Comparative analyses of the information content of letters, characters, and inter-word spaces across writing systems.

One difference among writing systems is how orthographic cues are used to demarcate words; although most alphabetic scripts use inter-word spaces, some Asian scripts do not explicitly mark word boundaries (e.g., Chinese). It is unclear whether these differences are arbitrary or whether they are designed to maximize reading efficiency. Here, we show that spaces inserted between words in non-demarcated scripts provide less information about word boundaries than spaces in demarcated scripts. Furthermore, despite the fact that less information is contained by inter-word spaces than characters/letters of the same size, the information content of inter-word spaces in demarcated scripts is closer to that of characters/letters compared to the information content of inter-word spaces that are inserted in non-demarcated scripts. These results suggest that the conventions used to demarcate word boundaries are sufficient to support efficient reading. Our findings provide new insights into the universals and variation across writing systems and shed light on the mental processes that support skilled reading.

Saccadic targeting in the Landolt-C task: Implications for Chinese reading.

Participants in an eye-movement experiment performed a modified version of the Landolt-C paradigm (Williams & Pollatsek, 2007) to determine if there are preferred viewing locations when they searched for target squares embedded in linear arrays of spatially contiguous clusters of squares (i.e., sequences of one to four squares having missing segments of variable size and orientation). The results of this experiment indicate that, although the peaks of the single- and first-of-multiple-fixation landing-site distributions were respectively located near the centers and beginnings of the clusters, thereby replicating previous patterns that have been interpreted as evidence for the default saccadic-targeting hypothesis, the same dissociation was evident on nonclusters (i.e., arbitrarily defined regions of analysis). Furthermore, properties of the clusters (e.g., character number and gap size) influenced fixation durations and forward saccade length, suggesting that ongoing stimulus processing affects decisions about when and where (i.e., how far) to move the eyes. Finally, results of simulations using simple oculomotor-based, default-targeting, and dynamic-adjustment models indicated that the latter performed better than the other two, suggesting that the dynamic-adjustment strategy likely reflects the basic perceptual and motor constraints shared by a variety of visual tasks, rather than being specific to Chinese reading. The theoretical implications of these results for existing and future accounts of eye-movement control are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Dynamic reading in a digital age: new insights on cognition.

People increasingly read text displayed on digital devices, including computers, handheld e-readers, and smartphones. Given this, there is rapidly growing interest in understanding how the cognitive processes that support the reading of static text (e.g., books, magazines, or newspapers) might be adapted to reading digital texts. Evidence from recent experiments suggests a complex interplay of visual and cognitive influences on how people engage with digital reading. Although readers can strategically adjust their reading behaviors in response to their immediate reading context, the efficacy of these strategies depends on cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational factors. A better understanding of the factors that influence reading offers the promise of leveraging digital technologies to enhance the reading experience.

Lexical processing across the visual field.

This article reports six experiments in which participants made speeded binary decisions about letter strings that were displayed for 100 versus 300 ms at different retinal eccentricities in the left versus right visual field to examine how these variables and task demands influence word-identification accuracy and latency. Across the experiments, lexical-processing performance decreased with eccentricity, but to a lesser degree for words displayed in the right visual field, replicating previous reports. However, the effect of eccentricity was attenuated for the two tasks that required "deep" semantic judgments (e.g., discriminating words that referenced animals vs. objects) relative to the tasks that required "shallow" letter and/or lexical processing (e.g., detecting words containing a pre-specified target letter, discriminating words from nonwords). These results suggest that lexical and supra-lexical knowledge play a significant role in supporting lexical processing, especially at greater eccentricities, thereby allowing readers to extend the visual span, or region of effective letter processing, into the perceptual span, or region of useful information extraction. The broader theoretical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to existing and future models of reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Are there preferred viewing locations in Chinese reading? Evidence from eye-tracking and computer simulations.

The Chinese writing system is different from English in that individual words both comprise one to four characters and are not separated by clear word boundaries (e.g., interword spaces). These differences raise the question of how readers of Chinese know where to move their eyes to support efficient lexical processing? The widely accepted default-targeting hypothesis suggests that Chinese readers direct their eyes to a small number of preferred-viewing locations (PVLs), such as the beginning or middle of upcoming words. In this article, we report two eye-movement experiments testing this hypothesis. In both experiments, participants read sentences comprising entirely two-character words, but either without (Experiment 1) or with (Experiment 2) explicit knowledge of this structure prior to their participation. The results of both experiments indicate the absence of PVLs. Simulations using implemented versions of a simple oculomotor-based hypothesis, two variants of the default-targeting hypothesis, and the hypothesis that saccade lengths are modulated as a function of estimated parafoveal-processing difficulty (i.e., dynamic-adjustment hypothesis) suggest that the latter provides the best account of saccadic-targeting during Chinese reading. These results are discussed in relation to broader issues of eye-movement control during reading and how models of such must be modified to provide more accurate accounts of the reading of Chinese and other languages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

How do task demands and aging affect lexical prediction during online reading of natural texts?

