Humans can read and comprehend text rapidly, implying that readers might process multiple words per fixation. However, the extent to which parafoveal words are previewed and integrated into the evolving sentence context remains disputed. We investigated parafoveal processing during natural reading by recording brain activity and eye movements using MEG and an eye tracker while participants silently read one-line sentences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe saccade 3 to 5 times per second when reading. However, little is known about the neuronal mechanisms coordinating the oculomotor and visual systems during such rapid processing. Here, we ask if brain oscillations play a role in the temporal coordination of the visuomotor integration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSentences can be enriched by considering what the speaker does not say but could have done, the alternative. We conducted two experiments to test whether the salience of the alternative contributes to how people derive implicatures. Participants responded true or false to underinformative categorical sentences that involved quantifiers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumans have a remarkable ability to efficiently explore visual scenes and text using eye movements. Humans typically make eye movements (saccades) every ~250 ms. Since saccade initiation and execution take 100 ms, this leaves only ~150 ms to recognize the fixated object (or word) while simultaneously previewing candidates for the next saccade goal.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn spite of the reduced visual acuity, parafoveal information plays an important role in natural reading. However, competing models on reading disagree on whether words are previewed parafoveally at the lexical level. We find neural evidence for lexical parafoveal processing by combining a rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) approach with magnetoencephalography (MEG) and eye-tracking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccording to the lexical quality hypothesis, differences in the orthographic, semantic, and phonological representations of words will affect individual reading performance. While several studies have focused on orthographic precision and semantic coherence, few have considered phonological precision. The present study used a suite of individual difference measures to assess which components of lexical quality contributed to competition resolution in a masked priming experiment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClassification within the sport of vision impairment (VI) shooting is based upon the athlete's visual function. This study aimed to determine whether more than one class of competition is needed within VI shooting on the basis of visual field loss. Qualification scores of 23 elite athletes were obtained at World Championship events in prone and standing shooting disciplines.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study assessed the prevalence of childhood stuttering in adults with dyslexia (AWD) and the prevalence of dyslexia in adults who stutter (AWS). In addition, the linguistic profiles of 50 AWD, 30 AWS and 84 neurotypical adults were measured. We found that 17 out of 50 AWD (34 %) reported stuttering during childhood compared to 1 % of the neurotypical population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe influential hypothesis by Markus & Kitayama (Markus, Kitayama 1991. , 224) postulates that individuals from interdependent cultures place others above self in interpersonal contexts. This led to the prediction and finding that individuals from interdependent cultures are less egocentric than those from independent cultures (Wu, Barr, Gann, Keysar 2013.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research has shown that early-acquired words are produced faster than late-acquired words. Juhasz and colleagues (Juhasz, Lai & Woodcock, Behavior Research Methods, 47 (4), 1004-1019, 2015; Juhasz, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-10, 2018) argue that the Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) loci for complex words, specifically compound words, are found at the lexical/semantic level. In the current study, two experiments were conducted to evaluate this claim and investigate the influence of AoA in reading compound words aloud.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe characterized cognitive function in two metabolic diseases. MPS-IVa (mucopolysaccharidosis IVa, Morquio) and tyrosinemia type III individuals were assessed using tasks of attention, language and oculomotor function. MPS-IVa individuals were slower in visual search, but the display size effects were normal, and slowing was not due to long reaction times (ruling out slow item processing or distraction).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNiemann-Pick type C (NP-C) is a rare recessive disorder associated with progressive supranuclear gaze palsy. Degeneration occurs initially for vertical saccades and later for horizontal saccades. There are studies of oculomotor degeneration in adult NP-C patients [1, 2] but no comparable studies in children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMetonymic words have multiple related meanings, such as college, as in the building ("John walked into the college") or the educational institution ("John was promoted by the college"). Most researchers have found support for direct access models of metonymy but one recent study, Lowder and Gordon (2013), found delayed reading times for metonymic sentences relative to literal controls, in support of an indirect access account. We conducted a speed-accuracy-tradeoff experiment to test whether their result was caused by lower retrieval probabilities, consistent with direct or indirect access models of metonymy, or slower retrieval dynamics, consistent only with indirect access accounts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBasic competence in theory of mind is acquired during early childhood. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that the ability to take others' perspectives in communication improves continuously from middle childhood to the late teenage years. This indicates that theory of mind performance undergoes protracted developmental changes after the acquisition of basic competence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious studies have documented both neuroplasticity-related BDNF Val(66)Met and emotion regulation-related 5-HTTLPR polymorphisms as genetic variants that contribute to the processing of emotions from faces. More specifically, research has shown the BDNF Met allele and the 5-HTTLPR Short allele to be associated with mechanisms of negative affectivity that relate to susceptibility for psychopathology. We examined visual scanning pathways in response to angry, happy, and neutral faces in relation to BDNF Val(66)Met and 5-HTTLPR genotyping in 49 children aged 4-7 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFQ J Exp Psychol (Hove)
April 2015
We investigated how orthographic and phonological information is activated during reading, using a fast priming task, and during single-word recognition, using masked priming. Specifically, different types of overlap between prime and target were contrasted: high orthographic and high phonological overlap (track-crack), high orthographic and low phonological overlap (bear-gear), or low orthographic and high phonological overlap (fruit-chute). In addition, we examined whether (orthographic) beginning overlap (swoop-swoon) yielded the same priming pattern as end (rhyme) overlap (track-crack).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn an eyetracking study, we examined whether readers use psychological essentialist reasoning and perspective taking online. Stories were presented in which an animal or an artifact was transformed into another animal (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychon Bull Rev
December 2011
When readers need to go beyond the straightforward compositional meaning of a sentence (i.e., when enriched composition is required), costly additional processing is the norm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe interpretation generated from a sentence of the form P and Q can often be different to that generated by Q and P, despite the fact that and has a symmetric truth-conditional meaning. We experimentally investigated to what extent this difference in meaning is due to the connective and and to what extent it is due to order of mention of the events in the sentence. In three experiments, we collected interpretations of sentences in which we varied the presence of the conjunction, the order of mention of the events, and the type of relation holding between the events (temporally vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
January 2008
An eye-movement study examined the processing of expressions requiring complement coercion (J. Pustejovsky, 1995), in which a noun phrase that does not denote an event (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough natural language appears to be largely compositional, the meanings of certain expressions cannot be straightforwardly recovered from the meanings of their parts. This study examined the online processing of one such class of expressions: concealed questions, in which the meaning of a complex noun phrase (the proof of the theorem) shifts to a covert question (what the proof of the theorem is) when mandated by a sub-class of question-selecting verbs (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExperiment 1 examined whether the semantic transparency of an English unspaced compound word affected how long it took to process it in reading. Three types of opaque words were each compared with a matched set of transparent words (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComprehenders often need to go beyond conventional word senses to obtain an appropriate interpretation of an expression. We report an experiment examining the processing of standard metonymies (The gentleman read Dickens) and logical metonymies (The gentleman began Dickens), contrasting both to the processing of control expressions with a conventional interpretation (The gentleman met Dickens). Eye movement measures during reading indicated that standard (producer-for-product) metonymies were not more costly to interpret than conventional expressions, but logical metonymies were more costly to interpret than both standard metonymies and conventional expressions.
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