The lab discovered: Place-for-institution metonyms appearing in subject position are processed as agents.

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syntactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.

Emotionality effects in Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from lab-based and web-based lexical decision tasks.

Previous studies have shown that processes of word recognition are influenced by the emotional content of a word. This pattern is most readily explained by the motivated attention and affective states model (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1997), which states that emotional stimuli are motivationally significant and capture attention. Drawing on this theoretical account, the current study compared lexical decision response times to positive and negative emotion words versus neutral words across two experimental environments - a traditional lab-based environment and a web-based environment.

Effects of syntactic structure on the processing of lexical repetition during sentence reading.

Previous research has demonstrated that the ease or difficulty of processing complex semantic expressions depends on sentence structure: Processing difficulty emerges when the constituents that create the complex meaning appear in the same clause, whereas difficulty is reduced when the constituents appear in separate clauses. The goal of the current eye-tracking-while-reading experiments was to determine how changes to sentence structure affect the processing of lexical repetition, as this manipulation enabled us to isolate processes involved in word recognition (repetition priming) from those involved in sentence interpretation (felicity of the repetition). When repetition of the target word was felicitous (Experiment 1), we observed robust effects of repetition priming with some evidence that these effects were weaker when repetition occurred within a clause versus across a clause boundary.

Relative Clause Effects at the Matrix Verb Depend on Type of Intervening Material.

Although a large literature demonstrates that object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well as how best to explain these effects. An eye-tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017) demonstrated that readers experience more processing difficulty at the matrix verb for ORCs than for SRCs when the matrix verb immediately follows the relative clause (RC), but the difficulty is eliminated if a prepositional phrase (PP) intervenes. A careful examination of Staub et al.

Effects of Print Exposure on an Online Lexical Decision Task: A Direct Replication Using a Web-Based Experimental Procedure.

Due to the global pandemic, behavioral sciences including psychology that have traditionally relied on face-to-face data collection methods are facing a crisis. Given these circumstances, the present study was designed as a web-based replication of the findings reported in Lee et al. (2019) on the relationship between print exposure measured by the Korean Author Recognition Test (KART) and online measures of word processing using the lexical decision task and offline measures of language ability.

Processing of Self-Repairs in Stuttered and Non-Stuttered Speech.

Previous research suggests that listeners can use the presence of speech disfluencies to predict upcoming linguistic input. But how is the processing of typical disfluencies affected when the speaker also produces atypical disfluencies, as in the case of stuttering? We addressed this question in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants heard self-repair disfluencies while viewing displays that contained a predictable target entity. Half the participants heard the sentences spoken by a speaker who stuttered, and half heard the sentences spoken by the same speaker who produced the sentences without stuttering.

Effects of contrastive focus on lexical predictability during sentence reading: The case of constructions.

Previous research suggests that language comprehenders are sensitive to the presence of focus-sensitive particles-words like and that are effective at marking the focus of the sentence. In addition to signalling linguistic focus, these words can also establish a semantic contrast between the focused element and an alternate set. For example, the phrase places linguistic focus on and may also prompt comprehenders to anticipate a set of upcoming entities that stand in semantic contrast to .

Individual differences in reading: Separable effects of reading experience and processing skill.

A large-scale eye-tracking study examined individual variability in measures of word recognition during reading among 546 college students, focusing on two established individual-differences measures: the Author Recognition Test (ART) and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN). ART and RAN were only slightly correlated, suggesting that the two tasks reflect independent cognitive abilities in this large sample of participants. Further, individual variability in ART and RAN scores were related to distinct facets of word-recognition processes.

I see what you meant to say: Anticipating speech errors during online sentence processing.

Everyday speech is rife with errors and disfluencies, yet processing what we hear usually feels effortless. How does the language comprehension system accomplish such an impressive feat? The current experiment tests the hypothesis that listeners draw on relevant contextual and linguistic cues to anticipate speech errors and mentally correct them, even before receiving an explicit correction from the speaker. In the current visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we monitored participants' eye movements to objects in a display while they listened to utterances containing reparandum-repair speech errors (e.

Development and assessment of the Korean Author Recognition Test.

This research reports the development and evaluation of a Korean Author Recognition Test (KART), designed as a measure of print exposure among young adults. Based on the original, English-language version of the Author Recognition Test (ART), the KART demonstrates significant relationships with offline measures of language ability, as well as online measures of word recognition. In particular, KART scores were related to participants' responses on the Comparative Reading Habits (CRH) checklist, suggesting that KART is a valid measure of print exposure.

Lexical Predictability During Natural Reading: Effects of Surprisal and Entropy Reduction.

What are the effects of word-by-word predictability on sentence processing times during the natural reading of a text? Although information complexity metrics such as surprisal and entropy reduction have been useful in addressing this question, these metrics tend to be estimated using computational language models, which require some degree of commitment to a particular theory of language processing. Taking a different approach, this study implemented a large-scale cumulative cloze task to collect word-by-word predictability data for 40 passages and compute surprisal and entropy reduction values in a theory-neutral manner. A separate group of participants read the same texts while their eye movements were recorded.

