVL), whether saccading to the right or left. For centrally presented targets, refixation probability and lexical-decision time were the lowest near the word's center, suggesting an optimal viewing position (OVP). The viewing-position effects found here were modulated (1) by print exposure, both in central and parafoveal vision; and (2) by the intrinsic qualities of the stimulus (lexicality and word frequency) for targets in central vision but not for parafoveally presented targets.

Frequency and predictability effects in the Dundee Corpus: an eye movement analysis.

Analyses carried out on a large corpus of eye movement data were used to comment on four contentious theoretical issues. The results provide no evidence that word frequency and word predictability have early interactive effects on inspection time. Contrary to some earlier studies, in these data there is little evidence that properties of a prior word generally spill over and influence current processing. In contrast, there is evidence that both the frequency and the predictability of a word in parafoveal vision influence foveal processing. In the case of predictability, the direction of the effect suggests that more predictable parafoveal words produce longer foveal fixations. Finally, there is evidence that information about word class modulates processing over a span greater than a single word. The results support the notion of distributed parallel processing.

On-line contextual influences during reading normal text: The role of nouns, verbs and adjectives.

In a series of multiple-regression analyses conducted on the French part of the Dundee corpus, the time spent inspecting a target word in a given sentence was found to depend on its degree of semantic relatedness (as assessed in the LSA framework) to two content words belonging to a prior part of the sentence, and located at varying distances to the left of the target. However, only verb primes were found to elicit a significant influence when located in the more remote position. In addition, the influence elicited by remote primes was modulated as a function of their position in the constituent structure, relative to the position of the target. This pattern of results suggests that relatively abstract semantic relations, probably involved in processing operations developed at the sentence level, can directly influence eye-movement control mechanisms.

On-line contextual influences during reading normal text: a multiple-regression analysis.

On-line contextual influences during reading were examined in a series of multiple-regression analyses conducted on a large-scale corpus of eye-movement data, using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to assess the degree of contextual constraints exerted on a given target word by the immediately prior word and by the prior sentence fragment. A decrease in inspection time was observed as contextual constraints increased. Word-level constraints exerted their influence both forward (on both single-fixation and gaze durations) and backward (on gaze duration only). An independent sentence-level effect was only visible in the forward direction, and only for gaze duration. Gaze duration was also sensitive to the depth of embedding of the target word in the syntactic structure. We conclude that both low-level and high-level contextual constraints can translate in the eye-movement record.

The consequences of violations to reading order: an eye movement analysis.

Adjective-Noun and Noun-Adjective sequences inspected with single fixations in the French part of the Dundee Corpus were examined. Violations to canonical reading order produced significant effects on average inspection time, but only for fixations on the two words concerned and the immediately following fixation. Extended analyses on both English and French data sets also show local consequences of violations to reading order, but only very limited evidence of longer-lasting effects on wrap-up. The fact that a failure to maintain a strict left-right serial reading order seems not to result in significant processing disruption poses a challenge to current models of eye movement control in reading.

The influence of punctuation and word class on distributed processing in normal reading.

A series of multiple regression analyses was conducted on a corpus of eye movement data to examine whether the influence of properties of words n-1 and n+1 on the time spent fixating word n changes as a function of whether word n is associated with a punctuation mark (i.e., whether or not a punctuation mark separates word n from either word n-1 or word n+1). The results suggest that distributed processing is not significantly impaired. However, punctuation marks also carry word class information and word classes are not evenly distributed across positions relative to punctuation marks. Word class probability does modulate parafoveal-on-foveal effects.

An influence over eye movements in reading exerted from beyond the level of the word: evidence from reading English and French.

We report the results of a series of multiple regression analyses conducted on the Dundee Corpus, a corpus of eye-movement data obtained from ten British and ten French young adults as they read newspaper articles (the equivalent of more than 52,000 words per language) presented on a screen, five lines at a time. Inspection parameters (inter-word saccade latency, saccade extent, skipping probability, first fixation and gaze duration and number of fixation) were all determined in part by properties defined beyond the level of individual words, e.g., the relative or mean length of adjacent words rather than individual word length. Properties defined at this level do not feature in any current model of eye-movement control in reading. Moreover, foveal inspection time was found to vary as a function of the properties of words in the parafovea (lexical frequency for English; initial trigram informativeness for French). We account for these results by proposing a process monitoring mechanism, in which a number of visual parameters simultaneously contribute to optimize visibility over a sequence of adjacent words.

