Evidence for simultaneous syntactic processing of multiple words during reading

Abstract

A hotly debated issue in reading research concerns the extent to which readers process parafoveal words, and how parafoveal information might influence foveal word recognition. We investigated syntactic word processing both in sentence reading and in reading isolated foveal words when these were flanked by parafoveal words. In Experiment 1 we found a syntactic parafoveal preview benefit in sentence reading, meaning that fixation durations on target words were decreased when there was a syntactically congruent preview word at the target location (n) during the fixation on the pre-target (n-1). In Experiment 2 we used a flanker paradigm in which participants had to classify foveal target words as either noun or verb, when those targets were flanked by syntactically congruent or incongruent words (stimulus on-time 170 ms). Lower response times and error rates in the congruent condition suggested that higher-order (syntactic) information can be integrated across foveal and parafoveal words. Although higher-order parafoveal-on-foveal effects have been elusive in sentence reading, results from our flanker paradigm show that the reading system can extract higher-order information from multiple words in a single glance. We propose a model of reading to account for the present findings.

Readers Are Parallel Processors

“…Influences from word n + 1 on n would provide stronger evidence for parallelism, as n + 1 could have an impact on n only if it were processed simultaneously. While such effects are not found at levels of semantic processing [12,14,15] (which, as we argue in this Opinion article, is for good reason), they are consistently found at the level of letter processing, with words being recognized faster when followed by an orthographically related word than an unrelated word [10][11][12][13]18].…”

“…The second assumption has been that if words are processed in parallel, information should be spatially integrated across words, such that readers will more rapidly recognize certain word characteristics (e.g., letters, sounds, meaning) if those characteristics are shared with surrounding words [10][11][12][13][14][15]. As it turns out, readers do integrate letter information across words [10][11][12][13][14][15], but higher-level integration effects (e.g., the word 'dog' being recognized faster when followed by 'cat' than when followed by an unrelated word) have remained largely elusive [12][13][14][15]. This has led researchers to believe that parallel processing may occur at sublexical levels, but that lexical access nonetheless occurs serially.…”

“…But this conclusion is not warranted. Parallel processing may well proceed without integrating high-level information across words [5,14,15]. The rationale for this alternative scenario is simple: readers would have to be able to keep track of which meanings belong to which positions in the sequence, given that each word has a unique role in contributing to sentence comprehension.…”

Event‐related brain potentials reveal how multiple aspects of semantic processing unfold across parafoveal and foveal vision during sentence reading

“…There are important costs and benefits to consider with respect to the flanker‐ERP paradigm. This paradigm has now been adopted quite widely in the literature, and its relative strengths and weaknesses have been addressed across a now substantial number of prior studies (Barber et al, , ; Declerck, Snell, & Grainger, ; Kornrumpf et al, ; Li et al, ; Niefind & Dimigen, ; Payne et al, ; Payne & Federmeier, ; Snell, Bertrand, & Grainger, ; Snell, Declerck, & Grainger, ; Snell, Meeter, & Grainger, ; Snell, Vitu, & Grainger, ; Stites et al, ; Zhang, Li, Wang, & Wang, ). Nevertheless, there are some important considerations with respect to the current findings that merit review.…”

Reading without spaces revisited: The role of word identification and sentence-level constraints

“…Based on our own theoretical work incorporating word identification mechanisms in a model of eye-movement control and reading (OB1-Reader: Snell, van Leipsig, Grainger, & Meeter, 2018), in the present study we take a new look at the possible contributions of bottom-up word identification and top-down sentence-level constraints in facilitating the reading of unspaced text. We hypothesize that sentence reading generates a representation of the sentence in working memory, that in turn generates expectations about the identity and location of individual words (Grainger, 2018;Mirault, Snell, & Grainger, 2018;Snell et al, 2018;Snell, Meeter, & Grainger, 2017). We follow the example of Schad, Nuthmann, and Engbert (2010) by introducing a "shuffled" text condition as a means to investigate the influence of higher-level sentencelevel constraints.…”