Effects of word predictability and preview lexicality on eye movements during reading: A comparison between young and older adults.

Previous eye-tracking research has characterized older adults' reading patterns as "risky," arguing that compared to young adults, older adults skip more words, have longer saccades, and are more likely to regress to previous portions of the text. In the present eye-tracking study, we reexamined the claim that older adults adopt a risky reading strategy, utilizing the boundary paradigm to manipulate parafoveal preview and contextual predictability of a target word. Results showed that older adults had longer fixation durations compared to young adults; however, there were no age differences in skipping rates, saccade length, or proportion of regressions.

Print exposure modulates the effects of repetition priming during sentence reading.

Individual readers vary greatly in the quality of their lexical representations, and consequently in how quickly and efficiently they can access orthographic and lexical knowledge. This variability may be explained, at least in part, by individual differences in exposure to printed language, because practice at reading promotes the development of stronger reading skills. In the present eyetracking experiment, we tested the hypothesis that the efficiency of word recognition during reading improves with increases in print exposure, by determining whether the magnitude of the repetition-priming effect is modulated by individual differences in scores on the author recognition test (ART).

Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading.

How is syntactic analysis implemented by the human brain during language comprehension? The current study combined methods from computational linguistics, eyetracking, and fMRI to address this question. Subjects read passages of text presented as paragraphs while their eye movements were recorded in an MRI scanner. We parsed the text using a probabilistic context-free grammar to isolate syntactic difficulty.

Prediction in the Processing of Repair Disfluencies.

Imagine a speaker who says "…" Before hearing the repair, the listener is likely to anticipate the word "" based on the context, including the reparandum "." Thus, even though the reparandum is not intended as part of the utterance, the listener uses it as information to predict the repair. The issue we explore in this article is how prediction operates in disfluency contexts.

Prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm.

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies (e.g., "The chef reached for some salt uh I mean some ketchup .

Eye-Tracking and Corpus-Based Analyses of Syntax-Semantics Interactions in Complement Coercion.

Previous work has shown that the difficulty associated with processing complex semantic expressions is reduced when the critical constituents appear in separate clauses as opposed to when they appear together in the same clause. We investigated this effect further, focusing in particular on complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb (e.g.

Individual differences in the perceptual span during reading: evidence from the moving window technique.

We report the results of an eye tracking experiment that used the gaze-contingent moving window technique to examine individual differences in the size of readers' perceptual span. Participants read paragraphs while the size of the rightward window of visible text was systematically manipulated across trials. In addition, participants completed a large battery of individual-difference measures representing two cognitive constructs: language ability and oculomotor processing speed.

Focus takes time: structural effects on reading.

Previous eye-tracking work has yielded inconsistent evidence regarding whether readers spend more or less time encoding focused information compared with information that is not focused. We report the results of an eye-tracking experiment that used syntactic structure to manipulate whether a target word was linguistically defocused, neutral, or focused, while controlling for possible oculomotor differences across conditions. As the structure of the sentence made the target word increasingly more focused, reading times systematically increased.

Natural forces as agents: reconceptualizing the animate-inanimate distinction.

Research spanning multiple domains of psychology has demonstrated preferential processing of animate as compared to inanimate entities--a pattern that is commonly explained as due to evolutionarily adaptive behavior. Forces of nature represent a class of entities that are semantically inanimate but which behave as if they are animate in that they possess the ability to initiate movement and cause actions. We report an eye-tracking experiment demonstrating that natural forces are processed like animate entities during online sentence processing: they are easier to integrate with action verbs than instruments, and this effect is mediated by sentence structure.

The manuscript that we finished: structural separation reduces the cost of complement coercion.

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., began the memo).

Effects of animacy and noun-phrase relatedness on the processing of complex sentences.

Previous work has suggested that syntactically complex object-extracted relative clauses are easier to process when the head noun phrase (NP1) is inanimate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is animate, as compared with the reverse animacy configuration, with differences in processing difficulty beginning as early as NP2 (e.g., The article that the senator .

It's hard to offend the college: effects of sentence structure on figurative-language processing.

Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar place-for-institution metonyms (e.

Word recognition during reading: the interaction between lexical repetition and frequency.

Memory studies utilizing long-term repetition priming have generally demonstrated that priming is greater for low-frequency than for high-frequency words and that this effect persists if words intervene between the prime and the target. In contrast, word-recognition studies utilizing masked short-term repetition priming have typically shown that the magnitude of repetition priming does not differ as a function of word frequency and does not persist across intervening words. We conducted an eyetracking-while-reading experiment to determine which of these patterns more closely resembles the relationship between frequency and repetition during the natural reading of a text.

The sentence-composition effect: processing of complex sentences depends on the configuration of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases.

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was reduced when the head NP was unusual relative to the embedded NP, as manipulated by lexical frequency. When both NPs were common or both were unusual, results showed strong effects of both commonness and sentence structure, but no interaction.