Facilitated identification of predictable words during online reading has been attributed to the generation of predictions about upcoming words. But highly predictable words are relatively infrequent in natural texts, raising questions about the utility and ubiquity of anticipatory prediction strategies. This study investigated the contribution of task demands and aging to predictability effects for short natural texts from the Provo corpus. The eye movements of 49 undergraduate students (mean age 21.2) and 46 healthy older adults (mean age 70.8) were recorded while they read these passages in two conditions: (a) reading for meaning to answer occasional comprehension questions; (b) proofreading to detect "transposed letter" lexical errors (e.g., clam instead of calm) in intermixed filler passages. The results suggested that the young adults, but not the older adults, engaged anticipatory prediction strategies to detect semantic errors in the proofreading condition, but neither age group showed any evidence of costs of prediction failures. Rather, both groups showed facilitated reading times for unexpected words that appeared in a high constraint within-sentence position. These findings suggest that predictability effects for natural texts reflect partial, probabilistic expectancies rather than anticipatory prediction of specific words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding the visual constraints on lexical processing: New empirical and simulation results.

Word identification is slower and less accurate outside central vision, but the precise relationship between retinal eccentricity and lexical processing is not well specified by models of either word identification or reading. In a seminal eye-movement study, Rayner and Morrison (1981) found that participants made remarkably accurate naming and lexical-decision responses to words displayed more than 3 degrees from the center of vision-even under conditions requiring fixed gaze. However, the validity of these findings is challenged by a range of methodological limitations. We report a series of gaze-contingent lexical-decision and naming experiments that replicate and extend Rayner and Morrison's study to provide a more accurate estimate of how visual constraints delimit lexical processing. Simulations were conducted using the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2012) to assess the implications for understanding eye-movement control during reading. Augmenting the model's assumptions about the impact of both eccentricity and visual crowding on the rate of lexical processing provided good fits to the observed data without impairing the model's ability to simulate benchmark eye-movement effects. The findings are discussed with a view toward the development of a complete model of reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A multitask comparison of word- and character-frequency effects in Chinese reading.

In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of two-character target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The character-frequency effects, however, were facilitatory for naming but inhibitory for both lexical decision and reading. Further correlational analyses indicated that participants' performance (as measured using overall response latencies and the sizes of the frequency effects) was not consistent across tasks but was relatively reliable within the lexical-decision and reading tasks. These findings are discussed in relation to what is known about the reading of Chinese versus alphabetic scripts, word-identification tasks, and models of word identification. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Conversation dynamics in a multiplayer video game with knowledge asymmetry.

Despite the challenges associated with virtually mediated communication, remote collaboration is a defining characteristic of online multiplayer gaming communities. Inspired by the teamwork exhibited by players in first-person shooter games, this study investigated the verbal and behavioral coordination of four-player teams playing a cooperative online video game. The game, Desert Herding, involved teams consisting of three ground players and one drone operator tasked to locate, corral, and contain evasive robot agents scattered across a large desert environment. Ground players could move throughout the environment, while the drone operator's role was akin to that of a "spectator" with a bird's-eye view, with access to veridical information of the locations of teammates and the to-be-corralled agents. Categorical recurrence quantification analysis (catRQA) was used to measure the communication dynamics of teams as they completed the task. Demands on coordination were manipulated by varying the ground players' ability to observe the environment with the use of game "fog." Results show that catRQA was sensitive to changes to task visibility, with reductions in task visibility reorganizing how participants conversed during the game to maintain team situation awareness. The results are discussed in the context of future work that can address how team coordination can be augmented with the inclusion of artificial agents, as synthetic teammates.

Assessing Team Effectiveness by How Players Structure Their Search in a First-Person Multiplayer Video Game.

People working as a team can achieve more than when working alone due to a team's ability to parallelize the completion of tasks. In collaborative search tasks, this necessitates the formation of effective division of labor strategies to minimize redundancies in search. For such strategies to be developed, team members need to perceive the task's relevant components and how they evolve over time, as well as an understanding of what others will do so that they can structure their own behavior to contribute to the team's goal. This study explored whether the capacity for team members to coordinate effectively can be related to how participants structure their search behaviors in an online multiplayer collaborative search task. Our results demonstrated that the structure of search behavior, quantified using detrended fluctuation analysis, was sensitive to contextual factors that limit a participant's ability to gather information. Further, increases in the persistence of movement fluctuations during search behavior were found as teams developed more effective coordinative strategies and were associated with better task performance.

