Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Eye movements were measured during the silent reading of sentences to extract several oculomotor measures. Rather than each measure being examined independently, oculomotor responses were grouped into two types, the assumption being that the grouping would project onto underlying constructs. Properties of forward-directed movements were assumed to reflect the success with which linguistic information was acquired (acquisition), and corrective responses were assumed to reveal readers’ responding to difficulties (correction). These two types of oculomotor responses were linked to indexes of reading accuracy (accuracy), which were obtained from separate materials so that eye movements with one set of materials could be used to predict reading accuracy for another set of materials. Path analyses indicated that correction, but not acquisition, was linked to accuracy. The additional clustering of acquisition, correction, and accuracy scores identified a group of readers with relatively low accuracy scores. These readers were typical in their acquisition of linguistic information but under-used corrective responding.

The present experiment examined the use of parafoveally presented first-language (LI) orthographic and phonological codes during reading of second-language (L2) sentences in proficient Russian-English bilinguals. Participants read English sentences containing a Russian preview word that was replaced by the English target word when the participant’s eyes crossed an invisible boundary located before the preview word. The use of English and Russian allowed us to manipulate orthographic and phonological preview effects independently of one another. The Russian preview words overlapped with English target words in (a) orthography (ВЕЛЮР [vʲɪˈlʲʉr]–BERRY), (b) phonology (БЛАНК [blank]–BLOOD), or (c) had no orthographic or phonological overlap (КАЛАЧ [kɐˈlat͡ɕ]–BERRY; ГЖЕЛЬ [ɡʐɛlʲ]–BLOOD). The results of this study showed a clear and strong benefit of the parafoveal preview of Russian words that shared either orthography or phonology with English target words. This study is the first demonstration of cross-script orthographic and phonological parafoveal preview benefit effects. Bilinguals integrate orthographic and phonological information across eye fixations in reading, even when this information comes from different languages.

The examination of how we read handwritten words (i.e., the original form of writing) has typically been disregarded in the literature on reading. Previous research using word recognition tasks has shown that lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) are magnified when reading difficult handwritten words. To examine this issue in a more ecological scenario, we registered the participants’ eye movements when reading handwritten sentences that varied in the degree of legibility (i.e., sentences composed of words in easy vs. difficult handwritten style). For comparison purposes, we included a condition with printed sentences. Results showed a larger reading cost for sentences with difficult handwritten words than for sentences with easy handwritten words, which in turn showed a reading cost relative to the sentences with printed words. Critically, the effect of word frequency was greater for difficult handwritten words than for easy handwritten words or printed words in the total times on a target word, but not on first-fixation durations or gaze durations. We examine the implications of these findings for models of eye movement control in reading.

In the domain of language research, the simultaneous presentation of a visual scene and its auditory description (i.e., the visual world paradigm) has been used to reveal the timing of mental mechanisms. Here we apply this rationale to the domain of numerical cognition in order to explore the differences between fast and slow arithmetic performance, and to further study the role of spatial-numerical associations during mental arithmetic. We presented 30 healthy adults simultaneously with visual displays containing four numbers and with auditory addition and subtraction problems. Analysis of eye movements revealed that participants look spontaneously at the numbers they currently process (operands, solution). Faster performance was characterized by shorter latencies prior to fixating the relevant numbers and fewer revisits to the first operand while computing the solution. These signatures of superior task performance were more pronounced for addition and visual numbers arranged in ascending order, and for subtraction and numbers arranged in descending order (compared to the opposite pairings). Our results show that the “visual number world”-paradigm provides on-line access to the mind during mental arithmetic, is able to capture variability in arithmetic performance, and is sensitive to visual layout manipulations that are otherwise not reflected in response time measurements.

