It has recently been claimed that presenting text with the first half of each word printed in bold (as is done in this example), so-called Bionic Reading, facilitates reading. However, empirical ...tests of this claim are lacking, and theoretically one might expect a cost rather than a benefit. Here I tested participants' reading speed of 100 paragraphs that were presented either in ‘Bionic’ or in normal font. Statistical analyses revealed no significant difference in reading times between Bionic and normal reading. I conclude that Bionic Reading does not facilitate reading.
A hotly debated issue in reading research concerns the extent to which readers process parafoveal words, and how parafoveal information might influence foveal word recognition. We investigated ...syntactic word processing both in sentence reading and in reading isolated foveal words when these were flanked by parafoveal words. In Experiment 1 we found a syntactic parafoveal preview benefit in sentence reading, meaning that fixation durations on target words were decreased when there was a syntactically congruent preview word at the target location (n) during the fixation on the pre-target (n-1). In Experiment 2 we used a flanker paradigm in which participants had to classify foveal target words as either noun or verb, when those targets were flanked by syntactically congruent or incongruent words (stimulus on-time 170 ms). Lower response times and error rates in the congruent condition suggested that higher-order (syntactic) information can be integrated across foveal and parafoveal words. Although higher-order parafoveal-on-foveal effects have been elusive in sentence reading, results from our flanker paradigm show that the reading system can extract higher-order information from multiple words in a single glance. We propose a model of reading to account for the present findings.
Reading research is exhibiting growing interest in employing variants of the flanker paradigm to address several questions about reading. The paradigm is particularly suited for investigating ...parallel word processing, parafoveal-on-foveal influences, and visuospatial attention in a simple but constrained setting. However, this methodological deviation from natural reading warrants careful assessment of the extent to which cognitive processes underlying reading operate similarly in these respective settings. The present study investigated whether readers’ distribution of attention in the flanker paradigm resembles that observed during sentence reading; that is, with a rightward bias. Participants made lexical decisions about foveal target words while we manipulated parafoveal flanking words. In line with prior research, we established a parafoveal-on-foveal repetition effect, and this effect was increased for rightward flankers compared with leftward flankers. In a second experiment, we found that, compared with a no-flanker condition, rightward repetition flankers facilitated target processing, while leftward flankers interfered. Additionally, the repetition effect was larger for rightward than for leftward flankers. From these findings, we infer that attention in the flanker paradigm is indeed biased toward the right, and that the flanker paradigm thus provides an effective analogy to natural reading for investigating the role of visuospatial attention. The enhanced parafoveal-on-foveal effects within the attended region further underline the key role of attention in the spatial integration of orthographic information. Lastly, we conclude that future research employing the flanker paradigm should take the asymmetrical aspect of the attentional deployment into account.
Unified syntax in the bilingual mind Declerck, Mathieu; Wen, Yun; Snell, Joshua ...
Psychonomic bulletin & review,
02/2020, Letnik:
27, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Are syntactic representations shared across languages, and how might that inform the nature of syntactic computations? To investigate these issues, we presented French-English bilinguals with ...mixed-language word sequences for 200 ms and asked them to report the identity of one word at a post-cued location. The words either formed an interpretable grammatical sequence via shared syntax (e.g.,
ses feet sont big
– where the French words
ses
and
sont
translate into
his
and
are,
respectively) or an ungrammatical sequence with the same words (e.g.,
sont feet ses big
). Word identification was significantly greater in the grammatical sequences – a bilingual sentence superiority effect. These results not only provide support for shared syntax, but also reveal a fascinating ability of bilinguals to simultaneously connect words from their two languages through these shared syntactic representations.
Recent research has shown that readers may to fail notice word transpositions during reading (e.g., the transposition of "fail" and "to" in this sentence). Although this transposed word (TW) ...phenomenon was initially taken as evidence that readers process multiple words in parallel, several studies now show that TW-effects may also occur when words are presented one-by-one. Critically however, in the majority of studies TW-effects are weaker in serial presentation. Here we argue that while word position coding may to some extent proceed post-lexically (allowing TW-effects to occur despite seeing words one-by-one), stronger TW-effects in parallel presentation nonetheless evidence a degree of parallel word processing. We additionally report an experiment wherein a sample of Dutch participants (N = 34) made grammaticality judgments about 4-word TW sentences (e.g., '
', '
') and ungrammatical control sentences ('
', '
'), whereby the four words were presented either serially or in parallel. Ungrammaticality was decidedly more difficult to notice in the TW condition, but only when words were presented in parallel. No effects were observed in the serial presentation whatsoever. The present results bolster the notion that word order is encoded with a degree of flexibility, and further provide straightforward evidence for parallel word processing during reading.
