scholarly journals Effects of Lexical Variables on Silent Reading Comprehension in Individuals With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (9) ◽  
pp. 2589-2602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gayle DeDe
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Silent Reading ◽  
Word Class ◽  
First Pass ◽  
Pass Through

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.

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

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Knilans ◽  
Gayle DeDe
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Structural Complexity ◽  
Reading Performance ◽  
Complex Sentence ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Sentence Reading ◽  
First Pass ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
Critical Regions

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.

scholarly journals Reading Development, Word Length and Frequency Effects: An Eye-Tracking Study with Slow and Fast Readers

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Gerth ◽  
Julia Festman
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Lexical Access ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Reading Development ◽  
Reading Strategy ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Frequency Effects ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Whole Word

Research on reading development attempts to explain differences in the reading patterns of adults and children. Previous studies, which typically analyzed word length and frequency effects in developing readers, often focused on dyslexic or dysfluent readers. Similar to previous studies, we investigated the effects of word length and word frequency on the eye movements of children and added several novel aspects: We tested 66 typically developing German-speaking children. Children’s oral reading fluency was used as measure of reading ability. Only fast readers (n = 34, mean age 10.9 ± 0.9 years) and slow readers (n = 32, 11.2 ± 0.9 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment and silently read an age-appropriate original narrative text from a children’s book. The analysis of silent reading of the entire text confirmed the earlier group classification. To analyze word length and frequency, we selected 40 nouns as target words in the text. We found significant effects of word length and word frequency for all children in the expected direction. For fast readers, we detected significant interactions of word length and frequency in first fixation duration, gaze duration, and total reading time. These revealed a frequency effect for long, but not short words. This suggests lexical whole-word processing with a fast activation of the word’s lexical entry for shorter words and an application of the nonlexical route of the dual route cascaded model (DRC) with a slower lexical access to whole word forms for long words. Slow readers demonstrated a strong sensitivity to word length, indicating a slower or delayed lexical access to orthographic word forms. Additionally, they exhibited weaker word frequency effects. These findings suggest a developmental view of reading in typically developing children in accordance with the DRC, with nonlexical serial decoding as the seemingly prominent reading strategy of slow readers and lexical whole-word recognition as the prominent reading strategy of fast readers.

scholarly journals Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. e0259987
Author(s):  
Ehab W. Hermena ◽  
Sana Bouamama ◽  
Simon P. Liversedge ◽  
Denis Drieghe
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Lexical Ambiguity ◽  
Bias Effect ◽  
Lexical Ambiguity Resolution ◽  
Total Fixation ◽  
Lexical Disambiguation ◽  
High Incidence ◽  
First Pass

In Arabic, a predominantly consonantal script that features a high incidence of lexical ambiguity (heterophonic homographs), glyph-like marks called diacritics supply vowel information that clarifies how each consonant should be pronounced, and thereby disambiguate the pronunciation of consonantal strings. Diacritics are typically omitted from print except in situations where a particular homograph is not sufficiently disambiguated by the surrounding context. In three experiments we investigated whether the presence of disambiguating diacritics on target homographs modulates word frequency, length, and predictability effects during reading. In all experiments, the subordinate representation of the target homographs was instantiated by the diacritics (in the diacritized conditions), and by the context subsequent to the target homographs. The results replicated the effects of word frequency (Experiment 1), word length (Experiment 2), and predictability (Experiment 3). However, there was no evidence that diacritics-based disambiguation modulated these effects in the current study. Rather, diacritized targets in all experiments attracted longer first pass and later (go past and/or total fixation count) processing. These costs are suggested to be a manifestation of the subordinate bias effect. Furthermore, in all experiments, the diacritics-based disambiguation facilitated later sentence processing, relative to when the diacritics were absent. The reported findings expand existing knowledge about processing of diacritics, their contribution towards lexical ambiguity resolution, and sentence processing.

Effects of aging and noncanonical form presentation on idiom processing: Evidence from eye tracking

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Katja I. Haeuser ◽  
Shari Baum ◽  
Debra Titone
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Healthy Aging ◽  
Idiom Comprehension ◽  
First Pass ◽  
Effects Of Aging ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Idiom Processing ◽  
Noncanonical Form

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.

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