There has been growing interest in dynamic changes in the lexical processing system across trials, which have typically been assessed via linear mixed effect modelling. In the current study, we explore the influence of previous trial lexicality and previous trial perceptual degradation on the effect of lexicality and degradation on the current trial. The results of analyses of three datasets (two previously published studies and a new study) provide evidence for a robust four-way interaction among previous trial lexicality and degradation and current trial lexicality and degradation effects. Discussion emphasizes how priming of relevant dimensions (clear vs. degraded or word vs. nonword) within the experimental context modulates the influence of degradation on the current trial as a function of lexicality. These results suggest that in lexical decision there are robust lingering effects of the previous stimulus and response that carry over to the current stimulus and response, and participants cannot tune task-related systems to only the present trial. Importantly, although these complex relationships are theoretically important regarding lexical and decision level processes, these complexities also reinforce Keith Rayner’s emphasis on on-line eye-tracking measures during reading as the most straightforward window into word-level processes engaged during reading.

The effect of word frequency on eye movement behaviour during reading has been reported in many experimental studies. However, the vast majority of these studies compared only two levels of word frequency (high and low). Here we assess whether the effect of log word frequency on eye movement measures is linear, in an experiment in which a critical target word in each sentence was at one of three approximately equally spaced log frequency levels. Separate analyses treated log frequency as a categorical or a continuous predictor. Both analyses showed only a linear effect of log frequency on the likelihood of skipping a word, and on first fixation duration. Ex-Gaussian analyses of first fixation duration showed similar effects on distributional parameters in comparing high- and medium-frequency words, and medium- and low-frequency words. Analyses of gaze duration and the probability of a refixation suggested a nonlinear pattern, with a larger effect at the lower end of the log frequency scale. However, the nonlinear effects were small, and Bayes Factor analyses favoured the simpler linear models for all measures. The possible roles of lexical and post-lexical factors in producing nonlinear effects of log word frequency during sentence reading are discussed.

Prior research has shown that task instructions influence the locations and durations of eye fixations during scene viewing. These task-related changes in gaze patterns are likely to be associated with a top-down influence of attention. Presently we applied a saccadic-inhibition manipulation in order to detect another expected manifestation of top-down attention: perceptual enhancement. Participants viewed eight-item arrays containing photographs from two categories of scenes. Four of the photos depicted natural landscapes (“nature”) and the other four depicted urban environments (“buildings”). Participants were instructed to memorize scenes from one of the categories in preparation for a later recognition memory test. During eye fixations the border around the fixated scene flickered briefly from black to white with a random interval between flickers ranging from 400 to 600 ms. We computed the likelihood of a saccade being initiated in the period following the flicker. Consistent with prior research, we found a strong saccadic inhibition effect with maximum saccadic inhibition occurring approximately 97 ms following the flicker. Importantly, the saccadic inhibition effect was stronger and longer lasting when the subject’s eyes were fixated on a relevant scene compared to an irrelevant scene. These findings are consistent with perceptual enhancement as a result of top-down attention.

Recent studies using the boundary paradigm have shown that readers benefit from a parafoveal preview of a plausible continuation of the sentence. This plausibility preview effect occurs irrespective of the semantic or orthographic relatedness of the preview and target word, suggesting that it depends on the degree to which a preview word fits the preceding context. The present study tested this hypothesis by examining the impact of contextual constraint on processing a plausible word in the parafovea. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which a target word was either highly predictable or unpredictable. The boundary paradigm was used to compare predictable, unpredictable, and implausible previews. The results showed that target predictability significantly modulated the effects of identical and plausible previews. Identical previews yielded significantly more benefit than plausible previews for highly predictable targets, but for unpredictable targets a plausible preview was as beneficial as an identical preview. The results shed light on the role of contextual predictability in early lexical processing. Furthermore, these data support the view that readers activate a set of appropriate words from the preceding sentence context, prior to the presentation of the target word.

Research with lexical neighbours (words that differ by a single letter while the number and order of letters are preserved) indicates that readers frequently misperceive a word as its higher frequency neighbour (HFN) even during normal reading. But how this lexical influence on word identification changes across the adult lifespan is largely unknown, although slower lexical processing and reduced visual abilities in later adulthood may lead to an increased incidence of word misperception errors. In particular, older adults may be more likely than younger adults to misidentify a word as its HFN, especially when the HFN is congruent with prior sentence context, although this has not been investigated. Accordingly, to address this issue, young and older adults read sentences containing target words with and without an HFN, where the HFN was either congruent with prior sentence context or not. Consistent with previous findings for young adults, eye movements were disrupted more for words with than without an HFN, especially when the HFN was congruent with prior context. Crucially, however, there was no indication of an adult age difference in this word misperception effect. We discuss these findings in relation to the nature of misperception effects in older age.

