I “hear” what you're “saying”: Auditory perceptual simulation, reading speed, and reading comprehension

Abstract

Auditory perceptual simulation (APS) during silent reading refers to situations in which the reader actively simulates the voice of a character or other person depicted in a text. In three eye-tracking experiments, APS effects were investigated as people read utterances attributed to a native English speaker, a non-native English speaker, or no speaker at all. APS effects were measured via online eye movements and offline comprehension probes. Results demonstrated that inducing APS during silent reading resulted in observable differences in reading speed when readers simulated the speech of faster compared to slower speakers and compared to silent reading without APS. Social attitude survey results indicated that readers' attitudes towards the native and non-native speech did not consistently influence APS-related effects. APS of both native speech and non-native speech increased reading speed, facilitated deeper, less good-enough sentence processing, and improved comprehension compared to normal silent reading.

When Structure Competes with Semantics: Reading Chinese Relative Clauses

“…The results suggest that readers rely on a word-order heuristic as well as a plausibility heuristic, which conspire to cause miscomprehension. The same processing pattern has been observed in second language (L2) English speakers' comprehension as well (Jacob & Felser, 2016;Lim & Christianson, 2013a).Recently, Zhou and Christianson (2016a) found that readers engage in good-enough processing when reading unambiguous RCs with similarly competing syntactic and semantic information. Computation of the more challenging ORC structure in (3a) is interfered by the implausible semantic information, causing longer fixation durations, longer whole sentence reading times, more regressions in sentence processing, and lower comprehension accuracy in a paraphrase verification task (3b).…”

“…As a result, implausible sentences are more likely to end up misinterpreted with their thematic roles reversed, thereby generating a plausible but syntactically unfaithful interpretation. In English, ORCs are also more susceptible to these thematic role reversals (e.g., Zhou & Christianson, 2016a). Unlike the case of English relative clauses, however, plausibility and structure did not interact in the current Chinese relative clauses in online or offline measures.…”

“…We hypothesized that if Chinese does in fact have a strongly preferred relative clause structure, then the addition of implausible thematic role assignments to the more difficult (dispreferred) structure should produce an additive interaction such that the implausible, dispreferred structure becomes extremely difficult to process and comprehend. This prediction derives from several studies in English relative clause processing and passive sentence processing resulting in just such additive interactions (e.g., Christianson et al, 2010;Ferreira, 2003;Lim & Christianson, 2013b;Zhou & Christianson, 2016a). Alternatively, if Chinese relative clauses are relatively equivalent in their difficulty, perhaps for different reasons, we expected to observe a significant main effect for plausibility alone (Chen et al, 2006; cf.…”

“…Recently, Zhou and Christianson (2016a) found that readers engage in good-enough processing when reading unambiguous RCs with similarly competing syntactic and semantic information. Computation of the more challenging ORC structure in (3a) is interfered by the implausible semantic information, causing longer fixation durations, longer whole sentence reading times, more regressions in sentence processing, and lower comprehension accuracy in a paraphrase verification task (3b).…”

“…Because previous studies have shown that animacy significantly affects relative clause processing in Chinese (consistent with our suspicions about the importance of plausibility in Chinese relative clause processing) (Wu, 2009;Wu et al, 2010Wu et al, , 2012, we used only animate nouns as the objects and subjects in our study. Specifically, we used sentences that were similar to those in Zhou and Christianson (2016a), manipulating both syntactic (relative clause types) and semantic complexity (plausibility). According to GoodEnough Processing theory, the relative clause structure that is more difficult to process should show more evidence of plausibility heuristics influencing both the online processing and ultimate interpretations.…”