Form-to-expectation matching effects on first-pass eye movement measures during reading.
Recent Electroencephalography/Magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) studies suggest that when contextual information is highly predictive of some property of a linguistic signal, expectations generated from context can be translated into surprisingly low-level estimates of the physical form-based properties likely to occur in subsequent portions of the unfolding signal. Whether form-based expectations are generated and assessed during natural reading, however, remains unclear. We monitored eye movements while participants read phonologically typical and atypical nouns in noun-predictive contexts (Experiment 1), demonstrating that when a noun is strongly expected, fixation durations on first-pass eye movement measures, including first fixation duration, gaze duration, and go-past times, are shorter for nouns with category typical form-based features. In Experiments 2 and 3, typical and atypical nouns were placed in sentential contexts normed to create expectations of variable strength for a noun. Context and typicality interacted significantly at gaze duration. These results suggest that during reading, form-based expectations that are translated from higher-level category-based expectancies can facilitate the processing of a word in context, and that their effect on lexical processing is graded based on the strength of category expectancy.
Department of Psychology, University of Iowa.
Thomas A
TA
Farmer
Department of Psychology, University of Iowa.
Shaorong
S
Yan
Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University.
Klinton
K
Bicknell
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester.
Michael K
MK
Tanenhaus
D000328:Adult; D059031:Anticipation, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D055815:Young Adult