Complex words in Hebrew are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: a consonantal root embedded in a nominal or verbal word-pattern morpho-phonological unit made up of vowels or vowels and consonants. Research on written-word recognition has revealed a robust effect of the roots and the verbal-patterns, but not of the nominal-patterns, on word recognition. These findings suggest that the Hebrew lexicon is organized and accessed via roots. We explored the hypothesis that the absence of a nominal-pattern effect reflects methodological limitations of the experimental paradigms used in previous studies. Specifically, the potential facilitative effect induced by a shared nominal-pattern was counteracted by an interference effect induced by the competition between the roots of two words derived from different roots but with the same nominal-pattern. In the current study, a fast-priming paradigm for sentence reading and a “delayed-letters” procedure were used to isolate the initial effect of nominal-patterns on lexical access. The results, based on eye-fixation latency, demonstrated a facilitatory effect induced by nominal-pattern primes relative to orthographic control primes when presented for 33 or 42 ms. The results are discussed in relation to the role of the word-pattern as an organizing principle of the Hebrew lexicon, together with the roots.

Two experiments investigated the effects of domain knowledge on the resolution of ambiguous words with dominant meanings related to baseball. When placed in a sentence context that strongly biased toward the non-baseball meaning (positive evidence), or excluded the baseball meaning (negative evidence), baseball experts had more difficulty than non-experts resolving the ambiguity. Sentence contexts containing positive evidence supported earlier resolution than did the negative evidence condition for both experts and non-experts. These experiments extend prior findings, and can be seen as support for the reordered access model of lexical access, where both prior knowledge and discourse context influence the availability of word meanings.

Recording eye movements provides information on the time-course of word recognition during reading. Juhasz and Rayner [Juhasz, B. J., & Rayner, K. (2003). Investigating the effects of a set of intercorrelated variables on eye fixation durations in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 1312–1318] examined the impact of five word recognition variables, including familiarity and age-of-acquisition (AoA), on fixation durations. All variables impacted fixation durations, but the time-course differed. However, the study focused on relatively short, morphologically simple words. Eye movements are also informative for examining the processing of morphologically complex words such as compound words. The present study further examined the time-course of lexical and semantic variables during morphological processing. A total of 120 English compound words that varied in familiarity, AoA, semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance, sensory experience rating (SER), and imageability were selected. The impact of these variables on fixation durations was examined when length, word frequency, and lexeme frequencies were controlled in a regression model. The most robust effects were found for familiarity and AoA, indicating that a reader’s experience with compound words significantly impacts compound recognition. These results provide insight into semantic processing of morphologically complex words during reading.

Several theorists have argued that readers fail to detect semantic anomalies during reading, and that these effects are indicative of “shallow processing” behaviours. Previous studies of semantic anomalies such as the Moses illusion have focused primarily on explicit detection tasks. In the present study, we examined participants’ eye movements as they read true/false statements that were non-anomalous, or contained a semantic anomaly that was either high- or low-related to the correct information. Analyses of reading behaviours revealed that only low-related detected anomalies resulted in initial processing difficulty, but both detected and undetected anomalies, regardless of whether they were high- or low-related, resulted in delayed processing difficulty. The results extend previous findings on semantic anomalies and are discussed in terms of the RI-Val model of text processing.

The preferred viewing location in words [Rayner, K. (1979). Eye guidance in reading: Fixation locations within words. Perception, 8, 21–30] during reading is near the word centre. Parafoveal word length information is utilized to guide the eyes toward it. A recent study by Yan and colleagues [Yan, M., Zhou, W., Shu, H., Yusupu, R., Miao, D., Krügel, A., & Kliegl, R. (2014). Eye movements guided by morphological structure: Evidence from the Uighur language. Cognition, 132, 181–215] demonstrated that the word’s morphological structure may also be used in saccadic targeting. The study was conducted in a morphologically rich language, Uighur. The present study aimed at replicating their main findings in another morphologically rich language, Finnish. Similarly to Yan et al., it was found that the initial fixation landed closer to the word beginning for morphologically complex than for monomorphemic words. Word frequency, saccade launch site, and word length were also found to influence the initial landing position. It is concluded that in addition to low-level factors (word length and saccade launch site), also higher level factors related to the word’s morphological structure and frequency may be utilized in saccade programming during reading.

