Wrapping up Sentence Comprehension: The Role of Task Demands and Individual Differences

Abstract

This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was unmarked by punctuation, weakly marked by a comma, or strongly marked by a period. Comprehension demands were manipulated by presenting questions after either 25% or 100% of passages. Wrapup effects at punctuation boundaries manifested principally in rereading of earlier text and were more marked in lower proficiency readers. High comprehension load was associated with longer total reading time but had little impact on wrap-up effects. The relationship between eye movements and comprehension accuracy suggested that poor comprehension was associated with a shallower reading strategy under low comprehension demands. The implications of these findings for understanding how the processes involved in self-regulating comprehension are modulated by reading proficiency and comprehension goals are discussed.

Predictability effects and parafoveal processing in older readers.

“…Healthy older adults read more slowly than younger adults because they make more, and longer, fixations, and more regressions back to previously read text (see Paterson et al, 2020 for review). But, unlike other groups of slow readers, such as children (Blythe, 2014) or low-proficiency adults (e.g., Andrews & Veldre, 2021; Veldre & Andrews, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2016a), older readers of alphabetic languages have been reported to show longer forward saccades and increased word skipping relative to younger readers (Kliegl et al, 2004; Laubrock et al, 2006; McGowan et al, 2015; Rayner et al, 2006; Rayner et al, 2010). Rayner et al (2006) attributed this trade-off to older readers’ adoption of a risky-reading strategy (O’Regan, 1990) in which they use context to “guess” the identity of upcoming words to compensate for declines in visual acuity that limit the extraction of parafoveal information.…”

The impact of audio on the reading of intralingual versus interlingual subtitles: Evidence from eye movements

“…This complex decision making in turn indicates that the perceptual, cognitive, and oculomotor systems that are engaged during normal reading are both flexible and highly responsive to task demands. Moreover, eye-movement control during multimodal reading is much more complicated and nuanced than during "normal" reading (i.e., of statically displayed text), a complete understanding of which requires consideration of metacognitive strategies employed in evaluating the reader's need for subtitles to maintain effective comprehension (Andrews & Veldre, 2020). We admit that there are other factors that might modulate the effects of visual and auditory inputs (e.g., different strategies used in translating the audio into the subtitle might render different degrees of congruency in the semantic content between the two sources, thus affecting eye movements during subtitle reading, cf., Ghia, 2012;Ragni, 2020), but the study reported in this article brings us closer to understanding the mental processes underlying multimodal reading and the role of metacognition in these complicated visual-cognitive tasks.…”

How do task demands and aging affect lexical prediction during online reading of natural texts?

“…Given the inherent limitations of the reviewed ERP studies, one might argue that eye-movement studies of sentence reading more closely approximate natural reading because the individual words are displayed simultaneously, and because these studies usually include comprehension questions to encourage reading for meaning. However, comprehension questions are typically presented for only 25% to 33% of sentences and often assess little more than the presence/absence of particular words (Andrews & Veldre, 2021). Moreover, like the eye-movement studies of young adults, most of the eye-movement evidence for the risky reading hypothesis has been collected in prediction-friendly environments dominated by high-constraint sentence contexts.…”

“…In combination with the lack of continuity across texts, the absence of any test of comprehension may have reduced readers’ incentive to engage anticipatory prediction processes. Even when comprehension is assessed, the use of easy, lexical-verification questions is associated with a “less deliberate” reading strategy characterized by reduced regressions and rereading than when comprehension is assessed with more frequent and/or difficult questions (Andrews & Veldre, 2021; Radach et al, 2008). Thus, the limited evidence of lexical prediction in L&C16’s data may, in part, reflect the use of a shallow reading strategy that readers deemed to be “good enough” for the limited comprehension demands of the task (Ferreira et al, 2002).…”

“…However, the authors noted that these findings need to be interpreted cautiously because the impact of age on word frequency and predictability effects had only been investigated in seven and three studies, respectively. There is also evidence that the frequency and difficulty of comprehension questions influence the strategies revealed by young readers’ eye movements (Andrews & Veldre, 2021; Radach et al, 2008), and such manipulations have been found to modulate the extent of parafoveal processing in older adults (Wotschack & Kliegl, 2013). Thus, older adults’ reliance on prediction may depend on task demands (e.g., Paterson et al, 2020; Wotschack & Kliegl, 2013).…”