Seth N. Greenberg

The extraction of phrase structure during reading: Evidence from letter detection errors.

In light of recent suggestions regarding the prominence of structure in speech production and comprehension, it has been postulated that structural processing might also play a similarly important role in reading. Some evidence in support of this contention can be gleaned from eye-movement research. However, more systematic support comes from recent work on letter detection during reading, which has shown that the rate of omission errors is inordinately high for morphemes that disclose phrase structure. The results of three lines of research suggest that, early in text processing, readers attempt to extract a structural frame for the sentence to help the on-line integration of accessed representations, and that structure-supporting units recede to the background as the meaning of the sentence evolves.

Syntactic control of letter detection: Evidence from English and Hebrew nonwords.

According to the unitization account, letters are more often missed in function words (e.g., the) than in less common content words because their higher familiarity allows access to their whole-word representations. The present study, however, replicated this pattern with nonwords. For both Hebrew and English, nonwords produced more detection errors when placed in function slots than in content slots. A similar effect was found for Hebrew prefix nonwords, where the initial letter could be interpreted as a function morpheme or as part of the stem

The GO model: A reconsideration of the role of structural units in guiding and organizing text on line

Healy (1994) and Koriat and Greenberg (1994) offered different theoretical accounts of the missingletter effect (MLE) in the letter-detection task, whereby a disproportionate number of letter-detection errors occur in frequent function words. Healy emphasized identification processes, whereas Koriat and Greenberg viewed the structural role of the embedding word to be crucial. Recent research suggests that neither position alone can account for the complete set of observations pertaining to the MLE. The present paper offers a theoretical integration of these competing explanations of letter detection in terms of a GO (guidance-organization) model of reading. This model specifies how structural processing of connected text helps guide eye movements to semantically informative parts of the text, enabling readers to achieve on-line fluency.

The missing-letter effect in hebrew-word-frequency or word function

In this article, the authors attribute the missing-letter effect in Hebrew to the linguistic function of the words

The extraction of structure during reading: Evidence from reading prosody

According to the structural approach to reading, the extraction of structure precedes the analysis of meaning and paves the way for it. In this study, reading prosody was used to examine this proposition. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that reading prosody produced on line reflects the early extraction of structure. In Experiment 1, readers were successful in assigning natural prosody to unfamiliar text immediately upon its reading. Experiment 2 showed that the prosodic patterns applied are tuned to the structure of the sentence and are largely indifferent to the content of the sentence or to its semantic coherence. The results join with other findings in speech production and comprehension in supporting the precedence of structure to meaning in reading.

Allocation of Visuo-Spatial Attention and Saccade Programming During Reading

Abstract Current conceptions of visuo-spatial and lexical processing during reading (e.g., Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher and Rayner, 1998) assume that attention confines recognition processes to a single word at a time and that interword saccades are triggered by the completion of an initial stage of lexical processing while attention is exclusively allocated to the fixated word. Three experiments examined these assumptions by determining whether readers obtained useful lexical information to the right and left of fixation prior to the initiation of interword saccades. The results of Experiment 1 reveal that lexical information from a parafoveal word to the right of fixation can be obtained before a saccade to this word is committed to action. The results of Experiments 2 and 3 show that readers obtain useful lexical information from a target word to the left of fixation, irrespective of whether the target is subsequently reread. These findings indicate that more than one word is attended at a time during a fixation, that successive areas of attention overlap, and that programming of a saccade to a parafoveally visible word is not completed before attention is allocated to it.

Voice change in the stimulus suffix effect: Are the effects structural or strategic?

The literature on the stimulus suffix effect shows that if the suffix is presented in a voice different from that in which the list items are presented, there is less of a decrement in list recall than if the suffix is presented in the same voice. This experiment attempted to answer the question of whether this variable diminishes the suffix effect because of attentional factors or because of structural properties of echoic memory. Subjects received lists of digits in a male voice and either a tone, same-voice suffix, or different-voice suffix. Subjects received either the same suffix for all lists or two different suffixes. Those subjects given two suffixes and those given two tones were either forced to discriminate between them or had no discrimination requirement. The results demonstrated that voice change has both attentions] and structural consequences on the suffix effect, with the attentional factors being confined to the preterminal positions and the structural factors being confined to the last position or two.

The missing-letter effect for common function words depends on their linguistic function in the phrase.

It has been proposed that function words such as for and on conceal their letters because their higher familiarity allows fast access to their unitized representations. However, in this study we show that letter detection in function words varies with their linguistic role in text. When such words were embedded in a phrase where they were forced into a content role by the surrounding context (e.g., for or against or on switch), letter detection improved markedly and did not differ from that of matched content words. The result was replicated when the context preceding the function word and the overall sentential meaning were equated for both function and content usages

Prominence of leading functors in function morpheme sequences as evidenced by letter detection

Our previous work indicated that the increased difficulty in detecting letters in function in comparison with content morphemes derives from the role of functors in supporting phrase structure. Presumably, letters disappear in the transition from structure to content. Here the effect was most powerful for leading functors in a sequence of function morphemes (e.g., «that» in «that from the»). This pattern was found for Hebrew function prefixes that can be appended as a sequence to a content word (e.g., SMHGN, meaning «that from the garden»; Experiments 1 & 2) and also for sequences of Hebrew and English function words (Experiments 3 & 4)

The enhancement effect in letter detection: Further evidence for the structural model of reading.

According to the structural model of reading (A. Koriat & S. N. Greenberg, 1994), the extraction of structure leads the way to the analysis of meaning. Consistent with this model, previous letter-detection studies have documented an inordinately high rate of letter omissions in function morphemes, suggesting that the cognitive representation of function morphemes is diminished once they have been utilized to set phrase structure. The present study revealed a new and complementary enhancement effect: Letter detection in content morphemes that immediately followed functors was superior to that of content morphemes positioned elsewhere in the text. Together these effects suggest an on-line figure-ground representation of text in which structural elements recede as semantic elements are pushed to the foreground.