Words in Context: The Effects of Length, Frequency, and Predictability on Brain Responses During Natural Reading

Abstract

Word length, frequency, and predictability count among the most influential variables during reading. Their effects are well-documented in eye movement studies, but pertinent evidence from neuroimaging primarily stem from single-word presentations. We investigated the effects of these variables during reading of whole sentences with simultaneous eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fixation-related fMRI). Increasing word length was associated with increasing activation in occipital areas linked to visual analysis. Additionally, length elicited a U-shaped modulation (i.e., least activation for medium-length words) within a brain stem region presumably linked to eye movement control. These effects, however, were diminished when accounting for multiple fixation cases. Increasing frequency was associated with decreasing activation within left inferior frontal, superior parietal, and occipito-temporal regions. The function of the latter region—hosting the putative visual word form area—was originally considered as limited to sublexical processing. An exploratory analysis revealed that increasing predictability was associated with decreasing activation within middle temporal and inferior frontal regions previously implicated in memory access and unification. The findings are discussed with regard to their correspondence with findings from single-word presentations and with regard to neurocognitive models of visual word recognition, semantic processing, and eye movement control during reading.

Close yet independent: Dissociation of social from valence and abstract semantic dimensions in the left anterior temporal lobe

“…Previous fMRI studies observed word frequency effects in several brain regions including the left inferior frontal and occipito-temporal regions (Chee, Venkatraman, Westphal, & Siong, 2003;Hauk, Davis, & Pulvermüller, 2008;Schuster, Hawelka, Hutzler, Kronbichler, & Richlan, 2016), not in the ATL, which is the region of interest in the current study. In this validation analysis, increasing word frequency was significantly associated with higher activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus and with lower activation in the bilateral occipitaltemporal regions ( Figure S3A and Table S1), but not in the ATL, even at a lenient threshold of voxelwise p < .001, cluster size ≥10 voxels.…”

The neural correlates of thought–action fusion in healthy adults: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…First, robust activations were found in the lingual gyrus and the adjacent cerebellum. Differences in length between sentence and word stimuli can contribute to activity in the lingual gyrus (Schuster, Hawelka, Hutzler, Kronbichler, & Richlan, 2016). Differences in length between sentence and word stimuli can contribute to activity in the lingual gyrus (Schuster, Hawelka, Hutzler, Kronbichler, & Richlan, 2016).…”

Commonality of neural representations of sentences across languages: Predicting brain activation during Portuguese sentence comprehension using an English-based model of brain function

“…Phrases that contained adjectives that were followed by a noun remained on the screen until the noun disappeared. This display protocol (as opposed to presenting one word at a time or one sentence at a time) was adopted to approximate the type of encoding that is indicated by eye fixation studies of text reading (Just & Carpenter, 1980;Schuster, Hawelka, Hutzler, Kronbichler & Richlan, 2016). Presentation of a sample sentence: A familia estava feliz (The family was happy).…”