Grammar is background in sentence processing

abstract Boye and Harder (2012) claim that the grammatical–lexical distinction has to do with discourse prominence: lexical elements can convey discursively primary (or foreground) information, whereas grammatical elements cannot (outside corrective contexts). This paper reports two experiments that test this claim. Experiment 1 was a letter detection study, in which readers were instructed to mark specific letters in the text. Experiment 2 was a text-change study, in which participants were asked to register omitted words. Experiment 2 showed a main effect of word category: readers attend more to words in lexical elements (e.g., full verbs) than to those in grammatical elements (e.g., auxiliaries). Experiment 1 showed an interaction: attention to letters in focused constituents increased more for grammatical words than for lexical words. The results suggest that the lexical–grammatical contrast does indeed guide readers’ attention to words.

Grammatikalisering af danske præpositioner

Messerschmidt & al. (2018) made a distinction between grammatical and lexical prepositions based on the functional theory of grammatical status in Boye & Harder (2012), and demonstrated that this distinction is significant for the description of agrammatic speech. The functional theory predicts that grammatical items attract less attention than lexical ones. In this paper, we use a letter detection experiment to demonstrate that this also holds for Danish prepositions. Not all grammatical-lexical preposition pairs contrasted show a significant difference between letter detection rates, however. We argue that varying degrees of differences reflect different positions in a grammaticalization cline in which a grammatical descendent is gradually distilled out of a lexical source.

Microsaccades and attention in a high-acuity visual alignment task

ABSTRACTWhile aiming and shooting, we make tiny eye movements called microsaccades that shift gaze between task-relevant objects within a small region. However, in the brief period before pressing trigger, microsaccades are suppressed. This might be due to the lack of the requirement to shift gaze as the retinal images of the two objects start overlapping on fovea. Or we might be actively suppressing microsaccades to prevent any disturbances in visual perception caused by microsaccades around the time of their occurrence and their subsequent effect on shooting performance.In this study we looked at microsaccade rate while participants performed a simulated shooting task under two conditions: normal viewing in which they moved their eyes freely and eccentric condition in which they maintained gaze on a fixed target while performing shooting task at 5° eccentricity. As expected, microsaccade rate dropped at the end of the task in the normal viewing condition. However, we found the same for the eccentric condition in which microsaccade did not shift gaze between the task objects.Microsaccades are also produced in response to shifts in covert attention. To test whether disengagement of covert attention from eccentric shooting location caused the drop in microsaccade rate, we monitored participant’s spatial attention location by employing a RSVP task simultaneously at a location opposite to the shooting task. Target letter detection at RSVP location did not improve during the drop in microsaccade rate, suggesting that covert attention was maintained at the shooting task location.We conclude that in addition to their usual gaze-shifting function, microsaccades during fine acuity tasks might be modulated by cognitive processes other than spatial attention.

The use and nature of grapheme coding during sub-lexical processing and lexical access

This work aimed to investigate grapheme coding during sub-lexical processing and lexical access. Using the letter detection task in Experiment 1, we compared letter pairs that could be considered as a grapheme unit or not depending on context (referred to as weakly cohesive complex, e.g., an in chant vs cane) to real two-letter graphemes (highly cohesive complex, e.g., au in chaud) and single-letter graphemes (simple, e.g., a in place). Three experimental conditions were used, one of which was designed to prevent phonological influences. Data revealed that only highly cohesive complex graphemes were processed as units, not the weakly cohesive ones. The same pattern was found across experimental conditions in favor of an orthographic mechanism. In Experiments 2 and 3, a primed lexical decision task was used with two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and two different ranges of lexical frequency. We manipulated the number of graphemes removed from partial primes ( d**che vs do**he-DOUCHE) and relatedness. In contrast to Experiment 1, no evidence was provided in favor of a role of graphemes during lexical access. We suggest that graphemes can be conceived as sub-lexical orthographic units per se but can only be captured within a sub-lexical route to reading.

What a Simple Letter-Detection Task Can Tell Us About Cognitive Processes in Reading

Understanding reading is a central issue for psychology, with major societal implications. Over the past five decades, a simple letter-detection task has been used as a window on the psycholinguistic processes involved in reading. When readers are asked to read a text for comprehension while marking with a pencil all instances of a target letter, they miss some of the letters in a systematic way known as the missing-letter effect. In the current article, we review evidence from studies that have emphasized neuroimaging, eye movement, rapid serial visual presentation, and auditory passages. As we review, the missing-letter effect captures a wide variety of cognitive processes, including lexical activation, attention, and extraction of phrase structure. To account for the large set of findings generated by studies of the missing-letter effect, we advanced an attentional-disengagement model that is rooted in how attention is allocated to and disengaged from lexical items during reading, which we have recently shown applies equally to listening.