A corpus-based versus experimental examination of word- and character-frequency effects in Chinese reading: Theoretical implications for models of reading.

Chinese words consist of a variable number of characters that are normally written in continuous lines, without the blank spaces that are used to separate words in most alphabetic writing systems. These conventions raise questions about the relative roles of character versus whole-word processing in word identification, and how words are segmented from strings of characters for the purpose of their identification and saccade targeting. The present article attempts to address these questions by reporting an eye-movement experiment in which 60 participants read a corpus of sentences containing two-character target words that varied in terms of their overall frequency and the frequency of their initial characters. We examine participants' eye movements using both corpus-based statistical models and more standard analyses of our target words. In addition to documenting how key lexical variables influence eye movements and highlighting a few discrepancies between the results obtained using our two statistical approaches, our experiment shows that high-frequency initial characters can actually slow word identification. We discuss the theoretical significance of this finding and others for current models of Chinese reading, and then describe a new computational model of eye-movement control during the reading of Chinese. Finally, we report simulations showing that this model can account for our findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The effect of contextual plausibility on word skipping during reading.

Recent eye-movement evidence suggests readers are more likely to skip a high-frequency word than a low-frequency word independently of the semantic or syntactic acceptability of the word in the sentence. This has been interpreted as strong support for a serial processing mechanism in which the decision to skip a word is based on the completion of a preliminary stage of lexical processing prior to any assessment of contextual fit. The present large-scale study was designed to reconcile these findings with the plausibility preview effect: higher skipping and reduced first-pass reading times for words that are previewed by contextually plausible, compared to implausible, sentence continuations that are unrelated to the target word. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a short (3-4 letters) or long (6 letters) target word. The boundary paradigm was used to present parafoveal previews which were either higher or lower frequency than the target, and either plausible or implausible in the sentence context. The results revealed strong, independent effects of all three factors on target skipping and early measures of target fixation duration, while frequency and plausibility interacted on later measures of target fixation duration. Simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading demonstrated that plausibility effects on skipping are potentially consistent with the assumption that higher-level contextual information only affects post-lexical integration processes. However, no current model of eye movements in reading provides an explicit account of the information or processes that allow readers to rapidly detect an integration failure.

The influence of parafoveal preview, character transposition, and word frequency on saccadic targeting in Chinese reading.

This article reports the results of an eye-movement experiment which manipulated the frequency and parafoveal preview (i.e., nonword, transposed-character, or identical) of 2-character Chinese target words using a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). The key findings were that progressive saccades were longer into high- than low-frequency target words, and that this word-frequency effect was more pronounced for identical than transposed previews. These findings suggest that Chinese readers adjust their saccade lengths in response to variables that influence the rate of parafoveal lexical processing. To examine the feasibility of this hypothesis, 2 computer simulations were completed that pitted this dynamic-adjustment account (Liu, Huang, Gao, & Reichle, 2017) against an account in which readers simply move their eyes to a small number of default saccade targets (e.g., the beginning or center of the upcoming word; Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu, 2010). The simulation results show that the dynamic-adjustment hypothesis more accurately describes our experimental findings using fewer parameters. The theoretical implications of the dynamic-adjustment account of saccadic targeting are discussed relevant to both models of eye-movement control in reading and modes of Chinese word identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of parafoveal word frequency and segmentation on saccade targeting during Chinese reading.

Two eye-movement experiments are reported in which a boundary paradigm was used to manipulate the presence versus absence of boundaries for high-frequency and low-frequency target words in the parafovea. In Experiment 1, this was done by introducing a blank space after the target words, whereas in Experiment 2 this was done by rendering the target words in red. In both experiments, higher frequency targets engendered longer saccades, whereas the presence of parafoveal word boundaries engendered shorter saccades. This pattern suggests the operation of two countermanding saccade-targeting mechanisms: one that uses parafoveal processing difficulty to adjust saccade lengths and a second that uses word boundaries to direct the eyes toward specific saccade targets. The implications of these findings for models of eye-movement control during reading are discussed, as are suggestions for integrating dynamic-adjustment and default-targeting accounts.

The dynamic adjustment of saccades during Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements and simulations.