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.

Three eye-movement experiments were conducted to examine how the complexity of characters in Chinese words (i.e., number of strokes per character) influences their processing and eye-movement behaviour. In Experiment 1, English speakers with no significant knowledge of Chinese searched for specific low-, medium-, and high-complexity target characters in a multi-page narrative containing characters of varying complexity (3–16 strokes). Fixation durations and skipping rates were influenced by the visual complexity of both the target characters and the characters being searched even though participants had no knowledge of Chinese. In Experiment 2, native Chinese speakers performed the same character-search task, and a similar pattern of results was observed. Finally, in Experiment 3, a second sample of native Chinese speakers read the same text used in Experiments 1 and 2, with text characters again exhibiting complexity effects. These results collectively suggest that character-complexity effects on eye movements may not be due to lexical processing per se but may instead reflect whatever visual processing is required to know whether or not a character corresponds to an episodically represented target. The theoretical implications of this for our understanding of normal reading are discussed.

How do readers decide whether to skip or fixate a word? Angele and Rayner [2013. Processing the in the parafovea: Are articles skipped automatically? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39, 649–662] showed that English readers base skipping decisions on the parafoveal information available, but not the sentential context. Due to the increased visual density of the language, Chinese readers may be able to process a parafoveal word and integrate it with the sentence context to a greater extent than English readers. Consequently, influences on skipping decisions in Chinese may differ from those in English. In a boundary paradigm experiment, participants read sentences containing a single-character target verb (e.g., 取 meaning get) whose preview was manipulated in three conditions: identity preview; a preview consisting of the syntactically anomalous high-frequency structural particle de (的), or a pseudocharacter preview. The results showed that Chinese readers were more likely to skip the target when the preview was de than in either of the other conditions, suggesting that de-skipping is triggered by the parafoveal preview of a highly frequent particle word rather than on the likelihood of the upcoming word given the sentential context.

This eye movement study examined how people read nominal metaphors and similes in order to investigate how the surface form, or wording, of these expressions affected early processing. Participants silently read metaphors (knowledge is a river) and similes (knowledge is like a river). The identical words were used in the topic–vehicle pair (knowledge–river) in both conditions. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated longer reading times and a higher proportion of regressions in metaphors than in similes. Familiarity modulated later metaphor effects in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. Reading ability did not modulate the metaphor effects in Experiment 2. Results indicate that readers revised their initial interpretation of metaphors before moving on to read new text. This suggests that readers did not initially hold figurative interpretations of apt nominal metaphors that are somewhat familiar. Metaphor interpretation may be fast, but it is not easy.

Previous research shows that visual search for two different targets is less efficient than search for a single target. Stroud, Menneer, Cave, and Donnelly concluded that two target colours are represented separately based on modelling the fixation patterns. Although those analyses provide evidence for two separate target representations, they do not show whether participants search simultaneously for both targets, or first search for one target and then the other. Some studies suggest that multiple target representations are simultaneously active, while others indicate that search can be voluntarily simultaneous, or switching, or a mixture of both. Stroud et al.’s participants were not explicitly instructed to use any particular strategy. These data were revisited to determine which strategy was employed. Each fixated item was categorised according to whether its colour was more similar to one target or the other. Once an item similar to one target is fixated, the next fixated item is more likely to be similar to that target than the other, showing that at a given moment during search, one target is generally favoured. However, the search for one target is not completed before search for the other begins. Instead, there are often short runs of one or two fixations to distractors similar to one target, with each run followed by a switch to the other target. Thus, the results suggest that one target is more highly weighted than the other at any given time, but not to the extent that search is purely successive.

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.

