EXPRESS: Global measures of syntactic and lexical complexity are not strong predictors of eye movement patterns in sentence and passage reading.

The link between the cognitive effort of word processing and the eye movement patterns elicited by that word is well established in psycholinguistic research using eye tracking. Yet less evidence or consensus exists regarding whether the same link exists between complexity linguistic complexity measures of a sentence or passage, and eye movements registered at the sentence or passage level. This paper focuses on "global" measures of syntactic and lexical complexity, i.

Dose conformity and falloff in single-lesion intracranial SRS with DCA and VMAT methods.

Background: Intracranial stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) aims at achieving highly conformal dose distribution and, at the same time, attaining rapid dose falloff outside the treatment target. SRS is performed using different techniques including dynamic conformal arcs (DCA) and volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT).

Purpose: In this study, we compare dose conformity and falloff in DCA and VMAT plans for SRS with a single target.

Individual differences in word skipping during reading in English as L2.

The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO; Siegelman et al., 2022) contains data from unbalanced bilinguals reading in their first language (L1) for a variety of languages and in English as their second language (L2). We analyzed word skipping in L2 on the basis of five predictors consisting of the frequency and length of the word in L2 and three measures of individual differences.

A psycholinguistic study of intergroup bias and its cultural propagation.

Intergroup bias is the tendency for people to inflate positive regard for their in-group and derogate the out-group. Across two online experiments (N = 922) this study revisits the methodological premises of research on language as a window into intergroup bias. Experiment 1 examined (i) whether the valence (positivity) of language production differs when communicating about an in- vs.

Reading proficiency predicts spatial eye-movement control in the first and second language.

Research on first language (L1) reading has long since established the link between the proficiency of the reader and their efficiency in oculomotor control. More proficient readers make longer saccades and land closer to the word's center, which is a word's optimal viewing position, and make fewer refixations. Eye-tracking studies of second language (L2) reading have so far provided little evidence in this regard.

Toward an improved assessment of dose conformity in radiotherapy.

Background: Evaluation of dose conformity is important to ensure minimum dose to normal tissue and sufficient dose coverage of the planning target volume (PTV). The existing conformity indices depend on the PTV volume and do not differentiate between two different scenarios: overdosing normal tissue and underdosing PTV.

Purpose: In this study, we introduce a novel index to assess conformity of dose distributions in radiotherapy.

Cross-linguistic comparison in reading sentences of uniform length: Visual-perceptual demands override readers' experience.

Accurate saccadic targeting is critical for efficient reading and is driven by the sensory input under the eye-gaze. Yet whether a reader's experience with the distributional properties of their written language also influences saccadic targeting is an open debate. This study of Russian sentence reading follows Cutter et al.

Emotional State of Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Insights from the Cognitive and Social Well-Being (CoSoWELL) Corpus.

Objectives: In view of the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychologists face a challenge to document the pandemic-related change in emotional well-being of individuals and groups and evaluate the emotional response to this fallout over time.

Methodsp: We contribute to this goal by analyzing the new CoSoWELL corpus (version 2.0), an 1.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Moral Injury Among Ukrainian Civilians During the Ongoing War.

While severity of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and moral injury among civilians affected by armed conflicts is generally understudied, even less research exists on civilian populations during an active war. This paper reports a large-scale study that administered standard assessments of PTSD and moral injury severity, as well as rich demographic questionnaires, to nearly 1300 Ukrainian civilians during the ongoing Russian invasion. Analyses revealed an extremely high prevalence of severe PTSD symptoms and moral injury, relative to both proposed clinical cut-offs and to earlier measurements from a similar population.

Increase in Linguistic Complexity in Older Adults During COVID-19.

The reported psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures included a decline in cognitive functioning in older adults. Cognitive functioning is known to correlate with the lexical and syntactic complexity of an individual's linguistic productions. We examined written narratives from the CoSoWELL corpus (v 1.

Novel approach for the evaluation of dose conformity in radiotherapy.

Purpose: We describe a new approach to evaluate conformity of dose distributions in radiotherapy.

Methods: The suggested conformity factor λ is defined by using existing conformity indices and expansion of the planning target volume (PTV). If the average distance ( ) between the PTV and reference isodose surface and an arbitrarily selected PTV expansion margin ( ) are both much smaller than the size of the PTV, then λ approximately equals the ratio .

A cross-linguistic study of spatial parameters of eye-movement control during reading.