Phrasing effects in comprehending PP constructions.

The role of prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was investigated by means of three different tasks, namely auditory word monitoring (Experiment 1), self-paced reading (Experiment 2) and cross-modal comparison (Experiment 3). In all three experiments a critical prosodic unit or frame comprising a determiner, a noun and a Prepositional Phrase (PP) was preceded or surrounded by two context prosodic units (frames) whose length was varied. The participants' tendency to interpret the critical sequence as forming a single syntactic constituent (noun-complement interpretation of the PP) as opposed to two distinct syntactic constituents (verb-complement interpretation of the PP) was found to depend on the relative length of the critical and context prosodic units (frames). As a whole these results are consistent with the notion that phrasing effects occur in a retroactive way, after part of the utterance has been processed.

Parafoveal-on-foveal effects in normal reading.

A corpus of eye movement data derived from 10 English and 10 French participants, each reading about 50,000 words, was examined for evidence that properties of a word in parafoveal vision have an immediate effect on foveal inspection time. When inspecting a short word, there is evidence that the lexical frequency of an adjacent word affects processing time. When inspecting a long word, there are small effects of lexical frequency, but larger effects of initial-letter constraint and orthographic familiarity. Interactions of this kind are incompatible with models of reading which appeal to the operation of a serial attention switch.

Effect of grammatical gender on visual word recognition: evidence from lexical decision and eye movement experiments.

Lexical decision times and eye movements were recorded to determine whether grammatical gender can influence the visual recognition of isolated French nouns. This issue was investigated by assessing the use of two types of regularities between a noun's form and its gender--namely ending-to-gender regularities (e.g., the final letter sequence -at appears only in masculine nouns and, thus, is predictive of masculine gender) and gender-to-ending regularities (e.g., feminine gender would predict the final letter e, whereas masculine gender would not). Previous studies have shown that noun endings are used by readers when they have to identify gender. However, the influence of ending-to-gender predictiveness has never been investigated in a lexical decision task, and the effect of gender-to-ending regularities has never been evaluated at all. The results suggest that gender information can influence both the activation stage (Experiments 1 and 3) and the selection stage (Experiments 2 and 3) of the word recognition process.

What determines the eyes' landing position in words?

The place at which the eyes first fixate in a word during continuous reading, called the preferred landing position (PLP), is usually located halfway between the beginning and the middle of the word. To propose a mechanism that might account for the off-center location of the PLP, six eye movement experiments were conducted using a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and a stimulus bisection task (Experiments 2-6). The type of stimulus--linguistic (words and nonwords) versus nonlinguistic (strings of hashes, dotted lines, and solid lines)--and the stimulus presentation side (left vs. right) were manipulated. The results showed that (1) stimulus discreteness versus continuousness is an important factor in saccade computation and (2) PLP asymmetry can be explained in terms of attentional and/or oculomotor processes.

Parafoveal-on-foveal interactions in word recognition.

An experiment is reported in which participants read sequences of five words, looking for items describing articles of clothing. The third and fourth words in critical sequences were defined as "foveal" and "parafoveal" words, respectively. The length and frequency of foveal words and the length, frequency, and initial-letter constraint of parafoveal words were manipulated. Gaze and refixation rate on the foveal word were measured as a function of properties of the parafoveal word. The results show that measured gaze on a given foveal word is systematically modulated by properties of an unfixated parafoveal word. It is suggested that apparent inconsistencies in previous studies of parafoveal-on-foveal effects relate to a failure to control for foveal word length and hence the visibility of parafoveal words. A serial-sequential attention-switching model of eye movement control cannot account for the pattern of obtained effects. The data are also incompatible with various forms of parallel-processing model. They are best accounted for by postulating a process-monitoring mechanism, sensitive to the simultaneous rate of acquisition of information from foveal and parafoveal sources.