This article reports an eye-movement experiment in which participants scanned continuous sequences of Landolt-Cs for target circles to examine the visual and oculomotor constraints that might jointly determine where the eyes move in a task that engages many of the perceptual and motor processes involved in Chinese reading but without lexical or linguistic processing. The lengths of the saccades entering the Landolt-C clusters were modulated by the processing difficulty (i.e., gap sizes) of those clusters. Simulations using implemented versions of default-targeting (Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu, 2010) versus dynamic-adjustment (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016) models of saccadic targeting indicated that the latter provided a better account of our participants' eye movements, further supporting the hypothesis that Chinese readers "decide" where to move their eyes by adjusting saccade length in response to processing difficulty rather than by selecting default saccade targets. We discuss this hypothesis in relation to both what is known about saccadic targeting during the reading of English versus Chinese and current models of eye-movement control in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Eye-movement evidence for the mental representation of strokes in Chinese characters.

Although strokes are the smallest identifiable units in Chinese words, the fact that they are often embedded within larger units (i.e., radicals and/or characters that comprise Chinese words) raises questions about how and even if strokes are separately represented in lexical memory. The present experiment examined these questions using a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to manipulate the parafoveal preview of the first of two-character target words. Relative to a normal preview, the removal of whole strokes was more disruptive (i.e., resulting in longer looking times on targets) than the removal of an equivalent amount of visual information (i.e., number of pixels) from strokes located either in similar locations or throughout the entire character. These findings suggest that strokes are represented as discrete functional units rather than visual features or integral parts of the radicals/characters in which they are embedded. We discuss the theoretical implications of this conclusion for models of Chinese word identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Using eye movements to understand the leakage of information during Chinese reading.

How is attention allocated during reading? The present eye-movement experiment used a paradigm developed by Liu and Reichle (Psychological Science, 29, 278-287, 2018) to examine object-based attention during reading: Participants were instructed to read one of two spatially overlapping sentences containing colocated target/distractor words of varying frequency. Although target-word frequency modulated fixation-duration measures on the target word, the distractor-word frequency also had a smaller, independent effect. Survival analyses indicate that the distractor-word effect occurred later than the target-word effect, suggesting that subtle orthographic cues were noticed either later or occasionally, thereby modulating decisions about when to move the eyes. The theoretical ramifications of this "leakage" of information are discussed with respect to the general question of attention allocation during reading and possible differences between the reading of Chinese versus English.

The "risky" reading strategy revisited: New simulations using E-Z Reader.

Eye-movement studies have demonstrated that, relative to college-aged readers, older readers of alphabetic languages like English and German tend to read more slowly, making more frequent and longer fixations and longer saccades, and skipping more words, but also making more frequent regressions. These findings have led to suggestions that older readers either adopt a "risky" strategy of using context to "guess" words as a way of compensating for slower rates of lexical processing, or have a smaller and more asymmetrical perceptual span. Unfortunately, neither of these hypotheses seemingly explains more recent observations that older readers of Chinese seem to adopt a more "conservative" strategy, making shorter saccades and skipping less often. In this paper, we use the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control to examine several possible accounts of the differences between college-aged and older readers of both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. These simulations re-confirm that the "risky" strategy may be sufficient to explain age-related differences in reader's eye movements, with older readers of English versus Chinese being, respectively, more versus less inclined to guess upcoming words. The implications of these results for aging, reading, and models of eye-movement control are discussed.

Word predictability affects saccade length in Chinese reading: An evaluation of the dynamic-adjustment model.

How does a word's within-sentence predictability influence saccade length during reading? An eye-movement experiment manipulating the predictability of target words indicates that, relative to low-predictability target words, high-predictability targets elicit longer saccades to themselves. Simulations using computational models that respectively instantiate the targeting of saccades to default locations (Yan, Kliegl, Richter, Nuthmann, & Shu in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 705-725, 2010) versus the dynamic adjustment of saccade length (Liu, Reichle, & Li in Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition, 41, 1229-1236, 2015, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 1008-1025, 2016) indicate that the latter model provides a more accurate and parsimonious account of saccade-targeting behavior in Chinese reading. The implications of these conclusions are discussed with respect to current models of eye-movement control during reading and the necessity to explain eye movements in languages as different as Chinese versus English.

Models of Chinese Reading: Review and Analysis.

Our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in reading has been advanced by computational models that simulate those processes (e.g., see Reichle, 2015). Unfortunately, most of these models have been developed to explain the reading of English and other alphabetic languages, with relatively fewer efforts to examine whether or not the assumptions of these models also explain what has been learned from other languages and, in particular, non-alphabetic writing systems like Chinese (e.g., see Li, Zang, Liversedge, & Pollatsek, 2015). In this article, we will review those computational models that have been developed to explain the reading of Chinese, with the goal of comparing their theoretical assumptions to those of models that explain the reading of English. Our analysis indicates that there are both points of convergence and divergence between the theoretical assumptions of Chinese versus English models, suggesting that the cognitive systems supporting reading may be differentially influenced by features of the languages and/or writing systems, or that certain theoretical assumptions developed to explain the reading of one language might be adapted to explain the reading of others.