In an eye movement experiment employing the boundary paradigm, we compared parafoveal preview benefit during the reading of Chinese sentences. The target word was a two-character compound that had either a noun–noun or an adjective–noun structure each sharing an identical noun as the second character. The boundary was located between the two characters of the compound word. Prior to the eyes crossing the boundary, the preview of the second character was presented either normally or was replaced by a pseudocharacter. Previously, Juhasz, Inhoff, and Rayner observed that inserting a space into a normally unspaced compound in English significantly disrupted processing and that this disruption was larger for adjective–noun compounds than for noun–noun compounds. This finding supports the hypothesis that, at least in English, for adjective–noun compounds, the noun is more important for lexical identification than the adjective, while for noun–noun compounds, both constituents are similar in importance for lexical identification. Our results indicate a similar division of the importance of compounds in reading in Chinese as the pseudocharacter preview was more disruptive for the adjective–noun compounds than for the noun–noun compounds. These findings also indicate that parafoveal processing can be influenced by the morphosyntactic structure of the currently fixated character.

Several studies have examined effects of explicit task demands on eye movements in reading. However, there is relatively little prior research investigating the influence of implicit processing demands. In this study, processing demands were manipulated by means of a between-subject manipulation of comprehension question difficulty. Consistent with previous results from Wotschack and Kliegl, the question difficulty manipulation influenced the probability of regressing from late in sentences and re-reading earlier regions; readers who expected difficult comprehension questions were more likely to re-read. However, this manipulation had no reliable influence on eye movements during first-pass reading of earlier sentence regions. Moreover, for the subset of sentences that contained a plausibility manipulation, the disruption induced by implausibility was not modulated by the question manipulation. We interpret these results as suggesting that comprehension demands influence reading behavior primarily by modulating a criterion for comprehension that readers apply after completing first-pass processing.

To investigate how proficient pianists comprehend pitch relationships in written music when they first encounter it, we conducted two experiments in which proficient pianists’ eyes were tracked while they read and played single-line melodies. In Experiment 1, participants played at their own speed; in Experiment 2, they played with an external metronome. The melodies were either congruent or anomalous, with the anomaly involving one bar being shifted in pitch to alter the implied harmonic structure (e.g. non-resolution of a dominant). In both experiments, anomaly led to rapid disruption in participants’ eye movements in terms of regressions from the target bar, indicating that pianists process written pitch relationships online. This is particularly striking because in musical sight-reading, eye movement behaviour is constrained by the concurrent performance. Both experiments also showed that anomaly induced pupil dilation. Together, these results indicate that proficient pianists rapidly integrate the music that they read into the prior context and that anomalies in terms of pitch relationships lead to processing difficulty. These findings parallel those of text reading, suggesting that structural processing involves similar constraints across domains.

The preferred viewing location (PVL) is a robust finding in research on reading that when fixating on a word during normal sentence reading, readers tend to land slightly to the left of the center of the word. This is in contrast to the optimal viewing location in single word recognition, which falls at the center of the word. This study outlines the history of the PVL in eye tracking since Rayner’s 1979 original study, documenting the origins of the conflicting theoretical explanations. In addition, a new study is reported examining whether the PVL can be attributed solely to oculomotor error or a processing advantage by using an experimental manipulation that separates tracking direction (left-to-right reading) and landing position (left-to-right within a word). Sentences were presented to participants from the top to the bottom of a computer screen with one word per line while eye movements were recorded. In this presentation format, readers continued to land to the left of center, suggesting that the PVL in normal reading is not solely due to oculomotor error.

Many studies in reading have shown the enhancing effect of context on the processing of a word before it is directly fixated (parafoveal processing of words). Here, we examined whether scene context influences the parafoveal processing of objects and enhances the extraction of object information. Using a modified boundary paradigm called the Dot-Boundary paradigm, participants fixated on a suddenly onsetting cue before the preview object would onset 4° away. The preview object could be identical to the target, visually similar, visually dissimilar or a control (black rectangle). The preview changed to the target object once a saccade toward the object was made. Critically, the objects were presented on either a consistent or an inconsistent scene background. Results revealed that there was a greater processing benefit for consistent than inconsistent scene backgrounds and that identical and visually similar previews produced greater processing benefits than other previews. In the second experiment, we added an additional context condition in which the target location was inconsistent, but the scene semantics remained consistent. We found that changing the location of the target object disrupted the processing benefit derived from the consistent context. Most importantly, across both experiments, the effect of preview was not enhanced by scene context. Thus, preview information and scene context appear to independently boost the parafoveal processing of objects without any interaction from object–scene congruency.