Current theories of oculomotor control in reading differ in their accounts of saccadic targeting. Some argue that targets for saccades are solely selected on the basis of the rapidly changing sensory input, whereas others additionally allow for the reader's experiential biases to modulate saccade lengths. We investigated this debate using cross-linguistic data on text reading in 12 alphabetic languages from the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO) database.

Personhood and aging: Exploring the written narratives of older adults as articulations of personhood in later life.

Personhood is a complex concept in gerontological research. It is often used to explore the maintenance or reconstruction of self-identity. Narrative analysis has commonly explored how the stories that older individuals living with cognitive impairment(s) produce preserve the personhood that is perceived to be threatened by cognitive decline.

Cognitive and social well-being in older adulthood: The CoSoWELL corpus of written life stories.

This paper presents the Cognitive and Social WELL-being (CoSoWELL) project that consists of two components. One is a large corpus of narratives written by over 1000 North American older adults (55+ years old) in five test sessions before and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other component is a rich collection of socio-demographic data collected through a survey from the same participants.

How representative are student convenience samples? A study of literacy and numeracy skills in 32 countries.

Psychological research, including research into adult reading, is frequently based on convenience samples of undergraduate students. This practice raises concerns about the external validity of many accepted findings. The present study seeks to determine how strong this student sampling bias is in literacy and numeracy research.

Combined effect of heterogeneous target dose and heterogeneous radiosensitivity on tumor control probability for different fractionation regimens.

Purpose: To evaluate the combined effect of heterogeneous target dose and heterogeneous radiosensitivity on tumor control probability (TCP) for different number of fractions (N).

Methods: The linear-quadratic (LQ) model is employed to study dependence of TCP on N under the condition of fixed nominal biologically effective dose (BED).

Results: Formula for the optimum target dose which maximizes TCP under the condition BED=const is analytically derived.

Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO).

Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading behavior that are shared and those that vary systematically across languages through an investigation of eye-tracking data from 13 languages recorded during text reading.

Valence norms for 3,600 English words collected during the COVID-19 pandemic: Effects of age and the pandemic.

The topic of affective development over the lifespan is at the forefront of psychological science. One of the intriguing findings in this area is superior emotion regulation and increased positivity in older rather than younger adults. This paper aims to contribute to the empirical base of studies on the role of affect in cognition.

Effects of Spacing on Sentence Reading in Chinese.

Given that Chinese writing conventions lack inter-word spacing, understanding whether and how readers of Chinese segment regular unspaced Chinese writing into words is an important question for theories of reading. This study examined the processing outcomes of introducing spaces to written Chinese sentences in varying positions based on native speaker consensus. The measure of consensus for every character transition in our stimuli sentences was the percent of raters who placed a word boundary in that position.

The Effect of Loneliness on Cognitive Functioning Among Healthy Individuals in Mid- and Late-Adulthood: Evidence From the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA).

There is a consensus that loneliness correlates with an increased risk of cognitive impairment and rapid cognitive decline. However, it has yet to be determined how loneliness influences cognitively healthy aging. This study makes use of the large, nationally representative Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging (CLSA) to address this question.

A lingering question addressed: Reading rate and most efficient listening rate are highly similar.

Is it possible that silent reading rate is the same as the most efficient listening rate? The hypothesis has been formulated in the past, but never got much traction because silent reading is almost twice as fast as typical speech. On the other hand, several studies have shown that listening comprehension retains high quality for spoken materials presented at speeds up to 275 words per minute (wpm), and a recent meta-analysis has also shown that reading rate is lower than often thought: 240-260 wpm on average. To address the question above, we ran a new study specifically comparing spontaneous silent reading rate with comprehension of speech presented at different rates within the same participants and using matched texts.

Prevalence of spelling errors affects reading behavior across languages.

This cross-linguistic study investigated the impact of spelling errors on reading behavior in five languages (Chinese, English, Finnish, Greek, and Hebrew). Learning theories predict that correct and incorrect spelling alternatives (e.g.

Affect across adulthood: Evidence from English, Dutch, and Spanish.

Emotions play a fundamental role in language learning, use, and processing. Words denoting positivity account for a larger part of the lexicon than words denoting negativity, and they also tend to be used more frequently, a phenomenon known as positivity bias. However, language experience changes over an individual's lifetime, making the examination of the emotion-laden lexicon an important topic not only across the life span but also across languages.