An eye-tracking study of reading long and short novel and lexicalized compound words.

An eye-tracking experiment examined the recognition of novel and lexicalized compound words during sentence reading. The frequency of the head noun in modifier-head compound words was manipulated to tap into the degree of compositional processing. This was done separately for long (12-16 letter) and short (7-9 letters) compound words.

An integrated model of word processing and eye-movement control during Chinese reading.

In the Chinese writing system, there are no interword spaces to mark word boundaries. To understand how Chinese readers conquer this challenge, we constructed an integrated model of word processing and eye-movement control during Chinese reading (CRM). The model contains a word-processing module and an eye-movement control module.

The processing of Chinese compound words with ambiguous morphemes in sentence context.

We employed a boundary paradigm to investigate how Chinese two-character compounds (i.e., compound words) are processed during reading.

Chinese readers can perceive a word even when it's composed of noncontiguous characters.

This study explored whether readers could recognize a word composed of noncontiguous characters (a ) in Chinese reading. All 3 experiments employed Chinese 4-character strings ABCD, where both AB and CD were 2-character words. In the cross-character word condition, AC was a word but in the control condition, AC was not a word.

Examining Eye Movements in Visual Search through Clusters of Objects in a Circular Array.

Participants were asked to search for a complete in an array consisting of eight clusters of four Landolt s (i.e., s with a gap) arranged in a ring.

A simulator evaluation of the effects of attention maintenance training on glance distributions of younger novice drivers inside and outside the vehicle.

Driver distraction inside and outside the vehicle is increasingly a problem, especially for younger drivers. In many cases the distraction is associated with long glances away from the forward roadway. Such glances have been shown to be highly predictive of crashes.

Word properties of a fixated region affect outgoing saccade length in Chinese reading.

In two experiments, we investigated how forward saccades are targeted in Chinese reading. In Experiment 1, the critical region was a 4-character string which was either a word (one-word condition) or two 2-character word phrases (two-word condition). In Experiment 2, the critical region was either a high frequency word or a low frequency word.

Comparing the Glance Patterns of Older versus Younger Experienced Drivers: Scanning for Hazards while Approaching and Entering the Intersection.

Older drivers are known to look less often for hazards when turning at T-intersections or at four way intersections. The present study is an extension of Romoser & Fisher (2009) and attempts to further analyze the differences in scanning behavior between older and experienced younger drivers in intersections. We evaluated four hypotheses that attempt to explain the older drivers' failure to properly scan in intersections: difficulty with head movements, decreases in working memory capacity, increased distractibility, and failure to recall specific scanning patterns.

TRANSPOSED LETTER EFFECTS IN PREFIXED WORDS: IMPLICATIONS FOR MORPHOLOGICAL DECOMPOSITION.

A crucial issue in word encoding is whether morphemes are involved in early stages. One paradigm that tests for this employs the transposed letter (TL) effect - the difference in the times to process a word (misfile) when it is preceded by a TL prime (mifsile) and when it is preceded by a substitute letter (SL) prime (mintile) - and examines whether the TL effect is smaller when the two adjacent letters cross a morpheme boundary. The evidence from prior studies is not consistent.

Identifying and Remediating Failures of Selective Attention in Older Drivers.

Older drivers are primarily overinvolved in crashes at intersections, and failure to attend to regions that contain relevant information about potential hazards is a major contributor to this problem. Corroborating this, we have found that older drivers in both controlled scenarios on a driving simulator and somewhat less controlled situations on the road attend to (i.e.

Eye movements in reading versus nonreading tasks: Using E-Z Reader to understand the role of word/stimulus familiarity.

In this article, we extend our previous work (Reichle, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2012) using the principles of the E-Z Reader model to examine the factors that determine when and where the eyes move in both reading and non-reading tasks, and in particular the role that word/stimulus familiarity plays in determining when the eyes move from one word/stimulus to the next. In doing this, we first provide a brief overview of E-Z Reader, including its assumption that word familiarity is the "engine" driving eye movements during reading. We then review the theoretical considerations that motivated this assumption, as well as recent empirical evidence supporting its validity.

Dividing lines at the word boundary position helps reading in Chinese.

Unlike in English, the Chinese printing and writing systems usually do not respect a word boundary when they split lines; thus, characters belonging to a word can be on two different lines. In this study, we examined whether dividing a word across two lines interferes with Chinese reading and found that reading times were shorter when characters belonging to a word were on a single line rather than on adjacent lines. Eye movement data indicated that gaze durations in a region around the word boundary were longer and fixations were closer to the beginnings and ends of the lines when words were split across lines.

