How strongly do word reading times and lexical decision times correlate? Combining data from eye movement corpora and megastudies

Abstract

We assess the amount of shared variance between three measures of visual word recognition latencies: eye movement latencies, lexical decision times and naming times.After partialling out the effects of word frequency and word length, two well--documented predictors of word recognition latencies, we see that 7--44% of the variance is uniquely shared between lexical decision times and naming times, depending on the frequency range of the words used. A similar analysis of eye movement latencies shows that the percentage of variance they uniquely share either with lexical decision times or with naming times is much lower. It is 5 -17% for gaze durations and lexical decision times in studies with target words presented in neutral sentences, but drops to .2% for corpus studies in which eye movements to all words are analysed. Correlations between gaze durations and naming latencies are lower still. These findings suggest that processing times in isolated word processing and continuous text reading are affected by specific task demands and presentation format, and that lexical decision times and naming times are not very informative in predicting eye movement latencies in text reading once the effect of word frequency and word length are taken into account. The difference between controlled experiments and natural reading suggests that reading strategies and stimulus materials may determine the degree to which the immediacy--of--processing assumption and the eye--mind assumption apply. Fixation times are more likely to exclusively reflect the lexical processing of the currently fixated word in controlled studies with unpredictable target words rather than in natural reading of sentences or texts. 3 One of the ways in which theories of visual word processing aim to explain the cognitive processes involved in reading, is by accounting for differences in the time required to recognize different words. Hence, recognition times for large samples of words in different languages are collected to validate (computational) models of word processing. The question arises as to whether different measures of word recognition time are equally valid estimates when testing these theories.At first sight, the most ecologically valid estimate of the time needed to recognize a printed word is the time the eyes remain fixated on that word in silent reading, possibly over multiple fixations. However, these measures, which are typically obtained by registering the reader's eye movements with an eye--tracking system, are not necessarily the best estimates of word processing durations. As Kliegl, Nuthmann, and Engbert (2006) noted, the usefulness of reading times based on eye movements hinges on two assumptions. The first is the immediacy--of--processing assumption, or the idea that words are interpreted as soon as they are encountered (i.e., there are no instances in which word interpretation is temporarily suspended). The second is the eye--mind assumption, or the idea that readers continue to inspect a word for as long as that wo...

Presenting GECO: An eyetracking corpus of monolingual and bilingual sentence reading

“…In an interesting study, Kuperman et al (2012) found little shared variance between eye movement data from the Dundee corpus (Kennedy & Pynte, 2005) and reaction time data from the ELP (Balota et al, 2007). Our data could also be exploited by similar studies for comparing monolingual data from the corpus to, for instance, the BLP , the L1 bilingual data to the DLP (Keuleers, Diependaele, et al, 2010), and the L2 bilingual data to a potential future lexicon project in the L2 (which is nonexistent, to date).…”

“…Both Frank and Bod (2011) and Fossum and Levy (2012) used the Dundee corpus to evaluate their language models concerned with the role of hierarchical mechanisms in sentence processing. Kuperman et al, (2012) used both the megadata of the ELP (Balota et al, 2007) and the Dundee corpus (Kennedy & Pynte, 2005) to correlate lexical decision times with natural reading data. Their results showed very low correlations between these measures, implying that these commonly used methods measure, at least to some extent, different processes.…”

“…Subsequently, this project sparked the development of similar databases for French (FLP;Ferrand et al, 2010), Dutch (DLP; Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, 2010), and British English (BLP; Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012). These databases have been used to evaluate psycholinguistic ideas about frequency effects (e.g., Kuperman & Van Dyke, 2013), word length effects (e.g., Yap & Balota, 2009), neighborhood effects (e.g., Whitney, 2011;Yap & Balota, 2009), and the lexical decision task itself (Diependaele, Brysbaert, & Neri, 2012;Kuperman, Drieghe, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2012), but they have also been used to evaluate complex computational models of word recognition (e.g., Norris & Kinoshita, 2012;Whitney, 2011), illustrating the relevance and broad applicability of such big datasets.…”

Another cup of TEE? The processing of second language near-cognates in first language reading

“…The discrepancy of the effects in the two tasks across experiments (i.e. inhibition vs. facilitation) also points at certain constraints for using lexical decision procedures as a proxy for assessing processing mechanisms in normal reading for comprehension (Kuperman, Drieghe, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2013; see also Huestegge, Radach, Corbic, & Huestegge, 2009, for similar constraints with respect to single word naming tasks).…”

Sentence processing of taboo words: Evidence from eyetracking

“…Specific reading measures on the critical word were selected in order to observe processes related to lexical access and post-lexical sentential integration. The selected reading measures were: first-fixation duration (duration of first-fixation on the critical word), single-fixation duration (duration of first-fixation when only one fixation was made on the critical region), gaze-duration (summed duration of all fixations made on critical region before the eye left the word for the first time), and total-time on the critical region (for a review of these measures, see Rayner, 1998;Kuperman, 2013).…”