Simon P. Liversedge

Reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text: evidence from eye movements.

Native Chinese readers eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading.

Eye movements when reading transposed text: the importance of word beginning letters

Participants eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words with transposed letters compared to the normal baseline condition, and the greatest disruption was observed for word-initial transpositions. In Experiment 1, transpositions within low frequency words led to longer reading times than when letters were transposed within high frequency words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the position of word-initial letters is most critical even when parafoveal preview of words to the right of fixation is unavailable. The findings have important implications for the roles of different letter positions in word recognition and the effects of parafoveal preview on word recognition processes.

Encoding multiple words simultaneously in reading is implausible

Several prominent models of reading posit that attention is distributed to support the parallel lexical processing of multiple words. We contend that the auxiliary assumptions underlying this attention-gradient hypothesis are not well founded. Here, we address three specific issues related to the ongoing debate about attention allocation during reading: (i) why the attention-gradient hypothesis is widely endorsed, (ii) why processing several words in parallel in reading is implausible and (iii) why attention must be allocated to only one word at a time. Full consideration of these arguments supports the hypothesis that attention is allocated serially during reading.

Word length and landing position effects during reading in children and adults

The present study examined the effects of word length on childrens eye movement behaviour when other variables were carefully controlled. Importantly, the results showed that word length influenced childrens reading times and fixation positions on words. Furthermore, children exhibited stronger word length effects than adults in gaze durations and refixations. Adults and children generally did not differ in initial landing positions, but did differ in refixation behaviour. Overall, the results indicated that while adults and children show similar effects of word length for early measures of eye movement behaviour, differences emerge in later measures.

Eye movements and the use of parafoveal word length information in reading.

Eye movements were monitored in 4 experiments that explored the role of parafoveal word length in reading. The experiments employed a type of compound word where the deletion of a letter results in 2 short words (e.g., backhand, back and). The boundary technique (K. Rayner, 1975) was employed to manipulate word length information in the parafovea. Accuracy of the parafoveal word length preview significantly affected landing positions and fixation durations. This disruption was larger for 2-word targets, but the results demonstrated that this interaction was not due to the morphological status of the target words. Manipulation of sentence context also demonstrated that parafoveal word length information can be used in combination with sentence context to narrow down lexical candidates. The 4 experiments converge in demonstrating that an important role of parafoveal word length information is to direct the eyes to the center of the parafoveal word.

Eye movements of second language learners when reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text

The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text. Also, participants native languages were different in terms of their basic characteristics: English and Korean are spaced, whereas the other two are unspaced; Japanese is character based whereas the other three are alphabetic. Thus, we assessed whether any spacing effects were modulated by native language characteristics. Eye movement measures showed least disruption to reading for word-spaced text and longer reading times for unspaced than character-spaced text, with nonword-spaced text yielding the most disruption. These effects were uninfluenced by native language (though reading times differed between groups as a result of Chinese reading experience). Demarcation of word boundaries through spacing reduces non-native readers uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby speeding lexical identification, and in turn, reading. More generally, the results indicate that words have psychological reality for those who are learning to read Chinese as a second language, and that segmentation of text into words is more beneficial to successful comprehension than is separating individual Chinese characters with spaces.

Processing of compound-word characters in reading Chinese: An eye-movement-contingent display change study

Readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read Chinese two-constituent compound words in sentence contexts. The first compound-word constituent was either an infrequent character with a highly predictable second constituent or a frequent character with an unpredictable second constituent. The parafoveal preview of the second constituent was manipulated, with four preview conditions: identical to the correct form; a semantically related character to the second constituent; a semantically unrelated character to the second constituent; and a pseudocharacter. An invisible boundary was set between the two constituents; when the eyes moved across the boundary, the previewed character was changed to its intended form. The main findings were that preview effects occurred for the second constituent of the compound word. Providing an incorrect preview of the second constituent affected fixations on the first constituent, but only when the second constituent was predictable from the first. The frequency of the initial character of the compound constrained the identity of the second character, and this in turn modulated the extent to which the semantic characteristics of the preview influenced processing of the second constituent and the compound word as a whole. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of Chinese compound-word recognition and the constraint hypothesis of Hyönä, Bertram, and Pollatsek (2004). We conclude that word identification in Chinese is flexible, and parafoveal processing of upcoming characters is influenced both by the characteristics of the fixated character and by its relationship with the characters in the parafovea.

Inhibitory neighbor priming effects in eye movements during reading

We report an eye movement experiment investigating whether prior processing of a word’s orthographic neighbor in a sentence influences subsequent word processing during reading. There was greater difficulty in early word processing when a target word’s neighbor rather than a control word appeared earlier in a sentence; this effect was uninfluenced by the relative lexical frequency of the word and its neighbor. We discuss this inhibitory neighbor priming effect in terms of competitive network models of word recognition and the process of lexical identification in the E-Z Reader model of oculomotor control (e.g., Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998).

The influence of only and even on online semantic interpretation

Focus particles such as only and even indicate that the focused element(s) in a sentence should be contrasted with a set of contextually defined alternatives. Only indicates that properties assigned to the focus set are not shared by elements of the alternative set, whereas even indicates that the focus and alternative sets share the properties mentioned in the sentence. Even has the additional function of marking the focused element as being low on a scale of alternatives ranked in terms of likelihood, thereby signaling that what is being described is somewhat surprising. Using eyetracking, we demonstrate that contrast information associated with only and even is rapidly processed online, with effects for even being delayed, as compared with only (Experiment 1). This difference in time course was not driven by the underlying semantics of the sentence without the focus particle (Experiment 2) but was probably due to even’s more complex semantic function.

Binocular coordination during scanning of simple dot stimuli

We examined the influence of a variety of visual factors on binocular coordination during saccadic orienting. Some experimental conditions placed similar demands on the oculomotor system as those that occur during reading, but in the absence of linguistic processing. We examined whether saccade target extent, preceding saccade magnitude, preceding saccade direction, and parafoveal availability of saccade target influenced fixation disparity. Disparities similar in magnitude and frequency to those obtained in previous binocular reading experiments occurred. Saccade magnitude had a robust influence upon fixation disparities. The results are very similar to those obtained in investigations of binocular coordination during reading, and indicate that similar patterns occur during reading-like eye scanning behaviour, in the absence of linguistic processing.