Processing Novel and Lexicalized Finnish Compound Words.

Participants read sentences in which novel and lexicalized two-constituent compound words appeared while their eye movements were measured. The frequency of the first constituent of the compounds was also varied factorially and the frequency of the lexicalized compounds was equated over the two conditions. The sentence frames prior to the target word were matched across conditions.

Using E-Z Reader to simulate eye movements in nonreading tasks: a unified framework for understanding the eye-mind link.

Nonreading tasks that share some (but not all) of the task demands of reading have often been used to make inferences about how cognition influences when the eyes move during reading. In this article, we use variants of the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading to simulate eye-movement behavior in several of these tasks, including z-string reading, target-word search, and visual search of Landolt Cs arranged in both linear and circular arrays. These simulations demonstrate that a single computational framework is sufficient to simulate eye movements in both reading and nonreading tasks but also suggest that there are task-specific differences in both saccadic targeting (i.

The influence of word shading and word length on eye movements during reading.

An interesting issue in reading is how parafoveal information affects saccadic targeting and fixation durations. We investigated the influence of shading selected regions of text on eye movements during reading of long and short words within sentences. A target word, either four- or eight-letters long, was presented in one of four shading conditions: the whole target word shaded; the first half shaded; second half shaded; no shading.

Word knowledge influences character perception.

In two experiments, we examined whether context information can affect the activity of the nodes at the character level. Chinese readers viewed two Chinese characters; one was intact, but the other (the target) was embedded in a rectangle of visual noise and increased in visibility over time. The two characters constituted a word in one condition but did not in the other condition.

Long Term Effects of Hazard Anticipation Training on Novice Drivers Measured on the Open Road.

(a) The purpose of this study was to determine whether novice drivers that were trained to anticipate hazards did so better than novice drivers who were not so trained immediately after training and up to one year after training occurred. (b) Novice drivers who had held their restricted license for about one month were randomly assigned to a PC-based hazard anticipation training program (RAPT) or a placebo (control) training program. The programs took about one hour to complete.

TEXTING WHILE DRIVING: EVALUATION OF GLANCE DISTRIBUTIONS FOR FREQUENT/INFREQUENT TEXTERS AND KEYPAD/TOUCHPAD TEXTERS.

The threat that cell-phones pose to driving has been a well researched topic. There are fewer studies of the threat that texting creates for drivers, but the risks are obvious and the few existing studies confirm this. What is not obvious is whether frequent texters will expose themselves to the same risks as infrequent texters.

Do Crashes and Near Crashes in Simulator-Based Training Enhance Novice Drivers' Visual Search for Latent Hazards?

Young drivers (younger than 25 years of age) are overrepresented in crashes. Research suggests that a relevant cause is inadequate visual search for possible hazards that are hidden from view. The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a low-cost, fixed-base simulator training program that would address this failure.

Extrapolating spatial layout in scene representations.

Can the visual system extrapolate spatial layout of a scene to new viewpoints after a single view? In the present study, we examined this question by investigating the priming of spatial layout across depth rotations of the same scene (Sanocki & Epstein, 1997). Participants had to indicate which of two dots superimposed on objects in the target scene appeared closer to them in space. There was as much priming from a prime with a viewpoint that was 10° different from the test image as from a prime that was identical to the target; however, there was no reliable priming from larger differences in viewpoint.

Are Driving Simulators Effective Tools for Evaluating Novice Drivers' Hazard Anticipation, Speed Management, and Attention Maintenance Skills.

Novice drivers (teen drivers with their solo license for six months or less) are at a greatly inflated risk of crashing. Post hoc analyses of police accident reports indicate that novice drivers fail to anticipate hazards, manage their speed, and maintain attention. These skills are much too broadly defined to be of much help in training.

Parafoveal processing during reading is reduced across a morphological boundary.

A boundary change manipulation was implemented within a monomorphemic word (e.g., fountaom as a preview for fountain), where parallel processing should occur given adequate visual acuity, and within an unspaced compound (bathroan as a preview for bathroom), where some serial processing of the constituents is likely.

Directional processing within the perceptual span during visual target localization.

In order to understand how processing occurs within the effective field of vision (i.e. perceptual span) during visual target localization, a gaze-contingent moving mask procedure was used to disrupt parafoveal information pickup along the vertical and the horizontal visual fields.

The interpretation of ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence context.

Many trimorphemic words are structurally and semantically ambiguous. For example, unlockable can either be un-lockable (cannot be locked) or unlock-able (can be unlocked). Which interpretation is preferred and whether the preceding sentence context affects the initial interpretation is not clear from prior research.