Word recognition in sentence reading is influenced by information from both preview and context. Recently, semantic preview effect (SPE) was observed being modulated by the constraint of context, indicating that context might accelerate the processing of semantically related preview words. Besides, SPE was found to depend on preview time, which suggests that SPE may change with different processing stages of preview words. Therefore, it raises the question of whether preview time-dependent SPE would be modulated by contextual constraint. In this study, we not only investigated the impact of contextual constraint on SPE in Chinese reading but also examined its dependency on preview time. The preview word and the target word were identical, semantically related or unrelated to the target word. The results showed a significant three-way interaction: The SPE depended on contextual constraint and preview time. In separate analyses for low and high contextual constraint of target words, the SPE significantly decreased with an increase in preview duration when the target word was of low constraint in the sentence. The effect was numerically in the same direction but weaker and statistically nonsignificant when the target word was highly constrained in the sentence. The results indicate that word processing in sentences is a dynamic process of integrating information from both preview (bottom-up) and context (top-down).

Readers’ eyes often skip over words as they read. Skipping rates are largely determined by word length; short words are skipped more than long words. However, the predictability of a word in context also impacts skipping rates. Rayner, Slattery, Drieghe and Liversedge reported an effect of predictability on word skipping for even long words (10-13 characters) that extend beyond the word identification span. Recent research suggests that better readers and spellers have an enhanced perceptual span. We explored that whether reading and spelling skill interact with word length and predictability to impact word skipping rates in a large sample (N = 92) of average and poor adult readers. Participants read the items from Rayner et al., while their eye movements were recorded. Spelling skill (zSpell) was assessed using the dictation and recognition tasks developed by Sally Andrews and colleagues. Reading skill (zRead) was assessed from reading speed (words per minute) and comprehension accuracy of three 120 word passages each with 10 comprehension questions. We fit linear mixed models to the target gaze duration data and generalized linear mixed models to the target word skipping data. Target word gaze durations were significantly predicted by zRead, while the skipping likelihoods were significantly predicted by zSpell. Additionally, for gaze durations, zRead significantly interacted with word predictability as better readers relied less on context to support word processing. These effects are discussed in relation to the lexical quality hypothesis and eye movement models of reading.

Much of the investigation of eye movement control in visual cognition has focused on the influence of experimental variables on mean fixation durations. In this article, we explored the convergence between two distributional analysis techniques that were recently introduced in this domain. First, Staub, White, Drieghe, Hollway and Rayner, proposed fitting the ex-Gaussian distribution to individual participants’ data in order to ascertain whether a variable has a rapid or a slow influence on fixation durations. Second, the divergence point analysis (DPA) procedure was introduced by Reingold, Reichle, Glaholt and Sheridan in order to determine more precisely the earliest discernible impact of a variable on the distribution of fixation durations by contrasting survival curves across two experimental conditions and determining the point at which the two curves begin to diverge. In this article, we introduced a new version of the DPA procedure which is based on ex-Gaussian fitting. We evaluated this procedure by re-analyzing data obtained in previous empirical investigations as well as by conducting a simulation study. We demonstrated that the new ex-Gaussian DPA technique produced estimates that were consistent with estimates produced by prior versions of DPA procedure, and in the present simulation, the ex-Gaussian DPA procedure produced somewhat more accurate individual participant divergence point estimates. Based on the present findings, we also suggest guidelines for best practices in the use of DPA techniques.

The majority of the extensive experimental and theoretical literature on scalar strengthening assumes that the phenomenon is uniform across all types of scalars. The experiment reported here contributes to the growing evidence against scalar uniformity, while also exploring the suggestion of Van Tiel, Van Miltenburg, Zevakhina, and Guerts, (2014) of the role of boundedness in the observed variation. The current experiment utilizes a novel approach to exploring the interpretation of scalars, and also investigates the content of strengthened interpretations.

