scholarly journals Online Sentence Reading in People With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking

Author(s):  
Jessica Knilans ◽  
Gayle DeDe

Purpose There is a lot of evidence that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding structurally complex sentences (e.g., object clefts) than simpler sentences (subject clefts). However, subject clefts also occur more frequently in English than object clefts. Thus, it is possible that both structural complexity and frequency affect how people with aphasia understand these structures. Method Nine people with aphasia and 8 age-matched controls participated in the study. The stimuli consisted of 24 object cleft and 24 subject cleft sentences. The task was eye tracking during reading, which permits a more fine-grained analysis of reading performance than measures such as self-paced reading. Results As expected, controls had longer reading times for critical regions in object cleft sentences compared with subject cleft sentences. People with aphasia showed the predicted effects of structural frequency. Effects of structural complexity in people with aphasia did not emerge on their first pass through the sentence but were observed when they were rereading critical regions of complex sentences. Conclusions People with aphasia are sensitive to both structural complexity and structural frequency when reading. However, people with aphasia may use different reading strategies than controls when confronted with relatively infrequent and complex sentence structures.

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (9) ◽  
pp. 2589-2602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gayle DeDe

Purpose Previous eye-tracking research has suggested that individuals with aphasia (IWA) do not assign syntactic structure on their first pass through a sentence during silent reading comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the time course with which lexical variables affect silent reading comprehension in IWA. Three lexical variables were investigated: word frequency, word class, and word length. Methods IWA and control participants without brain damage participated in the experiment. Participants read sentences while a camera tracked their eye movements. Results IWA showed effects of word class, word length, and word frequency that were similar to or greater than those observed in controls. Conclusions IWA showed sensitivity to lexical variables on the first pass through the sentence. The results are consistent with the view that IWA focus on lexical access on their first pass through a sentence and then work to build syntactic structure on subsequent passes. In addition, IWA showed very long rereading times and low skipping rates overall, which may contribute to some of the group differences in reading comprehension.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Leigha A. MacNeill ◽  
Xiaoxue Fu ◽  
Kristin A. Buss ◽  
Koraly Pérez-Edgar

Abstract Temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI) is a robust endophenotype for anxiety characterized by increased sensitivity to novelty. Controlling parenting can reinforce children's wariness by rewarding signs of distress. Fine-grained, dynamic measures are needed to better understand both how children perceive their parent's behaviors and the mechanisms supporting evident relations between parenting and socioemotional functioning. The current study examined dyadic attractor patterns (average mean durations) with state space grids, using children's attention patterns (captured via mobile eye tracking) and parental behavior (positive reinforcement, teaching, directives, intrusion), as functions of child BI and parent anxiety. Forty 5- to 7-year-old children and their primary caregivers completed a set of challenging puzzles, during which the child wore a head-mounted eye tracker. Child BI was positively correlated with proportion of parent's time spent teaching. Child age was negatively related, and parent anxiety level was positively related, to parent-focused/controlling parenting attractor strength. There was a significant interaction between parent anxiety level and child age predicting parent-focused/controlling parenting attractor strength. This study is a first step to examining the co-occurrence of parenting behavior and child attention in the context of child BI and parental anxiety levels.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Katja I. Haeuser ◽  
Shari Baum ◽  
Debra Titone

Abstract Comprehending idioms (e.g., bite the bullet) requires that people appreciate their figurative meanings while suppressing literal interpretations of the phrase. While much is known about idioms, an open question is how healthy aging and noncanonical form presentation affect idiom comprehension when the task is to read sentences silently for comprehension. Here, younger and older adults read sentences containing idioms or literal phrases, while we monitored their eye movements. Idioms were presented in a canonical or a noncanonical form (e.g., bite the iron bullet). To assess whether people integrate figurative or literal interpretations of idioms, a disambiguating region that was figuratively or literally biased followed the idiom in each sentence. During early stages of reading, older adults showed facilitation for canonical idioms, suggesting a greater sensitivity to stored idiomatic forms. During later stages of reading, older adults showed slower reading times when canonical idioms were biased toward their literal interpretation, suggesting they were more likely to interpret idioms figuratively on the first pass. In contrast, noncanonical form presentation slowed comprehension of figurative meanings comparably in younger and older participants. We conclude that idioms may be more strongly entrenched in older adults, and that noncanonical form presentation slows comprehension of figurative meanings.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beate Hampe ◽  
Stefan Th. Gries

Abstract This paper presents a direct continuation of preceding corpus-linguistic research on complex sentence constructions with temporal adverbial clauses in a cognitive and usage-based framework (Diessel 2008; Hampe 2015). Working towards a more systematic construction-based account of complex sentences with before-, after-, until- and once-clauses in spontaneously spoken English, Hampe (2015) hypothesised that the morpho-syntactic realisations of configurations with initial adverbial clauses systematically diverge from those of configurations with final ones as a reflection of the specific functionality of each and that usage properties that are found across instantiations with a coherent functional load are retained in the schematisations creating constructions. This paper employs a multinomial regression in order to test to which extent each of eight closely related complex-sentence constructions with either initial or final before-, after-, until- and once-clauses can be predicted from the realisation of a few key morpho-syntactic properties of the respective adverbial and matrix clauses involved. The results support an analysis of complex-sentence constructions as meso-constructions that are not only specific about the subordinator and the positioning of the adverbial clause, but also retain “traces” of characteristic usage properties.


