Perceiving words during reading: Lack of facilitation from prior peripheral exposure

McConkie, George W.; Zola, David; Blanchard, Harry E.; Wolverton, Gary S.

doi:10.3758/bf03206231

Cited by 60 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Evidence that the perceptual span is restricted to a region of only one or two words in extent (McConkie & Rayner, 1975;McConkie, Zola, Blanchard, & Wolverton, 1982;Rayner, Inhoff, Morrison, Slowiaczek, & Bertera, 1981;Rayner, Well, Pollatsek, & Bertera, 1982) andthat linguisticallyuseful visual information is not available during saccades (Matin, 1974;Volkmann, 1962) supports the assumption that infonnation about the location and duration of individual fixations can be used to make inferences about processing of specific areas of the text and of individual words.…”

Section: Context Effects In Eye Trackingmentioning

confidence: 81%

Constraints on semantic priming in reading: A fixation time analysis

Carroll

Slowiaczek

1986

Mem Cogn

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In Experiment 1, subjects read sentences containing a category name or a neutral prime that was followed by a target exemplar that varied in typicality. Fixation time on the target exemplar was the measure of processing difficulty. The category name facilitated processing for both high-and low-typicality exemplars. Unexpectedly, high-typicality exemplars were processed more quickly than low-typicality exemplars in both primed and unprimed conditions. Experiment 2 extended the priming effect to primary associates. Most importantly, the priming effect was influenced by the syntactic structure of the stimulus sentence. When both the prime and the associated target word were in the same clause, semantic priming occurred, but when the prime and target were in different clauses, no associative facilitation was observed. These results were interpreted as supporting a clausal processing hypothesis based on an autonomous modular view of the language processing system. Furthermore, the results were consistent with direct control models of eye movements, which claim that fixation duration reflects the timing of processing related to the word currently under fixation.Skilled reading requires the integration of many kinds of information as words, sentences, and paragraphs are built into a mental representation of the discourse. Although context undoubtedly influences the integration of newly encountered information, the effects of different kinds of context are not yet well understood. The most restricted kind of semantic context is that contained within a phrase, frequently within a word pair. For example, in a noun phrase, a modifier might strongly suggest what the following noun will be (e.g., "amusement park" or "Goodyear blimp"). A second kind of context is provided by other information in the sentence. Sentential context includes semantic information from other phrases and clauses within the sentence as well as grammatical constraints (subcategorizations, frames, thematic roles, etc.). The most global level of context is provided by the theme or topic of the paragraph or passage. This type of context is built up over several sentences and its effects will presumably persist until the topic is changed or the discourse is terminated.

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Section: Context Effects In Eye Trackingmentioning

confidence: 81%

Constraints on semantic priming in reading: A fixation time analysis

Carroll

Slowiaczek

1986

Mem Cogn

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“…In other terms, informational persistence from the first word facilitated recognition of the target word. However, recent work by McConkie, Zola, Blanchard, and Wolverton (1982) suggests that integration of peripheral and foveal letter information does not occur when subjects read meaningful, connected text, since changes in letter identities across fixations go unnoticed under these conditions. Thus, the role of informational persistence in reading is an open question.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus duration and partial report performance

Yeomans

Irwin

1985

Perception & Psychophysics

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This paper investigates the effect of stimulus duration on partial report performance. Two experiments showed that variations in stimulus duration from 50 to 500 msec had little or no effect on partial report accuracy, decay, or error patterns. These results contrast with previous research demonstrating that increasing stimulus duration decreases visible persistence duration. Our findings thus provide support for the argument (Coltheart, 1980) that informational persistence (knowledge about the visual properties of a stimulus) is a separate phenomenon from visible persistence (the phenomenal persistence of a stimulus), and suggest that the traditional view of iconic memory, which conflates these two forms of persistence, is incorrect. Furthermore, our results indicate that informational persistence is not merely a function of unnaturally brief stimulus exposures, but exists even after exposure durations as long as 500 msec. Possible mechanisms of informational persistence, as well as its potential role in everyday perception, are discussed.It has been known for centuries that visual sensation persists after stimulus offset; the writings of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) reportedly contain the first known reference to this phenomenon (Allen, 1926). The fairly recent rekindling of interest in visual persistence can, perhaps, be traced to the work of Sperling (1960). Sperling briefly presented subjects an array of letters and, following their offset, cued report of one row of the array. Sperling found that subjects' recall performance for the cued row was very high if the cue was presented within about 100 msec or so of stimulus offset. Furthermore, recall accuracy decreased as the time between stimulus offset and presentation of the recall cue increased. These results stood in contrast with what happened when subjects were asked to report the entire array of letters. In this case, recall performance was limited to only a few items from the array. Taken together, these results suggested that immediately following stimulus offset there was more information available about the array than could be normally reported, but this information disappeared quickly with the passage of time. This method of sampling a subset of the total information in an array has been called the partial-report technique, and the superior recall performance under these conditions, the partial-report superiority effect.

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“…In order to determine the length of time the second word was present, it is necessary to identify the fixation on which the critical word was identified. McConkie, Zola, Blanchard, and Wolverton (1982) have shown that in cases where a five letter word is fixated only once, that fixation is typically the one which provides the visual information for the perception of that word. Therefore, instances were selected from the present data where there was only a single fixation on the critical word.…”

Section: What Determines Which Word Is Reported?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This will be referred to as the single fixation data. These fixations are the most likely to have been the fixations on which the critical word was acquired (McConkie et al, 1982). However, because this selection procedure produced a small data set, a more liberal criterion was also used.…”

Section: Effects On Eve Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Time course of visual information utilization during fixations in reading.

Blanchard¹,

McConkie²,

Zola³

et al. 1984

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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16 undergraduates read short texts from a cathode-ray tube as their eye movements were being monitored. During selected fixations, the text was briefly masked and then it reappeared with 1 word changed. Ss often were unaware that the word had changed. Sometimes they reported seeing the 1st presented word, sometimes the 2nd presented word, and sometimes both. When only 1 word was reported, 2 factors were found to determine which one it was: the length of time a word was present during the fixation and the predictability of a word in its context. Results suggest that visual information was utilized for reading at a crucial period during the fixation and that this crucial period could occur at different times on different fixations. The pattern of responses suggest that the first letter of a word was not utilized before other letters and that letters were not scanned from left to right during a fixation. (29 ref)

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Perceiving words during reading: Lack of facilitation from prior peripheral exposure

Cited by 60 publications

References 22 publications

Constraints on semantic priming in reading: A fixation time analysis

Constraints on semantic priming in reading: A fixation time analysis

Stimulus duration and partial report performance

Time course of visual information utilization during fixations in reading.

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