In a single eye movement experiment, we investigated the effects of context on the time course of local and global anomaly processing during reading in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In one condition, short paragraph texts contained anomalous target words. Detection of the anomaly was only possible through evaluation of word meaning in relation to the global context of the whole paragraph (Passage-Level Anomalies). In another condition, the anomaly could be detected via computation of a local thematic violation within a single sentence embedded in the paragraph (Sentence-Level Anomalies). For the sentence-level anomalies, the ASD group, in contrast with the typically developing (TD) group, showed early detection of the anomaly as indexed by regressive eye movements from the critical target word upon fixation. Conversely, for the passage-level anomalies, and in contrast with the ASD group, the TD group showed early detection of the anomaly with increased regressive eye movements once the critical word had been fixated. The reversal of the pattern of regression path data for the two groups, for the sentence- and passage-level anomalies, is discussed in relation to cognitive accounts of ASD.

Recently, Bélanger, Slattery, Mayberry and Rayner showed, using the moving-window paradigm, that profoundly deaf adults have a wider perceptual span during reading relative to hearing adults matched on reading level. This difference might be related to the fact that deaf adults allocate more visual attention to simple stimuli in the parafovea. Importantly, this reorganization of visual attention in deaf individuals is already manifesting in deaf children. This leads to questions about the time course of the emergence of an enhanced perceptual span (which is under attentional control) in young deaf readers. The present research addressed this question by comparing the perceptual spans of young deaf readers (age 7-15) and young hearing readers (age 7-15). Young deaf readers, like deaf adults, were found to have a wider perceptual span relative to their hearing peers matched on reading level, suggesting that strong and early reorganization of visual attention in deaf individuals goes beyond the processing of simple visual stimuli and emerges into more cognitively complex tasks, such as reading.

Contextual constraint is a key factor affecting a word’s fixation duration and its likelihood of being fixated during reading. Previous research has generally demonstrated additive effects of predictability and frequency in fixation times. Studies examining the role of parafoveal preview have shown that greater preview benefit is obtained from more predictable and higher frequency words versus less predictable and lower frequency words. In two experiments, we investigated effects of target word predictability, frequency and parafoveal preview. A 3 (Predictability: low, medium, high) × 2 (Frequency: low, high) design was used with Preview (valid, invalid) manipulated between experiments. With valid previews, we found main effects of Predictability and Frequency in both fixation time and fixation probability measures, including an interaction in early fixation measures. With invalid preview, we again found main effects of Predictability and Frequency in fixation times, but no evidence of an interaction. Fixation probability showed a weak Predictability effect and Predictability–Frequency interaction. Predictability interacted with Preview in early fixation time and fixation probability measures. Our findings suggest that high levels of contextual constraint exert an early influence during lexical processing in reading. Results are discussed in terms of models of language processing and eye movement control.

Reading requires integration of language and cognitive processes with attention and eye movement control. Individuals differ in their reading ability, but little is known about the neurocognitive processes associated with these individual differences. To investigate this issue, we combined eyetracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), simultaneously recording eye movements and blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) activity while subjects read text passages. We found that the variability and skew of fixation duration distributions across individuals, as assessed by ex-Gaussian analyses, decreased with increasing neural activity in regions associated with the cortical eye movement control network (left frontal eye fields [FEF], left intraparietal sulcus [IPS], left inferior frontal gyrus [IFG] and right IFG). The results suggest that individual differences in fixation duration during reading are related to underlying neurocognitive processes associated with the eye movement control system and its relationship to language processing. The results also show that eye movements and fMRI can be combined to investigate the neural correlates of individual differences in natural reading.

We explore two aspects of exovergence: we test whether smaller binocular fixation disparities accompany the shorter saccades and longer fixations observed in reading Chinese, and we test whether potentially advantageous psychophysical effects of exovergence transfer to text reading. We report differential exovergence in reading Chinese and English: Chinese readers begin fixations with more binocular disparity, but end fixations with a disparity closely similar to that of the English readers. We conclude that greater fixation-initial binocular disparity can be adaptive in the reading of visually and cognitively denser text.