1984 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 711-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. L. Muir ◽  
M. Cruz ◽  
B. A. Martin ◽  
H. Thommasen ◽  
A. Belzberg ◽  
...  

In six normal supine subjects epinephrine infusion produced a greater leukocytosis with smaller changes in heart rate and blood pressure than did norepinephrine or isoproterenol. Upright exercise in those subjects produced a greater leukocytosis than supine exercise at the same work load. To determine the lung's participation in these events, indium-labeled neutrophils (PMN) were given to four of the subjects. We found that 20–25% were retained in the first pass through the lung when compared with technetium-labeled erythrocytes. The number of labeled PMN in the lung gradually decreased and the number in the spleen and the liver increased. Exercise and catecholamine infusion caused an acceleration in the release of labeled cells from the lung, an increase in both labeled and unlabeled cells in the peripheral blood, and an increase in the number of labeled cells in the liver and spleen. This suggests that increased perfusion of low-flow areas in the lung may contribute to the increased leukocytosis seen in association with both exercise and catecholamine infusion.


Author(s):  
T. V. Repnina

By poly-predicative conditional constructions we mean complex sentences that contain at least three simple sentences, each representing either a condition or a consequence. Poly-predicative sentences can in addition contain other simple sentences that represent neither condition, nor consequence. Poly-predicative constructions that, apart from one condition and one consequence, also include other simple sentences, are not classified here as poly-predicative conditional constructions. While poly-predicative constructions in general have already been in the focus of researches attention, this article seems to address them on Catalan material for the first time. The purpose of this article is an analysis of syntactic relations in poly-predicative conditional constructions. Its objectives include their comparison in Catalan, Spanish, and French, identification of the main types of these constructions, and an analysis of their characteristics. Since the use of tenses and moods in the constructions addressed coincides with that in prototypical bi-predicative conditional constructions, we do not examine it here. The methods, used in this study, included: sampling during corpus collection, classification, description, comparison, transformational analysis and synthesis. The study is based on Catalan texts and their translations into Spanish and French. The findings of the study include: 1) Poly-predicative conditional constructions with several condition and/or consequence clauses are possible. Condition and consequence clauses can occupy different positions in poly-predicative conditional constructions; 2) In contrast to Catalan and Spanish, French admits the replacement of the conditional conjunction si by que; 3) Prototypical conditional and poly-predicative constructions are invariably characterized by subordination relations, with coordination parataxis possible as well. In addition, more complex syntactic structures are possible like, e. g., parallel co-coordination; 4) A prototypical conditional construction being a complex sentence, this limits possible syntactic types of poly-predicative conditional constructions. They cannot be structured as a string of simple sentences connected by coordination or subordination. Consecutive subordination of three or more subordinate sentences is not characteristic of conditional constructions; 5) The study identified a similarity between poly-predicative conditional constructions in Catalan, Spanish, and French. The present research is a contribution into the syntax of Romance languages.


Author(s):  
Samiullah Paracha ◽  
Ayaka Inuoue ◽  
Sania Jehanzeb

Nurturing the motivation to read is an important instructional goal. There can be a number of reasons for a learner to have problems with reading in online learning environments: (1) eyes being unable to scan easily along a line of print; or (2) as a result of concentrating on controlling the eyes concentration, the short-term memory become impaired. The study reported in this chapter used eye tracking method to provide a useful experimental design for exploring reading performance of university online learners. Different eye-tracking experiments were carried out to help informing the teachers to improve the learning environment and be able to do more accurate assessment about what the students were attending to on the screen.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Petr Buryan

In this article, we focus on causes of formation of incrustations in fluidised bed boilers that result from combustion of biomass-containing energy-producing raw materials and can significantly limit the efficiency of the respective power equipment operation. We applied laboratory procedures followed for assessment of characteristic eutectics of mixtures of coal ashes, desulphurisation components (dolomite and limestone), and woodchip ashes. Our analysis proved that combustion of these (or similar) raw materials, accompanied by repeated heating and cooling of combustion and flue gas desulphurisation products, leads to the formation of unfavourable incrustations. These incrustations can grow up to several tens of centimetres in size, thereby significantly restricting the power equipment functionality. They arise due to incrust reheating that results in the formation of eutectics, which have lower melting temperatures than that during their first pass through the combustion process. The same holds for desulphuriation components themselves. Formation of these new eutectics can be attributed both to recycling of substances produced during the first pass through the furnace as well as to mixtures formed both from recycled materials and from components initially combusted in the boiler furnace.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document