Prior research has shown that processing of a given target word is facilitated by the simultaneous presentation of orthographically related stimuli in the parafovea. Here we investigate the nature of ...such spatial integration processes by presenting orthographic neighbours of target words in the parafovea, considering that neighbours have been shown to inhibit, rather than facilitate, recognition of target words in foveal masked priming research. In Experiment 1, we used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm to manipulate the parafoveal information subjects received while they fixated a target word within a sentence. In Experiment 2, we used the Flanking Letters Lexical Decision paradigm to manipulate parafoveal information while subjects read isolated words. Parafoveal words were either a higher-frequency orthographic neighbour of targets words (e.g., blue-blur) or a high-frequency unrelated word (e.g., hand-blur). We found that parafoveal orthographic neighbours facilitated, rather than inhibited, processing of the target. Thus, the present findings provide further evidence that orthographic information is integrated across multiple words and suggest that either the integration process does not enable simultaneous access to those words' lexical representations, or that lexical representations activated by spatially distinct stimuli do not compete for recognition.
Orthographic processing is an open problem. Decades of visual word recognition research have fueled the development of various theoretical frameworks. Although these frameworks have had good ...explanatory power, various recent results cannot be satisfactorily captured in any model. In order to account for old and new phenomena alike, here I present a new theory of how the brain computes letter positions. According to
(which describes the
), each hemisphere of the brain comprises a set of mono- and multigram detectors. The crux is that the detectors for a given N-gram are activated to different extents in their respective hemispheres, depending on where in the visual field the N-gram is located. This differential activity allows the brain to estimate the leftness or rightness of that N-gram, whereby word activation is a function of the N-gram's identity plus its laterality relative to that of other activated N-grams. Simulations with PONG suggest that the framework effectively accounts for classic phenomena, as well as newer phenomena and cross-linguistic differences that cannot be explained by other models. I also reflect on the neurophysiological plausibility of the model and avenues for future inquiry. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
To what extent do readers process multiple words in parallel? Although it is now commonly accepted that letters are processed across multiple words simultaneously, higher-order (lexical, semantic, ...syntactic) parallel processing remains contentious. Recent use of the flanker paradigm has revealed that the syntactic recognition of foveal target words is influenced by the syntactic congruency of parafoveal flanking words even when target and flankers are shown for only 170 ms. It has been argued, however, that such settings may allow processing of multiple words even if this were to happen on a serial one-by-one basis. To circumvent this possibility, here I have tested participants in a syntactic categorization task whereby targets and flankers were shown for only 50 ms and replaced by post-masks. Significant effects of target-flanker congruency were observed in both response times and accuracy, indicating that readers extracted syntactic information from multiple words within the very brief presentation time. The present results strongly suggest that the brain extracts higher-order linguistic information from multiple words in parallel.
There are roughly two lines of theory to account for recent evidence that word processing is influenced by adjacent orthographic information. One line assumes that multiple words can be processed ...simultaneously through a parallel graded distribution of visuo-spatial attention. The other line assumes that attention is strictly directed to single words, but that letter detectors are connected to both foveal and parafoveal feature detectors, as such driving parafoveal-foveal integrative effects. Putting these two accounts to the test, we build on recent research showing that the pupil responds to the brightness of covertly attended (i.e., without looking) locations in the visual field. Experiment 1 showed that foveal target word processing was facilitated by related parafoveal flanking words when these were positioned to the left and right of the target, but not when these were positioned above and below the target. Perfectly in line with this asymmetry, in Experiment 2 we found that the pupil size was contingent with the brightness of the locations of horizontally but not vertically aligned flankers, indicating that attentional resources were allocated to those words involved in the parafoveal-on-foveal effect. We conclude that orthographic parafoveal-on-foveal effects are driven by parallel graded attention.
A surprisingly small portion of reading research has been dedicated to investigating how the visual word recognition process is influenced by embedded words (e.g., '
' in '
'), and no research has ...yet investigated embedded words in a natural reading setting. Covering this issue, the present work reports analyses of eye-tracking data from the GECO bilingual book reading corpus. Word viewing times were analyzed as a function of the number, frequency and proportional length of embedded words. We anticipated two scenarios: embedded words would either facilitate processing due to increased word-letter feedback, or inhibit processing due to increased lexical competition. A main facilitatory effect of embedded words on the recognition process was established, with an increasing number of embedded words resulting in shorter word viewing times and fewer fixations. This pattern was depicted by readers of Dutch as well as readers of English. Long, high-frequency embedded words formed an exception however, as these led to inhibition (Dutch participants) or a null-effect (English participants). The present results indicate that both scenarios outlined above are at play, but with a theoretical constraint on the role of word-to-word inhibitory connections. Specifically, such connections may predominantly exist among words of similar length. Hence, embedded words generally facilitate processing through word-letter feedback, but this facilitatory effect is countered by word-to-word inhibition if the embedded word's length approximates that of its superset.
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