Parafoveal processing in reading Schotter, Elizabeth R.; Angele, Bernhard; Rayner, Keith
Attention, perception & psychophysics,
2012/1, Letnik:
74, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The present review summarizes research investigating how words are identified parafoveally (and foveally) in reading. Parafoveal and foveal processing are compared when no other concurrent task is ...required (e.g., in single-word recognition tasks) and when both are required simultaneously (e.g., during reading). We first review methodologies used to study parafoveal processing (e.g., corpus analyses and experimental manipulations, including gaze-contingent display change experiments such as the boundary, moving window, moving mask, and fast priming paradigms). We then turn to a discussion of the levels of representation at which words are processed (e.g., orthographic, phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic). Next, we review relevant research regarding parafoveal processing, summarizing the extent to which words are processed at each of those levels of representation. We then review some of the most controversial aspects of parafoveal processing, as they relate to reading: (1) word skipping, (2) parafoveal-on-foveal effects, and (3)
n
+ 1 and
n
+ 2 preview benefit effects. Finally, we summarize two of the most advanced models of eye movements during reading and how they address foveal and parafoveal processing.
•English readers read sentences in the boundary paradigm to assess preview benefit (PB).•PB observed for synonyms (rollers-curlers) but not related words (styling-curlers).•Reading time related to ...how much sentence changed meaning with target vs. preview.•Semantic PB possible in English but words must be similar in meaning.•Non-synonyms provide PB in German and Chinese due to their orthographic properties.
While orthographic and phonological preview benefits in reading are uncontroversial (see Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012 for a review), researchers have debated the existence of semantic preview benefit with positive evidence in Chinese and German, but no support in English. Two experiments, using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), show that semantic preview benefit can be observed in English when the preview and target are synonyms (share the same or highly similar meaning, e.g., curlers-rollers). However, no semantic preview benefit was observed for semantic associates (e.g., curlers-styling). These different preview conditions represent different degrees to which the meaning of the sentence changes when the preview is replaced by the target. When this continuous variable (determined by a norming procedure) was used as the predictor in the analyses, there was a significant relationship between it and all reading time measures, suggesting that similarity in meaning between what is accessed parafoveally and what is processed foveally may be an important influence on the presence of semantic preview benefit. Why synonyms provide semantic preview benefit in reading English is discussed in relation to (1) previous failures to find semantic preview benefit in English and (2) the fact that semantic preview benefit is observed in other languages even for non-synonymous words. Semantic preview benefit is argued to depend on several factors—attentional resources, depth of orthography, and degree of similarity between preview and target.
Recent Web apps have spurred excitement around the prospect of achieving speed reading by eliminating eye movements (i.e., with rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP, in which words are presented ...briefly one at a time and sequentially). Our experiment using a novel trailing-mask paradigm contradicts these claims. Subjects read normally or while the display of text was manipulated such that each word was masked once the reader's eyes moved past it. This manipulation created a scenario similar to RSVP: The reader could read each word only once; regressions (i.e., rereadings of words), which are a natural part of the reading process, were functionally eliminated. Crucially, the inability to regress affected comprehension negatively. Furthermore, this effect was not confined to ambiguous sentences. These data suggest that regressions contribute to the ability to understand what one has read and call into question the viability of speed-reading apps that eliminate eye movements (e.g., those that use RSVP).
•Subjects read sentences in different moving parafoveal mask conditions.•We compare a correlational and an experimental approach to analyzing the data.•We replicate previous studies that found ...successor frequency effects.•Successor frequency effects are present even when parafoveal information is denied.•Successor frequency effects may be caused by factors unrelated to parafoveal processing.
In the past, most research on eye movements during reading involved a limited number of subjects reading sentences with specific experimental manipulations on target words. Such experiments usually only analyzed eye-movements measures on and around the target word. Recently, some researchers have started collecting larger data sets involving large and diverse groups of subjects reading large numbers of sentences, enabling them to consider a larger number of influences and study larger and more representative subject groups. In such corpus studies, most of the words in a sentence are analyzed. The complexity of the design of corpus studies and the many potentially uncontrolled influences in such studies pose new issues concerning the analysis methods and interpretability of the data. In particular, several corpus studies of reading have found an effect of successor word (n+1) frequency on current word (n) fixation times, while studies employing experimental manipulations tend not to. The general interpretation of corpus studies suggests that readers obtain parafoveal lexical information from the upcoming word before they have finished identifying the current word, while the experimental manipulations shed doubt on this claim. In the present study, we combined a corpus analysis approach with an experimental manipulation (i.e., a parafoveal modification of the moving mask technique, Rayner & Bertera, 1979), so that, either (a) word n+1, (b) word n+2, (c) both words, or (d) neither word was masked. We found that denying preview for either or both parafoveal words increased average fixation times. Furthermore, we found successor effects similar to those reported in the corpus studies. Importantly, these successor effects were found even when the parafoveal word was masked, suggesting that apparent successor frequency effects may be due to causes that are unrelated to lexical parafoveal preprocessing. We discuss the implications of this finding both for parallel and serial accounts of word identification and for the interpretability of large correlational studies of word identification in reading in general.
Planned vs. Actual Attention Avoyan, Ala; Ribeiro, Mauricio; Schotter, Andrew ...
Management science,
05/2024, Letnik:
70, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
People often need to plan how to allocate their attention across different tasks. In this paper, we run two experiments to study a stylized version of this attention-allocation problem between ...strategic tasks. More specifically, we present subjects with pairs of 2 × 2 games, and for each pair, we give them 10 seconds to decide how they would split a fixed time budget between the two games. Then, subjects play both games without time constraints, and we use eye-tracking to estimate the fraction of time they spend on each game. We find that subjects’ planned and actual attention allocation differ and identify the determinants of this mismatch. Further, we argue that misallocations can be relevant in games in which a player’s strategy choice is sensitive to the time taken to reach a decision.
