Journal of Eye Movement Research

11 pages, 200 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Multiple Regression Analysis of Syntactic and Semantic Influences in Reading Normal Text

by Joel Pynte, Boris New and Alan Kennedy

J. Eye Mov. Res. 2008, 2(1), 1-11; https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.2.1.4 - 8 Sep 2008

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 43

Semantic and syntactic influences during reading normal text were examined in a series of multiple regression analyses conducted on a large-scale corpus of eye-movement data. Two measures of contextual constraints, based on the syntactic descriptions provided by Abeillé, Clément and Toussenel (2003) and one measure of semantic constraint, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, were included in the regression equation, together with a set of properties (length, frequency, etc.), known to affect inspection times. Both syntactic and semantic constraints were found to exert a significant influence, with less time spent inspecting highly constrained target words, relative to weakly constrained ones. Semantic and syntactic properties apparently exerted their influence independently from each other, as suggested by the lack of interaction. Full article

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7 pages, 581 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Conditional Co-Occurrence Probability Acts like Frequency in Predicting Fixation Durations

by James K. Y. Ong and Reinhold Kliegl

J. Eye Mov. Res. 2008, 2(1), 1-7; https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.2.1.3 - 8 Sep 2008

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 62

Abstract

The predictability of an upcoming word has been found to be a useful predictor in eye movement research, but is expensive to collect and subjective in nature. It would be desirable to have other predictors that are easier to collect and objective in nature if these predictors were capable of capturing the information stored in predictability. This paper contributes to this discussion by testing a possible predictor: conditional co-occurrence probability. This measure is a simple statistical representation of the relatedness of the current word to its context, based only on word co-occurrence patterns in data taken from the Internet. In the regression analyses, conditional co-occurrence probability acts like lexical frequency in predicting fixation durations, and its addition does not greatly improve the model fits. We conclude that readers do not seem to use the information contained within conditional co-occurrence probability during reading for meaning, and that similar simple measures of semantic relatedness are unlikely to be able to replace predictability as a predictor for fixation durations. Keywords: Co-occurrence probability, Cloze predictability, frequency, eye movement, fixation duration Full article

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10 pages, 228 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Parafoveal-on-Foveal Effects Are Not an Artifact of Mislocated Saccades

by Allan Kennedy

J. Eye Mov. Res. 2008, 2(1), 1-10; https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.2.1.2 - 8 Sep 2008

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 49

Abstract

Oculomotor error leads to a proportion of saccades during reading missing their intended target. Two kinds of mislocation occur: either a word is erroneously re-fixated, or a word that was about to skipped is erroneously fixated. In both cases recorded fixation duration could be influenced by the fact that the overt fixation reflects neither the reader’s intentions, not the current locus of attention. It has been argued that mislocations of this kind account for apparent “parafoveal-on-foveal” interactions and that, consequently, the challenge posed by such effects for serial processing models of eye movement control is more apparent than real. It is argued here that this analysis is flawed: mislocated fixations cannot plausibly act within the architecture of a serial model to produce effects mimicking parafoveal-on-foveal cross-talk. The claim that parafoveal-on-foveal effects are restricted to measurements made when the eyes are very close to the relevant parafoveal target is not supported in an analysis of the effects of cumulative lexical frequency on foveal processing time. Full article

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12 pages, 729 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Parsing Costs as Predictors of Reading Difficulty: An Evaluation Using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus

by Marisa Ferrara Boston, John Hale, Reinhold Kliegl, Umesh Patil and Shravan Vasishth

J. Eye Mov. Res. 2008, 2(1), 1-12; https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.2.1.1 - 8 Sep 2008

Cited by 111 | Viewed by 92

Abstract

The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers’ eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram frequency and bigram frequency (transitional probability), word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the so-called “early” and “late” measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold. Full article

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1 pages, 49 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Editorial

by Rudolf Groner

J. Eye Mov. Res. 2008, 2(1), 1; https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.2.1.0 - 4 Sep 2008

Viewed by 44

Abstract

This is the first of a set of special issues to appear in the Journal emanating from the 14th European Conference on Eye Movements, held in Potsdam, Germany, in August 2007 [...] Full article

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J. Eye Mov. Res., Volume 2, Issue 1 (September 2008) – 5 articles

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