scholarly journals Semantic and morphological cross-word priming during sentence reading

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina Marjanovic ◽  
Davide Crepaldi

Our current understanding of visual word identification is difficult to extend to text reading—both experiments and theories focus primarily, if not exclusively, on out-of-context individual words. Here, we try to fill this gap by studying cross-word semantic and morphological priming within sentences in a natural reading, eye tracking experiment. We find that words are skipped more when they are preceded in the sentence by semantically related primes. Also, cross-word semantic priming manifests itself in later (e.g., gaze duration), but not in earlier (e.g., first-of-many fixations) indexes of eye movement on the target words. We also find that semantic priming is not modulated by the morphological agreement between primes and targets; and that morphological agreement does not yield any priming per se. These results point to independent lexical-semantic and morphological processing during sentence reading, and suggest cross-word reset for the latter, but not for the former.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina Marjanovic ◽  
Davide Crepaldi

Morphologically complex words are processed through their constituent morphemes during visual word recognition. While this has been primarily established through the stem priming paradigm, the role of shared affixes is more controversial. Also, most evidence on affix priming comes from derivation, while inflectional priming remains largely unaddressed. Here we present two lexical decision, masked priming experiments filling this gap. Taking advantage of the rich inflectional pattern of Slovene, we assessed inflectional suffix priming (mestam–HALJAM), and compared it to the well-established stem priming effect (haljov–HALJAM): while the latter is solid as expected, the former seems to be weak to non–existing. Results further indicate that there is no interaction between sharing a stem and sharing an inflectional suffix—neither stem nor suffix priming is boosted when primes and targets also share the other morpheme. These data indicate an important difference between stems, derivational affixes and inflectional affixes, which we consider in the context of models of visual word identification and information theory.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Viviani ◽  
Davide Crepaldi

Visual word identification is based on an early morphological analysis in one’s native language; how these mechanisms apply to a second language is much less clear. We recruited L1 Italian–L2 English speakers in a masked priming task where the relationship between prime and target was morphologically transparent, e.g., employer–EMPLOY, morphologically opaque, e.g., corner-CORN, or merely orthographic, e.g., brothel–BROTH. Critically, participants underwent a thorough testing of their lexical, morphological, phonological, spelling and semantic proficiency in their second language. By exploring a wide spectrum of L2 proficiency, we showed that this factor critically qualifies L2 priming. Genuine morphological facilitation only arises as proficiency grows; and opaque and orthographic priming shrink as L2 competence increases. Age of acquisition was also evaluated, and did not affect the priming pattern. Furthermore, we showed that L2 priming is modulated by sensitivity to probabilistic relationships between form and meaning. Overall, these data illustrate the trajectory towards a fully consolidated L2 lexicon, and show that masked priming is a key tracker of this process.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-311
Author(s):  
José David Moreno ◽  
José A. León ◽  
Lorena A. M. Arnal ◽  
Juan Botella

Abstract. We report the results of a meta-analysis of 22 experiments comparing the eye movement data obtained from young ( Mage = 21 years) and old ( Mage = 73 years) readers. The data included six eye movement measures (mean gaze duration, mean fixation duration, total sentence reading time, mean number of fixations, mean number of regressions, and mean length of progressive saccade eye movements). Estimates were obtained of the typified mean difference, d, between the age groups in all six measures. The results showed positive combined effect size estimates in favor of the young adult group (between 0.54 and 3.66 in all measures), although the difference for the mean number of fixations was not significant. Young adults make in a systematic way, shorter gazes, fewer regressions, and shorter saccadic movements during reading than older adults, and they also read faster. The meta-analysis results confirm statistically the most common patterns observed in previous research; therefore, eye movements seem to be a useful tool to measure behavioral changes due to the aging process. Moreover, these results do not allow us to discard either of the two main hypotheses assessed for explaining the observed aging effects, namely neural degenerative problems and the adoption of compensatory strategies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-446
Author(s):  
Hasibe Kahraman ◽  
Bilal Kırkıcı

AbstractResearch into nonnative (L2) morphological processing has produced largely conflicting findings. To contribute to the discussions surrounding the contradictory findings in the literature, we examined L2 morphological priming effects along with a transposed-letter (TL) methodology. Critically, we also explored the potential effects of individual differences in the reading networks of L2 speakers using a test battery of reading proficiency. A masked primed lexical decision experiment was carried out in which the same target (e.g., ALLOW) was preceded by a morphological prime (allowable), a TL-within prime (allwoable), an substituted letter (SL)-within prime (allveable), a TL-across prime (alloawble), an SL-across prime (alloimble), or an unrelated prime (believable). The average data yielded morphological priming but no significant TL priming. However, the results of an exploratory analysis of the potential effects of individual differences suggested that individual variability mediated the group-level priming patterns in L2 speakers. TL-within and TL-across priming effects were obtained only when the performance of participants on nonword reading was considered, while the magnitude of the morphological priming effects diminished as the knowledge of vocabulary expanded. The results highlight the importance of considering individual differences while testing L2 populations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110645
Author(s):  
Fengjiao Cong ◽  
Baoguo Chen

We conducted three eye movement experiments to investigate the mechanism for coding letter positions in a person’s second language during sentence reading; we also examined the role of morphology in this process with more rigorous manipulation. Given that readers not only obtain information from currently fixated words (i.e., the foveal area) but also from upcoming words (i.e., the parafoveal area) to guide their reading, we examined both when the targets were fixated (Exp. 1) and when the targets were seen parafoveally (Exp. 2 and Exp. 3). First, we found the classic transposed letter (TL) effect in Exp. 1, but not in Exp. 2 or Exp. 3. This implies that flexible letter position coding exists during sentence reading. However, this was limited to words located in the foveal area, suggesting that L2 readers whose L2 proficiency is not as high as skilled native readers are not able to extract and utilize the parafoveal letter identity and position information of a word, whether the word length is long (Exp. 2) or short (Exp. 3). Second, we found morphological information to influence the magnitude of the TL effect in Exp. 1. These results provide new eye movement evidence for the flexibility of L2 letter position coding during sentence reading, as well as the interactions between the different internal representations of words in this process. Altogether, this is helpful for understanding L2 sentence reading and visual word recognition. Thus, future L2 reading frameworks should integrate word recognition and eye movement control models.


1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Ewald Jackson ◽  
Gary W. Donaldson ◽  
Joseph R. Mills

Precocious readers are children who have made exceptionally rapid progress in beginning literacy. This study of precocious readers was designed to describe their skills in two ways: (a) by identifying any special strengths or weaknesses in precocious readers' component skills, relative to the skills of older but less rapidly developing readers, and (b) by identifying the extent to which individual differences in the skill patterns of precocious readers are multidimensional. The cognitive, word-reading, and text-reading skills of 116 postkindergarten precocious readers were compared with those of 123 second graders, mostly above-average readers, who were matched with the precocious readers on reading comprehension level. The two groups were compared using multiple-indicator modeling techniques. The same factor pattern accounted for the performance of both groups on a set of 29 measures. Therefore, comparisons of factor mean levels and factor covariances were interpretable. No meaningful weaknesses were identified in the average skill pattern of postkindergarten precocious readers. Their strengths tended to mirror weaknesses often identified among disabled readers. Precocious readers are especially rapid text readers, and they also are accurate identifiers of individual words, able to draw on strong phonological analysis skills as well as orthographic processes. However, covariances between orthographic and phonological word identification and between oral text-reading accuracy and effectiveness were lower for precocious than for second-grade readers, suggesting a diversity of skill patterns among highly able beginning readers.


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