This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.
Funding:
Work on this project was provided by the National Science Foundation Grant SES 1724550 “Collaborative Research: Attention in Games and Decisions,” awarded to A. Schotter and E. R. Schotter. The work of M. Ribeiro and M. Zou was supported by the Center for Experimental Economics Social Science at New York University.
Supplemental Material:
The online appendix and data are available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4834
.
Theories of preview benefit in reading hinge on integration across saccades and the idea that preview benefit is greater the more similar the preview and target are. Schotter (2013) reported preview ...benefit from a synonymous preview, but it is unclear whether this effect occurs because of similarity between the preview and target (i.e., integration), or because of contextual fit of the preview-synonyms satisfy both accounts. Studies in Chinese have found evidence for preview benefit for words that are unrelated to the target, but are contextually plausible (Yang, Li, Wang, Slattery, & Rayner, 2014; Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012), which is incompatible with an integration account but supports a contextual fit account. Here, we used plausible and implausible unrelated previews in addition to plausible synonym, antonym, and identical previews to further investigate these accounts for readers of English. Early reading measures were shorter for all plausible preview conditions compared to the implausible preview condition. In later reading measures, a benefit for the plausible unrelated preview condition was not observed. In a second experiment, we asked questions that probed whether the reader encoded the preview or target. Readers were more likely to report the preview when they had skipped the word and not regressed to it, and when the preview was plausible. Thus, under certain circumstances, the preview word is processed to a high level of representation (i.e., semantic plausibility) regardless of its relationship to the target, but its influence on reading is relatively short-lived, being replaced by the target word, when fixated.
•Orthographic neighbors yield reduced N400 in high constraint sentences (replication).•Lexicality does not affect N400 amplitude in high constraint sentences (replication).•Plausibility effect (low ...constraint) smaller than expectancy effect (high constraint).•Lexicality effect (left anterior negativity) only present in low constraint sentences.•Pseudowords are scrutinized closely by the readers in the absence of expectations.
Readers generate predictions about the meaning of upcoming words while reading constraining sentences. These predictions feed down to predictions about orthographic form. For example, orthographic neighbors of predicted words yield reduced N400 amplitudes compared to non-neighbors regardless of lexical status (Laszlo & Federmeier, 2009). We investigated whether readers are sensitive to lexicality in low constraint sentences when they must scrutinize the perceptual input more closely for word recognition. In a replication and extension of Laszlo and Federmeier (2009), we observed similar patterns as the original study in high constraint sentences, but found a lexicality effect in low constraint sentences that was not present when the sentence was highly constraining. This suggests that, in the absence of strong expectations, readers adopt a different reading strategy to scrutinize the structure of words more in depth to make sense of what they have read compared to when they encounter a supportive sentence context.
In contrast to earlier research, evidence for semantic preview benefit in reading has been reported by Hohenstein and Kliegl (
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40,
166–190,
...2013
) in an alphabetic writing system; they also implied that prior demonstrations of lack of a semantic preview benefit needed to be reexamined. In the present article, we report a rather direct replication of an experiment reported by Rayner, Balota, and Pollatsek (
Canadian Journal of Psychology, 40,
473–483,
1986
). Using the
gaze-contingent boundary paradigm
, subjects read sentences that contained a target word (
razor
), but different preview words were initially presented in the sentence. The preview was identical to the target word (i.e.,
razor
), semantically related to the target word (i.e.,
blade
), semantically unrelated to the target word (i.e.,
sweet
), or a visually similar nonword (i.e.,
razar
). When the reader’s eyes crossed an invisible boundary location just to the left of the target word location, the preview changed to the target word. Like Rayner et al. (
Canadian Journal of Psychology, 40,
473–483,
1986
), we found that fixations on the target word were significantly shorter in the identical condition than in the unrelated condition, which did not differ from the semantically related condition; when an orthographically similar preview had been initially present in the sentence, fixations were shorter than when a semantically unrelated preview had been present. Thus, the present experiment replicates the earlier data reported by Rayner et al. (
Canadian Journal of Psychology, 40,
473–483,
1986
), indicating evidence for an orthographic preview benefit but a lack of semantic preview benefit in reading English.
Current theories of eye movement control in reading posit that processing of an upcoming parafoveal preview word is used to facilitate processing of that word once it is fixated (i.e., as a foveal ...target word). This preview benefit is demonstrated by shorter fixation durations in the case of valid (i.e., identical or linguistically similar) compared with invalid (i.e., dissimilar) preview conditions. However, we suggest that processing of the preview can directly influence fixation behavior on the target, independent of similarity between them. In Experiment 1, unrelated high and low frequency words were used as orthogonally crossed previews and targets and we observed a reversed preview benefit for low frequency targets-shorter fixation durations with an invalid, higher frequency preview compared with a valid, low frequency preview. In Experiment 2, the target words were replaced with orthographically legal and illegal nonwords and we found a similar effect of preview frequency on fixation durations on the targets, as well as a bimodal distribution in the illegal nonword target conditions with a denser early peak for high than low frequency previews. In Experiment 3, nonwords were used as previews for high and low frequency targets, replicating standard findings that "denied" preview increases fixation durations and the influence of target properties. These effects can be explained by forced fixations, cases in which fixations on the target were shortened as a consequence of the timing of word recognition of the preview relative to the time course of saccade programming to that word from the prior one. That is, the preview word was (at least partially) recognized so that it should have been skipped, but the word could not be skipped because the saccade to that word was in a nonlabile stage. In these cases, the system preinitiates the subsequent saccade off the upcoming word to the following word and the intervening fixation is short.
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